The exact format of these sessions is not revealed, but it does sound like 368 people had to sit down at a desk on their own and have a list of rude words read out to them over the course of five days by someone with a clipboard. While a case could certainly be made for the importance of conducting such research, pity the poor statistician questioning their life choices as they ask their fourth person of the day "What about 'knob'? What do you think about 'knob'?"*

The "Non-English words" section contains a handy translation table for those who do not speak the relevant languages. Some of these are very offensive indeed and should probably not be wielded by anyone who lacks the suitable linguistic and cultural context, or possibly anyone at all. But the "mild" South Asian pan-linguistic term Uloo Ka Patha – which literally translates as "son of an owl" and reportedly means "idiot", "imbecile" or "moron" – definitely deserves wider use.

Cricket was at the forefront of the sporting boycott of apartheid, albeit accidentally so. The MCC initially did not select the South African born “cape coloured” player Basil d’Oliviera for the 1969 tour of South Africa, probably for political reasons. The consequent pressure on them, and the ‘injury’ to selected player Tom Cartwright (who, it is rumoured, withdrew in order to increase the pressure to select d’Oliviera), resulted, eventually, in the cancellation of the tour which, in turn, resulted in the widespread boycott. I supported the boycott almost without reservations and certainly without regret.

As things stand it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Afghanistan will face a cricketing boycott which, I suspect, is the only sporting boycott that matters in this case. In the past decade or so cricket as conquered Afghanistan, and Afghanistan, frankly, has conquered cricket, rising from an unknown participant in the third or fourth rank of cricketing nations, to becoming one of only 11 Test playing countries, with some of the best and most sought-after short from players in the world; no other sport comes close to it.

I am far more regretful about this one than about the South African boycott. Here are some thoughts.

About 5,600 people gave birth outside a hospital in California in 2020, up from about 4,600 in 2019 and 3,500 in 2010. The shift took place during a widespread “baby bust,” so the proportion of births outside hospitals rose from 0.68% in 2010 to 1.34% in 2020, according to a KHN analysis of provisional data from the California Department of Public Health. The proportion of births outside hospitals stayed relatively high — 1.28% — from January through July 2021.

Tuskegee was no secret; many researchers just didn’t see the problem with it. Holding up universities as “the guardians of voluntary participation” since 1947 is an absurd fantasy. Rules have been developed around medical research exactly because of egregious harms, particularly against vulnerable minority populations. We have to keep talking about informed consent because of the looming specter of research misconduct in this arena.

What’s more, the fact is that mandatory vaccination policies are not medical experiments at all, so seeing this through the lens of IRB and Nuremberg is wrongheaded; such policies are not the sort of human-subjects research governed by the infrastructure Walsh discusses. Our home university, Virginia Tech, requires students, faculty and staff to submit their vaccine documentation or file for a medical or religious exemption (for which weekly testing is then required). The FDA has now approved the Pfizer vaccine in full, so students should have no reason to refuse vaccination based on how "new" or "untested" it is.

“For many less-educated Americans, the economy and society are no longer providing the basis for a good life. Concurrently, all-cause mortality in the U.S. is diverging by education — falling for the college-educated and rising for those without a degree — something not seen in other rich countries.”

Community and technical colleges educate more people per year than apprenticeship programs, coding boot camps and federal job training programs combined, noted Tamar Jacoby, president of Opportunity America and author of the report. Nonetheless, many people underestimate the value of these institutions.

As four key insights in this analysis will later show, teacher, parent, and student conversations on social media have been largely siloed within their individual groups and focused on different aspects of the education system. However, the pandemic—and the far-reaching issues generated by it, such as an exam-grading controversy and students’ mental health—represent important moments when the three groups united in joint conversations around education, ripening the possibility for change.

Social listening is an innovative and relatively new research method for gathering and making sense of large amounts of social media data. We were particularly intrigued by the promise of social media data scraping for targeting the thoughts and sentiments of the millions of citizens whose voices simply cannot make it into even the most ambitious of surveys.

In 1927-1928, a large research study was undertaken by the Payne Fund, an educational foundation. Superintendents and principals in hundreds of American schools were surveyed; they were asked their views on the value and importance of educational broadcasting. The responses were so positive that it inspired the Ohio Department of Education, along with Ohio State University, to make educational broadcasts more widely available. The Ohio legislature allocated $20,000 for the project, and the Ohio School of the Air was born; it debuted on January 7, 1929, operating four days a week, from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. By the end of 1929, more than 230 Ohio communities had installed radios in their schools so that students could hear the daily programs, broadcast from Ohio State’s WEAO in Columbus and powerful Cincinnati commercial station WLW.

Having a budget enabled the Ohio School of the Air to produce top-quality programs that were interesting for students, and easy for teachers to build discussions around—there were even sample lesson plans and suggested readings provided. It also meant being able to hire talented professionals to read poetry or perform Shakespearean plays, native speakers to give French lessons, and experienced musicians for music appreciation (a major plus for schools too small to have their own orchestras or glee clubs). And students were not just passive listeners: the lessons often included talks by well-known experts, like aviators, or doctors, or scientists, or journalists, or even the governor, who answered questions the students had asked.

But what Facebook has built, according to Horwitz, is not a system to protect the integrity and security of Facebook users with a large audience. It is an over-broad attempt to ward off what employees call “PR fires” — a side effect of which being that the users with the biggest megaphones are given another channel by which to spread whatever information they choose with little consequence.

When we do not believe we will need information later, we do not recall it at the same rate as when we do believe we’ll need it.Because the internet is readily available, we may not feel we need to encode the information. When we need the answer, we will look it up.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that everyone at colleges and universities wear masks indoors, even if they are fully vaccinated, in locales with substantial or high transmission of the coronavirus. Most of the country meets that standard at this point. The CDC also recommends that colleges offer and promote covid vaccines.

A series of influential articles published in the 1970s would argue that for a few decades after the Scopes trial, biology textbooks would become “less scientific.” According to these historians, textbook writers and publishers deleted sections about evolution, removed pictures of Darwin, softened “controversial” discussions by weaving in religious quotations, and moved the topic evolution to the last chapter of the textbooks, where it could easily be cut out (sometimes literally, with scissors).

Scholar Ron Ladouceur refers to this popular narrative as the “myth of Scopes,” which he defines as “the conventional belief that the theory of evolution…was fairly presented in high school textbooks prior to the Scopes trial, but that references to the topic were systematically removed by authors and publishers under pressure from Christian fundamentalists over the next 35 years.”

Orca will likely soon be dwarfed by competing projects in the US and Scotland that are expected to come online in the next two years. But even then, without much more public and private investment, the industry will be far from the 10 million tons per year that the International Energy Agency says are needed by 2030.

Like many pandemic-induced changes to American society, what remains to be seen is whether homeschooling is having a moment, or whether it is establishing itself as a permanent feature among educational options in the US. There are reasons to suspect it could be the latter.

Specifically, the researchers found that for every additional $50,000 of net worth accumulated at midlife, the risk of death later in life dropped by 5%.

Judging from the media coverage of the work from home (WFH) phenomenon, you’d think it’s become near universal. It’s not. In July, only about one in eight workers were teleworking—the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) preferred term—and those are heavily concentrated in a few sectors and occupations, and among the highly credentialed.

According to BLS stats, in July 2021, just 13% of workers are doing so remotely because of the pandemic, down from 35% in May 2020, the first month the numbers were collected. (See graph below.) And that initial 35% number was inflated by the fact that so many workers who couldn’t work from home, like those in retail and hospitality, had been laid off. Since that peak, the share has declined in twelve of the subsequent fourteen months.

But most jobs just can’t be done remotely. Those who can work remotely have to be served by the majority of lower-status, lower-paid workers who make things and move them around. If they were paid not to work, money would quickly become worthless because there’d be nothing to buy with it—no food, no electricity, no appliances, no medical equipment, nothing.

We present a set of computing tools and techniques that every researcher can and should consider adopting. These recommendations synthesize inspiration from our own work, from the experiences of the thousands of people who have taken part in Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry workshops over the past 6 years, and from a variety of other guides. Our recommendations are aimed specifically at people who are new to research computing.

We all know of college students who are pre-med one minute and pursuing an architectural degree the next. A lot of those changes will be occurring early on, during the fall semester. We need to ensure that students, especially diverse students, don’t see this as a failure or setback but rather as an opportunity to help them find their way. Hopefully, some will take a path toward professions where their perspective and presence are critically needed.

“The key is the data that I have in my possession. Data is not clean of the sins of the past.”

Earlier in the pandemic, fully virtual students were paired with teachers at their home schools who guided them through a full day of classes — from math to gym — often alongside their pre-pandemic classmates.

But this year, after the state prohibited that kind of remote learning, San Diego launched a standalone virtual academy with its own virtual teachers. Students get some live instruction and teacher check-ins, then spend the rest of the time doing work on their own.

Another change? The level of interest. Last year, 44% of students ended the year online. But so far, less than 1% have chosen the virtual academy, though the district is still working through applications.

“Our projections consistently foresee a positive future for wild cacao in Peru as the current suitable area is expected to largely remain suitable and to further expand in the future,” explain Ceccarelli and her colleagues.

The research team cautions that despite the positive findings, chocolate lovers shouldn’t celebrate too soon. Even if wild cacao does fare well in the forests of a warmer world, that does not mean that it would grow well enough under cultivation to replace domestic cocoa as a cash crop. And their model didn’t try to incorporate other possible knock-on effects of a changing climate, such as increasing pests and disease.

These concerns about credibility are overblown. Credibility is whether others think you mean what you say in a given situation. It is context-specific; because circumstances can vary widely, credibility is judged on a case-by-case basis. How a state has behaved in the past is an important component of its credibility, but it is not the only one. The Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan will affect these calculations the next time the United States commits to an extraordinarily costly venture in a place not vital to the country’s core security interests, but it is unlikely to sabotage U.S. credibility writ large.

Credibility is different from reputation, however. If credibility is whether others think your deeds will match your words, reputation is what others think of you in the first place. On this count, the consequences of the U.S. withdrawal will likely be considerably greater. The pullout has been messy and chaotic: the Taliban took control of Afghanistan more quickly than the Biden administration had publicly predicted, and members of a regional branch of the Islamic State (or ISIS) launched a deadly bomb attack at the Kabul airport as Afghan and foreign citizens attempted to evacuate the country.

Reputations are, in essence, beliefs—they exist only in the minds of others. The formation and maintenance of reputations therefore has an important psychological component, and the psychological evidence is relatively clear that observers pay attention to past actions when predicting future behavior. Experimental studies I conducted with Jonathan Renshon and Keren Yarhi-Milo on both members of the public and elite decision-makers found that when asked to assess a country’s resolve in a foreign policy crisis, observers consistently focus on behavior in previous disputes, even when presented with countervailing information about capabilities and interests. The question is not simply whether allies and adversaries will doubt U.S. resolve because Washington backed down from a 20-year stabilization effort in Afghanistan. It is whether their existing doubts will grow stronger than they would have had the United States continued fighting.

Americans are exhausted by educational disruption. That's the message of a new survey by the journal Education Next. According to their poll, support for virtually every proposed innovation has dropped since 2019 (a few items were flat). That includes both highly popular measures, such as annual testing, and more controversial policies, including charter schools. 

Prior to the 1960s and 1970s, writes Ensmenger, computer programming was thought of as a “routine and mechanical” activity, which resulted in the field becoming largely feminized. The work wasn’t particularly glamorous; “coders” were “low-status, largely invisible.” They were only supposed to implement the plans sketched out by male “planners.” Ensmenger quotes one female programmer, who recalled, “It never occurred to any of us that computer programming would eventually become something that was thought of as a men’s field.”

Google readily (and ironically) admits that such ubiquitous web tracking is out of hand and has resulted in “an erosion of trust... [where] 72% of people feel that almost all of what they do online is being tracked by advertisers, technology firms or others, and 81% say the potential risks from data collection outweigh the benefits.”

“Research has shown that up to 52 companies can theoretically observe up to 91% of the average user’s web browsing history,” a senior Chrome engineer told a recent Internet Engineering Task Force call, “and 600 companies can observe at least 50%.”

The results are generally consistent with past research: Online coursework generally yields worse student performance than in-person coursework. The negative effects of online course-taking are particularly pronounced for less-academically prepared students and for students pursuing bachelor’s degrees. New evidence from 2020 also suggests that the switch to online course-taking in the pandemic led to declines in course completion. However, a few new studies point to some positive effects of online learning, too.

Reversing course, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday that all students and staff should wear masks inside schools, regardless of whether they’re vaccinated — an acknowledgment that slowing vaccination rates and the highly contagious delta variant are complicating plans for a more normal start to the school year.

And those not vaccinated are 29 times more likely to be hospitalized for COVID.

A new report titled, “Stranded Credits: A Matter of Equity,” from Ithaka S+R, explores the lived experiences of students and staff familiar with institutional debt, also known as stranded credits. This phenomenon particularly impacts students of color, first-generation and low-income students. The report defines stranded credits as academic credits achieved by students that they cannot access due to an unpaid balance.Stranded credits not only impact students’ academic progress, they can also thwart career trajectories because they are unable to access their transcripts due to unpaid debt. Researchers also found this phenomenon also has a detrimental impact on mental health and wellbeing.

In a longitudinal study of almost 400,000 employees from nearly 400 Japanese firms over 12 years, the gender gap in bonus pay was found to be greater in workplaces with a merit-based system than in workplaces without it, said Eunmi Mun, a professor of labor and employment relations at Illinois.

As U.S. President Joe Biden seeks to resurrect American leadership on the world stage, the perennial question of how the United States should respond to international crises looms large. In his latest book, the political scientist John Mueller offers a refreshingly straightforward answer: Washington should aim not for transformation but for “complacency,” which Mueller characterizes as “minimally effortful national strategy in the security realm.”

Education researchers have a particular kind of tutoring in mind, what they call “high-dosage” tutoring. Studies show it has produced big achievement gains for students when the tutoring occurs every day or almost every day. Less frequent tutoring, by contrast, was not as helpful as many other types of educational interventions. In the research literature, the tutors are specially trained and coached and adhere to a detailed curriculum with clear steps on how to work with one or two students at a time. The best results occur when tutoring takes place at school during the regular day.

Especially suspect, in Pliny’s opinion, were professional magicians, or “magi,” a term that originally referred to Persian fire priests but came to mean any practitioner of magic for hire. “The most blatant example of the shamelessness of the magi,” he writes, is a ritual to produce an amulet that makes its wearer invisible.

Shields might prove helpful in specific instances — like halting the big droplets emitted during coughs and sneezes — but not particularly in trapping the "unseen aerosol particles" by which COVID-19 spreads. "The smaller aerosols travel over the screen and become mixed in the room air within about five minutes," said Catherine Noakes, a professor at the University of Leeds in England. "This means if people are interacting for more than a few minutes, they would likely be exposed to the virus regardless of the screen." 

The refusal of many people in the United States to get vaccinated has helped lead to a new surge of COVID-19 cases. But as a paper that health researchers Diane S. Saint-Victor and Saad B. Omer wrote back in 2013 shows, this kind of dynamic is not unique to our nation or our political moment. Vaccine refusal has stymied the eradication of many diseases.

To complicate matters further, about half of the roughly forty-five known examples were discovered before the emergence of rigorous archaeological standards for documenting objects’ findspots and contexts. This means that we simply have no idea where—or even when—some of the most famous slave collars were originally found, such as the so-called Zoninus collar now in the collection of the Museo Nazionale Romano.

On the other hand, the specimens that were excavated more recently show a range of archaeological contexts so wide that it is almost impossible to make generalizations: some have been found still attached around a skeleton’s neck, indicating that “for some slaves at least, a metal neck collar was permanent,” while others have been found in trash heaps and gutters, perhaps discarded by successful fugitives.j

For all that, it is hard not to think that he would have been a more appealing character, at least aesthetically speaking, if he had lived 200 years earlier. In the 19th century McAfee might have composed "The Revolt of Islam" or a biography of William Tell in between keeping a pet bear in his Oxford rooms or fighting for Greek independence. Instead he both consumed and sold an enormous amount of drugs, wrote computer software, and ran unsuccessfully for the presidential nomination of a minor political party....

That evening's debate was memorable not least of all for McAfee's candor. In response to a question about what works of political philosophy had inspired the candidates, he flatly declared: "I come to you untutored in the great thinkers of libertarianism. The first book I ever read cover to cover was Darwin's Origin of Species at the age of 30. I read that book because I was dealing drugs in Mexico at the time and it was the only English-language book I could find."

In a case of l’esprit de l’escalier, I just worked out the perfect parenthetical addition to this piece that was published in Inside Story, responding to a string of pro-natalist pieces in the New York Times and elsewhere. The central point is that the economic model in which strong young workers support elderly retirees is outdated and will only become more so.

The model underlying the desire for a population pyramid is one in which physical work predominates. Young and strong, needing only on-the-job training, workers leave school at 14 and immediately start contributing to the economy. By 65, they are worn out and ready for retirement. In this model, the more young people, the better.

One of the most entertaining of these rumors was what historian John McMillan has called “the Great Banana Hoax of 1967.” In the spring of that year, publishers of underground papers printed a recipe for smoking banana peels. It involved freezing the peels, blending them into a pulp, baking the residue at 200 degrees, and then smoking it in a cigarette or pipe (The Berkeley Barb, March 17, 1967). This supposedly produced an experience similar to that of smoking marijuana.

It involved freezing the peels, blending them into a pulp, baking the residue at 200 degrees, and then smoking it in a cigarette or pipe (The Berkeley Barb, March 17, 1967). This supposedly produced an experience similar to that of smoking marijuana.

As fun, if not necessarily effective, as banana smoking might have been, it was not without risks. According to The Rag, two people were taken into custody for possession of what turned out to be a banana peel: according to the Los Angeles Free Press, Donald Arthur Snell of Santa Fe Springs, California, was charged with driving while under the influence of drugs—the drug being banana peel (Berkeley Barb, May 26, 1967).

But small gatherings like Doug’s party are a potential important source of transmission, though this has been really hard to measure. At least, unless you get clever, which is what a team led by Anupam Jena did in this article, appearing in JAMA Internal Medicine.

With coronavirus infections falling in the U.S., many people are eager to put the pandemic behind them. But it has inflicted wounds that won’t easily heal. In addition to killing 600,000 in the United States and afflicting an estimated 3.4 million or more with persistent symptoms, the pandemic threatens the health of vulnerable people devastated by the loss of jobs, homes and opportunities for the future. It will, almost certainly, cast a long shadow on American health, leading millions of people to live sicker and die younger due to increasing rates of poverty, hunger and housing insecurity.

It will, almost certainly, cast a long shadow on American health, leading millions of people to live sicker and die younger due to increasing rates of poverty, hunger and housing insecurity.

In particular, it will exacerbate the discrepancies already seen in the country between the wealth and health of Black and Hispanic Americans and those of white Americans. Indeed, new research published Wednesday in the BMJ shows just how wide that gap has grown. Life expectancy across the country plummeted by nearly two years from 2018 to 2020, the largest decline since 1943, when American troops were dying in World War II, according to the study. But while white Americans lost 1.36 years, Black Americans lost 3.25 years and Hispanic Americans lost 3.88 years. Given that life expectancy typically varies only by a month or two from year to year, losses of this magnitude are “pretty catastrophic,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and lead author of the study.

Western powers have reacted with alarm to the ICC’s recent attempts to open investigations outside Africa, heaping pressure on the court and leveling sanctions against it. In so doing, they have revealed the tacit understanding that international criminal law applies to some more than others.

(Laugh if you will, but archaeology has proven that the ancients who once inhabited the Iberian Peninsula greatly valued the lime-flavored nacho chip for its nutritive value, and they long afforded it primacy among chips.)

Since the U.S. doesn't have a statutory minimum of paid public holidays like most of the rest of the world, it will fall on employers to decide whether or not to actually honor America's Second Independence Day.

Shane Frederick has devised a cognitive reflection test – three questions in which there is an intuitive but wrong answer and a non-intuitive but right answer. He has found that even at the US’s top universities, less than half of students get all three questions right.

Lawmakers say covid’s disproportionate impact on California’s Black and Latino residents, who experienced higher rates of sickness and death, makes their request even more pressing.

Yet even in the age of the cruise missile, the bayonet remains. However obsolete on the battlefield, it’s an “attitudinal and behavioral” tool. The point is all about morale-building. Stone notes: “What has proved important is its role in motivating scared, and frequently isolated, soldiers to continue fighting when their instincts demand otherwise.”

Perhaps the most striking thing about this article is that there is only a passing mention of Bitcoin — and nothing about cryptocurrency more generally — even though these attacks are only possible because of cryptocurrency.

When it comes to Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), I do a lot of gushing.

We have maintained that cryptocurrencies do have a fundamental value, arising principally from their ability to potentially provide greater privacy and anonymity compared to the conventional banking system. But that feature is difficult to value, which makes cryptocurrency exchange rates volatile and subject to bubbles. In addition, that very feature makes these assets desirable for the conduct of illegal activities, which is likely to invite increasing surveillance and regulation. In turn, those controls will work to reduce the value of cryptocurrencies, not only for use in illicit transactions, but for legitimate users as well.

“One of the problems we face as scholars of lying is that everybody thinks they know how lying works,” says Hartwig, who coauthored a study of nonverbal cues to lying in the Annual Review of Psychology. Such overconfidence has led to serious miscarriages of justice, as Tankleff and Deskovic know all too well. “The mistakes of lie detection are costly to society and people victimized by misjudgments,” says Hartwig. “The stakes are really high.”

We have learned since [2008] that the present generation of economists has not figured out how the economy works …

The journal’s first issue was published recently and it contains 10 button-pushing essays that supply answers to questions including whether it’s OK to commit violence in order to save animals (yes), whether criminals should be be placed in medically induced comas (maybe), and whether in the end our lives have any meaning at all (no).

“I think this is good for a lot of us math teachers because it’s forced us to rethink what assessments are supposed to accomplish,” said Matthew Rector, a math teacher and department chair at Grant Union High School in Sacramento. “In the past, most of us have thought about assessments as ranking tools—give a kid a grade and move on. Assessments should be about moving mathematical knowledge forward.”

By the 1930s, the UCI had some reasons to be skittish about technological changes to the bicycle. The authors write that it was under pressure from bike manufacturers, which were ramping up production of safety bicycles to satisfy a growing Depression-era demand for cheap transportation.

But many students detest survey classes in general, and introductory U.S. history courses in particular.  They consider these sweeping introductions a colossal waste of time and money, a diversion from their real interests, and little more than a box checking exercise taken only to fulfill a requirement.  Typically large and impersonal, and, in the case of history, repetitive of classes that students took in high school, these are courses to ”get out of the way.”

But the value of an introductory class lies, I think, in instilling a particular way of thinking.  In history, that means recognizing:That everything – every concept, activity, institution, and social role -- has a history.

That “we can’t escape history”  -- that our lives are caught up in long-term historical processes and that many of society’s most pressing problems are rooted in the past decisions and actions.

That judging the past fairly is hard, since it requires us to recognize that the past is another country, with its own culture, circumstances, and moral frameworks.

That “nothing is inevitable until it happens,” that history is contingent and key events are the consequence of chance, personality, mindsets, individual and collective choices, and circumstances.

That “History is problem solving”; understanding the confluence of factors and conjuncture of forces that contribute to historical change, whether this involves the role of racism or fear of the Soviet Union play in the decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan or the influence of geography on the outcome of the Civil War.

The disappointing April jobs report released last week inspired many commentators to echo this analysis: The post-pandemic recovery is slowing down because government benefits are too generous.The business class is right to be scared. But it's not because the recovery is slowing.

The coming months are set to turn into a time of reckoning for bad employers. The unique dynamic of the pandemic recovery could prove quickly unsurvivable for companies that are inefficient, as well as those that offer low pay, toxic work environments, or abusive bosses.

Most people are inherently reluctant to change things, even when it could be to their benefit. We see this dynamic everywhere. People rarely switch jobs, even though job switchers often end up making more money as a result. Studies have found millions don't refinance their mortgage, even though it would save them significant money with no downside. Similarly, people rarely switch health insurance even if it would be to their financial benefit. People often go with whatever treatment center their doctor refers them to, even if shopping around could save them hundreds.

The pandemic though has forced people to rethink their plans. Pew Research found two thirds of unemployed people are seriously considering changing the field they work in.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) of art are all the rage right at the moment. For the right price (sometimes millions of dollars!) you can acquire a record of ownership of a digital asset like an image or video. Your ownership is recorded in a blockchain. You’re not even buying the copyright to this image, you’re just buying the concept of owning it. Does that explanation make sense to you? Because it barely makes sense to me.

Right now there’s a statement you can sign on the mathematical community’s ties with the NSA — the US National Security Agency, one of the world’s largest employers of mathematicians.

Most discussions of fatigue at the turn of the twentieth century begin with neurasthenia (from a Greek term meaning nervous exhaustion), the diagnosis popularized by neurologist George M. Beard in 1869. Like other physicians at the time, Beard viewed the body as a machine powered by energy produced by the nerves. The depletion of that energy resulted in the condition he called neurasthenia.

Josephine Clara Goldmark’s landmark book Fatigue and Efficiency appeared in 1912. Chair of the Committee on the Legal Defense of Labor Laws of the National Consumers League, Goldmark had begun her study of fatigue several years earlier at the request of her brother-in-law Louis Brandeis (later the first Jewish justice on the U.S. Supreme Court), who was preparing his brief for Muller v. Oregon, the Supreme Court case that established the constitutionality of limiting women’s working hours. Although Goldmark noted that many factors contributed to industrial fatigue, including noise, speed, and monotony, she placed the greatest emphasis on the length of the working day.

The book also reflected contemporary beliefs about women’s bodies. Women “are less resistant to fatigue than men,” Goldmark wrote, “and their organisms suffer more gravely than men’s from the strains and stresses of industrial fatigue.”

“Together, these findings illustrate that the most common approach to diversity in higher education ironically reflects the preferences, and privileges the outcomes, of White Americans,” the study notes.

What must one believe in to be willing to borrow tens of thousands of dollars in order to pursue a certification of completion — a B.A.? What would a college have to promise in order to compel someone to do that? What would a bank have to believe to extend this person credit? Or the U.S. government, to guarantee such loans en masse — now roughly $2 trillion? And what would a society have to believe to sustain the system that keeps it all going?

"On 'snow days' or days when school buildings are closed due to an emergency, all students and families should plan on participating in remote learning," the NYC Department of Education said.

Two 19th century Belgian bibliographers heard about the Dewey Decimal System and asked to translate it into French. But rather than slavishly follow Dewey, they added some significant twists. Their system, first published in 1905 and still used today, is known as the Universal Decimal Classification.

The truth is the question of whether student debt should be canceled is largely irrelevant. Most student debt will be canceled sooner or later, because an ever-growing share of borrowers cannot possibly repay their loans. Ever. The only question that matters is whether President Biden and Democrats in Congress can grapple with reality and fix America's colossally stupid system of funding higher education.

Effectively, the IDR program (whose enrollment has grown steadily to about a fifth of borrowers) is a tacit admission that most student loans are never going to be paid off in full. Those who have not enrolled have seen far higher rates of default; on current trends most borrowers will be in IDR eventually, which is rapidly becoming a kind of ad hoc bankruptcy program for student borrowers. In a sense, the U.S. is starting to fund its higher education system with a payroll tax on people who go to college but are too poor to pay for it out of pocket — except we then force them to sit under an enormous load of basically imaginary debt for decades while doing it. This damages their credit, making it harder to get a job, a house, a car, and so on.

But there is a problem with the new authenticity standard. The people who made applying to college an elaborate performance, a nervous and yearslong exercise in self-construction have now decided that the end result of this elaborate performance must be “the real you.”

As we face a new struggle to get covid-19 vaccination rates up in this country, we need to remember that there is a group of people with virtually zero vaccine uptake. This group often congregates together in indoor gatherings, coming into close physical contact for extended periods. Fully 24% of Americans are part of this group. We call them children.

Even before the 1950s began, Meredith writes, the phrase “the Nifty Fifties” began circulating. On a much more ominous note, one Chicago Tribune writer warned that “with an eye to Russia, this next decade will be tagged either ‘The Friendly Fifties’—or ‘The final Fifty.” And a report from Hays, Kansas, explained that dust storms in that area had led residents to declare the start of the “Filthy ’50s,” a callback to the “Dirty ’30s.”

Instead of lamenting a demise of expertise, wouldn’t it be more productive to ask whether the language of expertise features characteristics that invite its audience to overlook or misread it?

But new research suggests schools that tighten security and surveillance in response to shootings or other acts of violence may worsen long-term discipline disparities and academic progress, particularly for Black students.Schools that maintain the closest watch on students have significantly higher suspension rates and lower math performance than schools that use a lighter touch, according to new research released at the annual American Educational Research Association conference earlier this month. The findings also suggest a high-surveillance culture at school can make it harder for educators to implement strategies like restorative justice intended to reduce discipline disparities for students of color.

And these consequences fell disproportionately on Black students, who were more than four times more likely than white students to attend a school with the highest level of surveillance.

Indeed, it was lost—an estimated 1000 pages of poetry and pictures—until partly rediscovered by a small boy named Dave, in an IKEA in suburban Stroughton, Massachussets.

Substantial portions were in use as a prop book on a VITTSJÖ shelf unit (appropriately, as this unit promises ‘an open, airy feel.’)

Yet, in district after district, Black families are largely choosing to continue learning from home, despite efforts to reopen their schools. Rather than using equity as a buzzword to gain moral high ground in the reopening debate, we believe that advocates and school officials should listen to and engage with Black families and trust their decision-making.

So how can I make such a brash counter-claim that tests, quizzes, and exams are not essential? McFarland mentions how proctoring is not optional if “the goal of an exam or test or assignment is to measure learning or skill mastery.”

This is where the big reveal comes: quizzes, tests, exams, assignments – none of those can measure learning or skill mastery. Not directly at least.

All forms of tests and assignments are designed to serve as this evidence in the form of a proxy for direct observation. The idea is that if you really learned something, you can take that knowledge and answer questions about it, or describe it, or do a project with it, or something along those lines. There are a wide range of assignment options that work well as a proxy, but exams and tests are usually questionable at best. This is especially true when they rely on one of the most popular forms: the multiple choice question.

The research is usually aimed at seeing how many students cheated, not finding out the likelihood that they will cheat on your specific test this Friday.

The reason for this is because those numbers probably wouldn’t be as scary as “5000% of students cheat!” This is important because the real concerns most critics have with proctoring technology are about the problems with racism, ableism, and privacy violations that students have reported. If you think that most of the students in your course would probably cheat, you kind of shrug at the possible problems and say “well, I have to do something.” But if someone were to say that there was a less-than-5% chance any given student would cheat on your specific exam, then suddenly, the problems you subject students to do not seem worth it.

But it is also not surprising that a younger generation of left intellectuals has turned against higher education, given that it has turned against them. Following years of austerity budgets and the systematic deprofessionalization of academic labor, millennials and their generational successors have found it harder and harder to get faculty positions. As for students, a college degree of some sort has become a near-universal standard for younger cohorts entering an increasingly credentialized labor market. For them, the university has meant neither an enriching intellectual experience that sets them on a path of humanistic, lifelong inquiry nor a path to middle-class economic stability, but rather escalating tuition for degrees of questionable value that sets them on a path of crushing, lifelong debt. Once popular on the right, the Bennett hypothesis is likely to find more and more of its adherents on the left.

But brains need not and should not be confined to our bodies. They can, and should, and sometimes do, reside elsewhere.

One place is in our habits. I invest into tracker funds by direct debit each month. Most of my investment is done without thinking. 

Strictly speaking, this isn’t optimal: stock markets aren’t fully efficient and tracker funds can be beaten by momentum and defensive stocks (pdf) (but, I suspect, not by any other strategy). Implementing such strategies, however, would require me to think. And if I did that I’d fall prey to the gazillion cognitive biases that I warn IC readers against.

But there is another more cynical case for universal voting. Democracy, which has come to be based on an ever-greater franchise, provides legitimacy to government and an orderly mechanism for resolving political conflict. Undermine those things, and violence and instability could spill out of control.

Sesame Street introduced Roosevelt Franklin in February 1970. He was created and originally voiced by Sesame Street actor Matt Robinson, who felt the show lacked content that would draw in Black kids. He told Ebony magazine in a 1970 interview that kids needed “more realism in black-oriented problems,” a concern echoed by others....

The Muppet was a hot topic behind the scenes. Other Black Sesame Street staffers felt he was too stereotypical, with one of the show’s advisers noting, “I like the idea of black muppets, [but not] this one-dimensional use of black muppets.” Robinson pushed back, advocating for the use of Black English as a way to meet kids where they were. Still, a 1973 article in Black World Magazine called the attempt “a gross misrepresentation of Black Language.” Later, a 1975 Freedomways article called out Roosevelt and his segments as “a chaos of ‘darky’ accents and racist stereotypes.”