Social media and the Boston bombings: When citizens and journalists cover the... - 0 views
Demography and the Future of Secularism - Boston.com - 1 views
-
-
The American Enterprise Institute is one of the leading conservative think tanks. The AEI, and the conservative movement in general, have an interest in a more religious population, since religious voters are more likely to vote Republican and for conservative parties elsewhere in the world. Therefore, one needs to skeptical of research emanating from a think tank with a strong ideological bias; especially when that research serves the interests of the institution.
-
-
Across the world, "population change is reversing secularism and shifting the center of gravity of entire societies in a conservative religious direction." The same will be true here in the United States, where religious families have more children than non-religious ones.
-
It's easy to underestimate the role that population change can have in social change, Kaufmann says, but it can have a huge role, especially when differences in values drive differences in fertility
- ...7 more annotations...
When the 'A' in U.C.L.A. Stands for 'Achievement' - Campaign Spotlight - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
The campaign, now getting under way, is for the University of California, Los Angeles. The campaign proclaims that U.C.L.A. is the home of “the optimists,” people who are risk-takers, rule-breakers and game-changers.
-
The campaign is the first for U.C.L.A. from an agency named 160 Over 90, which is based in Philadelphia and recently opened an office in Newport Beach, Calif.
-
That work underscores the growing presence of universities and colleges as advertisers in the media. Their goals include selling themselves to prospective students and the parents of those students, seeking donations from alumni, recruiting faculty members and improving their standings in various surveys.
- ...7 more annotations...
-
That work underscores the growing presence of universities and colleges as advertisers in the media. Their goals include selling themselves to prospective students and the parents of those students, seeking donations from alumni, recruiting faculty members and improving their standings in various surveys.
How facts backfire - The Boston Globe - 15 views
-
Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.
Ch. 2, The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850 - 0 views
-
The grass-plot before the jail, in Prison Lane, on a certain summer morning, not less than two centuries ago, was occupied by a pretty large number of the inhabitants of Boston; all with their eyes intently fastened on the iron-clamped oaken door. Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of New England, the grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good people would have augured some awful business in hand. It could have betokened nothing short of the anticipated execution of some noted culprit, on whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of public sentiment. But, in that early severity of the Puritan character, an inference of this kind could not so indubitably be drawn. It might be that a sluggish bond-servant, or an undutiful child, whom his parents had given over to the civil authority, was to be corrected at the whipping-post. It might be, that an Antinomian, a Quaker, or other heterodox religionist, was to be scourged out of the town, or an idle or vagrant Indian, whom the white man's fire-water had made riotous about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of the forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins, the bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die upon the gallows.
Boston Massacre Historical Society - 25 views
https://www.cengagebrain.com.mx/shop/content/sivulka45317_1111345317_01.01_toc.pdf - 28 views
Connected, exhausted - Boston.com - 32 views
Boston Tea Party - 0 views
Alternatives to powerpoint - Edcamp Boston - 10 views
Boston Review - Carlos Fraenkel: Citizen Philosophers - 0 views
-
In 1971 the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985 eliminated philosophy from high schools. Teachers, professors in departments of education, and political activists championed its return, while most academic philosophers were either indifferent or suspicious. The dictatorship seems to have understood philosophy's potential to create engaged citizens; it replaced philosophy with a course on Moral and Civic Education and one on Brazil's Social and Political Organization ("to inculcate good manners and patriotic values and to justify the political order of the generals," one UFBA colleague recalls from his high school days).
Was Dickens's Christmas Carol borrowed from Lowell's mill girls? - Ideas - The Boston G... - 15 views
-
Dickens had encountered that narrative trope in the stories written by the Lowell mill girls, who typically published either anonymously or under pseudonyms like “Dorothea” or “M.” In one anonymous story called “A Visit from Hope,” the narrator is “seated by the expiring embers of a wood fire” at midnight, when a ghost, an old man with “thin white locks,” appears before him. The ghost takes the narrator back to scenes from his youth, and afterward the narrator promises to “endeavor to profit by the advice he gave me.” Similarly, in “A Christmas Carol,” Scrooge is sitting beside “a very low fire indeed” when Marley’s ghost appears before him. And, later, after Scrooge has been visited by the ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Future, he promises, “The spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.”
-
That’s not how the scholars see it. Literary borrowing, even quite detailed borrowing, was accepted practice at the time—“It was just a different way of looking at things back then,” says Archibald. (“American Notes,” for instance, includes many pages of writing by the famed 19th-century physician Samuel Gridley Howe, all without attribution, and apparently without any thought by Dickens that he was doing something improper.)
Atul Gawande: How Do Good Ideas Spread? : The New Yorker - 36 views
-
Why do some innovations spread so swiftly and others so slowly
-
Consider the very different trajectories of surgical anesthesia and antiseptics, both of which were discovered in the nineteenth century.
-
The first public demonstration of anesthesia was in 1846.
- ...18 more annotations...
Getting Into the Ivies - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
For American teenagers, it really is harder to get into Harvard — or Yale, Stanford, Brown, Boston College or many other elite colleges — than it was when today’s 40-year-olds or 50-year-olds were applying. The number of spots filled by American students at Harvard, after adjusting for the size of the teenage population nationwide, has dropped 27 percent since 1994.
-
The share for any individual college is minuscule, of course. In 2012, about 33 out of every 100,000 American 18- to 21-year-olds were attending Harvard, down from 45 per 100,000 in 1994. These changes in the share tell you how much harder, or easier, admission has become for American teenagers on average. Between 1984 and 1994, it became easier at many colleges. The college-age population in this country fell during that time to 14.1 million in 1994 from 16.5 million in 1984, and the number of foreign students was relatively stable.
-
Over the last 20 years, several large colleges, like N.Y.U. and the University of Southern California, have improved markedly, effectively increasing the number of seats on elite campuses
- ...3 more annotations...
7 things every kid should master - Magazine - The Boston Globe - 104 views
-
no research demonstrating a relationship between those tests and measures of thinking or life outcomes
Young Goodman Brown (by Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1835) - 14 views
-
She talks of dreams, too. Methought, as she spoke, there was trouble in her face, as if a dream had warned her what work is to be done to-night
-
The clock of the Old South was striking, as I came through Boston; and that is full fifteen minutes agone