Although the traditional public schools in the city have about the same ratio of poor children—and a significantly smaller ratio of black and Latino children—the charter schools outperformed the traditional schools by 12 points in math and five points in reading. Those are substantial differences.Klein is overstating the case. Not all poor, minority children are alike, and there’s good reason to believe that the charter school population and the regular public school population differ in some important ways. For one thing, the charter kids all have parents who are involved in these new schools. Some charters make a considerable effort to reach these parents. The Success Network charters – the ones that Klein mentions specifically – spent $880,000 recruiting students to its four schools and another $1.3 million on “network events and community outreach." [source]
If children are under stress, the ways they respond are remarkably similar. They get sad, distracted, aggressive, and tune out.Nocera summarizes what she found in high-poverty schools.
Chaos reigned. The most disruptive children dominated the schools. Teachers didn’t have control of their classrooms — in part because nothing in their training had taught them how to deal with traumatized children. Too many students had no model of what school was supposed to mean. “These were schools that were not ready to be schools.”In a school where chaos reigns, even the good kids – the ones who entered the charter lottery but lost – will not learn as much.
We test rival hypotheses about the origins of Americans’ perceptions of weather change, and find that actual weather changes are less predictive of perceived changes in local temperatures, but better predictors of perceived flooding and droughts. Cultural biases and political ideology also shape perceptions of changes in local weather. Overall, our analysis indicates that beliefs about changes in local temperatures have been more heavily politicized than is true for beliefs about local precipitation patterns. Therefore risk communications linking changes in local patterns of precipitation to broader changes in the climate are more likely penetrate identity-protective cognitions about climate.
People’s perceptions of rainfall are more accurate than are their perception of temperatures. If you try talk about temperature, you run up against misperception based on ideology. If you want to convince conservatives that climate change and global warming are real, talk about the drought (or floods), not the heat.
I suggested that it was in an age-old tradition of the quest of immortality, first described in the ancient Mesopotamian Gilgamesh Epic.He also accuses them or their supporters of venal motives.
Successful morally inspired movements typically ally themselves with powerful groups motivated by very hard material interests.This from someone who was being paid by a multi-billion dollar industry to further their material interests. This irony is apparently lost on Berger, who, interestingly, does not even hint that he got penny from Tobacco. Maybe he forgot.
Then there is the “slippery slope” argument – the scare tactic of exaggeration and false equivalency.I cannot say whether Bloomberg’s quasi-European lifestyle has anything to do with his idea of New York City as a quasi-European welfare state.*
There is also an equivalent of the Saudi Arabian police force dedicated to “the promotion of virtue and the suppression of vice”—an army of therapists, coaches, educators, advice columnists, dieticians, and other moral entrepreneurs. To date (still) they mainly rely on persuasion rather than coercion. Wait a little. [Emphasis by Berger.]Yes, you read that correctly. If you can’t buy a 30-oz. cup of sugar-water and instead have to buy two 15-ounce cups, the Saudi police are just around the corner.
Le fumeur d'hier comme le fumeur d'aujourd'hui transgresse le seul sacré que nous soyons désormais capables de reconnaître, le culte du corps, de sa santé, de sa longévité, sur lequel s'est finalement rabattu le désir d'éternité. [emphasis added]He likens anti-smoking policies to Islamic authoritarianism:
ce mélange d'autoritarisme bien-pensant, de suffisance pseudo-savante et de bonne conscience sécuritaire qui caractérise souvent les ayatollahs de la santé. [emphasis added]And he sees the same slippery slope.
L'interdit du tabac n'est pas la dernière des prohibitions que l'on nous prépare.The major difference from Berger is that, as far as I know, Castel was not being paid by Gauloises.
| IRA GLASS: Is that moment [when you reveal to others] a moment of horror or a moment of pride?
MARY ARCHBOLD: Half and half. There’s the horror of: What reaction is it going to be? And then there’s the quiet pride that maybe you saw me as me before you saw me as an actor with a disability. IRA: You feel like those two things are contradictory? MARY: [Immediately] Yes. IRA: I’m not sure I understand that. It’s like you’re saying you want them to see you. But you includes the fact that you have only one full arm. MARY: True. But it’s not my leading characteristic. And often times when people find it out first, that’s sort of how they describe me. I’m like categorized “one-arm Mary.” IRA: But everyone when you see them, you see some superficial thing – their hair or the way they’re dressed or their age whatever it is, their race whatever it is, and they get classified . . . MARY: And I’d be happy to be classified among any other things. You can call me “the short girl,” you can call me “the brunette girl,” you can call me “the blue-eyed girl” – whatever you want to say. Just not “the disabled girl.” . . . . . And because I am a performer, it’s sort of a professional necessity, ’cause otherwise the only role I’ll be called in for is “wounded vet who just came home from Afghanistan.” And this way, I get called in for “housewife,” I get called in for “mom.” |
It is so easy to imagine from the perspective both of the murdered and the murderer . . . that I cannot quite fathom why it doesn't happen all the time. It is our safety that’s mysterious.His answer is basically human nature. His view is comfortingly anti-Hobbesian:
We are more thoroughly controlled by our society's norms than we tend to imagine. In a setting of peace, outside the context of war, to perpetrate an act like the Aurora massacre requires an almost superhuman feat of volition. There aren't more Aurora's because we are sociable robots, programmed for peace. To override that programming and act really monstrously requires both an uncommon estrangement and an implausibly free will.My first reaction when I read Wilkinson’s question was that his starting assumption was wrong: in fact there are more Auroras – disgruntled or unstable people who walk into an office or public space and start shooting. There are so many in fact – twenty a year on average (USA Today) – that to be national news, the incident has to be unusual in some way. Just three days before Aurora, a man in Tuscaloosa who had recently been sacked from his job got his AK-47, stood outside a crowded bar, and opened fire. Nobody was killed, so the story didn’t get much coverage.
The guy basically had normal guns.Maybe the Times quoted Volokh out of context. I hope so, but I fear not. I would like to think that a military assault rifle with a 100-round clip is not a normal weapon. But apparently I am out of touch with the realities of American life.
Arguing for the [Paterno] statue’s removal, the legendary coach Bobby Bowden said he wouldn’t want Sandusky’s crimes “brought up every time I walked out on the field.” That’s the point. Sandusky’s crimes should never be forgotten . . . . It is shameful to deify men who put nationalist ritual before children. But it is more shameful to pretend that this elevation was achieved by Joe Paterno’s singular hand.I’ll pass for the moment on questions about the function of heroes and whether we really need them and what it says about our society that we apparently do need them and who are the people we choose to make our heroes. But the simple point is that the statue should never have been built. And if the Happy Valleyans had known then what they know now, it would not have been built.
in fairness to the truth, we now know more than enough to know that I am inoperable, incurable and have months to live. As the doctors told me, it is just "bad luck" when a perfectly healthy person with no symptoms is discovered (by accident) to have cancer so advanced that nothing can be done.He did try chemo and survived both the treatment and the disease. Those four years are something of a bonus for us. But this time, he rejected the idea of treatment, preferring, as he said four years ago “to see death as part of life.”
According to McLuhan, it is the dominant pattern of visual coverage in the popular press, comprising a fusion of sex and technology: Explore and enlarge the domain of sex by mechanical technique and possess machines in a sexually gratifying way. Long, slender ladies' legs are an expression of our 'replaceable parts' cultural dynamics. The industrial mode of production mechanized sex too. In ads the human body is depicted behavioristically as a sort of love machine capable merely of specific thrill, a view which reduces sex experience to a problem in mechanics and hygiene.I wonder if the filmmaker, Allison deFren, makes any explicit reference to McCluhan and his ideas.
The ticket granted the recipient free entry to the movies or to a local youth center. They gave out an average of 40,000 tickets per year. . . .Just the day before I saw this item, my sister-in-law had sent around a link to this video of an Australian bank doing something similar. The difference is that the bank’s dependent variable is not clearly defined or measured, and its method is over the top.
Youth recidivism was reduced from 60% to 8%. Overall crime was reduced by 40%. Youth crime was cut in half. And it cost one-tenth of the traditional judicial system.
A degree in sociology is far from useless. The opposite is true. My sociology degree helped prepare me for every job I’ve ever had, and for life in general.
Barack Obama in 2008 . . . infamously labeled blue-collar voters “bitter,” as they “cling to guns or religion.”Besides Obama’s perception (or as Brooks sees it, misperception)
there is an entire academic literature in the social sciences dedicated to showing conservatives as naturally authoritarian, dogmatic, intolerant of ambiguity, fearful of threat and loss, low in self-esteem and uncomfortable with complex modes of thinking.(Note that Brooks is careful not to say that the research actually shows this, though it does. Instead, the research – most of it by those unhappy liberals – is “dedicated to showing” conservatives in a bad light. Sort of like the research “dedicated to showing” that planet Earth is getting warmer – another liberal conspiracy.*)
Obviously, liberals must be happier, right?Wrong, says Brooks.
Religious participants are nearly twice as likely to say they are very happy about their lives as are secularists (43 percent to 23 percent). The differences don’t depend on education, race, sex or age; the happiness difference exists even when you account for income.That’s a bit misleading. Happiness is in fact related to income, race, and education in exactly the ways you would expect, though for some reason Brooks does not include those variables in his analysis. What Brooks means is that the religion effect holds even when you control for those variables.
none, it seems, are happier than the Tea Partiers, many of whom cling to guns and faith with great tenacity.This does not square with the image of Tea Partiers as bitter and angry. But maybe that’s because until recently, they didn’t have much to be bitter about. The US was their country, and they knew it. That’s why ever since November 2008 they have kept talking about “taking back our country.” (See my “Repo Men” post from two years ago.)
Rigorous codes of conduct allow people to build their character. Changes in behavior change the mind, so small acts of ritual reinforce networks in the brain. A Mormon denying herself coffee may seem like a silly thing, but regular acts of discipline can lay the foundation for extraordinary acts of self-control when it counts the most.“The Book of Mormon” was then (April of last year). “Henry V” is now. Self-control might have been nice, but now let’s give it up for rambunctiousness.
Henry V is one of Shakespeare's most appealing characters. He was rambunctious when young and courageous when older.How did Hal become so appealing and courageous? Not through self-control taught by church or school, says Brooks. Those confining institutions are the bad guys. They don’t know how “to educate a fiercely rambunctious” kid.
But the big story here is cultural and moral. If schools want to re-engage Henry, they can't pretend they can turn him into a reflective Hamlet just by feeding him his meds and hoping he'll sit quietly at story time.That stuff about people changing themselves – self-control to work within institutions – that was so 2011 Brooks.
Schools have to engage people as they are. . . not just teachers who celebrate cooperation, but other teachers who celebrate competition; not just teachers who honor environmental virtues, but teachers who honor military virtues; not just curriculums that teach how to share, but curriculums that teach how to win and how to lose; not just programs that work like friendship circles, but programs that work like boot camp.I’m not sure which part of Brooks’s column is more fatuous. That paean to boot camp (see Charles Pierce’s commentary here ) is pretty good. But Brooks also implies that the gender imbalance in disciplinary problems in schools (mostly boys) is recent:
Boys are much more likely to have discipline problems. An article as far back as 2004 in the magazine Educational Leadership found that boys accounted for nearly three-quarters of the D's and F's.That “far back” date conveniently puts it in the contemporary era. Was this imbalance any different in 1894? In some ways, schools haven’t really changed all that much. The first lesson kids have to learn is still the same: sit still.
A 2010 Health Affairs study found that doctors in Ontario, a Canadian province, spent $22,205 each year dealing with the single-payer agency, compared to the $82,975 American doctors spend dealing with private insurance companies, Medicare and Medicaid.Or maybe they were patients in need of costly tests:
An MRI that costs, on average, $1,200 in the United States comes in at $824 north of the border.(from a WaPo blog by Sarah Kliff.)
Who Flies the Flag? Not Always Who You Might Think
A Closer Look at Patriotism
On average, a person with a distinctively black name . . .does have a worse life outcome . . . . But it isn't the fault of his or her name. . . . The kind of parents who name their son Jake don't tend to live in the same neighborhoods or share economic circumstances with the kind of parents who name their son DeShawn. And that's why, on average, a boy named Jake will tend to earn more money and get more education than a boy named DeShawn. DeShawn's name is an indicator–but not a cause–of his life path.I was skeptical about this when I read it years ago. What about all those field tests for civil rights groups? What about those black college grads who finally wise up and send out their resumes as D. William Green after DeShawn W. Green gets nothing but rejections?
Moreover, the race- and class- based penalties compound for low-SES black males. In other words, Jalen and DaQuan are both disadvantaged on the job market compared to Caleb and Ronny, but DaQuan is by far the most severely disadvantaged. Worse yet: the situation between white and black candidates does not change whether they are graduates from less selective schools like UMass and UC Riverside or highly selective schools like Harvard and Stanford.Gaddis has a brief write-up of his research here.
these laws aren’t really enacted as a homicide-control measure, right? It’s more the opposite, that they legalize certain violence that used to be criminal.Presumably, if the killers were standing their ground, those additional dead white males deserved to die. Or at least, their killing was justifiable.
Human ancestors regularly went through cycles of abundance and famine, each of which favors different reproductive strategies. While periods of abundance favor strategies associated with postponing reproduction in favor of one’s own development (e.g., by pursuing an education), periods of scarcity favor more immediate reproduction. The latter strategy is more successful during times of resource scarcity because it decreases the likelihood that one will perish before having the chance to reproduce.
For women, periods of scarcity also decrease the availability of quality mates, as women’s mate preferences reliably prioritize resource access.“Reliably prioritize resource access” is from the SciAm blogpost, presumably the venue that’s reader-friendly for the general public. What the sentence means, I think, is this: A recession reduces the number of guys with enough money to take care of a family.
The police told me they would hang out for a while in case the thief materialized. “Where do you think he is?” I asked. “In there, probably,” said one of the cops, motioning to the entrance of the building we were standing in front of. It was a Department of Social Services facility, home to the New York City Job Center, the New York City Residential Center, and the New York City Food Stamp Office. Times are tough.
I put dead people’s hair on my head and talk loudly in front of strangers for money.In a previous post (here) I noted that actors and magicians share with their audience an unusual and self-contradictory definition of the situation. The performer makes every effort to convince the audience that he is something he is not – the possessor of supernatural powers, a prince of Denmark, etc. But he must also convey the idea that he is really just an ordinary person and that he is fully aware that he is not what he is claiming to be. As long as everyone shares this definition of the situation, the show can go on. Without that definition, the professional actor, as Ms. Plimpton suggests, sounds absurd if not deranged.
Time passed slowly. Ms. Notaro spotted a familiar face in the crowd and asked for help. Her friend shouted a reminder. Ms. Notaro started the story again, froze, joked and asked for help. As this series of false starts continued, patterns emerged in expressions, gestures, cadence.She is violating the usual definition of how comedians should perform, and the audience is puzzled.
Not all of the audience however was amused. As minutes went by, people start checking their watches and rolling their eyes. This atmosphere resembled what I imagine the first minutes of watching Andy Kaufman read the entire “Great Gatsby” onstage were like. The audience chuckled, then murmured. Was this all a stunt? And seriously, when was it going to end?I saw Andy Kaufman a few times at The Improv long ago, and the audience reaction (or mine at least) went beyond puzzlement or boredom to places like distress or anger.
Their first idea was to target the friends of people who already liked Pizza Delicious on Facebook. But that wound up targeting 74 percent of people in New Orleans on Facebook — 224,000 people. They needed something narrower.To get the access to the data, you don’t really have to be an advertiser; you just have to play one on Facebook. Neal Caren at UNC tells you how. He used Facebook to compare rates of same-sex and hetero preferences across age groups and states. His instructional post is here.
The Pizza Delicious guys really wanted to find people jonesing for real New York pizza. So they tried to target people who had other New York likes — the Jets, the Knicks, Notorious B.I.G. Making the New York connection cut the reach of the ad down to 15,000.
Seemed perfect. But 12 hours later, Michael called us. “It was all zeroes across the board,” he said. Facebook doesn't make money till people click on the ad. If nobody clicks, Facebook turns the ad off. They'd struck out.
So they changed the target to New Orleans fans of Italian food: mozzarella, gnocchi, espresso. This time they were targeting 30,000 people.
Those ads went viral. They got twice the usual number of click-throughs, on average. The ad showed up more than 700,000 times. Basically, everyone in New Orleans on Facebook saw it. Twice.
