March 2010
2 posts
Schools are ALWAYS failing, so the myth goes →
Why do we presume that poor kids need a more rigid and authoritarian school climate than “ordinary” kids?
David Berliner and Bruce Biddle wrote a book on the topic: The Manufactured Crisis, in 1995. Richard Rothstein has continued the theme in most of his work, but rereading The Way We Were?, one realizes that public schools have always been driven by crises. Albert Shanker once acknowledged to...
Diane Ravitch's About-Face →
NCLB: She once supported it, but now says its requirements for testing in math and reading have squeezed vital subjects like history and art out of classrooms.
“Accountability, as written into federal law, was not raising standards but dumbing down the schools,” she writes. “The effort to upend American public education and replace it with something that was market-based began to feel too radical...
February 2010
9 posts
Brooks - More meritocracy (perhaps), less trust →
As we’ve made our institutions more meritocratic, their public standing has plummeted.
Government used to be staffed by party hacks. Today, it is staffed by people from public policy schools. But does government work better than it did before?
In 2007, 47 percent of Harvard grads went into finance or consulting. Yet would we say that banks are performing more ably than they were a half-century...
Krugman - Health Insurance Pool →
All individuals, including healthy individuals, should be required by law to buy into insurance plants, this increasing the insurance pool. Insurance only works when there are large numbers of people paying in who are not taking out (at least as much).
Should tax dollars pay online for-profit tuition... →
It's the economy, stupid →
Trust in government is simply a function of how well the economy is doing, nothing more, nothing less.
The U.S. is Screwed →
But wait, not so fast…
- Asian disunity and regional conflicts
- Lack of Chinese innovation
- Increasingly aging population
- Military inferiority
Hitler's 50% Sack →
Hitler, according to the Russian autopsy report, was missing one testicle.
3 theories on why…
- Congenital. Various scholars and psychologists have used this to explain or partially explain his behavior (for instance, Freudians claim that those born with only one testicle are obsessed with ordering the world).
- War injury.
- Russians made it up.
Marcus Winters: http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/winters.htm
Sol Stern: http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/stern__s.htm
Critics of Core Knowledge
Peter McLaren: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_McLaren
Ivan Illich: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich
NCLB to States: Must Meet Proficiency Standards,... →
// ]]
// ]]]]>]]> What percentage of Georgia’s fourth-graders are good readers? It seems to depend on whom you ask. The state will tell you that 85 percent of them met or exceeded the proficiency benchmark on its 2007 test. Not too shabby. On the other hand, only 28 percent of fourth-graders in Georgia scored high enough to be considered proficient on the National Assessment of Educational...
Population and Productivity →
News of a population bust might come as a surprise to many Americans. More than two centuries after English scholar Thomas Malthus argued that population growth exceeded the earth’s ability to feed us—“The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man,” he wrote—the media continue to warn us about impending environmental catastrophe and mass...
January 2010
16 posts
“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”
— This was said by Charles James...
What Makes a Great Teacher? →
“Parents have always worried about where to send their children to school; but the school, statistically speaking, does not matter as much as which adult stands in front of their children. Teacher quality tends to vary more within schools—even supposedly good schools—than among schools.
But we have never identified excellent teachers in any reliable, objective way. Instead, we tend to...
Review of "A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the... →
Haidt conducted a series of interesting experiments in which subjects read stories involving actions that don’t cause anyone harm but violate certain other societal norms, such as protected and consensual incest between adults or eating the family dog after it has been run over. Subjects tend to emphatically label the acts immoral, but they can’t come up with a good reason why. Haidt...
Chess, Computer Chess and AI →
In his book Chess Metaphors, Diego Rasskin-Gutman points out that a player looking eight moves ahead is already presented with as many possible games as there are stars in the galaxy. Another staple, a variation of which is also used by Rasskin-Gutman, is to say there are more possible chess games than the number of atoms in the universe. All of these comparisons impress upon the casual observer...
Notes on “Was the Best Defense a Good Offense? Jefferson Davis and Confederate Strategies” from TMS by McPherson.
Common Historical Opinion on Why CSA lost: Davis’ poor relationships with Western Theater generals Joseph Johnston and P.T. Beauegard and favoritism towards Braxton Bragg and John Bell Hood led to disaster in the West, where the CSA undeniably lost the war. His good...
Moscow's Stray Dogs →
Moscow has 35,000 stray dogs.
“Every so often, you would see one waiting on a metro platform. When the train pulled up, the dog would step in, scramble up to lie on a seat or sit on the floor if the carriage was crowded, and then exit a few stops later. There is even a website dedicated to the metro stray (www.metrodog.ru) on which passengers post photos and video clips taken with their...
Notes from “The Confederacy: A House Divided?” from This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War by James McPherson.
Main interpretive branches on the outcome of the war…
INTERNAL - Why did the South Lose? (focuses mainly on CSA)
EXTERNAL - Why or how did the North win (considers both USA and CSA)
Lee, upon surrendering, offered an external explanation: “We have...
Failure in Haiti Rescue Operation →
As the 19th century chief of staff of the Prussian Army, Helmuth von Moltke, warned: “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” In this case, what nobody in Washington seems to have grasped is that no plan will survive first contact with a disaster of this scale.
No point in lamenting that any more. Search and rescue teams from Virginia and California (the same places that sent teams to...
John Edwards/Elizabeth Edwards are horrible, ridiculous, self-destructive people and we hate them!
But wait, what do we really know? And is it really all that horrible? And why are we so quick to judge?
Boskops - Larger Skulls (hence bigger brains?) but... →
As more possible outcomes of a plan become visible, the variance among judgments between individuals will likely lessen. There are far fewer correct paths—intelligent paths—than there are paths. It is sometimes argued that the illusion of free will arises from the fact that we can’t adequately judge all p ossible moves, with the result that our choices are based on imperfect, sometimes...
Humanities Grad Students: You've Been Warned →
I usually write back, explaining that in this era of grade inflation (and recommendation inflation), there’s an almost unlimited supply of students with perfect grades and glowing letters. Of course, some doctoral program may admit them with full financing, but that doesn’t mean they are going to find work as professors when it’s all over. The reality is that less than half of...
December 2009
19 posts
Goldstone Report Largely Bogus, so says New... →
Since the early 1990s, the nature of the military conflict facing Israel has been dramatically shifting. What was mainly a clash between states and armies has turned into a clash between a state and paramilitary terror organizations, Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north. This new form of struggle is now called “asymmetrical war.” It is defined by an attempt on the part of those groups to...
The Atlantic - Why our Healt Care System is FUBAR →
Education, public safety, environment, infrastructure—all other public priorities are being slowly devoured by the health-care beast.
By what mechanism does society determine that an extra, say, $100 billion for health care will make us healthier than even $10 billion for cleaner air or water, or $25 billion for better nutrition, or $5 billion for parks, or $10 billion for recreation, or $50...
Large Hadron Collider article →
The L.H.C. is not merely the world’s largest particle accelerator but the largest machine ever built.
inside the machine it’s one degree colder than outer space, thus making the L.H.C. the coldest place in the universe.
a magnet that generates a magnetic field 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s
If this new collider doesn’t produce groundbreaking discoveries, particle physics will have reached...
Learning Style Be Damned →
According to Harold Pashler, teachers should disregard learning style. It is true, students of a certain learning style will enjoy a lesson taught in their way more than students of a different learning style. Yet Pashler’s findings show ways of teaching certain things have uniformly better testing results.
“In almost every actual well-designed study, Mr. Pashler and his colleagues...
New Republic - American business schools prepare... →
Up until World War I, the archetypal manufacturing CEO was production oriented—usually an engineer or inventor of some kind. Even as late as the 1930s, business school curriculums focused mostly on production. Khurana notes that many schools during this era had mini-factories on campus to train future managers.
After World War II, large corporations went on acquisition binges and turned...
Protocol Economy by Brooks →
“In the 19th and 20th centuries we made stuff: corn and steel and trucks. Now, we make protocols: sets of instructions.”
http://www.amazon.com/Bin-Ladens-Arabian-American-Century/dp/B002IKLO8W/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1261069542&sr=1-1
Books I may want to read by this Toulmin guy…
The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning
Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity
The Architecture of Matter
“It took telephones seventy-one years to penetrate 50 percent of American homes,...”
– Ken Auletta, as quoted in LA Times story
November 2009
18 posts
