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Javier E

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Father of 'Flow,' Dies at 87 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...aly-csikszentmihalyi-dead.html

psychology flow education

shared by Javier E on 29 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • Flow became an important element of positive psychology, a movement started in the early 2000s by Dr. Csikszentmihalyi and Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. It focused not on the pathologies of the human mind but its everyday experiences.
  • “Csikszentmihalyi was such a leader in our field it’s hard to do his contributions justice,” Laurie Santos, a professor of psychology at Yale, wrote in an email. “I think in a world where it’s become harder and harder to focus, his work on flow has become even more important.”
  • Dr. Csikszentmihalyi did not just explain “flow”; he offered a pointed critique of why so many people fail to achieve it. He cited countless studies showing that most people prefer meaningful work over mindless downtime, but argued that Americans in particular had been conditioned to hate their jobs and love passive relaxation.
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  • He blamed television, above all, for the decline in hobbies, avocations and lifelong education — activities that blend aspects of work and play and, he said, offer the best opportunity for flow and, through it, happiness.
  • Some critics said his finger pointing smacked of snobbery, to which he had a response: “If holding that everyone should have a chance to get the highest quality of experience is an elitist notion, so be it,” he wrote in a guest essay for The New York Times in 1993. “It is better than resigning oneself to a life of mindless entertainment.”
  • “We can’t afford to become trapped within ourselves, our jobs, and religions, and lose sight of the entire tapestry of life,” he said in a 1995 interview with Omni magazine. “When the self loses itself in a transcendent purpose — whether to write great poetry, craft beautiful furniture, understand the motions of galaxies, or help children be happier — the self becomes largely invulnerable to the fears and setbacks of ordinary existence.”
Javier E

Technopoly-Chs. 4.5--The Broken Defenses - 0 views

expert technocracy technopoly information meaning bureaucracy history institutions Postman book notes

shared by Javier E on 02 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • r ~~~-~st of us. There is almo-~t-n~ ~ wheth;~~ct~~l or imag'l ined, that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world that would [ make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction.
  • The belief system of a tool-using culture is rather like a brand-new deck of cards. Whether it is a culture of technological simplicity or sophistication, there always exists a more or less comprehensive, ordered world-view, resting on a set of metaphysical or theological assumptions. Ordinary men and women might not clearly grasp how the harsh realities of their lives fit into the grand and benevolent design of the universe, but they have no doubt that there is such a design, and their priests and shamans are well able, by deduction from a handful of principles, to make it, if not wholly rational, at least coherent.
  • From the early seventeenth century, when Western culture u~ertook to reorganize itself to accommodate the printing press, until the mid-nineteenth century, no significant technologies were introduced that altered l-he form, volume, or speed of . in~. As a consequence, Western culture had more than two hundred years to accustom itself to the new information conditions created by the press.
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  • That is eseecial1y the case with technical facts.
  • as incomprehensible problems mount, as the con- ~ cept of progress fades, as meaning itself becomes suspect, the T echnopolist stands firm in believing that what the world needs is yet more information. It is like the joke about the man who , complains that the food he is being served in a restaurant is \ inedibleand also that the_ portions are too small
  • The faith of those who believed in Progress was based on the assumption that one could discern a purpose to the human enterprise, even without the theological scaffolding that supported the Christian edifice of belief. Science and technology were the chief instruments of Progress, and · i.Lac_cumulation of reliable in orma on a out nature _1b_n, would bring ignorance, superstition, and suffering to an end.
  • In T ~chnopoly, we are driven to fill our lives with the quesUo "accesTinformation.
  • But the genie that came out of the bottle proclaiming that information was the new god of culture was a deceiver. It solved the problez:n of information scarcity, the disadvantages o_f wh~s~ious. But it gave no wami g_ahout the dan_gers of information7rttn,
  • !:ion of what is called a_ curriculum was a logical step toward 1./ organizing, limiting, and discriminating among available sources of information. Schools became technocracy's first secular bureaucracies, structures for legitimizing some parts of the flow of infgrmatiQD and di"s.ci.e.diling other earts. School;;ere, in short, a ~eans of governing the ecology of information.
  • James Beniger's The <;antral Revolution, which is among the three or four most important books we have on the lb\b'ect of the relation of informe;ition to culture. In the next chapter, I have relied to a considerable degree on The Control Revolution in my discussion of the breakdown of the control mechanisms,
  • most of the methods by which technocracies. have hoped to keep information from running amok are now dysfunctional. Indeed, one_ ~_i!)!_.Q.L.de£ining_a.I..em Q~ oly is to say that its inf_o_fmation immu is inoperable.
  • Very early ~n, tt..w.as..understood that the printed book had er ate.cl-a ir::ifo · · on crisis and that . =somet ing needed to be done to aintain a measure of control.
  • it is why in _a TechnoE,.oly there can be no transcendent sense of purpose or meaning, no cultural coherence.
  • In - 1480, before the informati9n explosion, there were thirty-four schools in all of England. By 1660, there were 444, one school for every twelve square miles.
  • There were several reasons for the rapid growth of the common school, but none was more obvious than that it was a necessary response to the anxiefies and confusion aroused by information on the loose. The inven-
  • The milieu in which T echnopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e., inf~rmation appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds; and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose.
  • Abetted ~~orm of ed~~on that in itself has been em _lie~any co~e~ent world-view, Technopoly deprives us of the social, p·olitical, historical, mefaphys1cal, logical, or spiritual bases for knowing what is beyond belief.
  • It developed new institutions, such as the school and representative government. It developed new conceptions of knowledge and intelligence, and a height-
  • ened respect for reason and privacy. It developed new forms of economic activity, such as mechanized production and corporate capitalism, and even gave articulate expression to the possibilities of a humane socialism.
  • There is not a single line written by Jefferson, Adams, Paine, Hamilton, or Franklin that does not take for granted that when information is made available to citizens they are capable of managing it. This is not to say that the Founding Fathers believed information could not be false, misleading, or irrelevant. But they believed that the marketplace of infonpation and ideas was sufficiently ordered so that citizens could make sense of what they read and heard and, through reason, judge ·its μsefulness to their lives. Jefferson's proposals for education, Paine'~ arguments for self-governance, Franklin's arrangements for community affairs assume coherent, commonly shared principles.that allow us to debate such questions as: What are the responsibilities of citizens? What is the nature of education? What constitutes human progress? What are the limitations of social structures?
  • New forms of public discourse came into being through newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and books.
  • It is no wonder that the eighteenth century gave us our standard of excellence in the use of reason, as exemplified in the work of Goethe, Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Vico, Edward Gibbon, and, of course, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Thomas Paine.
  • I weight the list with America's "Founding Fathers" because technocratic-typographic America was the first nation ever to be argued into existence irLpr111t. Paine's Common Sense and The Rights of Man, Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, and the Federalist Papers were written and printed efforts to make the American experiment appear reasonable to the people, which to the eighteenth-century mind was both necessary and sufficient. To any people whose politics were the politics of the printed page, as Tocqueville said of America, reason and printr ing were inseparable.
  • The presumed close connection among information, reason, and usefulness began to lose its_ legitimacy toward the midnineteenth century with the invention of the telegraph. Prior to the telegraph, information could be moved only as fa~. as a train could travel: al5out thirty-five miles per hour. Prior to the telegraph, information was sought as part of the process of understanding and solvin articular roblems. Prior to the telegraph, informal-ion tended to be of local interest.
  • First Amendment to the United States Constitution stands as a monument to the ideolo_g~~ print. It says: "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging freedom of speech or of the press; or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." In these forty-five words we may find the fundamental values of the literate, reasoning_giind as fostered by the print revolution: a belief in privacy, individuality, intellectual freedom, open criticism, and ~.' adio .
  • telegraphy created the idea of context-free . 1 informatig_n::= that fs'~the idea that the value of information need ;;~t be ti~ to any function it might serve in social and political
  • decision-making and action. The telegraph made information into a commodity, a "thing" that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning. 2
  • a new definition qf information came into being. Here was information that rejected the necessit ·of interco~nectedness, proceeded without conte~rgued for instancy against historic continuity, and offere · ascination· in place of corn !exit and cohe ence.
  • The potential of the telegraph to transform information into a commodity might never have been realized except for its artnershi with the enny ress, which was the first institution to grasp the significance of the annihilation of space and the saleability of irrelevant information.
  • the fourth stage of the information revolution occurred, broadcasting. And then the fifth, computer technology. Each of these brought with it new forms of information, unpre~edented amounts of it, and increased speeds
  • photography was invented at approximately the same time a~phy, and initiated the Ehi:rd stage of the information revolution. Daniel Boorstin has called it "the graphic revolution," bec~use the photograph and other ico~ogr~phs br~ on a massive intrusion of ima es into the symbolic environment:
  • The new imagery, with photography at its forefront, did not merely function as a supplement to language but tended to replace it as our dominant: means for construing, understanding~d testing reaj.ity.
  • ~ the beginning of the seventeenth century, an entirely new information environment had been created by_12rint
  • It is an improbable world. It is a world in which the idea of human progress, as Bacon ex~sed it, has been g~ by the idea of technological progress.
  • The aim is no_t to reduZe ignorance, r . supersti ion, and s ering but to accommodate ourselves to the requirements of new technologies.
  • echnopoly is a state of cttlture., It is also a st~te of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in te0,~logy, finds · .atisf~tions in technolo , and takes its orders from technolog-¥,
  • We proceed under ( the. assumption that information is our friend, believing that cultures may suffer grievously from a lack of information, which, of course, they do. It is only now beginning to be understood that cultures may also suffer grievously from infori mation glut, information without meaning, information without · .... control mechanisms.
  • Those who feel most comfortable in Technop.oJy are those who are convinced that technical progress is humanity's supreme achievement and the instrument by which our most profound dilemmas may be solved. They also believe that information is an unmixed blessing, which through its continued and uncontrolled production and dissemination offers increased freedom, creativity, and peace of mind.
  • Th_e relationship between information and the mechanisms ( for its control is fairly simple ~ec · ·ology increases the available supply of information. As the supply is increased, \ control mechanisms are strained. Additional control mech\ anisms ~re needed to cope with new information. When addi1 tional control mechanisms are themselves technical, they in tum I further increase the supply of information. When the supply of information is no longer controllable, a general breakdown in psychic tranquillity and social purpose occurs. Without defenses, people have no way of finding meaning in their experiences, lose their capacity to remember, and have difficulty imagining reasonable futures.
  • any decline in the force of i~~~ti'?n_s makes people vulnerable to information chaos. 1 To say that life is destabilized by weakened institutions is merely to say that information loses its use and therefore becomes a source of confu;~n rather than coherence.
  • T echnop_oly, then, is to say it is what h~pens to society when the defe~ainst informati;~ glut have broken down.
  • Soci~finstitufions sometimes do their work simply by denying people access to information, but principally by directing how much weight and, therefore, value one must give to information. Social institutions are concerned with the meaning of information and can be quite rigorous in enforcing standards of admission.
  • H is what happens when a culture, overcome by information generated by technology, tries to employ technology itself as a means of providing clear direction and humane purpose. The effort is mostly doomed to failure
  • although legal theory has been taxed to the limit by new information from diverse sources-biology, psychology, and sociology, among themthe rules governing relevance have remained fairly stable. This may account for Americans' overuse of the co~~-~~ as a mean; of finding cohe_!Til.<iAncl__s.tability. As other institutions become I unusabl~ mechanisms for the control of wanton information, the courts stand as a final arbiter of truth.
  • the school as a mechanism for information control. What its standards are can usually be found in, a curriculum or, with even more clarity, in a course catalogue. A college catalogue lists courses, subjects, and fields of study that, taken together, amount to a certified statement of what a serious student ought to think about.
  • The Republican Party represented the interests of the rich, who, by definition, had no concern for us.
  • More to the point, in what is omitted from a catalogue, we may learn what a serious student ought not to think about. A college catalogue, in other words, is a formal description of an information management program; it defines and categorizes knowledge, and in so doing systematically excludes, demeans, labels as trivial-i~ a word, disregards certain kinds of information.
  • In the West, the family as an institution for the management of nonbiological information began with the ascendance of print. As books on every conceivable subject become available, parent_~ were forced int°._the roles of guard-· ians'... protectors, nurturers, and arbiters of taste and rectitude. \ Their function was to define what it means to be a child by \ excluding from the family's domain information that would 1. undermine its purpose.
  • all_ theories are oversimplifications, or at least lead to oversimplification. The rule of law is an oversimplification. A curriculum is an oversimplification. So is a family's conception of a child. T~~t is the funt!ion _o._Ltheories-_ to o~~~~ip:lp}}_fy, and thus to assist believers in_ organiziDg, weighting, _ _an~_ excluding information. Therein lies the power of theories.
  • That the family can no longer do this is, I believe, obvious to everyone.
  • Th~-ir weakness is that precisely because they oversimplify, they are vulnerable to attack by new information. When there is too much information to _$_ustaJ12 -~,:Z}I theory, infoLm_a_ti.on._Q.~S<?~es essentially mea11iD_g!~s
  • The political party is another.
  • As a young man growing up in a Democratic-household, I was provided with clear instructions on what value to assign to political events and commentary.
  • The most imposing institutions for the control of information are religio!1 ~nd the st~J:f, .. They do their work in a somewhat more abstract way than do courts, schools, families, or political parties. The_y m?n~g~__Ji;1formation throug~ creation of mytJ:is and stories that express theories about funq1m1entaf question_s_:_ __ 10:_hy are we here, where have we come from, and where are we headed?
  • They followed logically from theory, which was, as I remember it, as follows: Because people need protection, they must align themselves with a political organization. The Democratic Party was entitled to our loyalty because it represented the social and economic interests of the working class, of which our family, relatives, and neighbors were members
  • the Bible also served as an information control mechanism, especially in the moral domain. The Bible gives manifold
  • any educational institution, if it is to function well in the mana~~nt of information, must have a theory about its purpose and meaning-'. .!n'!::!Sl. have the means to give clear expression to its_ theory, and must do so, to a large extent, by excluding information.
  • instructions on what one must do and must not do, as well as guidance on what language to avoid (on pain of committing blasphemy), what ideas to avoid (on pain of committing heresy), what symbols to avoid (on pain of committing idolatry). Necessarily but perhaps._ unfortunately, the Bible also explained how the world came into being in such literal detail that it could not accommodate new information produced by the telescope and subsequent technologies.
  • in observing God's laws, and the detailed requirements of their enactment, believers receive guidance about what books they should not read, about what plays and films they should not see, about what music they should not hear, about what subjects their children should not study, and so on. For strict fundamentalists of the Bible, the theory and what follows from it seal them off from unwanted information, and in that way their actions are invested with meaning, clarity, and, they believe, moral authority.
  • Those who reject the Bible's theory and who believe, let us say, in the theory of Science are also protected from unwanted information. Their theory, for example, instructs them to disregard information about astrology, dianetics, and creationism, which they usually label as medieval superstition or subjective opinion.
  • Their theory fails to give any guidance about moral information and, by definition, gives little weight to information that falls outside the constraints of science. Undeniably, fewer and fewer people are bound in any serious way to Biblical or other religious traditions as a source of compelling attention and authority, the result of which is that they make no f!lOral decisions, onl~_pradical ones. _This is still another way of defining Technopoly. The term is aptly used for a _culture whose av.~ilable theories do not offer guidance about what is acceptable informaHon in the moral domain.
  • thought-world that functions not only without a transcendent; narrative to provide moral underpinnings but also without strong social institutions to control the flood of information produced by technology.
  • In the r case of the United States, the great eighteenth-century revolution was not indifferent to commodity capitalism but was nonetheless infused with profound moral content. The U~!ed States was not merely an experiment in a new form of governance; it wai1nefu1fillmenl-oFGocf s plan. True, Adams, Jeffe;son, and Painere1ected-fne supernatural elements in the Bible,· but they never doubted that their experiment had the imprimatur of \ Providence. People were to be free but for a eurp_9se. Their [ God~giv_e~ig[ifs im li~_? obli ations and responsibilities, not L onfytoGod but to other nations, to which the new republic would be a guide and a showcase of what is possible-w~en reason and spirituality commingle.
  • American Technopoly must rel,y, to an obsessive extent, on technica( ~ethods to control the flow of information. Three such means merit speci attention.
  • The first is bureaucracy, which James Beniger in The Control © Revolution ra°i1l~as atoremost among all technological solutions to the crisis of control."
  • It is an open question whether or not "liberal democracy" in its present form can provide a thought-world of sufficient moral substance to sustain meaningful lives.
  • Vaclav Havel, then newly elected as president of Czechoslovakia, posed in an address to the U.S. Congress. "We still don't know how to put morality ahead of politics, science, and economics," he said. "We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of our actions-if they are to be moral-is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success." What Havel is saying is that it is not enough for his nation to liberate itself from one flawed theory; it is necessary to find another, and he worries that Technopoly provides no answer.
  • Francis Fukuyama is wrong. There is another ideological conflict to be fought-between "liberal democracy" as conceived in the eighteenth century, with all its transcendent moral underpinnings, and T echnopoly, a twentieth-century
  • in at- ~ tempting to make the most rational use of information, bureaucracy ignores all information and ideas that do not contribute to efficiency
  • bureaucracy has no intellectual, I political, or moral theory--,--except for its implicit assumption that efficiency is the principal aim of all social institutions and that other goals are essentially less worthy, if not irrelevant. That is why John Stuart Mill thought bureaucracy a "tyranny" and C. S. Lewis identified it with Hell.
  • in principle a bureaucracy is simply a coordinated series of techniques for reducing the amount of information that requires processing.
  • The transformation of bureaucracy from a set of techniques·> designecfto serve social ~tutions to an auton-;;mous metainstitution that largely serves itself came as a result of several developments in the mid-andlate-nineteenth century: rapid ../ industrial growth, improvements in transportation and commu- ·✓ nication, the extension of government into ever-larger realms of V public and business affairs, the increasing centralization of gov- v ernmental structures.
  • extent that the decision will affect the efficient operations of the J bureaucracy, and takes no responsibility for its human consequences.
  • Along the way, it ceased to be merely a servant of social institutions an
  • became ~ their master. Bureaucracy now not only solves problems but creates them. More important, it defines what our problems are---and they arec!.lways, in the bureaucra!!c view, problems of l . , efficiency.
  • ex~r- (J} tis~ is a second important technical means by which Technopoly s~s furiously to control information.
  • the expert in Techno oly has two characteristics that distinguish im or her from experts of the {i) past. First, Technopoly's experts tend to be ignorant about any matter not directly related to their specialized area.
  • T echnopoly' s experts claim dominion not only_gyer technical matters but also over so@,--12~ichological. and moral · aff~irs.
  • "bureaucrat" has come to mean a person who \ by training, commitment, and even temperament is indifferent ~ ). to both the content and the fatality of a human problem. Th~ \ 'bureaucrat considers the implications of a decision only to the
  • Technical machinery is essential to both the bureaucrat and c:/ the expert, and m~ be regarded as a third mechanism of information control.
  • I have in mind "softer" technologies such as IQ tests, SATs, standardized forms, taxonomies, and opinion polls. Some of these I discuss in detail in chapter eight, "Invisible T echnologies," but I mention them here because their role in reducing the types and quantity of information admitted to a system often goes unnoticed, and therefore their role in redefining traditional concepl::s also· goes unnoticed. There is, for example, no test that can measure a person's intelligenc
  • Th_~-role of t!;_e ~xpert is to concentrate o_l}_one_ .H~ld of knowledge, sift through all that is available, eliminate that -.--:-: __ __:~---------which has no bearing on a problem, and use what is left !Q. !!§Sist in solving a probl~.
  • the expert relies on our believing in the reality of technical machinery, which means we will reify the answers generated by the machinery. We come to believe that our score is our intelligence,· or our capacity for creativity or love or pain. We come to believe that the results of opinion polls are what people believe, as if our beliefs can be encapsulated in such sentences as "I approve" and "I disapprove."
  • it is disas~ \ trou~p!ie~e_~ved by technical means and where efficiency is usually irrelevant, such as in education, law, fa~iiy life, and p·r;blems of p~;;~~al maladjustment.
  • perceptions and judgment declines, bureaucracies, expertise, and technical machinery become the principal means by which, T echnopoly hopes to control information and thereby provide itself with intelligibility and order. The rest of this book tells the · story of why this cannot work, and of the pain and stupidity that are the consequences.
  • Institutions ca~~aked~cisions on the basis of scores and. sfatistics, and. there certainly may be occasions where there is no reasonable alternative. But unless such decisions are made with profound skepticism-that is, acknowledged as being made for administrative convenience-they are delusionary.
  • In Technopoly, the \. delusion is sanctified by our granting inordinate prestige to experts who are armed with sophisticated technical machinery. Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. I would go further: in Technopoly, all exeeds are invested with the charisma of priestliness
  • The god they serve does not speak \ of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity. And that is why such concepts as sin and evil disappear in Technopoly. They come from a moral universe that is irrelevant to the theology of expertise. And so the priests of Technopoly call sin "social deviance," which is a statistical concept, and they call evil "psychopathology," which is a medical concept. Sin and evil disappear because they cannot be measured and objectified, and therefore cannot be dealt with by experts.
  • As the power of traditional social institutions to organize
Javier E

Pandemic-Era Politics Are Ruining Public Education - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...622824

learning teaching trends school history ideology books reading research social social media technology psychology

shared by Javier E on 11 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • You’re also the nonvoting, perhaps unwitting, subject of adults’ latest pedagogical experiments: either relentless test prep or test abolition; quasi-religious instruction in identity-based virtue and sin; a flood of state laws to keep various books out of your hands and ideas out of your head.
  • Your parents, looking over your shoulder at your education and not liking what they see, have started showing up at school-board meetings in a mortifying state of rage. If you live in Virginia, your governor has set up a hotline where they can rat out your teachers to the government. If you live in Florida, your governor wants your parents to sue your school if it ever makes you feel “discomfort” about who you are
  • Adults keep telling you the pandemic will never end, your education is being destroyed by ideologues, digital technology is poisoning your soul, democracy is collapsing, and the planet is dying—but they’re counting on you to fix everything when you grow up.
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  • It isn’t clear how the American public-school system will survive the COVID years. Teachers, whose relative pay and status have been in decline for decades, are fleeing the field. In 2021, buckling under the stresses of the pandemic, nearly 1 million people quit jobs in public education, a 40 percent increase over the previous year.
  • These kids, and the investments that come with them, may never return—the beginning of a cycle of attrition that could continue long after the pandemic ends and leave public schools even more underfunded and dilapidated than before. “It’s an open question whether the public-school system will recover,” Steiner said. “That is a real concern for democratic education.”
  • The high-profile failings of public schools during the pandemic have become a political problem for Democrats, because of their association with unions, prolonged closures, and the pedagogy of social justice, which can become a form of indoctrination.
  • The party that stands for strong government services in the name of egalitarian principles supported the closing of schools far longer than either the science or the welfare of children justified, and it has been woefully slow to acknowledge how much this damaged the life chances of some of America’s most disadvantaged students.
  • Public education is too important to be left to politicians and ideologues. Public schools still serve about 90 percent of children across red and blue America.
  • Since the common-school movement in the early 19th century, the public school has had an exalted purpose in this country. It’s our core civic institution—not just because, ideally, it brings children of all backgrounds together in a classroom, but because it prepares them for the demands and privileges of democratic citizenship. Or at least, it needs to.
  • What is school for? This is the kind of foundational question that arises when a crisis shakes the public’s faith in an essential institution. “The original thinkers about public education were concerned almost to a point of paranoia about creating self-governing citizens,”
  • “Horace Mann went to his grave having never once uttered the phrase college- and career-ready. We’ve become more accustomed to thinking about the private ends of education. We’ve completely lost the habit of thinking about education as citizen-making.”
  • School can’t just be an economic sorting system. One reason we have a stake in the education of other people’s children is that they will grow up to be citizens.
  • Public education is meant not to mirror the unexamined values of a particular family or community, but to expose children to ways that other people, some of them long dead, think.
  • If the answer were simply to push more and more kids into college, the United States would be entering its democratic prime
  • So the question isn’t just how much education, but what kind. Is it quaint, or utopian, to talk about teaching our children to be capable of governing themselves?
  • The COVID era, with Donald Trump out of office but still in power and with battles over mask mandates and critical race theory convulsing Twitter and school-board meetings, shows how badly Americans are able to think about our collective problems—let alone read, listen, empathize, debate, reconsider, and persuade in the search for solutions.
  • democratic citizenship can, at least in part, be learned.
  • The history warriors build their metaphysics of national good or evil on a foundation of ignorance. In a 2019 survey, only 40 percent of Americans were able to pass the test that all applicants for U.S. citizenship must take, which asks questions like “Who did the United States fight in World War II?” and “We elect a President for how many years?” The only state in which a majority passed was Vermont.
  • he orthodoxies currently fighting for our children’s souls turn the teaching of U.S. history into a static and morally simple quest for some American essence. They proceed from celebration or indictment toward a final judgment—innocent or guilty—and bury either oppression or progress in a subordinate clause. The most depressing thing about this gloomy pedagogy of ideologies in service to fragile psyches is how much knowledge it takes away from students who already have so little
  • A central goal for history, social-studies, and civics instruction should be to give students something more solid than spoon-fed maxims—to help them engage with the past on its own terms, not use it as a weapon in the latest front of the culture wars.
  • Releasing them to do “research” in the vast ocean of the internet without maps and compasses, as often happens, guarantees that they will drown before they arrive anywhere.
  • The truth requires a grounding in historical facts, but facts are quickly forgotten without meaning and context
  • The goal isn’t just to teach students the origins of the Civil War, but to give them the ability to read closely, think critically, evaluate sources, corroborate accounts, and back up their claims with evidence from original documents.
  • This kind of instruction, which requires teachers to distinguish between exposure and indoctrination, isn’t easy; it asks them to be more sophisticated professionals than their shabby conditions and pay (median salary: $62,000, less than accountants and transit police) suggest we are willing to support.
  • To do that, we’ll need to help kids restore at least part of their crushed attention spans.
  • staring at a screen for hours is a heavy depressant, especially for teenagers.
  • we’ll look back on the amount of time we let our children spend online with the same horror that we now feel about earlier generations of adults who hooked their kids on smoking.
  • “It’s not a choice between tech or no tech,” Bill Tally, a researcher with the Education Development Center, told me. “The question is what tech infrastructure best enables the things we care about,” such as deep engagement with instructional materials, teachers, and other students.
  • The pandemic should have forced us to reassess what really matters in public school; instead, it’s a crisis that we’ve just about wasted.
  • Like learning to read as historians, learning to sift through the tidal flood of memes for useful, reliable information can emancipate children who have been heedlessly hooked on screens by the adults in their lives
  • Finally, let’s give children a chance to read books—good books. It’s a strange feature of all the recent pedagogical innovations that they’ve resulted in the gradual disappearance of literature from many classrooms.
  • The best way to interest young people in literature is to have them read good literature, and not just books that focus with grim piety on the contemporary social and psychological problems of teenagers.
  • We sell them insultingly short in thinking that they won’t read unless the subject is themselves. Mirrors are ultimately isolating; young readers also need windows, even if the view is unfamiliar, even if it’s disturbing
  • connection through language to universal human experience and thought is the reward of great literature, a source of empathy and wisdom.
  • The culture wars, with their atmosphere of resentment, fear, and petty faultfinding, are hostile to the writing and reading of literature.
  • W. E. B. Du Bois wrote: “Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?”
  • The classroom has become a half-abandoned battlefield, where grown-ups who claim to be protecting students from the virus, from books, from ideologies and counter-ideologies end up using children to protect themselves and their own entrenched camps.
  • American democracy can’t afford another generation of adults who don’t know how to talk and listen and think. We owe our COVID-scarred children the means to free themselves from the failures of the past and the present.
  • Students are leaving as well. Since 2020, nearly 1.5 million children have been removed from public schools to attend private or charter schools or be homeschooled.
  • “COVID has encouraged poor parents to question the quality of public education. We are seeing diminished numbers of children in our public schools, particularly our urban public schools.” In New York, more than 80,000 children have disappeared from city schools; in Los Angeles, more than 26,000; in Chicago, more than 24,000.
Javier E

Covid Study Finds 18 Million Deaths, Three Times Official Tally - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...lobal-deaths-since-spanish-flu

deaths pandemic research mortality science

shared by Javier E on 11 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • “At the global level, this is quite the biggest mortality shock since the Spanish flu,” s
  • Covid drove a 17% jump in deaths worldwide, he said in an interview. The flu pandemic that began in 1918 killed at least 50 million people. 
  • The evidence suggests the mortality surge is a direct result of Covid-19, the researchers said. But some deaths may also have occurred indirectly, they said, caused by a lack of access to health care and other essential services during the pandemic, or from behavioral shifts that led to suicide or drug abuse. 
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Because of its large population, India alone accounted for an estimated 22% -- or 4.1 million -- of the global deaths. The U.S. and Russia were the next highest with 1.1 million each, followed by Mexico, Brazil and Indonesia.
  • In the end, the scientists estimated there was an excess of 120 deaths for every 100,000 people around the world. The study found 21 countries had estimated mortality rates higher than 300 per 100,000, led by Bolivia and Bulgaria
  • Places with the lowest estimated excess mortality rate were Iceland, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand.
  • Mask-wearing, physical distancing and other public health measures led to a decline in other communicable diseases, which reduced mortality in some countries
  • the prevalence of obesity and older age in a population were two of the biggest determinants of excess mortality, Murray said. 
peterconnelly

Opinion: No more union-busting. It's time for companies to give their workers what they... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

companies cnn opinion

shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • This year, workers at Amazon, Starbucks and other major corporations are winning a wave of union elections, often in the face of long odds and employer resistance. These wins are showing it's possible for determined groups of workers to break through powerful employers' use of union-busting tactics, ranging from alleged retaliatory firings to alleged surveillance and forced attendance at anti-union "captive audience meetings." But workers should not have to confront so many obstacles to exercising a guaranteed legal right to unionize and bargain for improvements in their work lives and livelihoods.
  • For decades, wage suppression, growing income inequality and persistent racial and gender wage gaps have characterized the US labor market.
  • But now, as workers are pointing the way to better workplaces and a more equitable economy, employers and policymakers need to pay attention. Policymakers must better protect workers' union rights, and employers must start respecting workers' right to participate in union elections without interference or coercion.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Unions are among the most effective mechanisms available for addressing massive economic inequalities. Congress should adopt labor law reforms to better protect workers' right to organize, starting with the widely popular Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act. Among other things, the PRO Act would create the first serious monetary penalties for employers that retaliate against workers for unionizing.
  • Congress must also adequately fund the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) so the agency can enforce labor law.
  • Many US workers say they want a union, but far too few have one. Right now, workers who've won recent union elections are inviting employers to meet them as equals and start bargaining union contracts.
  • Labor unions are highly correlated with safer conditions because they give workers a voice in setting workplace policies and the ability to engage management in addressing concerns without fear of retaliation.
  • The Black-led, multiracial committees that have led organizing drives at Amazon warehouses and the young women baristas leading breakthrough organizing victories at Starbucks are changing the public face of the labor movement in powerful and promising ways.
  • Two-thirds of union workers are women and/or workers of color.
  • In any company, the transparency and consistency of a union contract that sets wage rates, scheduled raises and procedures for promotions helps guard against forms of discriminatory bias that otherwise disadvantage women and workers of color.
  • Unionizing workers will continue to need extraordinary solidarity, persistence and public support in order to succeed. This is a moment of opportunity for all of us. Anyone ready to start reversing the worst economic inequalities the US has seen in almost a century can choose now to join and support workers who are organizing unions.
peterconnelly

Opinion: Budweiser's very smart Super Bowl call - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

cnn opinion

shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • This year's Super Bowl will be full of firsts: the first without a packed stadium; the first requiring players and coaches to follow Covid-19 protocol; and the first broadcast in a long time to go without ads from some of its big, perennial advertisers.
  • That is surprising considering the Super Bowl, which typically draws around 100 million viewers
  • has been frequently rated the most-watched broadcast of th
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Budweiser has also released a 90-second digital ad encouraging people to embrace vaccination.
  • What's even more extraordinary is Anheuser-Busch's decision to scrap its Budweiser Super Bowl ad in favor of supporting the Ad Council and COVID Collaborative's vaccine awareness initiative and donating money to go toward the organizations' future ad campaigns.
  • e year
  • This move by Budweiser is big, and it gives humanitarian organizations like mine hope and optimism.
  • who among the wealthiest corporations will join Budweiser? Which will put a fraction of their profits to push back against urgent and catastrophic events — and potentially save lives?
  • I'll be honest. It is hard for me to have a rosy outlook on companies reporting tens of billions of profits in 2020.
  • I know corporate success helps our economy, rewards innovators and brings job security to middle class workers. But I also know that with investment we can solve hunger. If ordinary American donors can contribute enough to feed a family of five for a month, corporations and those who've done well during the pandemic could do exponentially more.
  • By applying their ad money to public service, Budweiser is not only anticipating a better future -- it is helping make it a reality.
peterconnelly

Donald Trump is pushing an insane conspiracy about the Georgia governor's race - CNNPol... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

CNN.com

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • (CNN)One week ago, Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp crushed former Sen. David Perdue by 52(!) points in a high-profile primary fight.
  • On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump, who endorsed Perdue, suggested that something was fishy about that race.
  • So, because Trump's record of endorsements in 2022 is generally strong, the fact that he endorsed a bunch of candidates in Georgia who lost must mean that there were shenanigans happening.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • "Something stinks in Georgia," concludes Robinson. "The numbers are funny because many of these races were rigged."
  • According to Robinson, those numbers are "funny" and "rigged." Which is a pretty big claim to make without any evidence other than a month-old poll and suggestions that Trump's endorsement had mattered in other states and, therefore, had to matter more in Georgia.
  • Georgia Republicans are, yes, generally supportive of Trump. But there remains some lingering resentment that Trump's relentless focus on the 2020 election may have cost the GOP two Senate seats in January 2021 runoffs -- and, with them, the Senate majority. Therefore, backing candidates solely because they are willing to endorse Trump's baseless election claims may be less appealing to Georgia Republican voters than voters in other states where Trump's endorsement has mattered more.
  • That seems slightly more plausible than Robinson's fact-free suggestion of hundreds of thousands of votes being somehow manipulated to hurt Trump, right?
peterconnelly

Facebook-parent Meta to share more details with researchers about political ad targetin... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

cnn meta

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • (CNN Business)Facebook-parent Meta on Monday said it would soon offer more transparency and information to researchers about how political and social ads are targeted to users on the platform, months before the US midterm elections.
  • The effort, dubbed the Facebook Open Research and Transparency project, was created to help qualified academic researchers study social media's impact on society with measures included to protect users' privacy, according to the company.
  • The data provided to researchers will include information such as the interest categories, which can include everything from "environmentalism" to "frequent travelers," chosen to help target each individual ad.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • we hope to help people better understand the practices used to reach potential voters on our technologies
peterconnelly

Should kids be allowed to use smartphones in the classroom? - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...phones-school-safety

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • The commonly recommended age for a first cellphone is 13 years old. Most kids that age are in the eighth grade, getting ready to learn algebra. The desperate phone calls to 911 coming from inside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., where 21 people were killed last month, were placed by children younger than that.
  • In the aftermath of another school shooting, concerned parents are weighing whether phones are a distraction or a potential lifeline for their children.
  • Phone ownership already is widespread among younger children, with 43 percent of 8-to-12-year-olds owning their own smartphone
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The devices have become part of many students’ daily lives, despite various attempts over the years by state legislatures and cities to keep them out of classrooms.
  • Despite any emotional benefits for adults or educational use for children, screen-time and security experts don’t recommend taking smartphones to class, at least not without some ground rules and guidance on how to use them in a worst-case scenario.
  • A phone can make unwanted noises, and in a silent lockdown, even a vibration could be too loud. Depending on their age, kids might also be tempted to post about an ongoing incident to social media, which Trump said could both inspire other potential gunmen seeking fame or reveal details about their location. Even the ability to call 911 isn’t a good reason, because an entire school full of people calling at once could overload a switchboard.
  • She said it’s a distraction, and she worries it could replace in-person social interactions and knows she can’t have oversight over many conversations or posts that might happen via smartphone.
  • She’s also worried about misinformation that her daughter could see or read.
  • “Phones are not going to stop school shootings. Gun control might,” Twenge said.
peterconnelly

They Did Their Own 'Research.' Now What? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...do-your-own-research.html

new york times research

shared by peterconnelly on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • the crash of two linked cryptocurrencies caused tens of billions of dollars in value to evaporate from digital wallets around the world.
  • People who thought they knew what they were getting into had, in the space of 24 hours, lost nearly everything. Messages of desperation flooded a Reddit forum for traders of one of the currencies, a coin called Luna, prompting moderators to share phone numbers for international crisis hotlines.
  • “DYOR” is shorthand for “do your own research,”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • a reminder to stay informed and vigilant against groupthink.
  • A common refrain in battles about Covid-19 and vaccination, politics and conspiracy theories, parenting, drugs, food, stock trading and media, it signals not just a rejection of authority but often trust in another kind.
  • “Do your own research” is an idea central to Joe Rogan’s interview podcast, the most listened to program on Spotify, where external claims of expertise are synonymous with admissions of malice. In its current usage, DYOR is often an appeal to join in, rendered in the language of opting out.
  • “There’s this idea that the goal of science is consensus,” Professor Carrion said. “The model they brought to it was that we didn’t need consensus.” She noted that the women she surveyed often used singular rather than plural pronouns. “It was ‘she needs to do her own research,” Professor Carrion said, rather than we need to do ours. Unlike some critical health movements in the past, this was an individualist endeavor.
  • One of the enticing aspects of cryptocurrencies, which pose an alternative to traditional financial institutions, is that expertise is available to anyone who wants to claim it.
  • In crypto, the uses of DYOR are various and contradictory, earnest and ironic sometimes within the same discussion. Breathless investment pitches for new coins are punctuated with “NFA/DYOR” (not financial advice), or admonitions not to invest more than you can afford to lose, which many people are obviously ignoring; stories about getting rich are prefaced with DYOR; requests for advice about which coins to hold are answered with DYOR. It is the siren song of crypto investing.
  • In that way — the momentum of a group — crypto investing isn’t altogether distinct from how people have invested in the stock market for decades. Though here it is tinged with a rebellious, anti-authoritarian streak: We’re outsiders, in this together; we’re doing something sort of ridiculous, but also sort of cool.
  • “Now it seems like DYOR can only do so much,” the user wrote. Eventually, the user said, you end up relying on “trust.”
peterconnelly

Twitter launches a crisis misinformation policy - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

CNN.com

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Washington (CNN Business)Twitter will now apply warning labels to — and cease recommending — claims that outside experts have identified as misinformation during fast-moving times of crisis, the social media company said Thursday.
  • The platform's new crisis misinformation policy is designed to slow the spread of viral falsehoods during natural disasters, armed conflict and public health emergencies, the company announced.
  • "To determine whether claims are misleading, we require verification from multiple credible, publicly available sources, including evidence from conflict monitoring groups, humanitarian organizations, open-source investigators, journalists, and more," Twitter's head of safety and integrity, Yoel Roth, wrote in a blog post.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • It also comes amid an ongoing, global battle over the future of platform moderation, with officials in Europe seeking to heighten standards surrounding tech companies' content decision-making and lawmakers in many US states seeking to force platforms to moderate less.
marvelgr

THE BASES OF THE MIND:THE RELATIONSHIP OF LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT | by Koç Unive... - 0 views

medium.com/...guage-and-thought-a0bf30375528

shared by marvelgr on 13 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • We can talk about three different interactions when we investigate the complex relationships between language and thinking. First, the existence of language as a cognitive process affects the system of thinking. Second, thinking comes before language, and the learning of a language interacts with the conceptual process that is formed before language use. Third, each language spoken may affect the system of thinking. Here we will discuss these three interactions under these subsections: “thinking without language,” “thinking before language,” and “thinking with language.”
  • Babies can categorize objects and actions, understand the cause and effect relationship between events, and see the goals in a movement. Recent studies on action representation and spatial concepts have shown that babies’ universal and language-general action representation productively changes with the learning of the mother tongue. For example, languages use prepositions to express the relationship between objects, i.e., in, on, under. However, languages also vary how they use these relations. One of the most significant studies suggests that babies can differentiate between concepts expressed with prepositions such as containment (in) and support (on). The Korean language specifies the nature of these containment and support relationships using the tightness of the relationship between objects: tight or loose. For example, a pencil in a pencil-size box represents a tight relationship, while a pencil in a big basket represents a loose relationship.
  • In the late 1800s, anthropologist Franz Boas laid the foundations of cultural relativity. According to this point of view, individuals see and perceive the world within the boundaries of their cultures. The role of anthropology is to investigate how people are conditioned by their culture and how they interact with the world in different ways. To understand such mechanisms, it suggests, implications in culture and language should be studied. The reflection of this view in the relationship between language and thought is the linguistic determinism hypothesis advanced by Eric Safir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. This hypothesis suggests that thought emerges only with the effect of language and concepts that are believed to exist even in infancy fade away due to the language learned.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In conclusion, there is a nested relationship between language and thought. In the interaction processes mentioned above, the role of language changes. Even though the limits of our language are different from the limits of our thinking, it is inevitable that people prioritize concepts in their languages. This, however, does not mean that they cannot comprehend or think about concepts that do not exist in their language.
peterconnelly

How Some States Are Combating Election Misinformation Ahead of Midterms - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sheriff-election-midterms.html

new york times states election

shared by peterconnelly on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Ahead of the 2020 elections, Connecticut confronted a bevy of falsehoods about voting that swirled around online. One, widely viewed on Facebook, wrongly said absentee ballots had been sent to dead people. On Twitter, users spread a false post that a tractor-trailer carrying ballots had crashed on Interstate 95, sending thousands of voter slips into the air and across the highway.
  • the state plans to spend nearly $2 million on marketing to share factual information about voting, and to create its first-ever position for an expert in combating misinformation.
  • With a salary of $150,000, the person is expected to comb fringe sites like 4chan, far-ri
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • ght social networks like Gettr and Rumble, and mainstream social media sites to root out early misinformation narratives about voting before they go viral, and then urge the companies to remove or flag the posts that contain false information.
  • These states, most of them under Democratic control, have been acting as voter confidence in election integrity has plummeted.
  • In an ABC/Ipsos poll from January, only 20 percent of respondents said they were “very confident” in the integrity of the election system and 39 percent said they felt “somewhat confident.”
  • Some conservatives and civil rights groups are almost certain to complain that the efforts to limit misinformation could restrict free speech.
  • “State and local governments are well situated to reduce harms from dis- and misinformation by providing timely, accurate and trustworthy information,” said Rachel Goodman
  • “Facts still exist, and lies are being used to chip away at our fundamental freedoms,” Ms. Griswold said.
  • Officials said they would prefer candidates fluent in both English and Spanish, to address the spread of misinformation in both languages. The officer would track down viral misinformation posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, and look for emerging narratives and memes, especially on fringe social media platforms and the dark web.
criscimagnael

Writing History: An Introductory Guide to How History Is Produced | AHA - 0 views

www.historians.org/...ide-to-how-history-is-produced

shared by criscimagnael on 30 May 22 - No Cached
  • In fact, history is NOT a "collection of facts about the past." History consists of making arguments about what happened in the past on the basis of what people recorded (in written documents, cultural artifacts, or oral traditions) at the time.
  • The problem is complicated for major events that produce "winners" and "losers," since we are more likely to have sources written by the "winners," designed to show why they were heroic in their victories.
  • There is no interpretation. There is no explanation of why the Mexicas lost.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Many individuals believe that history is about telling stories, but most historians also want answers to questions like why did the Mexicas lose?
  • Unfortunately, in the case of the conquest of Mexico, there is only one genuine primary source written from 1519-1521. This primary source consists of the letters Cortés wrote and sent to Spain.
  • Ideally, under each of these "thesis statements," that is, each of these arguments about why the Mexicas were defeated, the authors will give some examples of information that backs up their "thesis." To write effective history and history essays, in fact to write successfully in any area, you should begin your essay with the "thesis" or argument you want to prove with concrete examples that support your thesis.
  • To become a critical reader, to empower yourself to "own your own history," you should think carefully about whether the evidence the authors provide does in fact support their theses. 
  • Or, if your professor has said something in class that you are not sure about, find material to disprove it—the "trash the prof" approach (and, yes, it is really okay if you have the evidence).
  • If one analyzes omens in the conquest, will it change the theses or interpretations presented in the textbook?
  • One way to think about the primary sources is to ask the questions: (1) when was the source written, (2) who is the intended audience of the source, (3) what are the similarities between the accounts, (4) what are the differences between the accounts, (5) what pieces of information in the accounts will support your thesis, and (6) what information in the sources are totally irrelevant to the thesis or argument you want to make.
    • criscimagnael
      criscimagnael on 30 May 22
       
      OPCVL!
criscimagnael

DOJ investigates Instagram's impact on young adults - 0 views

www.wisn.com/...40115444

shared by criscimagnael on 30 May 22 - No Cached
  • I probably check Instagram about 25 times a day," said Marika Marsh, a sophomore.She said while she's scrolling, she feels a bit of anxiety."Especially with girls today, because everyone looks so perfect all the time and it makes you feel insecure,"
  • "In reality, their days might be as boring as ours. I think it’s more of an image they're trying to portray for themselves,"
  • "Social media platforms identify young girls who click on information suggesting that they feel bad about how they look and they don't flood them with resources, helping them feel better."
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "A lot of the times I catch myself editing this to brighten my eyes, it will look nicer it's all about angles and perspective.
criscimagnael

Explained: Social media and the Texas shooter's messages | Explained News,The Indian Ex... - 0 views

indianexpress.com/...exas-shooters-messages-7942576

shared by criscimagnael on 30 May 22 - No Cached
  • Could technology companies have monitored ominous messages made by a gunman who Texas authorities say massacred 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school? Could they have warned the authorities? Answers to these questions remain unclear
  • But if nothing else, the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, seems highly likely to focus additional attention on how social platforms monitor what users are saying to and showing each other.
  • Shortly thereafter, Facebook stepped in to note that the gunman sent one-to-one direct messages, not public posts, and that they weren’t discovered until “after the terrible tragedy”.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Some reports appear to show that at least some of the gunman’s communications used Apple’s encrypted iPhone messaging services, which makes messages almost impossible for anyone else to read when sent to another iPhone user.
  • Facebook parent company Meta, which also owns Instagram, says it is working with law enforcement but declined to provide details.
  • A series of posts appeared on his Instagram in the days leading up to the shooting, including photos of a gun magazine in hand and two AR-style semi-automatic rifles. An Instagram user who was tagged in one post shared parts of what appears to be a chilling exchange on Instagram with Ramos, asking her to share his gun pictures with her more than 10,000 followers.
  • Meta has said it monitors people’s private messages for some kinds of harmful content, such as links to malware or images of child sexual exploitation. But copied images can be detected using unique identifiers — a kind of digital signature — which makes them relatively easy for computer systems to flag. Trying to interpret a string of threatening words — which can resemble a joke, satire or song lyrics — is a far more difficult task for artificial intelligence systems.
  • Facebook could, for instance, flag certain phrases such as “going to kill” or “going to shoot”, but without context — something AI in general has a lot of trouble with — there would be too many false positives for the company to analyze.
  • A recent Meta-commissioned report emphasized the benefits of such privacy but also noted some risks — including users who could abuse the encryption to sexually exploit children, facilitate human trafficking and spread hate speech.
  • Security experts say this could be done if Apple were to engineer a “backdoor” to allow access to messages sent by alleged criminals. Such a secret key would let them decipher encrypted information with a court order.
Javier E

Politics should be taught in primary schools, Alastair Campbell says | Alastair Campbel... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...schools-alastair-campbell-says

politics primary school argumentation learning education lesson

shared by Javier E on 26 May 23 - No Cached
  • the co-host of podcast The Rest is Politics expressed dismay that most students in the UK do not take politics classes unless they choose to study it at A-level.
  • Political education needs to start in primary schools, and then become part of the “everyday debate” in children’s entire school experience, he said. “Maybe you don’t call it politics,” he said, suggesting that it could be called “arguing”, “policy” or “big issues”.
  • “Some of the most enjoyable stuff I do is going into schools and trying to teach young kids what politics is,” he added. “When they sit down and they start thinking about stuff, it’s just so fascinating and innovative.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • more state school students need to be taught “how to communicate, how to argue, how to fight their corner” from a young age.
Javier E

No rides, but lots of rows: 'reactionary' French theme park plots expansion | France | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...nch-theme-park-plots-expansion

historiography france history

shared by Javier E on 22 Sep 23 - No Cached
  • Nicolas de Villiers said the theme park – whose subject matter includes Clovis, king of the Franks, and a new €20m (£17m) show about the birth of modern cinema – was not about politics. He said: “What we want when an audience leaves our shows – which are works of art and were never history lessons – is to feel better and bigger, because the hero has brought some light into their hearts … Puy du Fou is more about legends than a history book.”
  • He said the park’s trademark high-drama historical extravaganzas worked because, at a time of global crisis, people had a hunger to understand their roots and traditions. “The artistic language we invented corresponds to the era we live in. People have a thirst for their roots, a thirst to understand what made them what they are today, which means their civilisation. They want to understand what went before them.” He called it a “profound desire to rediscover who we are”.
  • e added: “People who come here don’t have an ideology, they come here and say it’s beautiful, it’s good, I liked it.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Guillaume Lancereau, Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, was part of a group of historians who published the book Puy du Faux (Puy of Fakes), analysing the park’s take on history. They viewed the park as having a Catholic slant, questionable depictions of nobility and a presentation of rural peasants as unchanged through the ages.
  • Lancereau did not question the park’s entertainment value. But he said: “Professional historians have repeatedly criticised the park for taking liberties with historical events and characters and, more importantly, for distorting the past to serve a nationalistic, religious and conservative political agenda. This raises important questions about the contemporary entanglement between entertainment, collective memory and politically oriented historical production …
  • “At a time when increasing numbers of undergraduates are acquiring their historical knowledge from popular culture and historical reenactments, the Puy du Fou’s considerable expansion calls for further investigation of a phenomenon that appears to be influencing the making of historical memory in contemporary Europe.”
  • Outside the park’s musketeers show, André, 76, had driven 650km (400 miles) from Burgundy with his wife and grandson. “We came because we’re interested in history,” he said. “The shows are technically brilliant and really make you think. You can tell it’s a bit on the right – the focus on war, warriors and anti-revolution – but I don’t think that matters.”
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