It lost in all 120 counties. And by 60-40 or worse in all but 9 of those counties. And—it did the worst in Kentucky’s smallestcounty: Robertson County. Population, 2,033 (as of 2023). It lost there 74-26!
For articles in academic journals, the distribution is similar. More than half of all articles are never read by anyone other than the author, the editor, and the journal’s reviewers. And a vast majority of all downloads are for a mere 1% of the articles.
At the behest of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, Hancock recently submitted an affidavit supporting new legislation that bans the use of so-called “deep fake” technology to influence an election. The law is being challenged in federal court by a conservative YouTuber and Republican state Rep. Mary Franson of Alexandria for violating First Amendment free speech protections.
Hancock’s expert declaration in support of the deep fake law cites numerous academic works. But several of those sources do not appear to exist, and the lawyers challenging the law say they appear to have been made up by artificial intelligence software like ChatGPT.
For instance, the declaration cites a study titled “The Influence of Deepfake Videos on Political Attitudes and Behavior,” and says that it was published in the Journal of Information Technology & Politics in 2023. But no study by that name appears in that journal; academic databases don’t have any record of it existing; and the specific journal pages referenced contain two entirely different articles.
To quote a Wisconsin State Journal story on test scores that were released yesterday: “The four specific categories used to calculate the district’s overall achievement score all declined in comparison with last year’s school report card. Graduate rates fell slightly, while chronic absenteeism, or the percentage of students that miss at least 10% of school, increased. Performance and growth among the district’s target student groups also declined.”
None of that is really news. MMSD has been way underperforming for years. And yet, Madison voters overwhelmingly approved two referendums that will authorize $507 million in capital improvements and another $100 million in operational spending, which will continue forever. The average taxpayer will shell out another $1,300 or so in a few years.
I wasn’t surprised that the referendums passed, but I was surprised at the margins. At around 70%, that’s about the same as the last set of referendums from a few years ago, despite the poor performance and despite the fact that these represent record property tax increases at a time when affordable housing is a top issue.
Given that, do the faculty in these schools, charged with preparing students for public service and equipping them to navigate charged public debates, reflect the breadth of American thinking on government and policy?
Schools of public policy are explicitly charged with preparing their students to play significant roles in public life. That’s the job. Four decades ago, Aaron Wildavsky, founding dean of UC–Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, explained that institutions like his “were designed to be organizations that would do for the public sector what business schools had done for the private sector”—namely, supply graduates who staff public bureaucracies and provide educated leadership.[2] As Harvard University president Derek Bok put it a half-century ago, programs like his institution’s famed Kennedy School of Government exist “to prepare a profession of public servants” who can “occupy influential positions in public life.”[3]
Policy schools make clear that they see this as their mission. Syracuse’s Maxwell School says that it is helping to “prepare new generations of leaders with an expansive foundation of knowledge and a socially responsible mindset.”[4] Matthew Auer, dean of the University of Georgia’s School of Public and International Affairs, holds that his school is “training two generations of leaders who, if we get it right, will preserve and strengthen our democracy.”[5] The University of Michigan’s Ford School aims to “inspire and prepare diverse leaders grounded in service, conduct transformational research, and collaborate on evidence-based policymaking to take on our communities’ and the world’s most pressing challenges.”[6]
Three days after the election, Justine Bateman, the former Family Ties star, catapulted herself into the political muck with a tweetstorm to her 140,000 followers that began: “Decompressing from walking on eggshells for the past four years.”
She continued: “Common sense was discarded, intellectual discussion was demonized. . . Complete intolerance became almost a religion and one’s professional and social life was threatened almost constantly. Those that spoke otherwise were ruined as a warning to others. Their destruction was displayed in the ‘town square’ of social media for all to see.”
In other words, she said out loud the thing everyone has been thinking.
For young people with big ambitions, bagging a measly bachelor’s degree no longer seems enough. Students in America have been rushing into postgraduate courses, even as demand for higher education among the general public has declined. These days nearly 40% of university-educated Americans boast at least two degrees. In Britain a surge in demand from foreign students has created a huge boom in postgraduate education. Universities there now dole out four postgraduate qualifications for every five undergraduate ones.
Master’s degrees lasting one or two years are the biggest draw. These courses are necessary for jobs, such as teaching in academia, that are appealing even if poorly paid. Yet many of the people who enroll in postgraduate study are taking part in an educational arms race. Now that undergraduate degrees are common, goes the thinking, it takes extra credentials to get ahead. The hope is that advanced qualifications will boost all manner of careers.
The national political class is going crazy over several of President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet picks. Matt Gaetz, Trump’s pick for Attorney General, and Pete Hegseth, chosen to head the Defense Department, come to mind. Now comes the latest controversial pick: Trump’s choice of Linda McMahon for Secretary of Education.
They bemoan her lack of experience and expertise in education, but is “expertise” at the DOE really what the country’s students need?
We have no particular insight on McMahon and she doesn’t have a deep education record for us to review. But what we do have is the record of the experts that have been running education for decades. And the record is a disaster anyway you cut it – at the national level, the Illinois level, and the city level, namely Chicago.
The observed temperature record, which combines sea surface temperatures with near-surface air temperatures over land, is crucial for understanding climate variability and change1,2,3,4. However, early records of global mean surface temperature are uncertain owing to changes in measurement technology and practice, partial documentation5,6,7,8, and incomplete spatial coverage9. Here we show that existing estimates of ocean temperatures in the early twentieth century (1900–1930) are too cold, based on independent statistical reconstructions of the global mean surface temperature from either ocean or land data. The ocean-based reconstruction is on average about 0.26 °C colder than the land-based one, despite very high agreement in all other periods. The ocean cold anomaly is unforced, and internal variability in climate models cannot explain the observed land–ocean discrepancy. Several lines of evidence based on attribution, timescale analysis, coastal grid cells and palaeoclimate data support the argument of a substantial cold bias in the observed global sea-surface-temperature record in the early twentieth century. Although estimates of global warming since the mid-nineteenth century are not affected, correcting the ocean cold bias would result in a more modest early-twentieth-century warming trend10, a lower estimate of decadal-scale variability inferred from the instrumental record3, and better agreement between simulated and observed warming than existing datasets suggest2.
This “data discrepancy” in ocean temperatures from 1900-1940 is not tiny at all, but majorly impacts (greatly decreases) the warming trend of the 20th Century.
At 8:30 p.m. on 16 May 1916, John J. Carty banged his gavel at the Engineering Societies Building in New York City to call to order a meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. This was no ordinary gathering. The AIEE had decided to conduct a live national meeting connecting more than 5,000 attendees in eight cities across four time zones. More than a century before Zoom made virtual meetings a pedestrian experience, telephone lines linked auditoriums from coast to coast. AIEE members and guests in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, New York, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco had telephone receivers at their seats so they could listen in.
The AIEE, a predecessor to the IEEE, orchestrated this event to commemorate recent achievements in communications, transportation, light, and power. The meeting was a triumph of engineering, covered in newspapers in many of the host cities. The Atlanta Constitution heralded it as “a feat never before accomplished in the history of the world.” According to the Philadelphia Evening Ledger, the telephone connections involved traversed about 6,500 kilometers (about 4,000 miles) across 20 states, held up by more than 150,000 poles running through 5,000 switches. It’s worth noting that the first transcontinental phone call had been achieved only a year earlier.
Earlier this week, Laura Helmuth resigned as editor in chief of Scientific American, the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. “I’ve decided to leave Scientific American after an exciting 4.5 years as editor in chief,” she wrote on Bluesky. “I’m going to take some time to think about what comes next (and go birdwatching), but for now I’d like to share a very small sample of the work I’ve been so proud to support (thread).”
Helmuth may in fact have been itching to spend more time bird watching—who wouldn’t be?—but it seems likely that her departure was precipitated by a bilious Bluesky rant she posted after Donald Trump was reelected.
In it, she accused her generation, Generation X, of being “full of fucking fascists,” complained about how sexist and racist her home state of Indiana was, and so on.
“Fuck them to the moon and back,” she said of the dumb high school bullies supposedly celebrating Trump’s victory.
Whether or not Helmuth’s resignation was voluntary, it should go without saying that a few bad social media posts should not end someone’s job. If that were the whole story here—an otherwise well-performing editor was ousted over a few bad posts—this would arguably be a case of “cancel culture,” or whatever we’re calling it these days.
Two former colleagues of Madison schools Superintendent Joe Gothard are accusing him of directing the misuse of federal COVID-19 relief funds during his tenure leading St. Paul Public Schools.
According to a draft complaint against the St. Paul school district, where Gothard worked before coming to Madison in May, Gothard and his leadership team “unlawfully” used public funds for staff bonuses and to fill the Minnesota district’s $43 million budget deficit.
Marie Schrul, the St. Paul school district’s former chief financial officer, and Curtis Mahanay, former business systems support manager, filed the lawsuit Wednesday morning in Ramsey County District Court. The two were fired in 2022 for raising concerns about mismanagement of the district’s finances, they argue in the draft complaint.
The complaint claims Gothard in 2022 convened 300 district leaders for an invite-only party where the food trucks alone cost $10,000 in public funds. Minnesota law requires that public funds must serve a “public purpose.”
For anyone who teaches at a business school, the blog post was bad news. For Juliana Schroeder, it was catastrophic. She saw the allegations when they first went up, on a Saturday in early summer 2023. Schroeder teaches management and psychology at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. One of her colleagues—a star professor at Harvard Business School named Francesca Gino—had just been accused of academic fraud. The authors of the blog post, a small team of business-school researchers, had found discrepancies in four of Gino’s published papers, and they suggested that the scandal was much larger. “We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data,” the blog post said. “Perhaps dozens.”
The story was soon picked up by the mainstream press. Reporters reveled in the irony that Gino, who had made her name as an expert on the psychology of breaking rules, may herself have broken them. (“Harvard Scholar Who Studies Honesty Is Accused of Fabricating Findings,” a New York Timesheadline read.) Harvard Business School had quietly placed Gino on administrative leave just before the blog post appeared. The school had conducted its own investigation; its nearly 1,300-page internal report, which was made public only in the course of related legal proceedings, concluded that Gino “committed research misconduct intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly” in the four papers. (Gino has steadfastly denied any wrongdoing.)
The collapse of the liberal order comes chiefly from overreach by American liberals. The charade in which Biden was ousted illustrates their fatal weakness. They believe their own legends. The Harris who campaigned for the presidency, less credible as a candidate than Biden, was a media simulacrum which evaporated on the night of the election. The Democrat insiders who invented the Harris facade, led by Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, sealed the fate of the regime they sought to renew.
Perpetual wars were a big part of liberal overreach. The campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq were fiascos that destroyed public support for overseas military intervention, probably for a generation. For many who voted for him, Trump was an anti-war candidate. If he sticks to a realist, transactional foreign policy, it will avoid ruinous neoconservative crusades, but may also generate further conflict. He will surely seek vengeance against Iran for its apparent involvement in a plot to assassinate him. With Putin emboldened by a dirty peace in Ukraine, a wider European war becomes more likely. The Baltic states and Poland are actively preparing for such an eventuality. Whatever happens in Europe, Trump may not much care.
India has overtaken China as the top source for international students in the US for the first time in about 15 years, according to new data released on Monday.
A total of 331,602 Indians studied in the US during the 2023-24 school year, compared with 277,398 Chinese, according to the latest annual survey by the Institute of International Education (IIE), a report sponsored by the US State Department. Indian students saw a 23 per cent increase from the previous academic year, while Chinese students saw a 4 per cent decrease.
Chinese students had been the largest foreign group since the 2009-10 school year, but their numbers have steadily declined from 2019-20 onward. That academic year, there were 372,532 Chinese studying in the US.
Meanwhile, Indian students have seen a steady growth in numbers since the 2020-21 academic year, with the total for 2023-24 about twice as large as it was then.
Private schools across the South that were established for white children during desegregation are now benefiting from tens of millions in taxpayer dollars flowing from rapidly expanding voucher-style programs, a ProPublica analysis found.
In North Carolina alone, we identified 39 of these likely “segregation academies” that are still operating and that have received voucher money. Of these, 20 schools reported student bodies that were at least 85% white in a 2021-22 federal surveyof private schools, the most recent data available.
Those 20 academies, all founded in the 1960s and 1970s, brought in more than $20 million from the state in the past three years alone. None reflected the demographics of their communities. Few even came close.
Northeast Academy, a small Christian school in rural Northampton County on the Virginia border, is among them. As of the 2021-22 survey, the school’s enrollment was 99% white in a county that runs about 40% white.
As you are aware, the CTU-CPS contract expired on June 30. CTU submitted a comprehensive proposal to CPS and CEO Pedro Martinez on April 16. The union’s proposals align with both the report on education issued by your mayoral transition committee last year and with the 5year strategic plan adopted by the Chicago Board of Education earlier this year. Our contract proposals are a blueprint for how those plans can be implemented and how the following shared goals are realized: (1) every child in Chicago should be able to attend a fully-staffed, fullyresourced neighborhood school that provides them with the same education, enrichment, and extracurricular opportunities as if they lived in a suburb 10 miles to the North, South, or West of the city; and (2) CPS must be a district that can develop, attract, recruit, and retain a diverse workforce of educators, reflective of the district’s school communities, who are provided the resources necessary to sustain a career in service to Chicago’s students.
Never before have Chicago’s teachers union, Board of Education and mayor held such a shared vision for Chicago Public Schools. Despite these commonalities, CEO Martinez has slowwalked negotiations, and Chicago’s educators have been without a contract for 5 months.
We are now at a critical juncture that requires your intervention to ensure that the Board of Education enshrines the commitments to transform public education that the people of the city. of Chicago elected you to carry out.
The CTU has been heartened to see the current, newly appointed Board of Education members take courageous stands to help the school district course correct on a number of issues. At its November 14 meeting, the Board adopted a resolution calling on Acero Charter schools to maintain the seven (7) campuses that earlier this fall it proposed to close. Up until the November Board meeting, CPS leadership had appeared content to allow Acero to go ahead with its plans, continuing a long history of prioritizing the “rights” of charter corporations over those of the students and families, despite the devastating impacts it would have on 2,000 predominantly Latine students, their families, and nearly 250 educators.
84% of schools are 3 stars or above and 93% of districts are.
We need report cards that accurately judge schools based on our national performance. Report cards change again next year, so that is the perfect opportunity.
…..
DPI suppressed insanity from lowering test score standards, though it led to some bizarre ratings for middle-class schools.
Evolutionary accounts assert that while diversity may lower subjective well-being (SWB) by creating an evolutionary mismatch between evolved psychological tendencies and the current social environment, human societies can adapt to diversity via intergroup contact under appropriate conditions. Exploiting a novel natural experiment in history, we examine the impact of the social environment, captured by population diversity, on SWB. We find that diversity lowers cognitive and hedonic measures of SWB. Diversity-induced deteriorations in the quality of the macrosocial environment, captured by reduced social cohesion, retarded state capacity, and increased inequality in economic opportunities, emerge as mechanisms explaining our findings. The analysis of first- and second-generation immigrants in Europe and the USA reveals that the misery of home country diversity persists even after neutralizing the role of the social environment. However, these effects diminish among the second generation, suggesting that long-term improvements in the social environment can alleviate the burden of diversity. Finally, in exploring whether human societies can adapt to diversity, we show evidence that diversity causes adopting cultural traits (such as establishing stronger family ties, assigning greater importance to friendships, and adopting a positive attitude towards competition) that can mitigate the misery of diversity. These results survive an exhaustive set of robustness checks.
In our new Marginal Revolution Podcast Tyler and I talk insurance, the history of insurance, the economics of insurance, the prospects for new types of insurance and more. Did you know that life insurance was once considered repugnant and was often illegal?
Tyler and I were both surprised how little good work there is on insurance. Here’s Tyler:
To understand how this works, it’s easier to think of the “keys” not as objects that fit into a lock, but as two complementary ingredients in an invisible ink. The first ingredient makes messages disappear, and the second makes them reappear. If a spy named Boris wants to send his counterpart Natasha a secret message, he writes a message and then uses the first ingredient to render it invisible on the page. (This is easy for him to do: Natasha has published an easy and well-known formula for disappearing ink.) When Natasha receives the paper in the mail, she applies the second ingredient that makes Boris’ message reappear.
In this scheme, anyone can make messages invisible, but only Natasha can make them visible again. And because she never shares the formula for the second ingredient with anyone — not even Boris — she can be sure the message hasn’t been deciphered along the way. When Boris wants to receive secret messages, he simply adopts the same procedure: He publishes an easy recipe for making messages disappear (that Natasha or anyone else can use), while keeping another one just for himself that makes them reappear.
This past summer, behind closed doors and under a veil of secrecy that even included the signing of a non-disclosure agreement, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, quietly took several steps that will lower academic standards for Wisconsin’s students – all with zero input from parents or lawmakers. These unilateral decisions by State Superintendent Jill Underly will not only impact how schools are assessed but will ultimately leave parents in the dark about their child’s progress.
The previous standards were implemented in 2012 under Gov. Tony Evers, who was then serving as DPI Superintendent, with bipartisan support. These standards aligned Wisconsin with the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and were designed to assess whether students were ready for college and careers. But now, a much lower bar has been created in Wisconsin and NAEP alignment is gone.
Lowered standards can create false sense of academic progress
For example, on the most recent round of the NAEP, about 32% of Wisconsin 8th graders were found to be proficient in reading. This is comparable to the 36% who were found to be proficient on the 2022-23 Forward Exam. But proficiency among this group jumped to 48.4% in 2023-24 on the state exam, creating a 16-percentage point gap. Even Evers has openly criticized these new lowered standards, stating that he believes, “We need to have as high of standards as possible.”
This comes after a period of steadily increasing competition to get into college since around the turn of the millennium, which aggravated fears among students and their families that they’d be rejected by the institutions of their choice. Widely reported impossibly low single-digit acceptance rates at the nation’s most highly selective universities and colleges only made that apprehension worse.
In fact, 87 percent of nonprofit four-year colleges in 2022 took half or more of the students who applied to them, up from 80 percent in 2012, the AEI study found.
In the summer before my freshman year of college in 1986, I waited for the letter that would bring news of my roommate, anxious to learn who fate had chosen to be possibly my new best friend, or my new worst enemy.
But that’s not what my son Nate did. Last spring, as a second-semester high-school senior, he was unwilling to test his luck. He used social media to identify, track, contact, court and bag an ideal roommate, a kid with proclivities that would fit his own like a fancy leather driving glove. An increasing number of incoming freshmen are curating that once unpredictable initiation into college life. The traditional method of simply spinning the wheel has become less common.
Much is gained as a result. For Nate, it’s meant a clean, harmonious living space—no Metallica poster to shout down his art print. A sensible wake-up time—early but not too early. Nate shares a major with his roommate and a sensibility. They come from the same kind of town in the same part of America. They don’t fight about music or politics.
For decades, schools all over the country taught reading based on a theory cognitive scientists had debunked by the 1990s. Despite research showing it made it harder for some kids to learn, the concept was widely accepted by most educators — until recent reporting by APM Reports.
Now, state legislators and other policymakers are trying to change reading instruction, requiring it to align with cognitive science research about how children learn to read. Several of them say they were motivated by the Sold a Story podcast.
Half of the states have now passed laws to change the way reading is taught since Sold a Story was released in 2022. At least four other states considered similar efforts.
The surge in activity is part of a wave of science of reading laws that began in 2013. But since Sold a Story, that trend has accelerated. Lawmakers have responded to the podcast by taking a closer look at what curriculum schools are buying, and, in some states, attempting to outlaw specific teaching methods.
The legislative efforts come at a time when fourth grade reading scoresin the United States have declined consistently since 2015, according to a nationwide achievement measurement conducted by the National Center for Educational Statistics.
Many parents know the struggle firsthand. Aaron Freeman grappled with why his sons were struggling to learn how to read. His youngest son, Cooper, said he felt like he was “running in the dark,” directionless and alone when he opened a book. When the Freeman family listened to the Sold a Story podcast, Aaron Freeman was left feeling heartbroken and enraged.
Voters all across the communities and neighborhoods in the Madison Metropolitan School District widely supported the district’s two referendums this month that will raise property taxes for decades. (more)
But in the affluent village of Maple Bluff, on the eastern shore of Lake Mendota, voters expressed more aversion to hiking taxes for public schools. A narrow majority of voters in the village backed one referendum and rejected the other.
Elsewhere in the school district, voters typically supported the school district’s $507 million facilities referendum by a comfortable margin and its $100 million operations referendum by a lower degree — although still well above a majority.
“If they don’t go to college, they should be able to walk right into a well-paid career. The No. 1 thing is to really work with these kids to help them find a career that they will enjoy,” McKenzie said. “These are all things that are directed at attacking the cycle of poverty.”
The Madison School Board plans to vote early next year whether to authorize the school. McKenzie said it could open as soon as fall 2026. The school’s proposal says it aims to enroll 150 freshmen in the first year and expand to 600 ninth through 12th graders by 2029.
The school was initially set to be named Pathway Career and College Academy. McKenzie said organizers changed the name because the Madison school district already has a workforce program, which “wasn’t particularly successful,” under the same name.
Education professor Martha Koch made several head-scratching claims in her Free Press piece, including the assertion that prospective K-8 math teachers are best served by avoiding university-level math courses. As chair of the department of mathematics and statistics at the University of Winnipeg, I would like to address these claims.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the onus is now on Koch to provide the research supporting her claims.
Education researchers are notorious for making bold claims based on poor research methodologies or passing off opinion as genuine research. Their chokehold on the education system may be why Manitoba students are struggling in the first place. Teachers, parents and the public should be wary of education claims that sound far-fetched or counterintuitive.
Mathematics is not the only subject that has been cut from the requirements for future K-8 teachers: science, English/French, and history/geography requirements have also been eliminated. At least professors of education are not (yet!) arguing that taking English at university will make you a worse English teacher. That argument would be ludicrous on its face, yet professors of education think they can dupe the public when it comes to math.
I would like to stress that future K-8 teachers are not being forced to take courses like calculus at university. Our department offers specialized courses that help K-8 education students understand the math curriculum they will need to teach. Similar courses are offered by the math departments at all universities in Manitoba. Teachers need strong content knowledge in the subjects they teach; pedagogy courses from education faculties are not sufficient.
The government’s change to teacher certification regulations will tarnish the reputations of the many outstanding teachers in our province and will devalue an education degree. The Manitoba government needs to reverse course on this backwards policy. The children in this province, especially those whose parents lack the resources to correct for bad educational policies, will be the ones to pay the price.
I’ve taught at a New England prep school for nearly 20 years. Families have been laser focused on top tier colleges, most of which are up here.
Except for a very few exceptional candidates, this has changed.
Dramatically.
There is another “great migration” happening, as a steady flow of middle and upper middle-class children of the meritocratic class have decided to go to college in the spirit of normalcy.
Students use AI to cheat on information discussion boards, says Amy Clukey, an associate English professor at the University of Louisville. They cheat on essays.
A few weeks ago, she emailed a student to say that she knew the student had cheated on a minor assignment with AI and if she did it again, she would fail the course. Clukey also noted there were several missed assignments. The student replied to “sincerely apologize,” said she was “committed to getting back on track,” and that she regretted “any disruption [her] absence or incomplete work may have caused in the course.” But her next paper was essentially written by artificial intelligence. Curious, Clukey asked ChatGPT to write an email apologizing to a professor for plagiarism and missed work. . . “It spit out an email almost exactly like the one I had gotten.”
“Professors in writing-intensive courses, particularly those teaching introductory or general-education classes” say “AI abuse has become pervasive,” writes McMurtrie. “Clukey said she feels less like a teacher and more like a human plagiarism detector, spending hours each week analyzing her students’ writing to determine its authenticity.”
Whitefish Bay High School has been named Wisconsin’s best high school, according to U.S. News & World Report’s 2025 rankings.
The publication analyzed about 25,000 public high schools — ultimately ranking nearly 17,660 — across the U.S. for this year’s edition of its annual rankings.
High schools were assessed on college readiness, state assessment proficiency, state assessment performance, underserved student performance, college curriculum breadth and graduation rate.
High schools are given a national rank, unlike the publication’s elementary and middle school rankings.
The annual boat race between Oxford and Cambridge universities is to be renamed after a designer watch as part of a multiyear tie-up with Chanel, in what is the French fashion house’s first foray into sport sponsorship.
From next year, the annual rowing contest will be rebranded as “The Chanel J12 Boat Race”, taking on the name of a high-end timepiece produced by the privately owned luxury goods company.
Chanel will replace Gemini, a cryptocurrency exchange founded by the Winklevoss twins, as the event’s title partner and become its official timekeeper.
On the surface, Thiel is someone who seems full of contradictions. He is a libertarian who has found common cause with nationalists and populists. He likes investing in companies that have the ability to become monopolies, and yet Trump’s White House wants to break up Big Tech. He is a gay American immigrant, but he hates identity politics and the culture wars. He pays people to drop out of college, but, in this conversation at least, still seems to venerate the way that the Ivy Leagues are an indicator of intelligence.
But perhaps that’s the secret to his success: He’s beholden to no tribe but himself, no ideology but his own. And why wouldn’t you be when you make so many winning bets? From co-founding the e-payment behemoth PayPal and the data analytics firm Palantir (which was used to find Osama bin Laden) to being the first outside investor in Facebook, Thiel’s investments—in companies like LinkedIn, Palantir, and SpaceX, to name a few—have paid off big time.
His most recent bet—helping his mentee J.D. Vance get elected as senator and then on the Trump ticket as vice president—seems also to have paid off. The next four years will determine just how high Thiel’s profit margin will be.
Today: Thiel explains why so many of his peers have finally come around to Trump; why he thinks Kamala—and liberalism more broadly—lost the election; and why the Trump 2.0 team will be better than last time, with antiestablishment figures who are willing to rethink the system. We talk about the border, trade deals, student debt, Israel and foreign policy, the rise of historical revisionism, the blurry line between skepticism and conspiracy, and his contrarian ideas about what we might face in a dreaded World War III.
Through a formal records request, the Badger Institute also was able to determine the district spent at least $15,000 to send school officials on three fact-gathering trips in October, November and December 2023 to schools in Atlanta and Macon, Georgia, and in Washington, D.C.
Nine school officials, including former Superintendent Keith Posley and Instructional Leadership Director Miguel Sanchez, were joined on two of the trips by Steve Lubar, executive director of the Administrators and Supervisors Council, representing MPS principals, assistant principals, and supervisors.
Police Chief Jeffrey Norman and Assistant Chief Steven Johnson were part of the group that went to Atlanta and Macon on Nov. 30-Dec. 1, according to the documents. But expenses for Lubar, Norman and Johnson were not paid by the district, the documents said.
Each of the trips included visits to various high schools and elementary schools and their public safety command centers, and the command and dispatch centers for each of those police districts, according to the documents.
We believe now is a good time to work hard on this vision again. In this essay we sketch out a set of ideas we believe can be used to help develop transformative new tools for thought. In the first part of the essay we describe an experimental prototype system that we’ve built, a kind of mnemonic medium intended to augment human memory. This is a snapshot of an ongoing project, detailing both encouraging progress as well as many challenges and opportunities. In the second part of the essay, we broaden the focus. We sketch several other prototype systems. And we address the question: why is it that the technology industry has made comparatively little effort developing this vision of transformative tools for thought?
When smartphones and social media platforms swept into teens’ lives in the early 2010s, schools experienced their own digital revolution, with 1-to-1 laptops, tablets, and iPads becoming staples in classrooms across the Western world. (1-to-1 means one device for every student.) A decade later, the revolutionary optimism is fading. OneOECD review found that most educational technology (EdTech) has not delivered the academic benefits once promised. Meanwhile, global test scores in math, science, and reading have been plummeting, as you can see in Figure 1 below. These trends were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, but they began in the early 2010s, just as digital devices were being placed on students’ desks.
Portola Valley officials last week raised alarms about dwindling cash reserves owing to rising expenses tied to a new sheriff’s contract and the state’s affordable housing mandate. The town of about 4,500 has about $1.6 million in general reserves, nearly all of which is committed to paying retiree benefits.
Like many small towns, Portola Valley relies on its adjoining county sheriff’s office to provide public safety. The San Mateo County sheriff’s union negotiated a rich new labor agreement in 2022 whose costs are being passed on to localities. Portola Valley’s sheriff’s payments are set to increase to $2.1 million next year from about $1 million in 2021.
Other employment costs are also soaring as the town is paying millions for consultants to comply with California’s affordable housing mandate. Homes in the town are worth $3.8 million on average. The state has threatened to withhold federal and state grants if Portola doesn’t rezone land to accommodate multi-family housing. This, by the way, is the essence of Kamala Harris’s housing plan: Leverage taxpayers dollars to compel states and localities to build more low-income housing.
Important note: This is the online republication of a paper petition that is being circulated in Manitoba. As per the general petition guidelines for presenting to the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba, the paper petition will be submitted to the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba.
If you have the opportunity, it is important that you please sign both the paper petition and the change.org petition.
1. Ensuring that teachers have a robust background in the subjects they teach is essential for maintaining high-quality education and fostering well-rounded learning experiences for all Manitoba students.
2. The recent amendments by the Province of Manitoba to the Teaching Certificates and Qualifications Regulation under The Education Administration Act have significantly lowered the standards for subject-area expertise required for teacher certification.
Now look at the SAT results as reported by the state, and how much they are down since 2017.
Property taxes up, up, up. Outcomes tragic. Zero accountability. Via @Wirepoints
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Bill Maher CALLS OUT Democrats: "You're the Teachers Union Education Party and you've turned schools and colleges into a joke." pic.twitter.com/5VGCHzDUVZ
— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) November 16, 2024
The president of the National Academy of Sciences, Marcia McNutt, has published welcome an essay promising to remain politically neutral and mitigate the political polarization of science.
Some notable quotes from the article:
“[S]cientists need to better explain the norms and values of science to reinforce the notion—with the public and their elected representatives—that science, at its most basic, is apolitical… Whether conservative or liberal, citizens ignore the nature of reality at their peril.”
“Scientists should better explain the scientific process and what makes it so trustworthy, while more candidly acknowledging that science can only provide the best available evidence and cannot dictate what people should value.”
This is without a doubt, the most succinct and accurate explanation by @DavidSacks of why what Donald Trump is trying to do is actually going to restore democracy and not bring about a dictatorship.
Face unrealized gains wealth tax bill of many x my annual net salary. ofc the company is loss making and all the investors have preference shares so I can’t take out any money.
These schools span every American state, dozens of countries from around the globe, and every kind of institution imaginable. They are small, private high schools nestled in Manhattan’s Upper East Side and Midwestern public schools with thousand-person graduating classes; international schools set a thousand miles from Cambridge and high schools a short walk from Harvard Yard.
For many of these schools, to send a student to Harvard is a blip, a rare anomaly in an obscure and lofty admissions process.
Now that we’ve had a few days to digest last week’s election results, let’s talk about what they mean for education. Rather than wade into policy wonkery, though, I want to discuss the implications for the zeitgeist that’s shaped K–12 schooling over the past half-decade or more—one that’s featured an embrace of progressive nostrums regarding racial identity, diversity, equity, social justice, gender, and inclusion. My bottom line is that Donald Trump is, in important ways, a vehicle for a cross-section of Americans to push back against the kinds of out-of-touch dogmas that I believe have fueled so many culture clashes over the past half-decade, especially around schools.
I want to be straight about where I’m coming from. Unlike most in the realms of education leadership, research, and advocacy, I’m firmly on the right. While I’m no great fan of President-elect Trump, I was heartened by Tuesday’s results, which included Republican victories in the Senate and, as I write, likely the House. I believe they hold big opportunities for educators across the board. Given that perspective, I’ll share a few thoughts that may (or may not) be useful to those in our field who feel very differently about what to make of those outcomes.
Like the rest of the mainstream media, Dowd’s a hypocrite. Six years ago she was happy to pronounce people guilty with no trial and no Miranda rights and no due process. Specifically, I’m wondering if Dowd has the courage to take back her hits on Brett Kavanaugh and me. Dowd declared Kavanaugh guilty in 2018. When Kavanaugh was accused by Christine Blasey Ford of sexual assault at a 1982 party when they were teenagers, Dowd tossed aside due process. She was the worst of the woke.
Dowd’s strategy was to compare Blasey Ford to Anita Hill, and claim that the conservative media was unfairly smearing Ford. “We are still watching a bookish university professor from the West,” Dowd wrote, “who tried to anonymously report an alleged blight on the character of a man about to ascend to a lifetime of power, get smeared as a demanding, mixed-up, uptight, loony fantasist.” You’ve gotta love that “bookish university professor from the West” bit.
“Dr. Blasey is dealing with some demonic forces not in play with Professor Hill,” Dowd wrote. “A vicious partisan internet that drove her out of her house and being discredited not merely by the White House but personally by a president who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault, who has consistently defended predators such as Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly and Roy Moore, and who is advised by the same man who enabled Ailes’s loathsome behavior at Fox News.”
Like the rest of her media colleagues, Dowd has shown no interest in the other side of the story. In 2018 I was dragged into the Kavanaugh battle when Christine Blasey Ford claimed I was in the room when Kavanaugh assaulted her. I have no memory of the alleged attack. Moreover, I have a lot of evidence that suggests that the Blasey claim was, as Kavanaugh said, a well-funded and orchestrated political hit.
In one of the weirder sci-fi novels of all time, Stranger in a Strange Land, author Robert Heinlein introduced a social innovation. One of the book’s characters holds a special designation as the “fair witness.” By way of demonstration, someone asks the fair witness what color a particular house is. She answers by naming the color on the side of the house she can see. Most people would say “The house is blue” or “The house is white,” but Heinlein’s fair witness only describes what she can count on, which is the visible side. It’s an interesting idea to ponder.
Donald Trump has been elected president for a second time. His first term met with media opposition greater than anyone has seen in recent memory. The Washington Post went so far as to adopt the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” In explaining his decision for the Post to withhold any presidential endorsement this year, owner Jeff Bezos pointed to a decline in public trust as a major problem for outlets such as his. Trump is back. Will the media double down or take the opportunity to regain lost trust and once again become indispensable to public discourse?
It had all come down to this, she thought, signing her name in careful script.
The years of agony endured by her son, who, at 11, still couldn’t read or write. The antidepressants the boy had been prescribed in a desperate attempt to salve his battered self-esteem. The thousands of dollars they’d scraped together for expert testing, to prove what their son’s severe learning disability required. The tedious and maddening back-and-forth between their lawyer and the one employed by the boy’s suburban Boston school district — the bargaining that yielded the document she had just signed.
Republicans won 88 total House seats, and some who aren’t “hard core” may support Mr. Abbott’s plan. The GOP state Senate improved its school-choice majority, too, with the victory of Adam Hinojosa over incumbent Democrat Morgan LaMantia. Texas is now poised this spring to pass its first private school choice program, and the nation’s largest, serving some five million students.
It’s a hard-fought win for Mr. Abbott, who made Republican opponents of his plan pay a political price. Twenty-one of them joined Democrats last fall to vote down his bill for scholarships worth about $10,000, plus billions in public-school funding. The Governor vowed to go after those who ran for re-election.
During the GOP primaries, Mr. Abbott endorsed 11 pro-school choice challengers. Eight won, and last week all eight were officially elected, along with other school-choice candidates the Governor backed in open races. One Republican incumbent who was ousted in his primary, Steve Allison in district 121, later endorsed the Democrat running for his seat in the general election. But Marc LaHood, the Republican backed by Mr. Abbott, won handily, 52.6% to 47.4%.
The Times ended its screed against RCP’s “scarlet-dominated” electoral map projection by quoting John Anzalone, Joe Biden’s former chief pollster, who said: “There’s a ton of garbage polls out there.” But being called “garbage” in America’s paper of record was nothing compared to what happened to RCP at Wikipedia.
Six months ago, when former Wikipedia chief Katherine Maher became CEO of NPR, video emergedof her talking about strategies at Wikipedia. She said the company eventually abandoned its “free and open” mantra when she realized “this radical openness… did not end up living into the intentionality of what openness can be.” Free andopen“recapitulated” too many of the same “power structures,” resulting in too much emphasis on the “Western canon,” the “written tradition,” and “this white male, Westernized construct around who matters.”
After voters overwhelmingly cast their ballots to eliminate the requirement that Massachusetts high school students pass the MCAS exam in order to receive a diploma, the question of whether the state will pursue a new statewide standard in the exams’ place — and what, exactly, that would look like — looms over the upcoming legislative session.
Education insiders said this week that conversations about implementing new education standards in wake of Question 2’s passage are already happening, and those who had campaigned against the initiative are pushing for an urgent solution.
Gov. Maura Healey, who opposed the MCAS question, told reporters on Wednesday that the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education will further update regulations.
“It’s time for us to continue what, frankly, was started before the election, which was to figure out the new path forward, and what is the new model for a really uniform standard,” Healey said. “Because, again, my position is we shouldn’t have different expectations for students depending on which ZIP code they’re in. There should be a uniformity to our expectations.”
Re: Teachers need subject expertise (Think Tank, Nov. 12)
I’m writing, as a parent and as an educator, in support of my colleague Anna Stokke’s Monday op-ed. Having spent two decades teaching post-secondary students in Manitoba, I am distressed, to say the least, to hear about the revisions to Manitoba’s teacher certification requirements.
While most of the discussion has focused on math education, which I can only speak to as a recipient, l’d like to emphasize that math is only one of the requirements being eliminated. These new standards mean that eighth-grade teachers will not need to have taken English, French, geography, history or math at the university level.
With all due respect to my colleagues in the faculty of education, knowing how to communicate content is not, and cannot be, a replacement for an understanding of the topic itself. Good teachers need both the ability to teach and the knowledge that underpins the subjects that they teach. A middle-school math teacher may not need to teach division in base-4, but understanding how division works, rather than just the mechanics of doing long division, can’t help but make them a better teacher.
Manitoba has a teacher staffing crisis, we are told. Rather than working to make K-8 education a field that attracts the best possible candidates, the government has decided that it would be easier and, no doubt, cheaper, to lower the standards of who is teaching our children.
It’s a devil’s bargain, and our children will be the ones to pay the price.
The Chicago City Council emphatically voted down Mayor Brandon Johnson’s plan to hike property taxes by $300 million Thursday, creating a yawning hole in the city’s 2025 budget that must now be closed.
Aldermen voted 50-0 in a rare unanimous roll-call vote to discard the tax hike in a special meeting that lasted just minutes and included no debate. The council’s decisive rejection gives aldermen leverage they have rarely enjoyed in ongoing budget negotiations: Whatever comes next, it won’t be Johnson’s original plan.
The property hike proved wildly unpopular with constituents, aldermen have said. But its demise forces the council and mayor to now come up with new answers. While many aldermen joined the mayor to argue Chicago must find new revenue and avoid layoffs, others said the body must make major budget cuts.
“The only way you are going to make real structural reform here is by making some deep cuts,” downtown Ald. Brendan Reilly, 42nd, said after the vote.
Join Planet Word and our journalist-in-residence, Emily Hanford, for a candid conversation with Maryland State Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Carey Wright. Their discussion will explore Dr. Wright’s vision for Maryland schools and lessons she brings from her success in implementing evidence-based literacy practices in Mississippi.
Under her leadership, Mississippi fourth graders made enormous strides on both the reading and math sections of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test commonly referred to as the Nation’s Report Card. With Maryland, one of the richest states in the U.S., having experienced a steady decline in achievement, change is certainly called for. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear from one of education’s most dynamic leaders and participate in what’s sure to be a lively audience Q&A.
Prompt injections are vulnerabilities in Large Language Models where attackers use crafted prompts to make the model ignore its original instructions or perform unintended actions.
Visual prompt injection refers to the technique where malicious instructions are embedded within an image. When a model with image processing capabilities, such as GPT-V4, is asked to interpret or describe that image, it might act on those embedded instructions in unintended ways.
During my first semester as a computer science graduate student at Princeton, I took COS 402: Artificial Intelligence. Toward the end of the semester, there was a lecture about neural networks. This was in the fall of 2008, and I got the distinct impression—both from that lecture and the textbook—that neural networks had become a backwater.
Neural networks had delivered some impressive results in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But then progress stalled. By 2008, many researchers had moved on to mathematically elegant approaches such as support vector machines.
I didn’t know it at the time, but a team at Princeton—in the same computer science building where I was attending lectures—was working on a project that would upend the conventional wisdom and demonstrate the power of neural networks. That team, led by Prof. Fei-Fei Li, wasn’t working on a better version of neural networks. They were hardly thinking about neural networks at all.
Rather, they were creating a new image dataset that would be far larger than any that had come before: 14 million images, each labeled with one of nearly 22,000 categories.
Li tells the story of ImageNet in her recent memoir, The Worlds I See. As she worked on the project, she faced plenty of skepticism from friends and colleagues.
Though I have many brilliant graduate students, I love working with undergraduate students. And I am not at all sure that you should favor people with graduate degrees, given a choice. Many graduate students tend to favor abstraction over practical skills. They often have an idealized view of the world. Moreover, these students are often consumed by research projects, theses, or dissertations, and the publication of scientific articles, which limits their time for concrete actions. On the other hand, undergraduate students, in my experience, show more enthusiasm for concrete and useful projects, even if they are not prestigious at first glance.
When she decided to uproot her life and move halfway across the world to run a company in a place where she had never lived, Nadia Carlsten wasn’t really sure what to expect.
But the American engineer with a passion for technology management definitely wasn’t expecting to be treated like a celebrity.
“I feel like the most popular person wherever I go,” Carlsten says. “I can just start the conversation with: I have over 1,500 GPUs—and everyone wants to talk to me.”
Carlsten has precisely 1,528 of the most powerful graphics-processing units on the planet because she just started as the chief executive of the Danish Centre for AI Innovation. The new company was built to run Denmark’s national AI supercomputer, which opened last week with a glitzy launch party where Carlsten was once again the center of attention.
DID YOU KNOW …schools had until September to obligate ~$1.49B in federal aid? …DPI lists ~$13.1M outstanding and ~$300K over the limit, despite the deadline? …details on evidence-based line items have been broken since May? Schools (probably) did their jobs. Hurry up, DPI!
Easy solution to avoid Mayor’s $300 million property tax increase without eliminating the 2,476 Police and 646 Firefighter and EMS positions he threatened: Reduce city subsidies to the schools by an amount equal to the annual TIF “WINDFALL” which would save the city $300 mil.
Schools don’t lose property tax revenues to TIF’s because their property tax rate rises to meet their levy request. City Council should also not pay the $170 million school district employee contribution to the school districts municipal pension fund employees.
The city has been providing almost $1 billion in subsidies annually to the schools in addition to the schools receiving 56% of all property taxes. That money is not finding its way into the classroom as only 54% of the $30,000 per student the district spends ends up in the schools.
Note that while Firefighters and Paramedics await their pay increase, the last teacher contract raised CTU member salaries 24-50%, hired 9,000 more employees and has ONE employee for every 7.6 students.
And then a small group of college administrators decided to blow it all up. The most important of them was James Conant, the president of Harvard from 1933 to 1953. Conant looked around and concluded that American democracy was being undermined by a “hereditary aristocracy of wealth.” American capitalism, he argued, was turning into “industrial feudalism,” in which a few ultrarich families had too much corporate power. Conant did not believe the United States could rise to the challenges of the 20th century if it was led by the heirs of a few incestuously interconnected Mayflower families.
So Conant and others set out to get rid of admissions criteria based on bloodlines and breeding and replace them with criteria centered on brainpower. His system was predicated on the idea that the highest human trait is intelligence, and that intelligence is revealed through academic achievement.
By shifting admissions criteria in this way, he hoped to realize Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a natural aristocracy of talent, culling the smartest people from all ranks of society. Conant wanted to create a nation with more social mobility and less class conflict. He presided during a time, roughly the middle third of the 20th century, when people had lavish faith in social-engineering projects and central planning—in using scientific means to, say, run the Soviet economy, or build new cities like Brasília, or construct a system of efficiency-maximizing roadways that would have cut through Greenwich Village.
When universities like Harvard shifted their definition of ability, large segments of society adjusted to meet that definition. The effect was transformative.
In trying to construct a society that maximized talent, Conant and his peers were governed by the common assumptions of the era: Intelligence, that highest human trait, can be measured by standardized tests and the ability to do well in school from ages 15 to 18. Universities should serve as society’s primary sorting system, segregating the smart from the not smart. Intelligence is randomly distributed across the population, so sorting by intelligence will yield a broad-based leadership class. Intelligence is innate, so rich families won’t be able to buy their kids higher grades. As Conant put it, “At least half of higher education, I believe, is a matter of selecting, sorting, and classifying students.” By reimagining college-admissions criteria, Conant hoped to spark a social and cultural revolution. The age of the Well-Bred Man was vanishing. The age of the Cognitive Elite was here.
2. The Ivy League was the recipient of $25.73 billion worth of federal payments during this period: contracts ($1.37 billion), grants ($23.9 billion) and direct payments – student assistance ($460 million).
In answer to Martha Koch’s opinion piece, “absolutely,” and I say that as a scientist with 40 years of experience in the biology of behaviour, but the crackpot ideas of self-described “researchers” that have held sway for the last 30 years with respect to influencing educational policy are the least reliable basis for advice to policy makers.
There is nothing less adequate than a self-professed expert saying “research shows” without actually describing the methodology for data acquisition, analytical framework and actual results, which, in the contemporary education context (the last 30 years) are worse literacy and numeracy outcomes precisely because the wrong people with unsupportable ideas that fly in the face of 2,000 years of contemporary, empirical experience in how humans learn have got hold of policy makers’ ears.
The fact is that literacy and numeracy have declined precipitously and disastrously, as many parents will attest. That debacle, to which Koch and her ilk have contributed, will take a long time to correct, and it is children and their futures at stake.
In her recent article, education professor Martha Koch claims the education courses future teachers take in the faculty of education are more useful than the subject-specific courses they took in their undergraduate degrees.
As someone with 25 years of teaching experience in the public school system, I must respectfully disagree. The subject-specific courses that I took in my undergraduate degree were much more helpful in my teaching career than the useless education courses offered by the faculty of education.
Don’t just take my word for it. Ask any teacher how they felt about their bachelor of education program. Chances are they will praise their teaching practicum where they worked in real classrooms with real students, but they will dismiss most of their required courses as useless theory. It would be a huge mistake to rely on education faculties to fill in the gaps that will inevitably arise from the lower admission standards for future teachers introduced by the current government.
First, they must recognize that they unwittingly seeded the ground for Trump’s revival. Their leftward acceleration under his presidency handed him the fodder he needed to portray the opposition as radical.
The shift was well-meaning and even understandable — Democrats wanted to redouble their commitment to those under duress at a time of threat — but it was political malpractice. Look no further than Harris’ now-famous support of trans surgery for prisoners. That was a commitment she made in 2019 because she and her advisers thought core Democrats wanted such purity. In truth, they simply wanted to beat Trump — which Joe Biden wisely recognized — but most others in the party misread the moment.
Years have passed since our last comparison of midwestern supreme courts, so let’s return for a look at four indicators: (1) the number of decisions filed; (2) the length of these decisions; (3) the number of separate opinions; and (4) the distribution of vote margins. As Minnesota and Iowa once served as the starting point for these posts, we’ll begin again with them.
Number of decisions Previous posts found that the justices in Minnesota and Iowa issued much larger volumes of decisions than did their colleagues in Wisconsin, and this gap became enormous in 2023-24 due to the surprising plunge in the number of decisions filed last term in the Badger State. As shown in Table 1, the totals for Minnesota and Iowa were more than six times the output in Wisconsin.[1]
Your communications and the data on your devices are far from the only sensitive digital records you’re constantly creating. You’re also leaving behind a trail of breadcrumbs on the paths you take around the internet—paths that are all too visible to your internet service provider and the websites you visit, and which can be highly revealing to anyone building a profile of you and your behavior.
“For me, I always say it’s important to remember you’re not ‘going to’ a website,” says Matt Mitchell, founder of CryptoHarlem, a security and privacy training and advocacy nonprofit. “You’re opening a door, and just like if you open your door, people can see you, and they can see behind you.”
So, what should the role of iPads, Chromebooks, or mobile education gaming be in the classroom? In an era when test scores are declining, how much have these technologies really contributed to student learning? Have the distraction effects of these devices overwhelmed the educational benefits? And at what age should these devices and programs be introduced?
To find answers to these questions, we invited Amy Tyson to write for us. Amy is a co-founder of Everyschool, an organization dedicated to making schools smarter, happier, and healthier through digital wellness. Amy offers a comprehensive analysis of the current landscape of screens in schools, addressing five major myths that fuel some of the device misuse and overuse in classrooms today. She also provides a clear, actionable roadmap for schools to adopt smarter, more effective technology practices that empower students to thrive in the 21st century.
EY has fired dozens of US staff for what the accounting and consulting firm called cheating on professional training courses, sparking an internal debate about business ethics and the limits of multitasking.
The dismissals took place last week after an investigation found that some employees had attended more than one online training class at a time during the “EY Ignite Learning Week” in May.
Several of the fired employees told the Financial Times they did not believe they were violating EY policy and were just trying to take advantage of interesting sessions that ranged from “How strong is your digital brand in the marketplace?” to “Conversing with AI, one prompt at a time”.
The sessions counted towards the 40 continuing professional education credits that EY required employees to complete in a year. The firm determined that watching two at a time amounted to an ethical breach.
“Our core values of integrity and ethics are at the forefront of everything we do,” EY said. “Appropriate disciplinary action was recently taken in a small number of cases where individuals were found to be in violation of our global code of conduct and US learning policy.”
As an orange sun rises over a deeply reddened nation, the woke left isn’t out, but it most certainly is down.
And while millions of Americans played a part, responsibility for the death of the woke regime rests in a small set of hands.
Neither conservatism, libertarianism, nor any other -ism killed the woke vibe.
Tech did.
As the woke regime intended to permanently transform America and the American people by spiritually commanding and controlling tech, this fact bears close examination.
