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Javier E

Our Services | Education Elements - 0 views

www.edelements.com/understanding-blended-learning

blended online education benefits

shared by Javier E on 24 Apr 12 - Cached
  • Blended learning allows teachers to do what they do best – work directly and closely with individual students and small groups – by harnessing the adaptive power and precision of technology.
  • In great blended learning schools, technology and teaching inform each other. Students alternate regularly between engaging with teachers and peers and focusing on online content tailored to their learning pace and progress.
  • The best blended learning approaches use technology to: help each student master the content and skills they need, allow teachers to get the most out of their planning and instructional time, and streamline operations with costs similar to – or less than – traditional schooling.
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  • The result of smart blended learning is richer and deeper interactions between teachers and students (and between students themselves) than in traditional classrooms. Integrating technology and teaching allows students to fully master content and skills, and at the pace that’s right for them.
Javier E

The rise of K-12 blended learning | Innosight Institute - 0 views

www.innosightinstitute.org/...-rise-of-k-12-blended-learning

blended online education benefits

shared by Javier E on 24 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently described a “new normal,” where schools would have to do more with less. Blended learning is playing a vital role, as school operators begin to rethink the structure and delivery of education with the new realities of public funding.
  • a new model that is student-centric, highly personalized for each learner, and more productive, as it delivers dramatically better results at the same or lower cost.
  • districtsuperintendents, and school principals must act now to prevent the cramming of online learning into the traditional system and to foster its transformative potential. As policymakers open the gates for innovation by creating zones with increased autonomy, they must simultaneously hold providers accountable for results so that the adoption of online learning leads to radically better outcomes for students.
Javier E

Farhad and Mike Discuss the Apple Case and a Go-Playing Computer Program - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-playing-computer-program.html

AI computer intuition

shared by Javier E on 13 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • The program is a blend of deep learning and Monte Carlo algorithms, meaning it is both good at recognizing patterns and has the ability to exhaustively search vast libraries of possible moves.
  • the timetable for computing dominance of Go has been moved up roughly a decade from when it had been expected. That’s largely because the new ability to blend pattern recognition algorithms and vast data sets has been yielding spectacular results in the last half-decade. It’s like computer scientists have found a powerful new hammer, and they’re using it to pound lots of different nails
  • The Google program combines two types of algorithms. One is a machine learning algorithm, which does an extremely good job of recognizing patterns based on being trained on a vast set of examples. So it is likely to have seen almost any move that a human could make, and also know which responses are better ones.
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  • A second type of algorithm can also see the consequences of particular moves far, far in advance of the game by playing millions and millions or perhaps even billions of combinations of moves. In contrast, human Go experts have their experience to rely on, but it is fuzzy by comparison. Think of this as an intellectual version of John Henry and the jackhammer.
Javier E

Our Services | Education Elements - 0 views

www.edelements.com/igning-blended-learning-school

blended online education benefits

shared by Javier E on 24 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • We have found the “rotation” and “flex” models to be the best ways to combine online learning and offline teaching to meet the needs of students and schools. Unlike pure “face-to-face” teaching, these models integrate technology into the core instructional time, with greater personal attention given to students than in purely online environments.
  • Rotation: Lab Student groups rotate between traditional classroom instruction and online instruction in a computer or learning lab Lab monitored by an instructional aide rather than certified teacher. In use at Rocketship Public Schools Rotation: Classroom Student groups rotate between traditional classroom instruction and online instruction within the classroom Classroom overseen by certified teachers, apprentice teachers, and instructional aides. In use at KIPP Empower Academy and Alliance College-Ready Public Schools Flex Student learn primarily online in a brick and mortar school location. Teachers act as facilitators. In use at Carpe Diem Schools
Javier E

Adam Serwer: White Nationalism's Deep American Roots - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...583258

white supremacy history culture racism nazi eugenics genocide

shared by Javier E on 15 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • The concept of “white genocide”—extinction under an onslaught of genetically or culturally inferior nonwhite interlopers—may indeed seem like a fringe conspiracy theory with an alien lineage, the province of neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers. In popular memory, it’s a vestige of a racist ideology that the Greatest Generation did its best to scour from the Earth.
  • History, though, tells a different story.
  • King’s recent question, posed in a New York Times interview, may be appalling: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” But it is apt. “That language” has an American past in need of excavation. Without such an effort, we may fail to appreciate the tenacity of the dogma it expresses, and the difficulty of eradicating it.
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  • The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.
  • What is judged extremist today was once the consensus of a powerful cadre of the American elite, well-connected men who eagerly seized on a false doctrine of “race suicide” during the immigration scare of the early 20th century. They included wealthy patricians, intellectuals, lawmakers, even several presidents.
  • Madison Grant. He was the author of a 1916 book called The Passing of the Great Race, which spread the doctrine of race purity all over the globe.
  • Grant’s purportedly scientific argument that the exalted “Nordic” race that had founded America was in peril, and all of modern society’s accomplishments along with it, helped catalyze nativist legislators in Congress to pass comprehensive restrictionist immigration policies in the early 1920s. His book went on to become Adolf Hitler’s “bible,” as the führer wrote to tell him
  • Grant’s doctrine has since been rejuvenated and rebranded by his ideological descendants as “white genocide
  • “Even though the Germans had been directly influenced by Madison Grant and the American eugenics movement, when we fought Germany, because Germany was racist, racism became unacceptable in America. Our enemy was racist; therefore we adopted antiracism as our creed.” Ever since, a strange kind of historical amnesia has obscured the American lineage of this white-nationalist ideology.
  • When Nazism reflected back that vision in grotesque form, wartime denial set in.
  • In 1853, across the Atlantic, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a French count, first identified the “Aryan” race as “great, noble, and fruitful in the works of man on this earth.”
  • In 1899, William Z. Ripley, an economist, concluded that Europeans consisted of “three races”: the brave, beautiful, blond “Teutons”; the stocky “Alpines”; and the swarthy “Mediterraneans.”
  • Another leading academic contributor to race science in turn-of-the-century America was a statistician named Francis Walker, who argued in The Atlantic that the new immigrants lacked the pioneer spirit of their predecessors; they were made up of “beaten men from beaten races,” whose offspring were crowding out the fine “native” stock of white people.
  • In 1901 the sociologist Edward A. Ross, who similarly described the new immigrants as “masses of fecund but beaten humanity from the hovels of far Lombardy and Galicia,” coined the term race suicide.
  • it was Grant who synthesized these separate strands of thought into one pseudo-scholarly work that changed the course of the nation’s history. In a nod to wartime politics, he referred to Ripley’s “Teutons” as “Nordics,” thereby denying America’s hated World War I rivals exclusive claim to descent from the world’s master race. He singled out Jews as a source of anxiety disproportionate to their numbers
  • The historian Nell Irvin Painter sums up the race chauvinists’ view in The History of White People (2010): “Jews manipulate the ignorant working masses—whether Alpine, Under-Man, or colored.
  • In The Passing of the Great Race, the eugenic focus on winnowing out unfit individuals made way for a more sweeping crusade to defend against contagion by inferior races. By Grant’s logic, infection meant obliteration:
  • The seed of Nazism’s ultimate objective—the preservation of a pure white race, uncontaminated by foreign blood—was in fact sown with striking success in the United States.
  • Grant, emphasizing the American experience in particular, agreed. In The Passing of the Great Race, he had argued that
  • Teddy Roosevelt, by then out of office, told Grant in 1916 that his book showed “fine fearlessness in assailing the popular and mischievous sentimentalities and attractive and corroding falsehoods which few men dare assail.”
  • President Warren Harding publicly praised one of Grant’s disciples, Lothrop Stoddard, whose book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy offered similar warnings about the destruction of white society by invading dusky hordes. There is “a fundamental, eternal, inescapable difference” between the races, Harding told his audience. “Racial amalgamation there cannot be.
  • Calvin Coolidge, found Grant’s thesis equally compelling. “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” Coolidge wrote in a 1921 article in Good Housekeeping.The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.
  • On Capitol Hill debate raged, yet Republicans and Democrats were converging on the idea that America was a white man’s country, and must stay that way. The influx of foreigners diluted the nation with inferiors unfit for self-government, many politicians in both parties energetically concurred. The Supreme Court chimed in with decisions in a series of cases, beginning in 1901, that assigned the status of “nationals” rather than “citizens” to colonial newcomers.
  • A popular myth of American history is that racism is the exclusive province of the South. The truth is that much of the nativist energy in the U.S. came from old-money elites in the Northeast, and was also fueled by labor struggles in the Pacific Northwest, which had stirred a wave of bigotry that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
  • He blended Nordic boosterism with fearmongering, and supplied a scholarly veneer for notions many white citizens already wanted to believe
  • When the Republicans took control of the House in 1919, Johnson became chair of the committee on immigration, “thanks to some shrewd lobbying by the Immigration Restriction League,” Spiro writes. Grant introduced him to a preeminent eugenicist named Harry Laughlin, whom Johnson named the committee’s “expert eugenics agent.” His appointment helped ensure that Grantian concerns about “race suicide” would be a driving force in a quest that culminated, half a decade later, in the Immigration Act of 1924.
  • Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was struggling mightily to define whiteness in a consistent fashion, an endeavor complicated by the empirical flimsiness of race science. In one case after another, the high court faced the task of essentially tailoring its definition to exclude those whom white elites considered unworthy of full citizenship.
  • In 1923, when an Indian veteran named Bhagat Singh Thind—who had fought for the U.S. in World War I—came before the justices with the claim of being Caucasian in the scientific sense of the term, and therefore entitled to the privileges of whiteness, they threw up their hands. In a unanimous ruling against Thind (who was ultimately made a citizen in 1936), Justice George Sutherland wrote:What we now hold is that the words “free white persons” are words of common speech to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word “Caucasian” only as that word is popularly understood.The justices had unwittingly acknowledged a consistent truth about racism, which is that race is whatever those in power say it is.
  • Grant felt his life’s work had come to fruition and, according to Spiro, he concluded, “We have closed the doors just in time to prevent our Nordic population being overrun by the lower races.” Senator Reed announced in a New York Times op-ed, “The racial composition of America at the present time thus is made permanent.” Three years later, in 1927, Johnson held forth in dire but confident tones in a foreword to a book about immigration restriction. “Our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed,” he warned. “The United States is our land … We intend to maintain it so. The day of unalloyed welcome to all peoples, the day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races, has definitely ended.”
  • t was America that taught us a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations,” Adolf Hitler told The New York Times half a decade later, just one year before his elevation to chancellor in January 1933. Elsewhere he admiringly noted that the U.S. “simply excludes the immigration of certain races. In these respects America already pays obeisance, at least in tentative first steps, to the characteristic völkisch conception of the state.”
  • Harry Laughlin, the scientific expert on Representative Johnson’s committee, told Grant that the Nazis’ rhetoric sounds “exactly as though spoken by a perfectly good American eugenist,” and wrote that “Hitler should be made honorary member of the Eugenics Research Association.”
  • What the Nazis “found exciting about the American model didn’t involve just eugenics,
  • “It also involved the systematic degradation of Jim Crow, of American deprivation of basic rights of citizenship like voting.”
  • Nazi lawyers carefully studied how the United States, despite its pretense of equal citizenship, had effectively denied that status to those who were not white. They looked at Supreme Court decisions that withheld full citizenship rights from nonwhite subjects in U.S. colonial territories. They examined cases that drew, as Thind’s had, arbitrary but hard lines around who could be considered “white.
  • Krieger, whom Whitman describes as “the single most important figure in the Nazi assimilation of American race law,” considered the Fourteenth Amendment a problem: In his view, it codified an abstract ideal of equality at odds with human experience, and with the type of country most Americans wanted to live in.
  • In 1917, overriding President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, Congress passed a law that banned immigration not just from Asian but also from Middle Eastern countries and imposed a literacy test on new immigrants
  • it has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and to church do not transform a Negro into a white man.
  • The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment, he believed, had failed to see a greater truth as they made good on the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal: The white man is more equal than the others.
  • two “rival principles of national unity.” According to one, the U.S. is the champion of the poor and the dispossessed, a nation that draws its strength from its pluralism. According to the other, America’s greatness is the result of its white and Christian origins, the erosion of which spells doom for the national experiment.
  • Grantism, despite its swift wartime eclipse, did not become extinct. The Nazis, initially puzzled by U.S. hostility, underestimated the American commitment to democracy.
  • the South remained hawkish toward Nazi Germany because white supremacists in the U.S. didn’t want to live under a fascist government. What they wanted was a herrenvolk democracy, in which white people were free and full citizens but nonwhites were not.
  • The Nazis failed to appreciate the significance of that ideological tension. They saw allegiance to the American creed as a weakness. But U.S. soldiers of all backgrounds and faiths fought to defend it, and demanded that their country live up to it
  • historical amnesia, the excision of the memory of how the seed of racism in America blossomed into the Third Reich in Europe, has allowed Grantism to be resurrected with a new name
  • Grant’s philosophical framework has found new life among extremists at home and abroad, and echoes of his rhetoric can be heard from the Republican base and the conservative media figures the base trusts, as well as—once again—in the highest reaches of government.
  • The resurrection of race suicide as white genocide can be traced to the white supremacist David Lane, who claimed that “the term ‘racial integration’ is only a euphemism for genocide,” and whose infamous “fourteen words” manifesto, published in the 1990s, distills his credo: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Far-right intellectuals in Europe speak of “the great replacement” of Europeans by nonwhite immigrants and refugees.
  • That nations make decisions about appropriate levels of immigration is not inherently evil or fascist. Nor does the return of Grantian ideas to mainstream political discourse signal an inevitable march to Holocaust-level crimes against humanity.
  • The most benignly intentioned mainstream-media coverage of demographic change in the U.S. has a tendency to portray as justified the fear and anger of white Americans who believe their political power is threatened by immigration—as though the political views of today’s newcomers were determined by genetic inheritance rather than persuasion.
  • The danger of Grantism, and its implications for both America and the world, is very real. External forces have rarely been the gravest threat to the social order and political foundations of the United States. Rather, the source of greatest danger has been those who would choose white purity over a diverse democracy.
Javier E

What Makes an American? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ration-assimilation-texas.html

american immigration American idea youth assimilation culture

shared by Javier E on 11 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • the Trumpian view that immigration was failing and that this failure posed an existential threat. The fear that foreigners refuse to adapt is widespread among immigration critics, and even Americans with more welcoming views sometimes worry that assimilation is proceeding less surely than it once did.
  • In a country of 44 million immigrants, no family stands for the whole. The Villanuevas merely stand for the substantial immigrant success missing from the Trump Twitter feed.
  • I got to see the process of becoming American through the eyes of Lara and her older sister, Kristine, who assimilated rapidly, in surprising and contrasting ways.
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  • The classic version of Americanization is called straight-line assimilation. It’s a three-generation tale as central to America’s mythology as the Boston Tea Party: The immigrants struggle amid poverty and bias; their children awkwardly juggle two cultures; the third generation completes the rise, with a white-collar job and a house in the suburbs. The story imparts two lessons: The descendants of immigrants advance and do so by blending in.
  • Straight-line assimilation was the reigning narrative of the mid-20th century. Half a century had passed since immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe had poured through Ellis Island. Learned men had warned that they would never adapt, but they did so decisively. A unified country had beaten the Nazis, with Mayflower descendants sharing foxholes with Kowalskis and Mancinis. Groups that warred abroad lived as neighbors in New York and Chicago. A Catholic became president.
  • Sometime in the 1960s, this assimilation story fell from favor. It overstated the acceptance that immigrants had won and understated the hardships they had faced. It idealized WASP culture and slighted the satisfactions of the ethnic community. It overlooked race — the lengths to which the country had gone to prevent the assimilation of blacks.
  • Leftist scholars condemned “the blight of assimilationist ideology” and celebrated ethnic struggle. Ozzie and Harriet gave way to Kojak and Columbo, heritage travel and klezmer bands. Assimilation seemed wrong as an explanation of what did happen and offensive as an explanation of what should happen.
  • But some scholars warn that Americanization carries risks, especially for the poor. The longer newcomers are in the United States, the more likely they are to smoke, grow obese or commit crimes. Two prominent scholars, Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut, have warned that the children of the most disadvantaged immigrants may assimilate downward, joining the native poor in a “rainbow underclass.”
  • Given the difficulties that immigrants and their descendants faced, Gans rightly called their assimilation “bumpy line” rather than straight. But bumps and all, assimilation prevailed
  • The resurgence of ethnic identity was heartfelt but no sign that assimilation had failed. On the contrary, as scholars like Herbert Gans and Mary Waters argued, Americans could celebrate their heritage precisely because it meant so little. It did not affect where they could live, whom they could marry or what jobs they could get. “Symbolic ethnicity” flourished, but divisions faded: intermarriage rose, discrimination fell and residential enclaves dispersed
  • Trumpism itself may impede assimilation: If you constantly tell immigrants they’re unwanted, they may come to believe it.
  • But other differences between the eras could ease assimilation. Immigrants have civil rights their predecessors lacked. (Sicilians did not have affirmative action.) Many arrive like Rosalie, already middle-class. And mainstream culture is much more diverse, making it easier to fit in.
  • Two academic camps have shaped debate about the children of immigrants. Both see the majority succeeding — advancing in school, securing jobs and integrating. Intermarriage is high, and English is near universal. “Today’s immigrants are actually learning English faster than their predecessors,” the National Academy of Sciences concluded in 2015.
  • It’s possible that Kristine’s generation will find assimilation harder. Economic mobility has waned; a quarter of the foreign-born lack legal status; and most of today’s immigrants are racial minorities, which could attract more enduring bigotry. Mass media once encouraged common identity. In today’s narrowcast world, pluribus triumphs over unum.
  • A rival group is more optimistic. They found that children of immigrants not only outperformed children of natives (of similar races) but did so despite having parents with less income and education. How could that be? Philip Kasinitz and three colleagues argue that children of immigrants often enjoy a “second-generation advantage” over native peers.
  • Two parts of the argument are familiar — immigrants, self-selected for ambition, pass along their drive, and the intensity of ethnic networks provides support that natives lack. But the researchers also argue that children of immigrants benefit intellectually from living at a cultural crossroads
  • Children of immigrants, they wrote, often “combine the best of both worlds” — their parents’ and their peers’ — or innovate in ways that “can be highly conducive to success.’
  • Curious about how she had grown curious, Lara formed her own assimilation theory: America had scared her into asking questions. Confused when she arrived and afraid of repeating second grade, “I told myself I should be interested right now.” Being interested became a habit. Put differently, blending cultures produced new thinking — Lara was simply repeating what the Kasinitz camp argues about the cultural crossroads.
Javier E

Sultan Erdogan: Turkey's Rebranding Into the New, Old Ottoman Empire - Cinar Kiper - Th... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...274724

turkey ottoman restoration japan Meiji

shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • "Why is it that when the whole of Europe is casting off its borders and unifying they don't become the Neo-Romans or the New Holy Roman Empire, but when we call for the peoples who lived together just a century ago to come together once again, we are accused of being Neo-Ottomans?"
  • In that same speech, the foreign minister spoke of the need for a "great restoration" where "we need to embrace fully the ancient values we have lost." Praising the historic bonds that connected the peoples of Turkey over the "new identities that were thrust upon us in the modern era," Davutoglu maintained that the road to Turkey's progress lies in its past - an assertion that has terrified the government's detractors enough for them to make it a losing political platform each new election.
  • The drive for change comes not from the 16th century Middle East or even 7th century Arabia, but rather 19th century Japan.
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  • Japan's Meiji Restoration of 1868 and Turkey's Kemalist Reforms that followed the establishment of the republic in 1923 are both models of modernization adopted by lagging countries in the periphery of the West. Both ushered in new eras for their respective countries and both involved great risks, often implementing drastic measures and facing hostile opposition
  • "Humanity is in need of a great restoration; our region is in need of a great restoration, and right in the center of all this great restoration, our very nation is striving for its own great restoration within itself." One does not repeat with such fervor the "need to restore greatly" unless they are making a point about the distinction between restoration and reform
  • The Ottoman Empire had already tried, and failed at, something similar in 1839 with the Tanzimat Reorganization, so by the time Ataturk's Kemalist Reforms rolled around 50 years after the Meiji Restoration, modernity and tradition seemed irreconcilable: modernization could not occur without Westernization. Almost everything was brought in line with the West; clothing was Europeanized, the alphabet was Latinized, numerals were - rather ironically - Arabized, and women could now not only display their hair but also vote and pursue professional careers, just to name a few
  • Erdoğan doesn't seek a return to pre-revolutionary Turkey. His actions aren't those of an overzealous Ottoman romantic but rather of a Meiji restorer, re-appropriating the republican revolution by redefining its spirit and essence to one that blends Western innovation with local culture, tradition and historic bonds -- "Western technique, Ottoman spirit"
  • the fundamental divergence between the two paradigms was in their disagreement over the role of culture. Adopting the slogan "Western technique, Japanese spirit," the Meiji Restoration involved taking the technological, scientific, industrial and military advancements of the West but retaining Japanese values. Japanese culture needed not be sacrificed in adopting modern economic and military techniques and would in fact be the glue that kept a revolutionary society together.
  • synthesizing the best of the West and the best of the East in order to strengthen his hand.
  • If your country has spent the past nine decades claiming to be a copy of the West, then the West has no reason to see you as anything more than an inferior copy of itself.
alexdeltufo

Republican Party Unravels Over Donald Trump's Takeover - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...er-donald-trumps-takeover.html

politics US

shared by alexdeltufo on 08 May 16 - No Cached
  • By seizing the Republican presidential nomination for Donald J. Trump on Tuesday night,
  • Rarely if ever has a party seemed to come apart so visibly. Rarely, too, has the nation been so on edge about its politics.
  • They fear their party is on the cusp of an epochal split — a historic cleaving between the familiar form of conservatism forged in the 1960s and popularized in the 1980s and a rekindled, atavistic nationalism,
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  • Yet if keeping the peace means embracing Mr. Trump and his most divisive ideas and utterances, a growing number are loath to do it.
  • “Because Paul Ryan, and I love him to death, but he’s one of those career politicians.
  • “Trump leveraged a perfect storm,” said Steve Case, the founder of AOL, in an email message. “
  • After seething at Washington for so long, hundreds or thousands of miles from the capital, many of these voters now see Mr. Trump as a kind of savior.
  • Many Republican voters trudged along with those earlier nominees, but never became truly animated until Mr. Trump offered them his brand of angry populism: a blend of protectionism at home and a smaller American footprint abroad.
  • “Everything is subject to negotiation, but I can’t and won’t be changing much, because the voters support me because of what I’m saying and how I’m saying it,” Mr. Trump said.
  • . Leaders such as Mr. Romney warned in the direst terms that Mr. Trump’s nomination would stain the party and lead it to ruin. Venerable media outlets on the right,
  • On the left, too, Senator Bernie Sanders has built his own movement with millions of voters, and $210 million in fund-raising, by using online tools as simple as email to seek support.
  • The adhesive that once held Republicans together — a shared commitment to a strong national defense and limited government
  • Alongside the turbulent economy were signs of something more profound plaguing blue-collar white communities, which have increasingly become core Republican constituencies: an increase in children born to single parents, higher rates of addiction and suicide, and shortened average life spans.
  • The party has never been more out of touch with our voters,” Vin Weber, a former Minnesota congressman, said of the two factions, acknowledging that Republicans could splinter completely after this election. “I don’t know how you reconcile a lot of them.”
Javier E

Richard Rorty's 1998 Book Suggested Election 2016 Was Coming - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-election-2016-was-coming.html

election 2016 leftist Democratic party working class redistribution globalization justice rorty

shared by Javier E on 24 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Three days after the presidential election, an astute law professor tweeted a picture of three paragraphs, very slightly condensed, from Richard Rorty’s “Achieving Our Country,” published in 1998. It was retweeted thousands of times, generating a run on the book
  • It’s worth rereading those tweeted paragraphs:[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. … One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
  • His basic contention is that the left once upon a time believed that our country, for all its flaws, was both perfectible and worth perfecting.
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  • But during the 1960s, shame — over Vietnam, over the serial humiliation of African-Americans — transformed a good portion of the left, at least the academic left, into a disaffected gang of spectators, rather than agitators for change
  • . A formalized despair became its philosophy. The system was beyond reform. The best one could do was focus on its victims.
  • The result was disastrous. The alliance between the unions and intellectuals, so vital to passing legislation in the Progressive Era, broke down. In universities, cultural and identity politics replaced the politics of change and economic justice.
  • at the very moment “socially accepted sadism” — good phrase, that — was diminishing, economic instability and inequality were increasing, thanks to globalization.
  • “This world economy will soon be owned by a cosmopolitan upper class which has no more sense of community with any workers anywhere than the great American capitalists of the year 1900.”
  • This group included intellectuals, by the way, who, he wrote, are “ourselves quite well insulated, at least in the short run, from the effects of globalization.”
  • Which left the white working-class guy and gal up for grabs — open to right-wing populists, maybe even strongmen.
  • “Outside the academy,” he wrote, “Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place.”
  • “Why could not the left,” he asked, “channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossessed?”
  • Right through the ’90s and into the 2000s, we had left-of-center politicians singing the praises of hope, rather than the hopelessness that Mr. Rorty decries. Bill Clinton explicitly campaigned as the “man from Hope,” and Barack Obama would later campaign on a platform of “hope” and “change.” In passing health care reform, Mr. Obama genuinely did something for the immiserated underclass, and both men, in their ways, rejected identity politics.
  • But it wasn’t enough, obviously. “Under Presidents Carter and Clinton,” Mr. Rorty wrote, “the Democratic Party has survived by distancing itself from the unions and from any mention of redistribution.” Mr. Clinton was particularly guilty of this charge, passing Nafta, appointing Robert Rubin as his Treasury secretary and enthusiastically embracing financial deregulation. Mr. Obama pushed the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And he was one of those fancy elites.
  • People are furiously arguing about what played a key role in this election — whether it was white working-class despair, a racist backlash or terror about the pace of cultural change. It seems reasonable to think that all three played a part.
  • What’s so striking about “Achieving Our Country” is that it blends these theories into a common argument: The left, both cultural and political, eventually abandoned economic justice in favor of identity politics, leaving too many people feeling freaked out or ignored.
  • “It is as if the American Left could not handle more than one initiative at a time,” Mr. Rorty wrote. “As if it either had to ignore stigma in order to concentrate on money, or vice versa.”
johnsonma23

Downed WWII bomber found in Pacific 72 years later - CNN.com - 0 views

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

wwii cnn US History

shared by johnsonma23 on 27 May 16 - No Cached
  • Downed WWII bomber found in Pacific 72 years later
  • As World War II raged in 1944, an American bomber took off on a mission with three crew members on board.
  • For 72 years, the TBM-1C Avenger lay on the ocean floor and with it, the remains of the crew.
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  • It was yet another success for Project RECOVER, an organization that blends old-school archival research with new-school sonar technology to find aircraft of Americans MIA, or missing in action.
  • For two months, the sonar scanned. And then, success.
  • The process began, as all the searches do, with intensive research at the National Archives, interviews with veterans, and a dig through old military photographs.
  • "This is more than reconnecting with history; it's about locating the missing to enable the U.S. government to bring them home for a proper burial,
  • The government will use personal items, such as dog tags, dental records and DNA to identify them
Javier E

Will Rocketship schools launch in District? - D.C. Schools Insider - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AGs7KyLH_blog.html

online education blended benefits

shared by Javier E on 24 Apr 12 - Cached
  • students divide their days between classroom instruction and a “Learning Lab” for online and small-group work in math and reading
  • the hybrid model can be operated with fewer certified teachers, generating savings that can be put back into instructor pay and investment in new schools
Javier E

The rise of online education - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...gIQA8e2AdL_print.html

online education blended benefits

shared by Javier E on 24 Apr 12 - Cached
  • fifth, sixth and seventh graders learn online for a significant portion of their in-class math periods at the path and pace that fit their individual needs. Meanwhile, teachers will coach the students to keep up with their math goals and help them apply the math concepts in small-group and class-wide projects.
  • Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are working to improve cognitive tutor software that utilizes the most cutting-edge cognitive science and neuroscience to improve learning for individual students
  • entrepreneurs are creating educational video games and embedding gaming techniques inside online learning experiences to boost student motivation and make learning fu
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Focusing on outcomes, on the other hand, encourages continuous improvement against a set of overall goals
  • move beyond the old input-based metrics used to micro-manage how people in the existing public-education system work and instead embrace outcomes-based regulations that reward individual student learning gains and liberate educators on the ground to figure out the best way to achieve those gain
  • the public education system will be transformed into a student-centric one
  • move beyond today’s time-based rules—those policies, regulations and arrangements that hold time as a constant and learning as the variable, which inhibits the ability to move to a competency-based learning system
Javier E

Clovis People Probably Not Alone in North America - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...pearheads-and-dna-suggest.html

human origins Americas migration

shared by Javier E on 13 Jul 12 - Cached
  • “The colonization of the Americas involved multiple technologically divergent, and possibly genetically divergent, founding groups.”
  • Indeed, new genetic evidence described in the current issue of the journal Nature shows that the Americas appeared to be first populated by three waves of migrants from Siberia: one large migration about 15,000 years ago, followed by two lesser migrations. Such a pattern had been hypothesized 25 years ago on the basis of Native American language groups spoken today, but had not been widely accepted by linguistics scholars.
  • human DNA from the cave, extracted from coprolites, or dried feces, pointed to Siberian-East Asian origins of the people.
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  • The findings lend support to an emerging hypothesis that the Clovis technology, named for the town in New Mexico where the first specimens were discovered, actually arose in what is now the Southeastern United States and moved west to the Plains and the Southwest. The Western Stemmed technology began, perhaps earlier, in the West. Most artifacts of that kind have been found on the West Coast and in Idaho, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. “We seem to have two different traditions coexisting in the United States that did not blend for a period of hundreds of years,” Dr. Jenkins said.
Javier E

Adventures In Vino « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...adventures-in-vino

wine Chile history

shared by Javier E on 06 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Until the late 1800s, carménère had been one of the prime grapes blended in Bordeaux. But it was thought to have mostly died off in the late 19th century, during the great epidemic of phylloxera (a devastating, sap-sucking insect) that killed off so many vineyards in Fra
  • in Chile in the early 1990s, winemakers got a hunch that much of their merlot might actually be carménère, and that eventually was verified through DNA testing by French viticulturalist Jean-Michel Boursiquot. How carménère got from France to Chile, and thrived, no one knows for sure
Javier E

Equality versus opportunity: Opportunity isn't a good enough goal. - 0 views

www.slate.com/..._isn_t_a_good_enough_goal.html

inequality equal opportunity

shared by Javier E on 01 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • polls and focus groups say that voters love it when people talk about opportunity.
  • Democrats and Republicans may disagree about just about everything, but they both love equal opportunity. Sidelining it in favor of some other goal is an argument the president just isn’t going to have.
  • whether focus groups want to hear it or not, the idea of equal opportunities is a toxic blend of the incoherent and undesirable. It makes no sense whatsoever as a social objective.
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  • So equal opportunities might mean a meritocracy. A society in which the best people succeed. Sort of like what we see in the world of distance running.
  • It turns out that the genetic predispositions for successful long-distance running are much more prevalent in Kenya than in Kansas or Korea. And as far as that goes, it’s fine. Distance running isn’t that big a deal. But would we want all of society to look like that?
  • The concept necessarily veers between opportunity-as-randomness and opportunity-as-hereditary-aristocracy, and neither comes across as particularly appealing.
  • , an opportunity to climb is no real answer for people at the bottom. A perfectly fair race is, in at least one important way, the same as a rigged race: Both have a first-place finisher and a last-place finisher
  • The question of what happens to the person at the bottom genuinely matters. Whether you want to phrase that in terms of the gap between the bottom and the top—inequality, as such—or simply look at the absolute condition of the people at the bottom, you can’t escape the conclusion that outcomes matter, and not just in terms of procedural fairness
  • Today, even poor people are able to take advantage of things like electricity and antibiotics that were rare or nonexistent 100 years ago. That’s the kind of opportunity that matters—the opportunity for everyone to enjoy a better life. But over the past generation, progress has been slow for the nonrich. And over the past 10 years, it’s been essentially absent.
Javier E

Summer Reading: How to Shake Up the Status Quo - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...how-to-shake-up-the-status-quo

innovation social books classics ideas creativity entrepreneur

shared by Javier E on 10 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • what better time to compile a short reading list for anyone interested in shaking up the status quo.
  • mindlessness is a curse that runs through society
  • “Innovation and Entrepreneurship” is a road map for anyone who wants to learn to think like an innovator in any field.
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  • Drucker identifies seven key sources of innovative opportunity, including such things as changes in demographics, perceptions and meaning, as well as industry structures. But the most important, he notes, are unexpected successes, which can reveal new possibilities and discrepancies between reality as it is assumed to be and reality as it is, in fact.
  • “Mindfulness” by Ellen J. Langer
  • Langer uses the term mindfulness, which is commonly associated with meditation, to describe a state of being in which one becomes oriented in the present, open to new information, sensitive to context, aware of different perspectives and untrapped by old categories.
  • How do you help people enter this state? One way is to help people reject absolute categories in favor of open-ended frames
  • Framing questions and instructions conditionally — or prompting people to be in the present in other ways — consistently leads to more creativity: musicians play with more energy and nuance; camp counselors provide better feedback to children; children think more critically in school.
  • Once you discover these values systems, you begin to recognize how they play out in society every day: how they shape behaviors in institutions that evolved out of different traditions
  • “Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics” by Jane Jacobs
  • Jane Jacobs is famous for her classic, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” In “Systems of Survival,” she asserts that our ethical frameworks have grown out of the fact that there are two ways that human beings ensure their survival: taking and trading.
  • we possess these two radically different ways of dealing with our needs, we also have two radically different systems of morals and values — both systems valid and necessary,”
  • Jacobs labels these systems “commercial” and “guardian” moral syndromes — the former historically associated with commerce, the latter with the military and government.
  • In the commercial syndrome, Jacobs identifies 15 values, including: “shun force,” “collaborate easily with strangers and aliens,” “be open to inventiveness and novelty,” “dissent for the sake of the task,” “be thrifty,” “be optimistic.”
  • By contrast, in the “guardian” syndrome she finds a parallel set of values like: “exert prowess,” “be obedient and disciplined,” “adhere to tradition,” “deceive for the sake of the task,” “be ostentatious,” “be fatalistic.”
  • “Innovation and Entrepreneurship” by Peter F. Drucker
  • her analysis helps explain whether institutions that blend value sets —like nonprofits or certain government departments — will encounter cultural obstacles or discover unforeseen opportunities.
  • “Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society” by John W. Gardner
  • Why do once vibrant institutions become calcified as they mature? Why do they lose their creative edge as they become more efficient? “A society decays when its institutions and individuals lose their vitality,”
  • he outlines what societies must do to renew their institutions on a continuing basis. It begins by helping individuals renew themselves: helping them to develop the self-knowledge and spiritedness needed to “to assault the complacency and rigidity of the status quo.” He outlines qualities of mind that are needed for this task: versatility and adaptability, the ability to tolerate ambiguity, the willingness to fail
  • “Instead of giving young people the impression that their task is to stand a dreary watch over the ancient values,” writes Gardner, “we should be telling them the grim but bracing truth that it is their task to re-create those values continuously in their own behavior, facing the dilemmas and catastrophes of their own time.”
Javier E

Pope Francis, in Sweeping Encyclical, Calls for Swift Action on Climate Change - The Ne... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-action-on-climate-change.html

Pope Francis climate change policy crisis economics capitalism

shared by Javier E on 19 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Pope Francis on Thursday called for a radical transformation of politics, economics and individual lifestyles to confront environmental degradation and climate change, blending a biting critique of consumerism and irresponsible development with a plea for swift and unified global action.
  • He describes relentless exploitation and destruction of the environment and says apathy, the reckless pursuit of profits, excessive faith in technology and political shortsightedness are to blame.
  • He places most of the blame on fossil fuels and human activity, while warning of an “unprecedented destruction of ecosystems, with serious consequence for all of us” if corrective action is not taken swiftly. Developed, industrialized countries were mostly responsible, he says, and are obligated to help poorer nations confront the crisis.
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  • News media interest was enormous, in part because of Francis’ global popularity, but also because of the intriguing coalition he is proposing between faith and science.
  • Catholic bishops and priests around the world are expected to discuss the encyclical in services on Sunday. But Francis is also reaching for a wider audience, asking in the document “to address every person living on this planet.”
  • Advocates of policies to combat climate change have said they hoped that Francis could lend a “moral dimension” to the debate.
  • “Within the scientific community, there is almost a code of honor that you will never transgress the red line between pure analysis and moral issues,” said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founder and chairman of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “But we are now in a situation where we have to think about the consequences of our insight for society.”
  • Catholic theologians say the overarching theme of the encyclical is “integral ecology,” which links care for the environment with a notion already well developed in Catholic teaching: that economic development, to be morally good and just, must take into account people’s need for things like freedom, education and meaningful work.
  • “The basic idea is, in order to love God, you have to love your fellow human beings, and you have to love and care for the rest of creation,” said Vincent Miller, who holds a chair in Catholic theology and culture at the University of Dayton, a Catholic college in Ohio. “It gives Francis a very traditional basis to argue for the inclusion of environmental concern at the center of Christian faith.”
  • “Critics will say the church can’t teach policy, the church can’t teach politics. And Francis is saying, ‘No, these things are at the core of the church’s teaching.’ ”
  • in a passage certain to rankle some Christians, he chastises those who cite Genesis as evidence that man has “dominion” over the earth that justifies practices like mountaintop mining or fishing with gill nets.
  • “This is not a correct interpretation of the Bible as understood by the Church,” Francis writes. The Bible teaches human beings to “till and keep” the garden of the world, he says. “ ‘Tilling’ refers to cultivating, plowing or working, while ‘keeping’ means caring, protecting, overseeing and preserving.
  • His most stinging rebuke is a broad critique of profit-seeking and the undue influence of technology on society. He praises achievements in medicine, science and engineering, but says that “our immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience.”
  • The pope rejects the belief that technology and “current economics” will solve environmental problems, or “that the problems of global hunger and poverty will be resolved simply by market growth.”
  • Francis sharply criticizes the trading of carbon credits — a market-based system central to the European Union’s climate policy — and says it “may simply become a ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors.”
  • “All is not lost,” he writes. “Human beings, while capable of the worst, are also capable of rising above themselves, choosing again what is good, and making a new start.”
Javier E

High Tech Hope for Repelling Mosquitoes - The New York Times - 0 views

well.blogs.nytimes.com/...-hope-for-repelling-mosquitoes

mosquito protection

shared by Javier E on 11 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • What I found was this: All of the current products offered varying levels of protection, but nothing worked as well as traditional chemical repellent. Nothing, that is, until I tested the patch, which could very well remove humans from the mosquito food chain for good.
  • Then came a test of the Kite compound. The patch, which isn’t available yet, smelled an awful lot like cloves, and as I inserted my arm into the glass box again, no mosquitoes landed anywhere near it.
  • I wasn’t able to talk anyone into telling me exactly what the highly coveted proprietary blend is made of, only that the first version to be released in 2016 — the one I tried — is made of plant-based fragrances and other compounds that don’t require E.P.A. approval. A second version is awaiting regulatory approval for 2017.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The new compound works by confusing a mosquito’s senses, hindering its ability to target us based on the carbon dioxide we exhale, and confounding its capacity to locate us up close.
Javier E

Tools Teenagers Use Everyday - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tools-teenagers-use-everyday

online courses education K-12

shared by Javier E on 06 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Hybrid or "blended" models that focus on serious content for deep learning, and bring together classroom interaction with tools like wikis, blogs, podcasts, social networks and discussion forums can engage students in ways that traditional environments do not. When students are given challenging material, asked to carry out authentic research and to create ways to share what they are learning with students from all over the world engagement goes up.
  • Assessment of student learning can be partially automated and designed to provide continuous feedback. When students need assistance, they can be directed to activities that will help them learn.
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