Education « Tikkunista!

5. Logic, Rationality, and the Rest of Us

Apr-27-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Like many of us, I often think my own views are completely rational and logical, while those whose views differ are either irrational or mendacious. That’s why I like the Sam Harris piece, which does exactly as he intends, and makes me confront how much that view of own values is untrue. The logical fallacies poster is a delight, as well. And the Guardian reminds us that while logic may not lead to all the answers, it’s better than the alternative.

* I Prefer My Opinion cartoon (Thanks Robbie!)

* The Fireplace Delusion Sam Harris

I recently stumbled upon an example of secular intransigence that may give readers a sense of how religious people feel when their beliefs are criticized. It’s not a perfect analogy, as you will see, but the rigorous research I’ve conducted at dinner parties suggests that it is worth thinking about. We can call the phenomenon “the fireplace delusion.”

On a cold night, most people consider a well-tended fire to be one of the more wholesome pleasures that humanity has produced. A fire, burning safely within the confines of a fireplace or a woodstove, is a visible and tangible source of comfort to us. We love everything about it: the warmth, the beauty of its flames, and—unless one is allergic to smoke—the smell that it imparts to the surrounding air.

I am sorry to say that if you feel this way about a wood fire, you are not only wrong but dangerously misguided. I mean to seriously convince you of this—so you can consider it in part a public service announcement—but please keep in mind that I am drawing an analogy. I want you to be sensitive to how you feel, and to notice the resistance you begin to muster as you consider what I have to say.

* Thou Shalt Not Commit Logical Fallacies poster (click to enbigify)

This infographic poster can be printed out at various sizes for hanging in your favourite place. Make yourself, your class, your friends or your kids smarter by hanging it somewhere your face is near.

* Attacks Paid For By Big Business Are ‘Driving Science Into A Dark Era’ Guardian

Most scientists, on achieving high office, keep their public remarks to the bland and reassuring. Last week Nina Fedoroff, the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science broke ranks in a spectacular manner. She confessed that she was now “scared to death” by the anti-science movement that was spreading, uncontrolled, across the US and the rest of the western world.

“We are sliding back into a dark era,” she said. “And there seems little we can do about it. I am profoundly depressed at just how difficult it has become merely to get a realistic conversation started on issues such as climate change or genetically modified organisms.”

9. How Our Brains Work

Mar-16-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Some days, maybe not so well. Teller (of Penn and ) has a fascinating piece on how magicians use your perception to trick you. Two pieces from Wired’s excellent blog, Frontal Cortex. The first looks at evidence that emotions are a better guide that rationality; the second at how investing in pre-school saves governments huge amounts of money later on. Remember that when your government proposes to save money by cutting pre-school funding.

* Teller Reveals His Secrets Smithsonian Magazine

In the last half decade, magic—normally deemed entertainment fit only for children and tourists in Las Vegas—has become shockingly respectable in the scientific world. Even I—not exactly renowned as a public speaker—have been invited to address conferences on neuroscience and perception. I asked a scientist friend (whose identity I must protect) why the sudden interest. He replied that those who fund science research find magicians “sexier than lab rats.”

I’m all for helping science. But after I share what I know, my neuroscientist friends thank me by showing me eye-tracking and MRI equipment, and promising that someday such machinery will help make me a better magician.

I have my doubts. Neuroscientists are novices at deception. Magicians have done controlled testing in human perception for thousands of years.

…magic’s not easy to pick apart with machines, because it’s not really about the mechanics of your senses. Magic’s about understanding—and then manipulating—how viewers digest the sensory information.

I think you’ll see what I mean if I teach you a few principles magicians employ when they want to alter your perceptions.

* Are Emotions Prophetic? Wired

For thousands of years, human beings have looked down on their emotions. We’ve seen them as primitive passions, the unfortunate legacy of our animal past. When we do stupid things – say, eating too much cake, or sleeping with the wrong person, or taking out a subprime mortgage – we usually blame our short-sighted feelings. People commit crimes of passion. There are no crimes of rationality.

This bias against feeling has led people to assume that reason is always best. When faced with a difficult dilemma, most of us believe that it’s best to carefully assess our options and spend a few moments consciously deliberating the information. Then, we should choose the alternative that best fits our preferences. This is how we maximize utility; rationality is our Promethean gift.

But what if this is all backwards? What if our emotions know more than we know? What if our feelings are smarter than us?

* Does Preschool Matter? Wired

For many kids, the most important years of schooling come before they can even read. Consider the groundbreaking work of the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman, who has repeatedly documented the power of early childhood education. One of his best case studies is the Perry Preschool Experiment, which looked at 123 low-income African-American children from Yspilanti, Michigan. (All the children had IQ scores between 75 and 85.) When the children were three years old, they were randomly assigned to either a treatment group, and given a high-quality preschool education, or to a control group, which received no preschool education at all. The subjects were then tracked over the ensuing decades, with the most recent analysis comparing the groups at the age of 40. The differences, even decades after the intervention, were stark: Adults assigned to the preschool program were 20 percent more likely to have graduated from high school and 19 percent less likely to have been arrested more than five times. They got much better grades, were more likely to remain married and were less dependent on welfare programs. This is why, according to Heckman and colleagues, every dollar invested in preschool for at-risk children reaps somewhere between eight and nine dollars in return.

7. M.I.T.: Public Access to Knowledge & Tools

Mar-02-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: (Full disclosure: as an alumnus, I’m biased, but.) What these all have in common is a continuing desire amongst the MIT community to make knowledge freely available to everyone. (One could probably put Tikkunista in this context.) We start with the learning initiative, which makes MIT courses freely available online; salute recently retired Prof Lewin, of the Physics dept, whose brilliant lectures are available for free online (three notable ones below); and end with a fascinating interview with the founder of Dropbox, which allows sharing between different computers/tablets/smart things also for free.

* MIT Launches Online Learning Initiative Technology Review

After almost 10 years of giving teachers and learners around the world free online access to nearly all MIT’s undergraduate and graduate course materials through OpenCourseWare, MIT is upping the ante.

In December the Institute announced an initiative that will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform. Code-named MITx, the effort will organize and present course material to enable students to learn interactively at their own pace, take part in online laboratories, receive individual assessments, and communicate with one another. MITx will operate on an infrastructure of open-source, scalable software….

MIT expects this learning platform to enhance the educational experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences. The eventual plan is to host a virtual community of millions of learners around the world.MIT will also make the MITx open learning software available free, so that other universities and learning institutions, such as K–12 school systems, can use the software for their online education offerings.

First Course online: Check the description for 6.002x Circuits and Electronics to learn what physics and math you need to be successful, watch a short introductory video, and enrol. The course, which runs March 5–June 8, is free but you must register and complete the assignments to earn an MITx certificate.

* The Professor Who Brings Physics to Life Technology Review

For 43 years, Lewin taught as many as 600 students a semester in MIT’s three introductory physics courses—8.01, 8.02, and 8.03—and consistently drew rave reviews. In 1999 the Institute began videotaping the 94 lectures from the three courses, and in 2004 OpenCourseWare started posting the videos, which could be viewed free of charge by anyone with an Internet connection. The lectures soon spread to YouTube, iTunes U, and Academic Earth, and in 2007 the New York Times caught wind of the traffic, profiling the physics professor in a front-page feature as an international “Web star.”

…On May 16, 2011, Lewin celebrated the release of his book by taking his notes out once more to deliver one last lecture in 26-100. The hall was filled beyond its capacity with current and former students, faculty, and fans. For Lewin, that last lecture—of more than 800 he has given in the hall—was a bittersweet high.

“You know you’ve got them in your hands,” he says. “You know that you could do anything with them that you wanted. You also know in a way it’s the last time that you will do that. Then you know that it comes to an end. It’s very emotional for me. But the beauty is, two million people watch me every year. And that will only increase.”

Sample Lewin lectures available

–How to Make Teaching Come Alive

–The Birth and Death of Stars

–The Wonders of Electricity and Magnetism

* Dropbox: Founder Drew Houston Simplifies the Cloud Technology Review

One file-hosting service in particular has evoked the kind of devotion ordinarily accorded social-networking services or beloved hardware manufacturers: Dropbox, the product of a startup founded in 2007 by MIT computer science students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. The service lets people use almost any computing device to store files in folders in the cloud as thoughtlessly as they store files in folders in their device’s memory. For most users, the service is free.

TR: Why did you want to start a company in a field—Internet file hosting—where there were so many competitors? I count as many as 15, including Apple’s new iCloud service.

Houston: For me, it goes all the way back to MIT, where there is a campus network called Athena. You can sit down at any of thousands of workstations and your whole environment follows you around: not just your files but where your icons were on your desktop. Then I left and discovered that no one had really built that for the rest of the world.

…TR: Tell me the requisite founder’s tale.

The breaking point for me was a bus ride. I went down to Boston’s South Station to ride the Chinatown bus to New York. I was thrilled to open my laptop and have four hours where I could finally get some work done. But I had that sinking feeling that something was wrong, and I started feeling in my back pocket for my thumb drive, and of course I could just see it sitting on my desk at home. So I sulked for about 10 or 15 minutes and then opened up the [text] editor and wrote some code that I thought would solve the problem. And I met up with Arash through a mutual friend at MIT, and he decided to drop out with a semester left, and we went to California and got to work….

Feb. 3rd, 2012 :: Year 9, Issue 5

Feb-03-2012 | Comments (1)

1. Followups

Bird’s Eye: All the followups have to do with extremes. We start with an In Focus photo spread on this week’s “Tough Guy” competition, another extreme sport many readers will not feel the need to partake of. But all readers partake in the debate on Foxconn, maker of the computers on which you read this. We link to a fine debate on Reddit: the excerpted quote is the top comment and makes a strong argument for Foxconn as a positive role in China. Many respondents don’t agree…. Continuing with our Apocalypse Soon investigation. we link to the recently web-restored Apocamon a comic adaptation of the Book of Revelations as performed by Pokemon. And following last week’s brain feature, we look at the ethics of upsizing your intelligence.

* Tough Guy 2012 In Focus – The Atlantic

Billed as “the toughest race in the world,” the Tough Guy 2012 competition took place yesterday in Perton, England. Every year, thousands of men and women tackle the course, which is described on the Tough Guy website as eight country miles filled with freezing mud and “barbed wire, cuts, scrapes, burns, dehydration, hypothermia, acrophobia, claustrophobia, electric shocks, sprains, twists, joint dislocation and broken bones.” Gathered here are some images of the fun had by the tough competitors in this year’s event.

* Foxconn And Workers Rights Reddit comment

“In a poor country like ours, the alternative to low-paid jobs isn’t well-paid ones, it’s no jobs at all.”-Jesús Heroles, Fmr. Mexican Ambassador to the US

I’m not going to lie, Foxconn doesn’t sound like a terribly fun place to work. That being said, it’s crucial to note that Foxconn employees are not slaves. Every employee is there of their own accord and is perfectly free to leave whenever they want (in fact, Foxconn has a 30-40% turnover rate). That’s critically important to realise. It’s important because the fact that someone would choose to work at Foxconn means that it’s better than any other option they have. Remember that for the vast majority of Foxconn workers, the alternative is farming rice in a country where there’s 1 tractor for every 200 farmers. It should be axiomatic that if a person is offered a choice, they will take the option that improves their life. Unless you’re of the opinion that all people to the East of the Himalayas are stricken with some kind of mass delusion, the fact that people are wilfully choosing to work at Foxconn should be indisputable evidence that Foxconn is having a positive effect on their lives.

* Apocamon: The Final Judgement (NSFW) Written by St. John the Divine, Illustrated by Patrick Farley

Warning: Some people will find this offensive and rude; others will find it very funny. Caveat lector.

* The Ethics Of Brain Boosting Oxford University

Recent research in Oxford and elsewhere has shown that one type of brain stimulation in particular, called transcranial direct current stimulation or TDCS, can be used to improve language and maths abilities, memory, problem solving, attention, even movement.

Critically, this is not just helping to restore function in those with impaired abilities. TDCS can be used to enhance healthy people’s mental capacities. Indeed, most of the research so far has been carried out in healthy adults.

TDCS uses electrodes placed on the outside of the head to pass tiny currents across regions of the brain for 20 minutes or so. The currents of 1–2 mA make it easier for neurons in these brain regions to fire. It is thought that this enhances the making and strengthening of connections involved in learning and memory. The technique is painless, all indications at the moment are that it is safe, and the effects can last over the long term.

Jan. 20th, 2012 :: Year 9, Issue 3

Jan-20-2012 | Comments (0)

1. Followups

Bird’s Eye: We open with a fine article by Will Hutton that takes a wide range of current changes we’ve looked at in past issues, and looks at how they share the rejection of reason. Well worth the read. Two contrasting pieces follow up on last week’s education piece: in the UK “creationism” is banned from science courses (as it’s not science); in Tuscon, “The Tempest” is banned from schools because students might feel sympathy for Caliban (and extend that to contemporary victims.) Sadly, this is not from The Onion. And we end with two funny commentaries on the US election, one Stephen Colbert and one that is from the Onion.

* Now is not the time to turn our backs on Enlightenment values Will Hutton The Observer

The dynamic element on the political right across the west is giving up on the Enlightenment. No longer does it want to embrace tolerance, reason, democratic argument, progress and the drive for social betterment as cornerstones of society. Tolerance is dismissed as an indulgence and a lack of moral standards; progress is trashed as an opportunity for social engineering and a cloak to enhance state power and also as featherbedding the feckless, undeserving poor.

Reason, runs this argument, too often identifies problems that require collective rather than individual responses, amplifying the dread power of the state, and democracy means respecting opponents who have views you consider noxious. Away with the whole damn thought system! Altogether, Enlightenment values are not the reason why the west has advanced so far so fast for the last two centuries and more; rather, they are why the west’s economies are in crisis and its societies are fragmenting.

… This is very much the position of President Zuma’s faction in the African National Congress as the party celebrates its 100th anniversary. Once one of the great forces in the African liberation struggle, it is now competing with Victor Orbán in manipulating a constitution to enlarge the party’s discretionary power… An anti-Enlightenment ANC will shamelessly champion its tribe, the Zulu. Reason, democracy, the rule of law and respect for dissent are values of the declining west. Thus the ANC can cock a snook at the scientific evidence that HIV is linked to Aids. If former President Mbeki, like his successor, believes differently, that is all that matters; everybody knows that science makes mistakes and is not objective. If senior American politicians such as Rick Santorum can argue that the scientific evidence supporting climate change is “junk science” and “an excuse for more government control of your life”, then the ANC can dismiss scientific evidence on Aids.

* Richard Dawkins Celebrates A Victory Over Creationists The Observer

The Department for Education has revised its model funding agreement, allowing the education secretary to withdraw cash from schools that fail to meet strict criteria relating to what they teach. Under the new agreement, funding will be withdrawn for any free school that teaches what it claims are “evidence-based views or theories” that run “contrary to established scientific and/or historical evidence and explanations”.

The British Humanist Association (BHA), which has led a campaign against creationism – the movement that denies Darwinian evolution and claims that the Earth and all its life was created by God – described the move as “highly significant” and predicted that it would have implications for other faith groups looking to run schools.Dawkins, who was one of the leading lights in the campaign, welcomed confirmation that creationists would not receive funding to run free schools if they sought to portray their views as science. “I welcome all moves to ensure that creationism is not taught as fact in schools,” he said. “Government rules on this are extremely welcome, but they need to be properly enforced.”

* Who’s Afraid of “The Tempest”? Salon

As part of the state-mandated termination of its ethnic studies program, the Tucson Unified School District released an initial list of books to be banned from its schools today. According to district spokeperson Cara Rene, the books “will be cleared from all classrooms, boxed up and sent to the Textbook Depository for storage.” Facing a multimillion-dollar penalty in state funds, the governing board of Tucson’s largest school district officially ended the 13-year-old program on Tuesday in an attempt to come into compliance with the controversial state ban on the teaching of ethnic studies.

….Another notable text removed from Tucson’s classrooms is Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest.” In a meeting this week, administrators informed Mexican-American studies teachers to stay away from any units where “race, ethnicity and oppression are central themes,” including the teaching of Shakespeare’s classic in Mexican-American literature courses.

* Mitt the Ripper YouTube

Stephen Colbert’s Super PAC Attacks Mitt Romney (Serial Killer)

* Obama Asks Why on Earth He Would Want To Serve Another Term Onion (Thanks, Dave!)

(Note to readers: If you hit the Onion “paywall”, you can easily circumvent it – just click the stop loading button when the entire article is visible, and you won’t get paywalled. Or just pay them. Or don’t go. Your karma.)

Citing three years of exhausting partisan politics, constant gridlock in Congress, and an overall feeling that the entire nation has “completely lost it,” President Barack Obama openly asked a campaign-rally crowd Tuesday why he’d want to serve another term as president of “this godforsaken country.”

…”I’m dead serious,” the president continued, saying that any reasonable person would have walked away the moment the Senate minority leader announced his main priority—above creating jobs and improving American health care—was to make Obama a one-term president. “I’m asking if anybody out there can come up with even one reason why I’d want to endure this unmitigated shit show for another minute, let alone through 2016. What’s in it for me, exactly? Can anyone answer that? Anyone at all?”

After a long silence during which crowd members mostly just shuffled their feet and stared at the ground, Obama said, “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

5. Education

Jan-13-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Rarely has a contrast been so clear: in Finland, there are no private schools and equality is the goal rather than excellence. In the US, discipline is enforced by armed police, and your life can be blocked for something you did at age six. Two powerful pieces about education.

* What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success Anu Partanen The Atlantic

Lately Finland has been attracting attention on global surveys of quality of life – Newsweek ranked it number one last year — and Finland’s national education system has been receiving particular praise, because in recent years Finnish students have been turning in some of the highest test scores in the world.

Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model — long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization — Finland’s success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play. The answers Finland provides seem to run counter to just about everything America’s school reformers are trying to do. For starters, Finland has no standardized tests. The only exception is what’s called the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at the end of a voluntary upper-secondary school, roughly the equivalent of American high school.

Instead, the public school system’s teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher. Periodically, the Ministry of Education tracks national progress by testing a few sample groups across a range of different schools.

As for accountability of teachers and administrators, Sahlberg shrugs. “There’s no word for accountability in Finnish,” he later told an audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. “Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.” For Sahlberg what matters is that in Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility.

* The Us Schools With Their Own Police The Guardian

More and more US schools have police patrolling the corridors. Pupils are being arrested for throwing paper planes and failing to pick up crumbs from the canteen floor. Why is the state criminalising normal childhood behaviour?

Each day, hundreds of schoolchildren appear before courts in Texas charged with offences such as swearing, misbehaving on the school bus or getting in to a punch-up in the playground. Children have been arrested for possessing cigarettes, wearing “inappropriate” clothes and being late for school.

…”several districts ticketed a six-year-old at least once in the last five years”. Fines run up to $500. For poorer parents, the cost can be crippling. Some parents and students ignore the financial penalty, but that can have consequences years down the road. Schoolchildren with outstanding fines are regularly jailed in an adult prison for non-payment once they turn 17. Stumping up the fine is not an end to the offending student’s problems either. A class-C misdemeanour is a criminal offence.

“Once you pay it, that’s a guilty plea and that’s on your record,” said Simpkins. “In the US we have these astronomical college and university expenses and you go to fill out the application to get your federal aid for that and it says have you ever been arrested. And there you are, no aid.”

6. Sex and Guilt

Nov-18-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Guilt can come in many ways. We start with a wonderful piece of brave writing by Shalom Auslander (This American Life, Foreskin’s Lament, Beware of God) who can’t stand that he gets turned on by things of which he disapproves, and he feels guilty about that. Great reading, though nsfw (not safe for work). Then a brilliant GLBT action to make straight people conscious of what feeling guilty about clothing choices is like.(“TIL” is computerese for “Today I learned”) And a fine study contrasts American parents and the results of their (generalization alert!) attempt to demonize teen sex with the Dutch experience.

* Hard-Core Porn Obsession(NSFW) Shalom Auslander GQ

I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household in New York, where the Old Testament was believed to be the literal word of the Almighty God and where we obeyed, as closely as we could, all 613 commandments elucidated within its holy pages. To us, God was not simply a concept, but a very real, everyday presence in our lives and our community. Which is to say, I know pornography. Hard-core, graphic pornography. My father had it buried beneath his mattress. My brother had it hidden under his dresser. Pornography, like God Himself, was everywhere. Sex was dirty. Pornography was worse.

The really bad news was this: God, my rabbis told me, could only grant me forgiveness for the sins I had committed against Him; sins I had committed against my fellow humans could only be forgiven by them personally. If they didn’t forgive me, my rabbis said, when I died and went to heaven, God would cause me to suffer in the exact way I had caused them to suffer.

At the time, though only 14 years of age, I had already tired of the porn magazines I found in my house and decided it was time for full-motion video. I went to Times Square, where a group of women stood outside a porn shop, protesting and carrying placards. On one placard was a picture of a naked woman tied to a bed. She had a ball gag in her mouth and clamps on her nipples. I ducked into the store, spent every dollar I’d stolen from my father’s wallet, hurried home, and hoped the videos wouldn’t work.

They worked.

* TIL about “wear jeans if you’re gay day.” Actually it’s kind of brilliant. via Reddit

The organizers of Gay Jeans Day at CMU analyse the action in this way.

To let GLBT students on their campus know there is a supportive community.
Jeans are chosen for this event because most people have a pair, and because deciding what to wear causes everyone — no matter what their sexual orientation — to think about how other people will react to their choice of clothing.
Allow straight people to think about how others will react to their perceived sexual orientation, and to experience having to alter their normal behavior to avoid being perceived as gay.

* Dutch Vs. American Parents’ Views On Teen Sex

When 16-year-old Natalie first started dating her boyfriend, her mother did something that would mortify most American parents: She took her to the doctor’s office to get her contraceptives. Her mother wasn’t weirded out by the fact that her teen daughter was about to have sex — in fact, she fully supported it. She merely wanted to make sure that she was doing it safely, and responsibly. A couple of months later, when it finally happened, her parents were totally accepting. As her father put it, “sixteen is a beautiful age” to lose your virginity.

If that seems like an unfamiliar attitude toward sex and parenting, it might have something to do with the fact that Natalie’s parents aren’t American — they’re Dutch. They are one of dozens of Dutch families interviewed by Amy T. Schalet, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, in her new book, “Not Under My Roof.” Schalet’s book compares the sexual attitudes of American and Dutch parents and her findings are nothing short of staggering: Whereas most American parents panic about the idea of allowing their kids to have sex with other kids under their roof, for many Dutch parents, it’s not only fine — it’s responsible parenting.

2. 9/11: The Domestic Results

Sep-09-2011 | Comments (0)

ird’s Eye: “Follow the money,” said Deep Throat to Bob Woodward. $42 million to raise Islamophobic fears in America (and Zadie Smith talks about the effects on her community). As a member of the NYFD says, ““The intersection of 9/11 and money is a busy intersection,” and we look at some of the players on that corner. Photographers can be detained these days “for taking pictures with no apparent aesthetic value”, as Stephen Harper plans to bring back draconian antiterrorist laws, possibly so as to fill the mega-prisons he’s planning to build.

* $42 Million From Seven Foundations Helped Fuel The Rise Of Islamophobia In America ThinkProgress

The Center for American Progress released a 130-page report today which reveals that more than $42 million from seven foundations over the past decade have helped fan the flames of anti-Muslim hate in America. The authors — Wajahat Ali, Eli Clifton, Matt Duss, Lee Fang, Scott Keyes, and myself — worked to expose the Islamophobia network in depth, name the major players, connect the dots, and trace the genesis of anti-Muslim propaganda. The report, titled “Fear Inc.: The Roots Of the Islamophobia Network In America,” lifts the veil behind the hate, follows the money, and identifies the names of foundations who have given money, how much they have given, and to whom they have given.

* Race, Religion, and Diversity in London After 9/11 Zadie Smith The New Yorker

Then came the cataclysm. The end of the world for nearly three thousand innocent people. The beginning of a different sort of world for the rest of us. From the epicenter in Manhattan, shock waves rippled across Europe. In North West London, a small but significant change: the stereotype of the Muslim boy was transformed. From quiet, sexless, studious child—sitting in the back of class and destined for an engineering degree—to Public Enemy No.1

*9|11: The Winners Village Voice

The September 11, 2001 attacks have been a symbol of many things and many causes, but like the lavish, flag-draped rebuilding of the site, it has also been a vehicle for enrichment. From corporations to politicians to government officials to nonprofits to the security industry to publishers to the health industry (not to mention the incidents of outright fraud over the years), many people have found ways to profit from one of the nation’s biggest disasters. 9/11 has created an economy all its own.“The intersection of 9/11 and money is a busy intersection,” says retired New York City firefighter Kenny Specht.

* Harper Plans To Bring Back Extraordinary Anti-Terror Powers For Police canada.com

Controversial clauses expanding the powers of police to combat terrorism are going to be reintroduced by the new Conservative majority government, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in an interview with CBC. Harper said for the first time since the Tories took control of the House of Commons the government plans to bring back measures in the Anti-Terrorism Act that expired in 2007.

“We think those measures are necessary. We think they’ve been useful,” Harper said of the expired parts of the act. “They’re applied rarely, but there are times where they’re needed.”The clauses were part of the act, introduced in 2001, and were required to be renewed every three years. They allowed for preventive detention of suspects for up to 72 hours, granted police the ability to arrest terrorism suspects without a warrant and enabled judges to compel witness to testify.

6. What’s Your Education Worth?

Jun-17-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: We start with a look at higher education, and the lack of positions available. Then there’s a very fine article from Education.com, which not only looks at the problems but has nine specific things concerned parents can do to improve your child’s education. And we end with liberal arts graduates writing (very well, we note) about why they value what they’ve learned in schools.

* Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education The Nation (via Reddit)

A few years ago, when I was still teaching at Yale, I was approached by a student who was interested in going to graduate school. She had her eye on Columbia; did I know someone there she could talk with? I did, an old professor of mine. But when I wrote to arrange the introduction, he refused to even meet with her. “I won’t talk to students about graduate school anymore,” he explained. “Going to grad school’s a suicide mission.”

…At Yale, we were overjoyed if half our graduating students found positions. That’s right—half. Imagine running a medical school on that basis. As Christopher Newfield points out in Unmaking the Public University (2008), that’s the kind of unemployment rate you’d expect to find among inner-city high school dropouts. And this was before the financial collapse. In the past three years, the market has been a bloodbath: often only a handful of jobs in a given field, sometimes fewer, and as always, hundreds of people competing for each one.

…Well, but so what? A bunch of spoiled kids are having trouble finding jobs—so is everybody else. Here’s so what. First of all, they’re not spoiled. They’re doing exactly what we always complain our brightest students don’t do: eschewing the easy bucks of Wall Street, consulting or corporate law to pursue their ideals and be of service to society. Academia may once have been a cushy gig, but now we’re talking about highly talented young people who are willing to spend their 20s living on subsistence wages when they could be getting rich (and their friends are getting rich), simply because they believe in knowledge, ideas, inquiry; in teaching, in following their passion. To leave more than half of them holding the bag at the end of it all, over 30 and having to scrounge for a new career, is a human tragedy.

* American Education: Waiting for Superman education.com, via Reddit

On international tests, American children rank 25th in math and 21st in science, despite the push for greater accountability through No Child Left Behind. … Nationwide, only 20-34 percent of kids in the United States are currently reading at grade level. What’s more, although America is falling behind in math, our kids are first in confidence. American students get terrible math scores compared to their international peers, but they think they’re great in math—in fact, they have more confidence in their math skills than students from any other country.

* Humanities Students Value Their Degrees The Chronicle

Am I living the right life? Nietzsche framed that seemingly simple question with a thought experiment: If you were told that you would spend the rest of time repeating this life again, exactly as it was, how would you react? Would you be content or terrified? After all, a “good life” could be one of little risk, maximal comfort, and minimal pain—certainly pleasant enough to repeat. A risk-taking life, though more glorious, is also more uncertain: Spills are an inevitable cost of striving. Is it worth taking those falls and bruises for all eternity?

Entering the university as a published scientist, I was on a well-marked path to a reassuringly risk-free career. However, somewhere along the line, a new set of questions presented itself, quietly at first, then insistently: questions from the global community relating to collective action, the rule of law, rhetoric, state-building, and state failure. Pursuing them, I could still process data and deduce paradigms, but my data set turned textual, deriving from history, literature, philosophy, and the classics.

The end point of my study is not clear; no laboratory awaits me after I graduate. That is the inherent challenge of the humanities life: demonstrating the pragmatic, productive value of my work. I do know, however, that the methods of analysis I’ve honed will be the tools I bring to bear upon my undergraduate honors thesis.

Most importantly, I know that I have taken the courageous path toward the striving life. Though I lost the security of a predetermined career, I’ve gained the freedom to mold myself a new one. This is a life I am proud of, that I claim as my own.

June 3rd, 2011 :: Year 8, Issue 20

Jun-03-2011 | Comments (0)

Followups

* Gil-Scott Heron Ave atque vale. The great musician, called by some the godfather of rap, died this week. Fine obituaries in The Independent and The Telegraph, and a flashback link to one of his many great songs: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

* US Prisons / US Education: For the same cost, guess which gets better meals?

* Other Planets: In Focus has a fine photo collection of shots from around the Solar System.

3. The Death of American Education

May-13-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Remember when we were told that all those jobs going overseas were just for unskilled labour, and the US would still prosper because Americans were so well educated? But the reality is that the decline in education is so appalling that the only response is to wonder why are the rich and powerful are doing this. And the only answer that makes sense is that they don’t care. It won’t affect them. Why not? Well, let’s start with a closeup on Detroit….and you may have tears in your eyes before you get to the Onion.

* Illiterate: Half of Detroit can’t read Business Insider

Detroit was once the symbol of American wealth and industrial capacity. It is now everybody’s emblem of decline. ….roughly half of all the people who live in Detroit are illiterate. They can’t read the back of a cereal box. They can’t read a weather report. They can’t read at all.

* Michigan Fires All Detroit Public School Teachers E.D. Kain Forbes

In Detroit, a city that has faced decline now for several decades, Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb has issued a layoff notice to all 5,466 public school teachers. …. Bobb is proposing to create charter schools for 16,000 students from 41 schools slated for closure. He argues that this will save millions of dollars….This is nothing short of a coordinated effort between the billionaire foundations pushing school reform and Tea Party conservatives intent on slashing benefits and ending collective bargaining rights. Public schools are under assault by the forces of privatization, and public school teachers face benefit and salary cuts while the very rich are promised tax cuts.

* For the cost of a single US soldier in Iraq, we can send between 35 and 40 students to university. reddit discussion

But it’s the education that we’re cutting, while military spending grows unchecked. Is it any wonder?

(Editor’s note: substitute ‘Canadian soldier’ and ‘Afghanistan’, and the same ratio holds)

* Budget Mix-Up Provides Nation’s Schools With Enough Money To Properly Educate Students The Onion

WASHINGTON—According to bewildered and contrite legislators, a major budgetary mix-up this week inadvertently provided the nation’s public schools with enough funding and resources to properly educate students.

Sources in the Congressional Budget Office reported that as a result of a clerical error, $80 billion earmarked for national defense was accidentally sent to the Department of Education, furnishing schools with the necessary funds to buy new textbooks, offer more academic resources, hire better teachers, promote student achievement, and foster educational excellence—an oversight that apologetic officials called a “huge mistake.”

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5. Logic, Rationality, and the Rest of Us

Jan. 20th, 2012 :: Year 9, Issue 3

1. Followups

2. 9/11: The Domestic Results

June 3rd, 2011 :: Year 8, Issue 20

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