“Experts leaned strongly toward the left of the political spectrum”
Data from Harvard Misinformation Review, survey of 150 misinformation experts
misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/wp-content/upl… (here with left to the left and right to the right)
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Higher Treasury yields snowball into $1.1 trillion of additional interest
Treasury yields have sprung to multiyear highs, forcing the U.S. government to pay a lot more in interest and putting pressure on the budget.
The U.S. government is expected to pay an additional $1.1 trillion in interest over the coming decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest estimates. Interest costs are on pace to surpass defense this year as one of the largest government expenses in the budget. Only Social Security and Medicare are forecast to be bigger burdens in the coming years.
The Small University Endowment That Is Beating the Ivy League
Baylor University has traded its way to the top of the university endowment performance rankings.
Many universities allocate their money among different assets and adjust periodically. Baylor, led by a former trader, seizes on market moves frequently to boost or cut exposure to its managers.
“The only thing I’m doing is what the market tells me to do: If the market goes up, we take some money back. If the market goes down, we give it money,” said investment chief David Morehead. “It is finance 101.”
Morehead regularly touts Baylor’s performance compared with other endowments to its outside fund managers. He takes particular pride in beating the Ivies, which Baylor has largely done over the past five years despite those endowments’ larger staffs. Besides Morehead, Baylor has four investment staffers, all women.
The endowment gained 6.4% for the fiscal year ended June 30, beating all the Ivy League endowments. Over the past five years, its 10.9% annualized return outpaced that of all the Ivies except for Brown University, which notched a 13.3% average annual gain. Baylor ranks in the top 5% of all U.S. endowments for the period, according to Wilshire Trust Universe Comparison Service.
“It was a strategy to promote equity by detracking, which intentionally keeps students of various abilities together”
San Francisco is “piloting” returning basic algebra to 8th grade classrooms and they’ve somehow made it cost $3 million in the first year alone, including $300k for “pilot data collection and analysis.”
It’s like a parody.
Exeter Under Ideology
Left-wing racialism has become the lexicon of the Ivy League, so it is only natural that its feeder schools have adopted it as well—partly out of idealism, partly out of cynicism.
The most prestigious of these is Phillips Exeter Academy. The school has graduated senators, diplomats, generals, and titans of industry. In the past, this meant assimilating the manners and mores of America’s elite Protestant culture. Today, it means drilling students in ideological concepts such as “white privilege,” “white fragility,” and “queer theory.” The Exeter man is prepared to rule or, at a minimum, to conform to the culture of those who do.
I have spoken with a recent graduate and obtained documents that show the shocking extent to which Exeter has assimilated fashionable left-wing ideologies of race and gender, which stand in stark contrast with the founding mission of the school and the common conception among many of its alumni. (Phillips Exeter Academy did not respond to a request for comment.)
The story begins with the 2020 death of George Floyd. Following the lead of Ivy League presidents, Exeter principal Bill Rawson published an open letter promising to “combat the pernicious legacy of systemic racism that Black people and other people of color face each and every day.” To do this, Rawson continued, “will require a willingness, particularly on the part of the white members of our community, to be actively and effectively anti-racist.”
“Black lives matter,” Rawson pleaded. “Black voices matter.”
The Case Against ‘Dead Poets Society’
The problem? The film’s fictional Keating and his real-life counterparts—who now dominate secondary and post-secondary education—mostly poison the young people whose intellectual and spiritual thirst they mean to quench.
Healthy Order and Healthy Disorder
Before Keating exerts his influence, Welton is a place where many boys are thriving. We see boys sneaking transistor radios into dorms, boys contemplating how to steal the girlfriends of public-school athletes, boys forming regular study groups and occasional cheating alliances, boys bustling with the restless physical energy that, more than any other characteristic, defines male youth.
That is, we see boys pushing against the boundaries that their parents and teachers have set—exactly as healthy teens should.
Are those boundaries overly narrow and constraining, and therefore due for reform? In some cases, absolutely—and tragically so. Animated by class anxiety and therefore deeply concerned about his son’s academic performance and professional trajectory, Mr. Perry, the father of a boy named Neil, forces his son to withdraw from a position as assistant editor of Welton’s yearbook so that he can focus exclusively on his course work. Worse, given Neil’s deep penchant for acting, Perry forbids his son from participating in a local production of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Neil defies his father by participating in the play anyway and ultimately commits suicide when his parents fail to understand the depth of his commitment to the theater and continue to insist that he become a doctor.
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NHS nurses being investigated for ‘industrial-scale’ qualifications fraud
The scam allegedly involves proxies impersonating nurses and taking a key test in Nigeria, which must be passed for them to become registered and allowed to work in the UK.
“It’s very, very worrying if … there’s an organisation that’s involving themselves in fraudulent activity, enabling nurses to bypass these tests, or if they are using surrogates to do exams for them because the implication is that we end up in the UK with nurses who aren’t competent,” said Peter Carter, the ex-chief executive of the RCN and ex-chair of three NHS trusts, calling it an “industrial-scale fraud”.
He praised the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) for taking action against those involved “to protect the quality of care and patient safety and the reputation of nurses”.
Politics and Education Governance
Frederick Hess and Michael Mcshane:
Chaotic campuses rife with double standardsabout the kinds of speech that merit protection. A Biden administration determined to let student borrowers shrug off hundreds of billions in loans and stick taxpayers with the tab. Progressive states working to eliminateadvanced math based on misguided notions of “equity.” Survey findings showing that, when asked about the purpose of civics education, more K–12 teachers mention environmental activism than “knowledge of social, political, and civic institutions.”
Tack on prolonged school closures, campus craziness, and declining test scores, and it’s no great surprise that public confidence in the nation’s schools and colleges has plunged. This plunge has shaken the public’s confidence in Democrats (long seen as the party of the teachers’ unions and the faculty lounge). But it also gives the GOP a historic opportunity to lead on education. Unburdened by longstanding relationships with the education blob, conservatives are well-positioned to stand up for common sense, shared values, and much-needed rethinking.
Yet, while Democrats have fumbled their longtime lead on education, Republicans haven’t yet seized the baton. Indeed, other than school choice, it can seem like the right doesn’t have many actionable ideas — with most of its energy consumed combating the left’s worst ideas. It can be far from clear what Republicans are actually for when it comes to education.
The happiest kids in the world have social safety nets
When my sister, her husband and their four-month-old daughter moved from New Jersey to the Netherlands in March of 2022, I wasn’t expecting our family to receive a lesson in Dutch parenting. But, after spending time at their former home on Bloemgracht, a street and canal in the Jordaan neighborhood of Amsterdam, I learned a lot about the Dutch parenting pedagogy: namely, allowing children to be free and independent—even when it means permitting them to bike in the rain. Yet underneath this conscious parenting philosophy, I observed that, while Dutch parenting may indeed be impressive, it’s the Dutch social safety net that permits parents to feel safe and secure enough to allow their children this broad freedom and independence.
Social safety net
Visiting my sister’s 1600s-era apartment one summer, I meet her Dutch neighbors Daan and Annamarie and their two children, Louie, 7, and Morris, 10. As my partner, Mike, and I sit on the bench in front of my sister’s home, we watch as Louie and Morris chase each other up and down the street, barefoot and dodging Bakfiets—the human-powered cargo bike that all the “cool” Dutch parents have—and run back and forth across the bridge over the Bloemgracht canal.
What, Exactly, Should You Eat? Inside the $190 Million Study Trying to Find the Answer
At a biomedical center here, there’s a man scarfing down Frosted Flakes and tater tots while hooked up to an IV. His job? To help the government figure out what you should eat.
That man, Kevin Elizabeth, a 28-year-old tech worker, is one of 500 Americans who will be living at scientific facilities around the country for six weeks, eating precisely selected meals and undergoing hundreds of medical tests. He is part of a new study, costing $189 million, that is one of the most ambitious nutrition research projects the National Institutes of Health has ever undertaken.
If the study succeeds, it could help Americans get healthier and cut through years of confusion about nutrition guidance.
Madison’s taxpayer funded K-12 systems’s lack of transparency
Monica Santana Rosen, the CEO of the Alma Advisory Group, which consulted on the superintendent search, explained why the board thought it was important to provide a platform for students, in particular, to ask questions of the candidates, but she did not answer why additional panels were not made available to the public.
“In the end, we felt it was better to prioritize the conversations that were going to bring the best information to the broader community,” Rosen said. “We really wanted to hear what the students had to ask the candidate and how each of them were going to respond.”
“Ultimately,” she added, “the board prioritizes students and parents as those who really are the closest and have a lot at stake in giving them the opportunity to have that platform and share it with the rest of the community.”
In late January, the district announced three finalists for superintendent: Mohammed Choudhury, the former state superintendent of the Maryland State Department of Education; Joe Gothard, the superintendent of Saint Paul Public Schools and a former Madison principal; and Yvonne Stokes, a former superintendent of Hamilton Southeastern Schools in Indiana. On Feb. 6 the district hosted two interview panels; one led by students and another by parents and caretakers. These were livestreamed but neither the public nor media could attend in person. The interview panels held on Feb. 7 were not livestreamed or open to the public or media at all.
$pending is always a challenge, given the moving numbers.
Mr. Rickert mentions current school year spending of $591,000,000 for 25,581 students or $23,103 per student.
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Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
“The Madison school district is planning to hit up taxpayers for $1 billion — one Billion with a capital B dollars — in referenda over the next 20 years to go carbon neutral”
Someone tell the Madison public schools we need more global warming, not less. The school district is planning to hit up taxpayers for $1 billion — one Billion with a capital B dollars — in referenda over the next 20 years to go carbon neutral.
MMSD can’t teach or keep young Javon safe but it’s going to replace that Swedish girl’s perpetual scowl with a Mona Lisa smile.
Blaska’s Bottom Line:What local government needs is an independent budgetary watchdog — something like the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance. (Where are the Frautschis and the Evjue Foundation when you really need them?) Meanwhile, the Republican state legislature is once again trying to give us a break on our income taxes — Gov. Evers having once before vetoed.
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Explore Madison taxpayer’s k-12 $pending, now at least $23k per student.
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Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Notes on Madison’s latest Superintendent Candidates
Update: Madison school district finalists’ history: one resigned, one fired, one now has his district striking.
This has been a curious superintendent interview cycle for our 2nd-biggest district. I hope they get it right, for the kids’ sakes.
@_kaylahuynh @AbbeyMachtig
Born with a treatable condition at a Milwaukee hospital, she died 30 hours later. What happened to Baby Amillianna?
On Sept. 18, 2021, Amillianna Ramirez-Johnson was born at Ascension Columbia St. Mary’s hospital in Milwaukee. She weighed 6 pounds, 15 ounces, had a halo of fuzzy, dark curls, 10 fingers, 10 toes and a healthy heart.
But her weak cry and the pale-blue tint to her skin signaled her breathing was stressed. The umbilical cord was “stained green,” according to medical records.
The staining was from meconium, a thick, tar-like substance that when passed by a newborn — creating the baby’s first dirty diaper — is a sign of good health. But when a fetus is stressed, meconium is released too soon, creating a toxic mix of amniotic fluid and waste that is inhaled prior to birth.
Amillianna had inhaled the sticky substance either in utero or while traveling through the birth canal. It entered her airways and settled in her lungs.
An hour after she was born, Amillianna was transferred to Room 624 in the neonatal intensive care unit. Before she and her parents were separated, a nurse held Amillianna close to her mother Karen Ramirez’s cheek, the newborn’s lips resting there for a quick couple of seconds.
Why Is the College-Completion Rate Stagnating?
A college education is often touted as absolutely necessary if one is to achieve the American dream. Yet college-completion rates have stagnated in recent years. Given that enrollment rates have declined, as well, it is clear that American colleges and universities have their work cut out for them if they want to survive. Colleges are not simply educational institutions—they are businesses. Without paying students (and a federal government to subsidize those payments), colleges and universities run the risk of folding.
The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC) recently published data concerning the national college-completion rate. That number has stagnated at 62.2 percent for students who started college in fall 2017, a similar outcome experienced by the last two cohorts, from 2015 and 2016.
No matter the cause, colleges will need to improve their completion rates in order to survive in the long term.The data also exhibited a widening gender gap, with 65.6 percent of women graduating in six years, while only 58.4 percent of men did the same. This represents the biggest gender divide since at least the cohort of 2008, the first tracked by NSCRC. While the news media constantly bombards the American public about a “patriarchy” that prevents women from succeeding, women are now consistently more likely to earn degrees than are men.
DPI’s actions do not comply with statutory rulemaking requirements and are therefore invalid.
The Quotes: WILL Education Counsel Cory Brewer stated, “This ruling is a win for parents, kids, and school choice in Wisconsin. As we noted in our lawsuit, DPI has been exceeding its authority under state law in how it administers the parental choice programs and making up the rules as it goes along. These programs were created to be a simple, easy to use option for eligible families, and today’s ruling helps restore that goal.”
Carol Shires, SCW Vice President of Operations, stated, “This ruling removes roadblocks for families and recognizes the real purpose of school choice: to open doors for parents to find the best educational opportunity for their children. Thankfully, common sense and sanity prevailed in this case.”
Catholic Memorial High School of Waukesha, Inc. President, Donna Bembenek, stated, “Catholic Memorial is proud to stand alongside WILL, SCWA, and Roncalli Catholic Schools to protect the rights of parents to send their kids to a school of their choosing. These programs were designed to create educational access for parents, and this ruling affirms that goal.
Milwaukee 911 dispatcher refused to send officer to carjacking, call audio shows
Nick Bohr:
A carjacking in a quiet neighborhood near 84th and Mill last October still haunts the 64-year-old victim.
“I remember the person coming into my car, pulling me out of the car, pushing me down, fighting me for my purse,” the victim said Tuesday. She doesn’t want to be identified because she’s still shaken by the crime.
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As she fought the young man, a neighbor called 911.
“Some kids are stealing my neighbor’s car. They’re in her car. They can’t get the car door shut,” she’s heard saying on the 911 call obtained by WISN 12 News through an open records request. The victim is heard as well, describing the ongoing carjacking.
The Argument Over a Long-Standing Autism Intervention
When Tiffany Hammond was growing up in Texas, in the nineteen-nineties, other children teased her for how she spoke: she talked too softly, she talked in a monotone, she paused too long between words, she didn’t talk enough, she talked to herself. “Something’s wrong with her head,” kids would say. She was always fidgeting with pens or Troll dolls. She tried to connect with her peers by taking on their interests as her own—the Goosebumps series of scary novels, the N.B.A.—but the attempts backfired, as when she printed out an N.B.A. schedule, laminated and color-coded it, and brought it to school as a conversation piece. She kept a notebook on “how to be human,” which included tips such as remembering to staple your worksheets at the top-left corner and acquiring a pair of the correct Filas. Nothing worked. “I wondered why I didn’t have friends, or if I even deserved friends,” Hammond said. She dreaded school so much that, on a few mornings, when she was supposed to be walking there, she instead tried to make it to her great-grandparents’ house, some twenty-five miles away.
Helping our kids do math every day
Our kids love math, so helping them do what they love seemed like a good daily goal.
However, life often got in the way, and we didn’t do enough math for them.
Making “doing math” a daily habit was a way to show them respect and honor their interests.
Making Math a Habit
Once both kids had shown enough interest in math that it was apparent to us that we should give them more math, we decided to make doing daily math a habit.
The first thing we tried was being organized and establishing a “Time” Cue.
Year of Fear: In his new book, sociologist Eric Klinenberg looks at what COVID exposed about America.
2020 is both a social autopsy of the institutions that broke down during the pandemic and the story of seven people who lived through it. Why combine these two approaches?
One of my heroes is C. Wright Mills, a midcentury sociologist. He argues that no sociological research project is complete unless you can connect it with the big picture, social story, and historical forces that worked on our individual lives and stories. In other words, the best sociology puts our personal experiences into a broader context because so many of the things that we experienced as personal problems are, in fact, shared problems that come from our culture. So, in all my work I’ve tried to go back and forth between the personal and the social — or some would say the structural. I’ve never done anything quite as intimate, though, as 2020.
Why focus exclusively on New York?
I’ve lived in New York City for 20 years. Shortly after the pandemic began, I published an article in the New York Times in which I argued that social distance was the wrong strategy for surviving the pandemic, that we needed physical distance but social solidarity. It was clear to me that this fact was going to allow some societies to get through the crisis while others fell apart. My initial idea was that I’d travel around the world and see what was happening in all these different societies. Well, of course, the pandemic lasted years, not weeks, so I never was able to go out and travel around the world. But I was in New York, and New York contains a world of different experiences.
How did growing up in Chicago shape your interests as a sociologist?
Civics: Warrantless Domestic Spying
What can we learn from this sordid story? At least two things. First, most House members want a warrant requirement for backdoor searches. HPSCI is constantly taking members’ temperature, and if members weren’t supporting reform, HPSCI wouldn’t have stopped the vote. 16/18
Overall, the Taxpayer supported Madison School District plans to spend about $591 million this school year”
Math achievement did not necessarily line up with per-pupil spending in Dane County and Wisconsin’s largest districts. Madison spent the most, for example, of the 10 county districts included in the analysis, or $18,896 per pupil in the 2021-22 school year, according to data from the state Department of Public Instruction. Among the state’s largest districts, it was second only to Milwaukee, which spent the most per student, or $19,164, in 2021-22, and had the lowest math scores.
Schools nationwide closed to in-person learning on the recommendation of federal health officials in March 2020 and in some cases, such as in Madison, didn’t fully reopen until the 2021-22 school year — a year and a half later. Public health researchers have long known that the old and the sick were most at risk of dying or developing serious illness from COVID-19, and research as early as the fall of 2020 indicated that in-person schooling did not create an elevated risk of getting COVID for students or employees.
While it’s not known to what degree closing schools curbed the spread of the disease, an October 2022 analysis by the joint Madison-Dane County public health agency of COVID hospitalizations and deaths linked to in-person schooling in Dane County showed there had been no deaths and eight hospitalizations among school populations — six of students and two of teachers.
One school-age person in Dane County, a 16-year-old boy, died of COVID-19, on Nov. 25, 2020.
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$pending is always a challenge, given the moving numbers.
Mr. Rickert mentions current school year spending of $591,000,000 for 25,581 students or $23,103 per student.
——-
Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
UW-Oshkosh professors push for no-confidence vote on chancellor, citing financial failures
The petition, which has been circulating for two weeks and has enough signatures to prompt a Faculty Senate vote, lists nine reasons faculty lack faith in Leavitt’s ability to lead UW-Oshkosh. They include Leavitt’s oversight of “substantial overspending of revenues” that contributed to the budget crisis and destruction of student support networks built over decades; failure to address potential enrollment declines; and a disregard for shared governance groups. The petition cited Leavitt’s reliance on a consulting firm, not faculty and staff governance, to determine layoffs.
“UW-Oshkosh is strong. Our top leadership is not,” the petition states. “We take no joy in listing the failings of our current leadership. Indeed, we live with their impact every day.”
The decline of financial privacy
Cash gave us substantial privacy by default because there was no technological alternative but there was never a collective vote for cash or, sadly, a consensus for privacy. You might hope that people would demand to keep the privacy rights they they once had but no. The populace seems indifferent to the erosion of privacy. Instead, paranoia about criminals hijacks the narrative. “What about the sex traffickers and terrorists?!” they shout. People seem more than willing to give up their privacy in exchange for a promise of security–false though the promise may be. Thus, we get ever more draconian regulations, effectively strangling our financial freedom. The $10,000 cash rule, for example, is insane, a reflection of Nixonian paranoia and not fit for a free society.
Grade Inflation at UC Riverside, and Institutional Pressures for Easier Grading
Three things are visually obvious from this graph:First, there’s a spike of high grades in Spring 2020 — presumably due to the chaos of the early days of the pandemic.Second, the percentage of As is higher in recent years than in earlier years.Third, the percentage of DFWs has remained about the same across the period.
In Fall 2013, 32% of enrolled students received As. In Fall 2023, 45% did. (DFW’s were 9% in both terms.)
One open question is whether the new normal of about 45% As reflects a general trend independent of the pandemic spike or whether the pandemic somehow created an enduring change. Another question is whether the higher percentage of As reflects easier grading or better performance. The term “inflation” suggests the former, but of course data of this sort by themselves don’t distinguish between those possibilities.
The increase in percentage As is evident in both lower division and upper division classes, increasing from 32% to 43% in lower division and from 33% to 49% in upper division.
How about UCR philosophy in particular? I’d like to think that my own department has consistent and rigorous standards. However, as the figure below shows, the trends in UCR philosophy are similar, with an increase from 26% As in Fall 2013 to 41% As in Fall 2024:
Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction
It’s Nobel Prize week, and the work behind mRNA COVID-19 vaccines has just earned the physiology or medicine prize. But this is Retraction Watch, so that’s not what this post is about.
A Nobel prize-winning researcher whose publications have come under scrutiny has retracted his 10th paperfor issues with the data and images.
Gregg Semenza, a professor of genetic medicine and director of the vascular program at Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Cell Engineering in Baltimore, shared the 2019 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for “discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.”
The pseudonymous sleuth Claire Francis had flagged possibly duplicated or manipulated images in Semenza’s publications on PubPeer before 2019, and other sleuths posted more beginning in October 2020.
At 93, Joy Hakim is Still in the Fight for Better Children’s Textbooks
As a small illustration of her long, idiosyncratic writing career, Joy Hakim likes to tell the story of a chance encounter in an Oakland elevator.
On the way down after a speaking engagement, a woman handed her a slip of paper — it contained the phone number of her son’s private school. He and his classmates, she said, could really benefit from their school swapping out its traditional history textbooks for a set of Hakim’s.
Asked who she was, the woman admitted that she was a representative of one of the big publishing houses.
“I was appalled,” Hakim remembered. “But this is an industry where almost no one believes the books educate well — and scores prove that.”
Hakim doesn’t know if the school ever switched over. But the episode underscores her uncomfortable place in an industry that has never quite embraced her. By turns raw, thrilling and eye-opening, her writing offers young people a look at history that they rarely get between the covers of mass-produced textbooks.
Can you imagine not only being so consistently wrong, but also failing to show any sort of humility?
In a sense, Ehrlich’s trajectory is an early example of the current activist script: Make an apocalyptic prediction with very little regard for the truth, then keep peddling your alarmism even as you’re proven wrong, acting like you’re justified if it gets more people to care about the broad strokes (specifics be damned). Disregard all damage and destruction in your wake, rinse and repeat.
Yale Weighs Reversing SAT Testing After Dartmouth, MIT Shift
Yale University is considering reinstating standardized testing and join Ivy League peer Dartmouth College in a policy shift that reflects a broad reevaluation within higher education admissions.
Jeremiah Quinlan, Yale’s dean of undergraduate admissions, said in an email that the university is “closely considering” its policy, adding that he expects to make an announcement in the coming weeks about the school’s plans for next year and beyond. Dartmouth said earlier this month that it will once again require applicants to submit scores starting in the fall.
Feds investigating Edina Public Schools for discrimination
The U.S. Department of Education is investigating Edina Public Schools over alleged discrimination, months after two Muslim students were suspended for using a pro-Palestinian slogan while protesting the Israeli war in Gaza.
The two students — Somali American girls who participated in a student walkout in support of Palestinians in October — each received a three-day suspension for chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Attorney Bruce Nestor announced Nov. 27 that he had filed a civil rights complaint against the school district on behalf of the suspended students. Speaking alongside members of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Nestor said the complaint was filed to defend students wanting to engage in speech in support of Palestinians, adding that “we will not stand for a double standard that punishes Muslim students.”
The Future of Land-Grant Universities
American universities are in trouble. And no, I don’t mean the troubles in the Ivy League, though these schools are indeed a mess. America’s other—potentially more important—universities also face a crisis. What made the American higher education system great was not just its Ivy League schools but its land-grant state universities. Today, however, budget pressures at these institutions could alter the trajectory of education, the labor force, and our politics for years.
Land-grant universities got their start in 1862, when the federal government donated land to the states, facilitating the creation of these schools. The idea, as the Department of Agriculture puts it, was to help “working class citizens” secure “equal access to higher education with a focus on farming and mechanical skills.” These were the skills most in need at the time. In 1900, for instance, just under half of Americans worked in agriculture. The resulting universities adapted their offerings over the years, the better to suit a changing economy. Today, many have become top-tier research institutions, with extensive libraries that rival those of the Ivy League.
Civics: Latham & Watkins cuts off its Hong Kong lawyers from international databases
Chan Ho-him and Kaye Wiggins in Hong Kong and Suzi Ring:
US law firm Latham & Watkins is cutting off automatic access to its international databases for its Hong Kong-based lawyers, in a sign of how Beijing’s closer control of the territory is forcing global firms to rethink the way they operate.
The world’s second-highest-grossing law firm has told staff that while Hong Kong will have access by default to China documents, from this month they will not be able to see other content in its international databases unless specifically given permission, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
The move underscores the growing difficulties for global companies operating in a city that made its name as an international financial hub. It comes after Beijing introduced new anti-espionage and data laws restricting information flows out of the country.
The law firm’s policy cuts off Hong Kong lawyers from default access to content in its US, Europe, Middle East and Asia databases.
Latham & Watkins is now “treating Hong Kong as the same as mainland China”, one of the people said, as US firms grow wary over Beijing’s closer control of the territory. The law firm declined to comment.
Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: a high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom
F. R. (Ruud) Van der Weel Audrey L. H. Van der Meer
As traditional handwriting is progressively being replaced by digital devices, it is essential to investigate the implications for the human brain. Brain electrical activity was recorded in 36 university students as they were handwriting visually presented words using a digital pen and typewriting the words on a keyboard. Connectivity analyses were performed on EEG data recorded with a 256-channel sensor array. When writing by hand, brain connectivity patterns were far more elaborate than when typewriting on a keyboard, as shown by widespread theta/alpha connectivity coherence patterns between network hubs and nodes in parietal and central brain regions. Existing literature indicates that connectivity patterns in these brain areas and at such frequencies are crucial for memory formation and for encoding new information and, therefore, are beneficial for learning. Our findings suggest that the spatiotemporal pattern from visual and proprioceptive information obtained through the precisely controlled hand movements when using a pen, contribute extensively to the brain’s connectivity patterns that promote learning. We urge that children, from an early age, must be exposed to handwriting activities in school to establish the neuronal connectivity patterns that provide the brain with optimal conditions for learning. Although it is vital to maintain handwriting practice at school, it is also important to keep up with continuously developing technological advances. Therefore, both teachers and students should be aware of which practice has the best learning effect in what context, for example when taking lecture notes or when writing an essay
Tracking student data falls short in combating absenteeism at school
Chronic absenteeism has surged across the country since the pandemic, with more than one out of four students missing at least 18 days of school a year. That’s more than three lost weeks of instruction a year for more than 10 million school children. An even higher percentage of poor students, more than one out of three, are chronically absent.
Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, calls chronic absenteeism – not learning loss – “the greatest challenge for public schools.” At a Feb. 8, 2024 panel discussion, Malkus said, “It’s the primary problem because until we do something about that, academic recovery from the pandemic, which is significant, is a pipe dream.”
K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: California’s growing burden
California’s highest income tax rate is 13.3%. That is in addition to a top federal tax rate of 37%. California also has a state sales tax rate of 7.25%, and many localities impose a smaller sales tax. So if a wealthy person earns and spends labor income in the state of California, the tax rate at the margin could approach 60%. Then there is the corporate state income tax rate of 8.84%, some of which is passed along to consumers through higher prices. That increases the tax burden further yet.
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More.
Why should we respect scientists when their role in the Covid lab leak debate revealed a worrying attachment to China
In a shrinking list of trusted authorities, scientists remain close to the top. The government, the church, the media and even the Post Office might all have had their scandals but, outside climate-denying, antivax circles, “the science” was still sacrosanct. Then along came Covid and raised the scientific establishment to the status of government, judge and jury.
Now the backlash has begun. It may not have reached the establishment, where “the science” is still regarded as akin to the Gospel, but distrust of science and scientists is on its way to becoming mainstream. And like all the other flawed institutions struggling to adapt to the new world of decentralised information and fragmenting authority, the scientific establishment thoroughly deserves its fate.
Notes on Milwaukee k-12 spending, staffing and enrollment
Wisconsin’s largest school district is planning to ask its voters to approve a $252 million annual increase in its revenue — and, consequently, spending — in an upcoming referendum.
That district, Milwaukee Public Schools, has seen a sharp increase in spending in the two most recent years of state data after nearly a decade of spending that mostly kept up with but did not exceed inflation.
That, in turn, followed years of steady increases in spending above the rate of inflation and, then, coinciding with the Walker-era Act 10 reforms that coupled a cut in state school aid with tools to allow districts to save money on benefits costs, a sharp drop in spending.
MPS’ referendum is set for April 2. It will ask voters whether MPS can exceed its “revenue limit” permanently. The increase would phase in over four years, starting with what MPS says would be $140 million in new annual revenue in the 2024-25 school year and ramping up to $252 million a year by 2027-28.
District officials say that state funding is inadequate because it has not kept pace with inflation.
Civics: Warrantless Surveillance
Imagine saying that the Fourth Amendment‘s warrant requirement should be ignored because it doesn’t “serve the national security interests of the United States.” This is like Mike Rogers-level idiocy.
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More.
How China Miscalculated Its Way to a Baby Bust
China’s baby bust is happening faster than many expected, raising fears of a demographic collapse. And coping with the fallout may now be complicated by miscalculations made more than 40 years ago.
The rapid shift under way today wasn’t projected by the architects of China’s one-child policy—one of the biggest social experiments in history, instituted in 1980. At the time, governments around the world feared overpopulation would hold back economic growth. A Moscow-trained missile scientist led the push for China’s policy, based on tables of calculations that applied mathematical models used to calculate rocket trajectories to population growth.
Four decades later, China is aging much earlier in its development than other major economies did. The shift to fewer births and more elderly citizens threatens to hold back economic growth. In a generation that grew up without siblings, young women are increasingly reluctant to have children—and there are fewer of them every year. Beijing is at a loss to change the mindset brought about by the policy.
Births in China fell by more than 500,000 last year, according to recent government data, accelerating a population drop that started in 2022. Officials cited a quickly shrinking number of women of childbearing age—more than three million fewer than a year earlier—and acknowledged “changes in people’s thinking about births, postponement of marriage and childbirth.”
Some researchers argue the government underestimates the problem, and the population began to shrink even earlier.
Becoming Disillusioned with Teaching by Matthew
“In place of ideas and curiosity and the beautiful blooming of young people discovering life, I felt as though I was dying in front of them.”
Edited by Cliff Williams from a recorded and transcribed conversation with Matthew on December 13, 2023. He was in his early thirties when we talked. “Matthew” is a pseudonym.
Becoming a Teacher
Matthew’s road to teaching began four or five years after he finished college. “I had studied writing when I was in college, but didn’t know what I wanted to do with it. I worked as a barista for a while. Then I spent several years doing various marketing jobs. I did copy writing, I wrote blog posts for businesses, and for a time I was a brand manager.
“After spending a few years in the world of marketing, I got jaded with it. I didn’t believe that more things needed to be sold. So I left marketing and started working at a bookstore.
“When I was in college, one of my professors had us read Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Gilead. I wasn’t ready for it at the time, but when I read it again after college, I fell in love with it. Then when a friend who also worked at the bookstore told me about Robinson’s new collection of essays, What Are We Doing Here?: Essays, I read it too.
“That book expresses Robinson’s frustration with the way the humanities were treated by government institutions and businesses, even by the educational system itself. She advocated for the beauty of reading and writing, and wrote eloquently about deeply human things.
Notes on changes in Wisconsin taxpayer K-12 funding policies
WILL:
The Assembly is currently considering AB900—a bill that would “decouple” public school spending from spending on the voucher and independent charter school programs. While the concept likely sounds quite confusing, it’s actually relatively straightforward, and will benefit public schools, taxpayers, and choice schools as well. We’ll explain how below.
PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Currently, when a student leaves for the state’s school choice programs and some independent charters, state aid to school districts is reduced to make up for the cost to the state of that student. This loss of state aid is allowed to be made up for with a revenue limit adjustment that raises property taxes in the district. AB900 would change this. School districts would no longer see their aid reduced for the cost of the voucher or charter students, leading to a property tax cut and access to more state aid. Instead, choice and charter schools would be funded by the state. In addition, the bill includes a provision for school districts to recoup 25% of the revenue limit authority they used to receive for voucher students—leading to additional revenue per pupil for the vast majority of districts in the state.
We have included an attachment that shows what the bill would result in for every district. This comes from a memo produced by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau. To help with understanding, consider the example from Green Bay reproduced below:
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Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Civics: Notes on Endorsements
I’m honored by the influx of endorsement requests. But let’s be honest, most endorsements are meaningless, so here’s what we’re doing: any candidate whom I endorse in this cycle will make a hard commitment to the following principles.
With violence at Brockton High School a near-daily problem, teachers are at a breaking point
In December 2022, his arm was broken trying to break up a fight after school, a day after he had remarked to other teachers that it was only a matter of time before someone got “seriously hurt — or God forbid — killed,” he recalled.
More than a year has passed since then, but the disruptions from the pandemic seem to have intensified, pushing teachers and staff to a breaking point. They recounted their experiences in interviews and in emotional testimony at a recent Brockton School Committee meeting, describing students vaping and dealing drugs, engaging in violent behavior that was recorded by crowds of onlookers, having sex in empty classrooms, and verbally harassing faculty.
Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?
It’s something her own children won’t experience.
Lancastle’s older brother and sister don’t have children and her husband is an only child. So Nicholas, 9, and Charlie, 7, don’t have any cousins at all — a growing trend as the decreasing fertility rate causes extended families to narrow over time, sociologists and demographers say.
Worldwide, families are shrinking, according to a kinship study published in December in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. That study, using international demographic data for every country in the world, projected a 38 per cent global decline in living relatives for individuals aged 65 by the year 2095, compared to 1950.
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Choose life.
Baby Bust’: Why Fewer Young People Expect to Become Parents
Jeffrey Klein: In your new book, Baby Bust, you raise some provocative issues about work and family…. As I read this book, I really felt you were compelled to write it. So, what do you find compelling about this topic?
Stewart D. Friedman: There’s both a personal reason and a professional one. I originally got into this topic area when my first son was born, now 26 years ago. When I met him for the first time, I was overwhelmed by a question that I just couldn’t get out of my head: “What am I going to do to make the world a safe place for him to grow up in?” This is a question that I hadn’t really thought much about before I met him, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. When I got back into my Wharton classroom about a week later, I framed the question in a slightly different way for the students, the future business leaders of the world: How are you thinking about the development, not so much of talent in the next generation, but of people? What does that mean for you professionally as well as personally, and how are you going to figure out how to do that in your own world?
That created quite a stir in the classroom. First of all, they had prepared a case on motivation and reward systems, and I had put that aside for the day. They weren’t very happy about that. But some people were quite upset about the fact that I was talking about family and kids. Others were upset because they didn’t really want to hear about my personal life. But quite a few were really grateful and interested in the questions that I was challenging them with as I just started to rant on this issue, completely unprepared.
7 tips for improving news coverage of private school choice
About half of U.S. states offer private school choice programs, which help families pay for private school. It’s a highly politicized, complicated issue involving multiple types of tuition assistance, hundreds of thousands of children and billions of taxpayer dollars.
It’s also an issue journalists need to examine closely. News coverage grounded in academic research is particularly important as more states consider starting these programs and lawmakers in states that have them push to expand.
How can journalists strengthen their coverage? We put this question to seven university professors who study private school vouchers and other private school choice programs. Here’s their advice:
1. Explain how the various private school choice programs differ.
In the U.S., the three most common private school choice programs are tuition vouchers, tax-credit scholarships and education savings accounts, or ESAs. Journalists often refer to them all as “voucher” programs, but there are key differences.
“ESAs are radically different from school vouchers,” Patrick J. Wolf, a professor of education policy and the 21st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice at the University of Arkansas, wrote to The Journalist’s Resource.
In our roundup of research on private school choice, we briefly explain these three programs:
The Forgotten History of the Chapter
It is hard to see chapters, such is their banal inevitability. The chapter possesses the trick of vanishing while in the act of serving its various purposes. In 1919, writing in the Nouvelle revue française, Marcel Proust famously insisted that the most beautiful moment in Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education was not a phrase but a blanc, or white space: a terrific, yawning fermata, one “sans l’ombre de transition,” without, so to speak, the hint of a transition. It is the hiatus, Proust explains, that directly ensues from a scene set during Louis Napoleon’s 1851 coup, in which the protagonist Frédéric Moreau watches the killing of his radical friend Dussardier by Sénécal, a former militant republican turned policeman for the new regime. After this sudden and virtuosic blanc, Frédéric is in 1867; sixteen aimless years elapse in the intervening silence. It is, Proust argues, a masterful change of tempo, one that liberates the regularity of novelistic time by treating it in the spirit of music. And yet this blanc is not entirely blank. What Proust neglects to mention, whether out of forgetfulness or disdain for such editorial and typesetting detail, is that the hiatus he is praising here is a chapter break.
“All three finalists either declined the Wisconsin State Journal’s interview requests prior to the panel interviews or did not respond to requests”
However, only two of those panels, one with students and one with parents, were available to watch via livestream. Members of the public and the media could not attend in person.
Nichols told the State Journal the board wanted to match the interview process from previous superintendent searches and “maintain the parts of our interviews we historically have made more public and then which were more internal anyway.”
“When you add a more public component to interviewing, I think generally it can add as a potential distraction from the interview itself.”
Harvard Extension School Administrator Accused of Plagiarism in Anonymous Complaint
Tilly R. Robinson and Neil H. Shah
Harvard Extension School administrator Shirley R. Greene was accused of 42 instances of plagiarism in her 2008 University of Michigan dissertation in a complaint sent to the University Friday — the latest in a string of anonymous plagiarism complaints against Black Harvard officials.
All three anonymous complaints — against former University President Claudine Gay, Harvard Chief Diversity Officer Sherri A. Charleston, and now Greene, who handles Title IX complaints at the Extension School — were leveled at Black women who hold or held leadership positions at the University.
Unlike Gay, Charleston and Greene are administrators and do not hold academic appointments at Harvard.
The complaint was submitted anonymously to the chair of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ professional conduct committee Friday afternoon and obtained by The Crimson.
Green Bay k-12 superintendent commentary
Green Bay School District Superintendent Claude Tiller is under review for comments he made on an Atlanta-based talk radio show last week, according to the Green Bay School Board.
Tiller was in Atlanta on Feb. 6 to recruit teachers from Morehouse College, Clark Atlanta University and Spelman College, according to his X, formerly known as Twitter, account. While there, he was a guest on a WAOK 1380 radio talk show “REALationship Talk.”
The Feb. 6 show, hosted by Adrienne Berry, focused on navigating educational leadership, according to the station’s Facebook page. Berry did not immediately respond to the Press-Gazette’s phone call or social media messages.
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More.
Do Not Trust Appearances: My Visit to Deep Springs College
Back in the late 1980s, I had come here to visit Deep Springs College. This college was really a commune of sorts, which was in the middle of the desert, a few hours outside of Las Vegas. At that time, the school boasted the highest SAT scores of any college in the United States and it was very small. In fact, if I recall correctly, there were only about 25 students in the entire school, which was itself supported by an endowment. Tuition was free. In order to attend the school, the students were required to take on various jobs on a farm that the school had established in the middle of the desert. There, the school was supposed to teach its students important real world skills such as self-reliance and resourcefulness, among other abilities. According to the school’s website:
Deep Springs is an all-male liberal arts college located on a cattle-ranch and alfalfa farm in California’s High Desert. Electrical pioneer L.L. Nunn founded the school in 1917 on the three pillars of academics, labor, and self-governance in order to help young men prepare themselves for lives of service to humanity. The school’s 26 students, along with its staff and faculty, form a close community engaged in this intense project.
Deep Springs operates on the belief that manual labor and political deliberation are integral parts of a comprehensive liberal arts education.
Each student attends for two years and receives a full scholarship valued at over $50,000 per year. Afterwards, most complete their degrees at the world’s most prestigious four year institutions.
New Bill Would Require Phonics-Based Reading Instruction in California
An Assembly bill introduced this week would require all California schools to teach students to read using the “science of reading,” a phonics-based approach that research shows is a more effective way to teach literacy.
AB 2222, introduced by Assemblymember Blanca Rubio, a Democrat from West Covina, is backed by Marshall Tuck, who ran for California superintendent of public instruction in 2018. Tuck is now the chief executive officer of EdVoice, an education policy organization. It’s also backed by the advocacy groups Decoding Dyslexia California and Families in Schools.
Many schools in California have already transitioned to the science of reading approach, but some are still using a method known as balanced literacy or whole language, which emphasizes sight recognition of words in addition to phonics. The battle over the best way to teach children to read has been heated, because the stakes are so high: strong literacy skills are linked to higher graduation rates, better employment opportunities, the chances of being incarcerated and the state’s overall economy.
Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?
Lancastle’s older brother and sister don’t have children and her husband is an only child. So Nicholas, 9, and Charlie, 7, don’t have any cousins at all — a growing trend as the decreasing fertility rate causes extended families to narrow over time, sociologists and demographers say.
Worldwide, families are shrinking, according to a kinship study published in December in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. That study, using international demographic data for every country in the world, projected a 38 per cent global decline in living relatives for individuals aged 65 by the year 2095, compared to 1950.
The composition of family networks is also expected to change, with grandparents and great-grandparents living longer, but the number of cousins, nieces and nephews declining, the authors noted.
Ten years into my college teaching career, students stopped being able to read effectively.
The response of my fellow academics, however, reassures me that I’m not simply indulging in intergenerational grousing. Anecdotally, I have literally never met a professor who did not share my experience. Professors are also discussing the issue in academic trade publications, from a variety of perspectives. What we almost all seem to agree on is that we are facing newobstacles in structuring and delivering our courses, requiring us to ratchet down expectations in the face of a ratcheting down of preparation. Yes, there were always students who skipped the readings, but we are in new territory when even highly motivated honors students struggle to grasp the basic argument of a 20-page article. Yes, professors never feel satisfied that high school teachers have done enough, but not every generation of professors has had to deal with the fallout of No Child Left Behind and Common Core. Finally, yes, every generation thinks the younger generation is failing to make the grade—except for the current cohort of professors, who are by and large more invested in their students’ success and mental health and more responsive to student needs than any group of educators in human history. We are not complaining about our students. We are complaining about what has been taken from them.
These Families Are Shutting Down the Bank of Mom and Dad
Nancy Clark and her then-28-year-old son, Reid Clark, had just sat down to dinner in June 2022 when the conversation turned to when he would move out. The topic had come up before, but this time they decided to set a date one year later.
Nancy, now 60, said she remembers thinking: “I know that becoming financially independent needs to feel a little painful.”
Reid set off on his own last June. He ditched a job managing his family’s three ice cream shops in New Hampshire for a gig as the assistant to a professional ice hockey team’s mascot in St. Paul, Minn. He also works at an M&M’s store.
Nancy bought him groceries when he moved in and occasionally gives $50. By this June, Reid will no longer get any financial help if he’s short. He hasn’t needed to hit up his mom for rent money in the past few months. “I want to chart my own path in life,” he said.
Taking such a gradual approach and framing the conversation around gaining financial independence give it a positive spin, said Rocky Fittizzi, a wealth strategies adviser at Bank of America Private Bank. Telling your children you’re cutting them off suggests it is a punishment.
Censorship and Amazon policies
Chris Gore and Alan Ng rant about Amazon Studios’ new DEI rules, how DEI will be the death of creativity and why Hollywood is no longer the dream.
How To Be Someone People Love To Talk To
First impressions really are a big deal and talking to new people can be daunting, no doubt. What’s the answer?
It’s simple, really. Research shows that if you expect people will like you, they probably will:
Social optimists, of course, are in the happy position of expecting to be accepted and finding that, generally speaking, they are. Social pessimists, though, face the dark side of what sociologist Robert K. Merton—who coined the expression ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’—has called a ‘reign of error’. Expectation of rejection leads to the projection of colder, more defensive behaviour towards others, and this leads to actual rejection.
Don’t take the cliche advice and “just be yourself.” Put some effort into being warm and open. Ironically, studies show putting your best foot forward actually reveals the real you:
An ideal might be 20% of Americans with a college degree—meaning a reduction of slots by approximately half.
In 1970, 10% of Americans had a college degree. Today, 40% of Americans have a college degree.
This means, by simple math, that the average intelligence of college graduates has plummeted and, simultaneously, creates a large cohort of Americans who feel entitled to “college-worthy professions” without the intellectual aptitude for them. Hence, the explosion of email jobs, DEI offices, and administrative positions—which are the most susceptible to capture by resentment ideology.
Meanwhile, the cost of this college-degree bubble is shifted onto taxpayers, as the $1.6 trillion student loan scheme is funded, subsidized, and guaranteed by the federal government.
46% of Americans didn’t read a book in 2023
First up, some stats that are as bracing as the January weather outside (not really, I live in Southern California) to kick off our roundup. A full 46% of Americans did not finish a book last year and 5% more read just one, so if you read two books you’re in the top half of American readers. If you read more than fifty, congrats you’re a book one per-center! Meanwhile, 42% read on paper, 22% digital, and 19% audiobooks, with e-books attracting the heaviest readers.
Lincoln Michel dives a level below the stats and notes that while it’s a tad obscured how they categorize the genres, a quite robust 12% of readers read literary fiction–the same as the number that read science fiction and more than the 11% who read romance–puncturing some of the “we write books people actually read” sneers among certain genre
No data? No problem! Undisclosed tinkering in Excel behind economics paper
Last year, a new study on green innovations and patents in 27 countries left one reader slack-jawed. The findings were no surprise. What was baffling was how the authors, two professors of economics in Europe, had pulled off the research in the first place.
The reader, a PhD student in economics, was working with the same data described in the paper. He knew they were riddled with holes – sometimes big ones: For several countries, observations for some of the variables the study tracked were completely absent. The authors made no mention of how they dealt with this problem. On the contrary, they wrote they had “balanced panel data,” which in economic parlance means a dataset with no gaps.
“I was dumbstruck for a week,” said the student, who requested anonymity for fear of harming his career
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: Over 35 thousand grants, 90+ billion USD…
Every bubble is a grant.
Fully interactive dashboard with details up to 31-jan-2024, filters to search by year, country or full-text across all fields.
Worse than Plagiarism: False Firstness Claims and Dismissive Literature Reviews
Recent revelations of suspicious, unattributed text borrowings at academe’s pinnacle of prestige—the president’s office at Harvard University—once again draws attention to the pestilence of plagiarism. Plagiarism scandals among elites are nothing new, of course, and pop up frequently in the news both here and abroad, often with serious negative consequences for the accused.[1]
Of course, plagiarism is unethical—it misdirects credit for the work and misrepresents the accomplishments of the perpetrator. But I will argue it is not the worst sin scholars commit in reference to the wider research literature, though it is more likely to be punished.
Plagiarism stands out among the pantheon of unethical scholarly shortcuts in part because it is relatively easy to catch, and with improving internet textual search tools, it is getting even easier. To catch a plagiarist, one only needs to find the original copied source.
Though malevolent, each incidence of plagiarism misrepresents only one piece of work in the wider research literature. Other, rarely punished research behaviors can misrepresent several other works, even entire research literature.
With a dismissive literature review, an author declares at the outset of an article that previous research on the topic is either nonexistent or no good. Typically, no evidence supports the claim, such as where or how—or even if—the author looked for previous work.
College Financial-Aid Applications Fall 57%
As of late January, about 700,000 seniors had completed applications, down from roughly 1.5 million applicants the same time last year, according to the National College Attainment Network’s analysis of Education Department data.
The rollout stands to be one of the biggest shocks to college admissions in decades, administrators said. Financial-aid packages may not go out until after the date students are normally expected to put down deposits. Some schools have already pushed back the deadline to accept offers of admissions, and more are expected to follow suit.
“Everyone wants answers. Everyone wants to know how and when. And we don’t have answers,” said Mj Huebner, vice president of admission and financial aid at Kalamazoo College. The school told applicants they won’t have to commit until June 1, a month later than usual.
The Government Accountability Office launched an investigation into this year’s Fafsa rollout, following a request from Republican lawmakers.
The Fafsa is used to apply for federal grants and loans. Applications usually open Oct. 1. Half of high-school seniors complete it between then and the end of December. Some schools give out aid packages as early as November. This year, the form wasn’t available until the end of December, and even then families didn’t have full access until January, though families still have time to apply.
“diminishes our district’s ability to maintain our high standard for 4K services that are needed for our families” – credentialism
The Wisconsin Association of School Boards, the Wisconsin Educational Association Council teachers union and Wisconsin State Reading Association have registered against the bill. The Wisconsin Child Care Administrators Association and the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association have registered in support.
Wisconsin Early Childhood Association Co-Director Paula Drew told legislators that while the organization “acknowledges that the way childcare is funded is flawed” in Wisconsin, the bill is “pitting public schools against local childcare providers.”
“While equitable 4K funding for community 4K childcare is an important piece, it’s not the silver bullet to solve the current childcare crisis,” Drew said. “Above all, there must be an ongoing state investment to stabilize childcare infrastructure in Wisconsin.”
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Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
While there is a cure for STDs, there is no cure for stupidity.
The problems with the sexual revolution are embarrassingly obvious. A philosophy of sex that views it as recreational and focused on personal satisfaction tilts inevitably toward seeing the other person as an object to be used. That is why sexual liberation has not proved the gateway to a feminist utopia but has instead favored men. It has also further downgraded children to those who interfere with self-fulfillment. Human bodies do not do well when we use them in any way we wish, especially in the sexual realm. Active gay men are seventeen times more likely to develop anal cancer than their heterosexual counterparts. Even the government acknowledges that, though it is strangely coy about offering the obvious advice. It is hard to imagine the government blithely reporting that statistic relative to any other human activity without also strongly advising people to desist from the problematic behavior. And we have yet to see the full effect of the free-floating sexual life of no commitments on that other current health problem: loneliness. I’d wager it will intensify, not mitigate, the problem of late-life isolation and despair. And yet the revolution continues apace, with each catastrophe simply one more glitch for the experts to solve.
Human history indicates that the self-evident nonsense of an idea is seldom a barrier to it becoming the dominant philosophy of its age. That man is born free and is everywhere in chains is one. That sex is a cost-free, light recreation is another. And we are paying a heavy price for this sexual fantasy, with no sign as yet that our scientific experts are willing to step up and play the role of moral conscience on anything but those issues where they can safely affirm the tastes of the day, such as recreational drugs, fruit-flavored vapes, and alcohol.
Why did the legislature remove third-grade literacy as a goal?
There is no doubt that the 2023 legislative session was “transformational.” I have written here about the numerous new education mandates that the DFL-controlled legislature passed and what they mean for Minnesota students, families, and educators.
But there were also things removed — such as the goal to support third-grade students in achieving grade-level literacy. As of spring 2023 test results, less than half (47.1 percent) of third-grade students statewide are reading at grade level as measured by the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment (MCA).
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Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Write Less, Teach more
Mock exams. Days, weeks, and months of preparation, ensuring our students feel ready to take on the reality of exam conditions. We believe they’re up to the task. Their exercise books? Immaculate. Extended writing? Reams worth. And every SLT book look is 100% green. All of this outward evidence available to us, calling us to the land of 100% 4+, only to have their mocks come back and it’s as if everything we taught them has disappeared. ‘This is shown in the quote’ when the last three essays have used context to embed them; summarising the story when their books have in-depth analysis of methods, alternative interpretations and ‘critical’ evaluations. So– what happened between that RAGd book look and the exam? We focused on their performance in the moment, emphasising speed and quantity, and looked for superficial behaviours, in hopes that they equated with a final demonstration, but in ignorance of the reality that long term learning doesn’t necessarily follow the temporary performance in lessons.
Notes on Meritocracy
A University of Cambridge academic has suggested that a meritocracy would reduce the number of black Harvard professors to almost zero.
Nathan Cofnas, an early career fellow at the faculty of philosophy, wants a “hereditarian revolution” and for a culture of “race realism” that acknowledges differences between ethnicities.
However, in a blog he says that many supporters of his theories are less intelligent than people who are more “woke”.
Cofnas, who was hired by the university in 2022, said that, without imposed diversity in recruiting, that black people “would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment”.
——
“Which is the same as killing them, by COVID standards, since people with less education”
So the poor kids are now likely to have both intensified poverty and intensified ignorance as factors in shortening their lives (plus the Biden-era flood of migrants, who are correlated with unemployment and incarceration for the low-skilled native-born).
The NYT journalists and editors don’t mention what happened in the one state where school closure was limited by the governor to about 3 months: Florida. Digging into their cited data source, characterized as a “national study” and with analysis “led by researchers at Stanford and Harvard”, it appears that Florida was ignored by the academic worthies (maybe anti-Science DeSantis suppressed data?).
Sweden recently showed a decline in PISA scores, suggesting that keeping schools open is just as bad for kids as closing them.
Woke Kindergarten critic put on leave by Bay Area school district amid national backlash
The East Bay teacher who publicly questioned spending $250,000 on an anti-racist teaching training program was placed on administrative leave Thursday, days after he shared his concerns over Woke Kindergarten in the Chronicle.
Hayward Unified School District teacher Tiger Craven-Neeley said district officials summoned him to a video conference Thursday afternoon and instructed him to turn in his keys and laptop and not return to his classroom at Glassbrook Elementary until further notice.
They did not give any specifics as to why he was placed on paid leave, other than to say it was over “allegations of unprofessional conduct,” Craven-Neeley said.
Physics for Mathematicians – Introduction
A few years ago, before finishing graduate school, I embarked on a quest to understand quantum field theory and the standard model of particle physics. My first project for this blog is going to be about the physics I learned along the way. My training is as a mathematician, and these articles are written with an audience in mind that’s a lot like me when I first started trying to learn this stuff. In particular, this means that I’m going to be assuming familiarity with some mathematical machinery that isn’t always part of the standard presentation of these ideas.
The point of this isn’t to exclude people (although sadly it probably will) but because I’m trying to fill a gap that I saw when I was trying to absorb this material from physics books. A lot of explanations of the “mathier” parts of physics are, despite their mathiness, written with an audience of physicists in mind, and so naturally emphasize the aspects of the situation which are relevant to solving physical problems. If your goal is to solve physical problems — as it should be for most of the people who learn physics — then this is the right thing to do. But for the reader who understands the mathematical machinery from a more general context, reading these sorts of explanations can be a bit of a slog, and it can often be unclear which parts of the text are “just math” and which parts are “doing physics.” My aim is to present these ideas in a way that makes that distinction clear.
The Past and Future of Education Reform
Frederick M. Hess and Michael Q. McShane
When the French statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand was asked for his thoughts on the Bourbon royal family in exile, he replied, “Ils n’ont rien appris, ni rien oublié.” They have learned nothing, and forgotten nothing. The Bourbons hadn’t learned the lessons of the French Revolution or grasped what it revealed about their nation. Worse, they carried an enduring grudge for all that the Jacobins had done. It was the worst possible combination, a recipe for disaster.
Too often, as we note in our new book Getting Education Right, Talleyrand’s Bourbons have served as the role model for the right when it comes to education reform. Since the Reagan era, the right’s education reformers have repeatedly fallen victim to the siren songs of compromise, swallowing their principles and endorsing heavy-handed government schemes in the service of not-so-bipartisan bipartisanship. Meanwhile, populists have kept the receipts, fueling frustration and justifiable distrust.
Fake research papers flagged by analysing authorship trends
Previous efforts to detect the products of paper mills have tended to focus on analysing the content of the manuscripts. One online tool, for example, searches papers for tortured phrases — strange alternative turns of phrase for existing terminology produced by software designed to avoid plagiarism detection. Another tool, being piloted by the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM), flags when identical manuscripts are submitted to several journals or publishers at the same time.
An approach that instead analyses the relationships between authors could be valuable as paper mills become better at producing convincing text, says Hylke Koers, chief information officer at the STM, who is based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. “This is the kind of signal that is much more difficult to work around or outcompete by clever use of generative AI.”
An analysis of the great worldwide baby bust and a critique of pronatalism
Pete:
The problem of collapsing world-wide birth-rates is a complex topic but I will state my thesis baldly at the beginning: there is a large overlap between the things that underpin long-standing worldwide birth-rate declines and the things that underpin our prosperity. As the biologist John Aitken has put it:- ‘The fundamental cause of human fertility decline is prosperity.’ Therefore, birth-rate declines are hard to undo and reverse because to unpick low-fertility risks also unpicking our prosperity too. Therefore, pronatalists face an uphill battle, to put it mildly. Pronatalism (a term used to describe advocates for policies geared towards increasing fertility rates) is nothing new but has gained greater salience in recent years due to rapidly rising old age dependency ratios across the OECD countries in particular. The Economist reports that the share of countries with pro-natalist policies has grown from 20% in 2005 to 28% in 2019. In any analysis of the merits or demerits of pronatalism it is important to differentiate between liberal and illiberal forms of pronatalism. In its illiberal guise, pronatalism can be motivated by an ugly ethno-nationalist undercurrent which views pronatalism as a means of avoiding what it perceives to be the evils of mass-immigration, which is seen in catastrophic terms as tantamount to ethnic replacement and racial/civilisational suicide. But this form of pronatalism is, at best, a fringe view in this country and I’m not going to waste my time critiquing a set of views which are not held by anyone with any real influence or power.
My critique is aimed at the less sinister and more liberal form of pronatalism which holds sway over a greater swathe of policy-makers. There are bad-faith criticswho will try to collapse the two forms of pronatalism into one and pretend that all forms of pronatalism are inherently morally suspect, but this is not a view I subscribe to. My critique of liberal pronatalism is not that it is inherently morally problematic to utilise various policies to try to encourage more people to have children. Pronatalism, in its liberal form, is a perfectly legitimate set of policy aims. My argument is pragmatic, not moralistic. My argument is that liberal pronatalism is simply not going to work. As the authors of Empty Planet’ explain:- ‘the “low-fertility trap” ensures that, once having one or two children becomes the norm, it stays the norm. Couples no longer see having children as a duty they must perform to satisfy their obligation to their families or their god. Rather, they choose to raise a child as an act of personal fulfilment. And they are quickly fulfilled.’
Young Americans learn and grow by being exposed to a wide range of perspectives.
You can’t make this up. The National Speech & Debate Assoc. ELIMINATED a high school debate topic about civil disobedience because it “was putting new students in a position to argue or listen to arguments that are not aligned with their own beliefs about issues of social equity and justice…”
Disrupting the School Discipline Dilemma
Dr. Rodriguez will share findings from a study that sheds light on the often-overlooked role of school support staff in mitigating the prevalence of and racial disparities in exclusionary discipline in public middle and high schools in New York City. Findings from the study underscore the importance of expanding the presence of support staff within schools and emphasize the necessity for greater diversity among school personnel.
UW Athletics operates a Canvas monitoring program for student athletes. That raises privacy concerns for their classmates.
A Canvas program allowing University of Wisconsin Athletics advisors to monitor the educational progress of student athletes is raising concerns about surveillance and privacy in UW-Madison classrooms.
Dorothea Salo, a UW-Madison School of Information professor, recently got an email from UW-Madison Vice Provost John Zumbrunnen about a “Canvas Observer Role” in one of her courses. She said the role allows learning specialists from UW Athletics to directly monitor student athletes’ progress in Canvas.
Observers are able to access class assignments, calendars, discussions — including posts from the entire class — and more. Other students in the course aren’t notified there’s an observer in it.
Salo said it’s not the first time she has received this email. This, alongside her past Canvas-related research, has her worried about the student athlete observer role and Canvas’ lack of data transparency as a whole.
Literacy or Loyalty? Mulligans?
In a discrete choice experiment in which bureaucrats in education were asked to make trade-offs between foundational literacy, completion of secondary school, and formation of dutiful citizens, respondents valued dutiful citizens 50% more than literate ones. For many policy makers, the goal is not the production of knowledge, but the fostering of nationalism.
This may sound like an odd set of priorities, but both European and Latin American countries had similar priorities when they expanded their education systems to serve more than a small elite around the turn of the 20th century. The goal was not to produce scientists or entrepreneurs but to inculcate a reliable workforce that would support the state.
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This is part of why I think modernity was born out of the Reformation and the response thereto. Education is always in danger of falling afoul of the state – either banned for any appreciable number of folks or for being required to emphasize the propaganda and justifications of the state. China, for instance, had everything needed for mass literacy – printing, a large scholar class, and even some reverence for written words. But instead the state used education largely to staff the bureaucracy on the basis of who could make Confucian piety sound the best and who had memorized the most Legalistic commentary.
The Protestant Reformation, most notably in Scotland, has this radical idea that even the poor dirt farmers of society need to be literate and educated enough to understand holy scriptures to grasp Reformed doctrine. And that understanding had to be enough to end with a “credible profession of faith” the evidenced understanding and (at least in theory), not just vain repetitions.
And this is part of why I think the West achieved so much, there really was an ideology of learning for a higher purpose and enough teachers bought that they were dealing with the immortal souls of their pupils that the fundamentals could not be short changed merely to maintain discipline or orthodoxy.
——
Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Universities are failing to boost economic growth
In practice, however, the great expansion of higher education has coincided with a productivity slowdown. Whereas in the 1950s and 1960s workers’ output per hour across the rich world rose by 4% a year, in the decade before the covid-19 pandemic 1% a year was the norm. Even with the wave of innovation in artificial intelligence (ai), productivity growth remains weak—less than 1% a year, on a rough estimate—which is bad news for economic growth. A new paper by Ashish Arora, Sharon Belenzon, Larisa C. Cioaca, Lia Sheer and Hansen Zhang, five economists, suggests that universities’ blistering growth and the rich world’s stagnant productivity could be two sides of the same coin.
Hiring for “global challenge,” including artificial intelligence.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin unveiled a faculty hiring initiative in areas of “global challenge” in a Thursday afternoon UW Board of Regents meeting.
The Wisconsin Research, Innovation and Scholarly Excellence (RISE) initiative will hire between 120 and 150 new faculty over the next three to five years, increasing regular hiring by around 40%.
“Over the next three-to-five years, RISE will accelerate the growth of UW-Madison’s network of AI innovators, adding up to 50 new faculty positions,” a UW-Madison press release read.
Artificial intelligence will be the first RISE initiative, according to the press release. RISE will ultimately comprise of three to five areas of focus, with future initiatives determined through a collaborative cross-campus process.
Science replaced by ‘ideology,’ says longtime teacher leaving Minnesota
A longtime educator said his faith and morals left with him little choice but to leave Minnesota at the end of this school year. He’ll start a new teaching job in North Dakota this fall.
Carl Williams, a teacher of 22 years who has spent the last 11 in the Belgrade-Brooten-Elrosa district, joined Liz Collin Reports this week.
“I just love teaching. I have a passion for teaching, and I just love my students,” Williams said.
Williams said he has observed a “push away from scientific knowledge and more towards ideological knowledge” in Minnesota’s schools.
Your appendix is not, in fact, useless. This anatomy professor explains
How did scientists get the idea that the appendix was useless?
There had been a lot of discussion about what the appendix might do as a function, whether it served a function, prior to [Charles] Darwin’s time. The [fact] that we can live without it does provide some support for the idea that it’s vestigial and it doesn’t really do anything. And so Darwin’s interpretation of it as a vestige was reasonable at the time, given the information that he had.
But now with modern technology, we can see things like the microanatomy and the biofilms in the appendix, and we have a better understanding of what it is and what it’s doing.
How has the appendix evolved over time?
If you map the distribution of appendices across a phylogeny — a tree of mammal life — you can interpret that the appendix has actually evolved independently. It has appeared independently multiple times throughout mammalian evolution. So that is evidence that it must serve some adaptive function. It’s unlikely that the same type of structure would keep appearing if it wasn’t serving some beneficial role.
ABA Gives Final Approval To Law School Free Speech Accreditation Standard
Law schools will now be asked to explicitly protect free speech rights for faculty, students and staff as part of the ABA accreditation process. … The ABA House of Delegates on Monday voted [Resolution 300] in favor of the creation of the law school standards regarding academic freedom and freedom of expression at its midyear meeting in Louisville, Kentucky. …
The proposal follows protests that disrupted conservative speakers at Stanford Law School and Yale Law School and continuing tensions on campuses since Hamas attacked Israel last fall. Standard 208, however, forbids disruptive activities that hinder free expression or impede law school activities.
Converting hundreds of compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach into mathematical networks reveals that they store lots of information and convey it very effectively
Kulkarni and her colleagues also used information networks to compare Bach’s music with listeners’ perception of it. They started with an existing computer model based on experiments in which participants reacted to a sequence of images on a screen. The researchers then measured how surprising an element of the sequence was. They adapted information networks based on this model to the music, with the links between each node representing how probable a listener thought it would be for two connected notes to play successively – or how surprised they would be if that happened. Because humans do not learn information perfectly, networks showing people’s presumed note changes for a composition rarely line up exactly with the network based directly on that composition. Researchers can then quantify that mismatch.
In this case, the mismatch was low, suggesting Bach’s pieces convey information rather effectively. However, Kulkarni hopes to fine-tune the computer model of human perception to better match real brain scans of people listening to the music.
K-12 Essex III Audit
The coronavirus pandemic was a 2-year catastrophe for children. Students suffered through virtual schooling, quarantined teachers, and emotional misery. Academic results, the lowest this century, still have not recovered.
After sending $860 million to help Wisconsin public schools manage through spring 2021, Congress sent a final $1.49 billion to get students back on track.
The goal? Do whatever it takes to catch kids up by September 2024.
The problem? No one knows how schools have directed it or not directed it…until now.
Denmark Eliminates Google Chromebooks & Platforms due to privacy issues
This week saw a conclusion on the Danish Chromebook case. The result, long-awaited by father and privacy activist Jesper Graugaard, shows that the Danish Data Protection Authority has issued an injunction regarding the tracking of children’s personal data via Chromebook and Google platforms in schools.
From 1 August 2024 onwards, Danish schools will no longer be allowed to enable Chromebooks and Google platforms to collect students’ personal data for processing. Each municipality will need to give an indication of how they will comply to this injunction by 1 March 2024.
For activist Graugaard, the decision comes as a relief. He began his crusade against Chromebooks in school in his home town Elsinor over four years ago. While this week’s report makes no reference to Jesper’s initiatives, it is clear that this injunction could not have been issued without his tireless and sometimes solitary activism.
Escalation Risks from Language Models in Military and Diplomatic Decision-Making
Juan-Pablo Rivera, Gabriel Mukobi, Anka Reuel, Max Lamparth, Chandler Smith, Jacquelyn Schneider
Governments are increasingly considering integrating autonomous AI agents in high-stakes military and foreign-policy decision-making, especially with the emergence of advanced generative AI models like GPT-4. Our work aims to scrutinize the behavior of multiple AI agents in simulated wargames, specifically focusing on their predilection to take escalatory actions that may exacerbate multilateral conflicts. Drawing on political science and international relations literature about escalation dynamics, we design a novel wargame simulation and scoring framework to assess the escalation risks of actions taken by these agents in different scenarios. Contrary to prior studies, our research provides both qualitative and quantitative insights and focuses on large language models (LLMs). We find that all five studied off-the-shelf LLMs show forms of escalation and difficult-to-predict escalation patterns. We observe that models tend to develop arms-race dynamics, leading to greater conflict, and in rare cases, even to the deployment of nuclear weapons. Qualitatively, we also collect the models’ reported reasonings for chosen actions and observe worrying justifications based on deterrence and first-strike tactics. Given the high stakes of military and foreign-policy contexts, we recommend further examination and cautious consideration before deploying autonomous language model agents for strategic military or diplomatic decision-making.
ABA Adopts New Academic Freedom / Freedom of Expression Requirement for Law School Accreditation
This apparently just happened; here’s the full American Bar Association standard (and see this ABA Journal article):
Standard 208: Academic Freedom and Freedom of Expression
[a] A law school shall adopt, publish, and adhere to written policies that protect academic freedom. A law school’s academic freedom policies shall:
[1] Apply to all full and part-time faculty, as well as to all others teaching in law school courses;
[2] Apply to conducting research, publishing scholarship, engaging in law school governance, participating in law related public service activities, curating library collections and providing information services, and exercising teaching responsibilities, including those related to client representation in clinical programs; and
Young Kansas City Chiefs Fan Sues Deadspin Over Racism Allegations
From the Complaint filed today in Armenta v. G/O Media Inc. (Del. Super. Ct.):
Nine-year-old H.A. loves the Kansas City Chiefs—and he loves his family’s Chumash-Indian heritage. On November 26, 2023, H.A. displayed that love by attending the Chiefs-Raiders NFL football game wearing a Chiefs jersey and necklace, his face painted half-red and half-black, and a costume headdress— just as Chiefs fans and other avid sports fans have done for decades.
During the CBS television broadcast, H.A. was shown for three seconds, where the audience can clearly see his red-and-black face paint. Immediately thereafter, CBS panned to a Raiders fan in black-and-white face paint. Together, they represented fervent fans with their faces painted for game-day battle, each wearing their team’s respective colors and costume garb ….
Those few seconds provided just the opportunity for Deadspin Senior Writer Carron Phillips to, on behalf of himself and his employer Deadspin, maliciously and wantonly attack a nine-year-old boy and his parents for Phillips’ own race-drenched political agenda. By selectively capturing from the CBS broadcast an image of H.A. showing only the one side of his face with black paint on it—an effort that took laser-focused precision to accomplish given how quickly the boy appeared on screen—Phillips and Deadspin deliberately omitted the half of H.A.’s face with red paint on it.
The Global Distribution of College Graduate Quality
Paolo Martellini, Todd Schoellman, and Jason Sockin.
We measure college graduate quality—the average human capital of a college’s graduates—for graduates from 2,800 colleges in 48 countries. Graduates of colleges in the richest countries have 50% more human capital than graduates of colleges in the poorest countries. Migration reinforces these differences: emigrants from poorer countries are highly positively selected on human capital. Finally, we show that these stocks and flows matter for growth and development by showing that college graduate quality predicts the share of a college’s students who become inventors, engage in entrepreneurship, and become top executives both within and across countries.
The Tragedy of Mathematics in Russia
Tsunami swept over the Russian mathematical community in 1999 after publication of the complete shorthand notes of the meetings of the notorious Emergency Commission of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR on the case of Academician Luzin [1]. Soon the article [2] appeared in the USA which revealed the personal testimony of G. G. Lorentz (1910–2006) about the mathematical life of that time in the USSR.1The Commission for the “hearing of the case of Ac[ademician] Luzin” was convened by the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR after the article “Enemies under the Mask of a Soviet Citizen” in the Pravda newspaper on July 3, 1936.Luzin was accused of all theoretically possible instances of misconduct in science and depicted as an enemy that combined “moral unscrupulousness and scientific dishonesty with deeply concealed enmity and hatred to every bit of the Soviet life.” It was alleged that he publishes “would-be scientific papers,” “feels no shame in declaring the discoveries of his students to be his own achievements,” and stands close to the ideology of the “black hundred,” orthodoxy, and monarchy “fascist-type modernized but slightly.” The closing of the lampoon read:
“we see school districts casting the blame for budget shortfalls on what is often a small number of choice students”
WILL:
Decoupling public school funding from choice funding is a win-win from the perspective of both public-school districts and choice/charter schools. School districts will no longer face the uncertainty of voucher enrollment numbers when crafting their budgets for the upcoming school year. In an era of declining enrollment across Wisconsin, this additional stability is important. In most cases, school districts will have access to more state aid than they did before—essentially offering a modest budget boost at a time when many districts are worried about their fiscal reality. And a recent memo from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau confirms that no school district will be left with less funding under this legislation.
Because school districts have the ability to raise property taxes to make up for lost revenue from school choice, this legislation will also result in property tax cuts for most Wisconsin families.
$pending, governance and achievement – Chicago k-12 edition
Two Chicago public schools.
Northside: Selective, 94% of black students reading proficient.
Douglas: $68,000 per pupil per year, 0% black students reading proficient.
Guess which one the "antiracist" school system wants to close for "equity" reasons?https://t.co/Z7hHSpu5zk
— i/o (@eyeslasho) February 7, 2024
Civics: The United States of Nullification
impulse to dial everything, immediately, up to 10. Cancel. Take no prisoners. Nullification has become the national fashion—civics as road rage. Brisk currents of stupidity ride the air, mingling with occasional whiffs of insanity. Nullification is the policy of people who think, if they think at all, in crude cartoons.
Summon a Demon and Bind it: A Grounded Theory of LLM Red Teaming in the Wild
Nanna Inie, Jonathan Stray, Leon Derczynski
Engaging in the deliberate generation of abnormal outputs from large language models (LLMs) by attacking them is a novel human activity. This paper presents a thorough exposition of how and why people perform such attacks. Using a formal qualitative methodology, we interviewed dozens of practitioners from a broad range of backgrounds, all contributors to this novel work of attempting to cause LLMs to fail. We relate and connect this activity between its practitioners’ motivations and goals; the strategies and techniques they deploy; and the crucial role the community plays. As a result, this paper presents a grounded theory of how and why people attack large language models: LLM red teaming in the wild.
“Less Affirmation And Insist on More work”
Recently, I offered a not-so-sophisticated explanation for the histrionics we’ve seen at elite colleges: too many students are simply aimless, lonely, and bored. Well-meaning concern about the mental and emotional state of college students today has fueled a lot of affirmation and hand-holding. But much of this may ultimately be counterproductive, exacerbating fragility rather than supporting well-being.
After all, on the merits, it’s hard to look at elite college students and conclude they’re overworked or overstressed. As I note:
University administrators double in number every 12 years
Over the last two decades, the number of managerial and professional staff that Yale employs has risen three times faster than the undergraduate student body, according to University financial reports. The group’s 44.7 percent expansion since 2003 has had detrimental effects on faculty, students and tuition, according to eight faculty members.
In 2003, when 5,307 undergraduate students studied on campus, the University employed 3,500 administrators and managers. In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on student enrollment, only 600 more students were living and studying at Yale, yet the number of administrators had risen by more than 1,500 — a nearly 45 percent hike. In 2018, The Chronicle of Higher Education found that Yale had the highest manager-to-student ratio of any Ivy League university, and the fifth highest in the nation among four-year private colleges.
The British Library cyber breach was an attack on the world’s knowledge
On October 29 last year, the British Library in London posted on X saying that the institution was struggling with “technical issues”. As these continued day after day, it became clearer to the library’s readers and thousands of scholars what had actually happened: the BL had fallen prey to a massive cyber attack, carried out by a criminal group that has become notorious for such things.
The BL holds something like 170mn items; essential digital archives, entire collections of texts and images and access to online learning resources were severely disrupted. Librarians and readers could no longer retrieve books, and after the BL declined to pay the ransom that had been demanded, the attackers dumped enormous quantities of employees’ personal data on to the dark web.
Six weeks later, the BL’s chief executive Roly Keating wrote in a blog post: “The people responsible for this cyber attack stand against everything that libraries represent: openness, empowerment, and access to knowledge.”
Not a single student can do math at grade level in 53 Illinois schools. For reading, it’s 30 schools
Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner
Spry Community Links High School, in the Heart of Little Village in Chicago, says its vision is to “provide a challenging and supportive environment…to enable our students to succeed in the 21st century.” Number one on the school’s focus list? “Increasing reading and math scores to or above grade level.”
But a look at state data that tracks reading and math scores for each Illinois school reveals two frightening facts about Spry. Not a single one of its 88 kids at the school can read at grade level. It’s the same for math. Zero kids are proficient.
Spry is one of 30 schools in Illinois where not a single student can read at grade level. Twenty-two of those schools are part of the Chicago Public Schools and the other eight are outside Chicago.
Eliminating Citywide San Francisco School Board elections
A Bay Area attorney is demanding that San Francisco school officials make the seismic shift from citywide board elections to smaller district races by November or face a massive and expensive legal battle that could result in paying millions of dollars in legal fees.
In a testament to the power of a landmark state voting law, the seven-member school board is expected to accede to the lawyer’s demands — approving a hurried adoption of individual district elections based on legal advice and the likelihood of losing a court fight, the Chronicle learned Tuesday.
The district is also expected to pay up to $40,000 to the attorney who pointed out possible violations of the California Voting Rights Act, which was passed in 2002 and was intended to give minority voters in the state better representation by redrawing election maps.
