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US official: Russian flight practices are unsafe in Syria - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html US pilots Russian Syria
shared by krystalxu on 25 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • The official said some of the incidents also involve the flying practices of Syrian regime aircraft.
  • American commanders and pilots are making certain to share everything they can with other crews in both safety and pre-flight briefings.
  • It was set up specifically to try to ensure there are no accidents or escalation in the use of forces.
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China Is a Paper Dragon - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...618778 china gdp rivalry US competition trade market repression history crisis
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  • “We’re in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st Century,” Biden said. His aides describe the president as preoccupied with the challenge from China.
  • aides say Biden believes it is a key test by which historians will judge his presidency.”
  • As Biden said to the nation from the well of the House of Representatives, the authoritarian President Xi Jinping is “deadly earnest” about China “becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world. He and others—autocrats—think that democracy can’t compete in the 21st century with autocracies.”
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  • many of the advances cited as Chinese strengths don’t hold up to close scrutiny. American analysts often publish worries about China’s growing navy, and especially its two aircraft carriers. But, Beckley writes, “Chinese pilots fly 100 to 150 fewer hours than U.S. pilots and only began training on aircraft carriers in 2012,” and he adds that “Chinese troops spend 20 to 30 percent of their time studying communist ideology.”
  • The book argues that China’s economic, financial, technological, and military strength is hugely exaggerated by crude and inaccurate statistics.
  • The claim that China will “overtake” the U.S. in any meaningful way is polemical and wrong—and wrong in ways that may mislead Americans into serious self-harming mistakes.
  • China may well surpass the United States as the largest economy on Earth by the 2030s. China was also almost certainly the largest economy on Earth in the 1830s. A big GDP did not make China a superpower then
  • Worried about Chinese students’ high scores on comparative math tests? You’re looking at the curated outputs of highly selective groups of students. Whereas public school is free through high school in the United States, China’s government only covers the costs of elementary and middle school. At many Chinese high schools, families have to pay tuition and other expenses, and these outlays are among the highest in the world. Consequently, 76 percent of China’s working-age population has not completed high school.
  • in the 1800s, the Chinese empire had a GDP much larger than that of Great Britain. The Chinese army of 800,000 men also enormously exceeded Britain’s troop numbers. Yet when the two states clashed in the two Opium Wars, from 1839 to 1842 and again in 1858, China was crushingly defeated. Why? A great part of the answer, then as now, was the cost of repression.
  • Many Chinese college students describe their universities as “diploma factories,” where student-teacher ratios are double the average in U.S. universities, cheating is rampant, students spend a quarter of their time studying “Mao Zedong thought,” and students and professors are denied access to basic sources of information, such as Google Scholar and certain academic journal repositories.
  • Chinese firms’ total spending on R&D as a percentage of sales revenue stalled at levels four times below the average for American firms. … Chinese firms remain dependent on foreign technologies and manual labor and have a rudimentary level of automation and digitization: on average Chinese enterprises have just nineteen robots per ten thousand employees; U.S. firms, by contrast, use an average of 176 robots per ten thousand employees.
  • But isn’t China sprinting to overtake the United States? Yes, but it’s stumbling badly in that pursuit. China now leads the world in retractions of scientific studies due to fraud; one-third of Chinese scientists have admitted to plagiarizing or falsifying results (versus 2 percent of U.S. scientists); and two-thirds of China’s R&D spending has been lost to corruption.
  • Beckley’s clarifying theoretical insight: Repression is expensive
  • The Chinese military’s first and paramount mission is preserving the power of the Chinese Communist Party against China’s own people. The U.S. military can focus entirely on external threats.
  • The lines that plot the comparative GDP of the United States and China distort the real balance of power between the two societies, Beckley argues, because China must devote such a large share of its resources to basic subsistence needs to avert the overthrow of the state.
  • this might be a useful moment to hear a contrary voice. In 2018, the Tufts University professor Michael Beckley published a richly detailed study of Chinese military and economic weaknesses. The book is titled Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower.
  • Nineteenth-century China faced an average of 25 local uprisings a year. Most of its troops had to be deployed to suppress rebellions and control banditry, leaving few available for war-fighting.
  • A final piece of the answer is that technological copycats face huge disadvantages against technological innovators. They will always lag behind the more creative rival, not only in the factory, but on the battlefield. “Repeatedly during the Opium Wars … Chinese armies of thousands were routed in minutes by a few hundred, or even a few dozen, British troops,”
  • Beckley seeks to highlight the immense defects of gross GDP as a measure of national strength—factoring in the costs of repression—and the strategic predicament of China’s location, barred from the open ocean by a ring of potential enemies on its eastern front, extending from Russia, through Korea, past Japan, to the Philippines, and then to Vietnam.
  • He said that he had become more alarmed by China’s aggressive and repressive intentions, but remained as dubious as ever about Chinese capacities.
  • Sanders lost the nomination, but he won the debate within the Democratic Party over trade policy. In his address, Biden committed to extending and enlarging “Buy American” favoritism in government procurement. His administration is maintaining Trump’s anti-China tariffs and is “reviewing”—not yet removing—tariffs against the European Union and other trade partners. Biden economic advisers warned during his campaign that trade expansion would rank low on their list of priorities, and so it is proving.
  • The Trump administration raised the defense budget by more than $100 billion a year, and the spending increases have continued even after the campaign against ISIS came to an end. More and more of the money is being directed to preparations for a conflict with China.
  • China’s language and behavior is assertive and provocative, for sure. China’s power is rising, yes. Its behavior at home and abroad is becoming more oppressive and more brutal; that’s also tragically true.
  • as Americans muster the courage and will to face Chinese realities, that reckoning needs also to appreciate the tremendous capabilities of this country, and the very real limits besetting China: a fast-aging population, massive internal indebtedness, and a regime whose worsening repression suggests its declining popularity.
  • two deep truths about Chinese society: It’s about to be home to a lot of old people, and trust in the state is very low, and for good reason.
  • As China’s population ages, it will deplete its savings. Chinese people save a lot to compensate for the state’s meager social-security provision. For three decades, the savings of ordinary people financed the spectacular borrowing of China’s state-owned enterprises
  • What happens as the savings are withdrawn to finance hundreds of millions of retirements? Again—who knows?
  • China misallocates capital on a massive scale. More than a fifth of China’s housing stock is empty—the detritus of a frenzied construction boom that built too many apartments in the wrong places
  • China overcapitalizes at home because Chinese investors are prohibited from doing what they most want to do: get their money out of China. Strict and complex foreign-exchange controls block the flow of capital
  • More than one-third of the richest Chinese would emigrate if they could, according to research by one of the country’s leading wealth-management firms. The next best alternative: sending their children out. Pre-pandemic, almost 1 million young Chinese attended Western universities. Pre-pandemic, only about 10,000 Americans were studying in China; single thousands were from other Western countries—and almost all of them were in the country to study language, not any academic specialty.
  • U.S. policy makers should look to the future with a little more confidence and a lot more trust in trade, markets, and the superior potential of a free people under an elected government.
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Suez Canal Blocked After Giant Container Ship Gets Stuck - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...suez-canal-blocked-ship.html
shared by rerobinson03 on 24 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • By Wednesday morning, more than 100 ships were stuck at each end of the 120-mile canal, which connects the Red Sea to the Mediterranean and carries roughly 10 percent of worldwide shipping traffic. Only the Panama Canal looms as large in the global passage of goods.
  • And if the ship is not freed within a few days, it would add one more burden to a global shipping industry already reeling from the coronavirus pandemic, creating delays, shortages of goods and higher prices for consumers.
  • The ship’s size has magnified every challenge. Though a gust of wind may seem an improbable David to the ship’s Goliath, the containers stacked at least nine-high atop the deck would have acted like a giant sail, Capt. Konrad said, giving Tuesday’s high winds more surface area to push against.As container ships have grown in scale, culminating in a new generation of ultra-large ships that includes the 1,312-foot-long Ever Given, the Suez Canal and global ports have struggled to keep pace. Parts of the canal were widened several years ago, though not enough to eliminate the tension for pilots charged with navigating it. Crew sizes have not increased to match the vessels, said Capt. Konrad, and technology for piloting through narrow channels has not improved.
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  • But if the ship’s extraction takes longer, it could pose a substantial risk for an already-overwhelmed industry. Global trade has been disrupted as locked-down American consumers ordered vast quantities of factory goods from Asia, yielding a monthslong shortage of shipping containers, the metal boxes that carry parts and finished products around the globe.The blockage of the Suez Canal will affect the movement of things like exercise bikes and printers built in Chinese factories destined for American households, and soybeans grown on American farms and shipped to food processors in Southeast Asia.
  • ut first comes the technical quagmire of freeing the Ever Given. Pictures from the canal showed the container-laden ship sitting sideways at such an angle that the name of the company that operates it, Evergreen, was clearly visible from the ship behind it.“Ship in front of us ran aground while going through the canal and is now stuck sideways,” an Instagram user who gave her name as Julianne Cona, a ship’s engineer onboard another vessel, posted alongside a photo of the stricken ship on Tuesday evening. “Looks like we might be here for a little bit…”
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The Flu May Linger in the Air, Just Like the Coronavirus - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...flu-aerosols-coronavirus.html Covid-19 transmission air
shared by Javier E on 16 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • examining the relative contributions of different modes of transmission — whether through contaminated surfaces; tiny aerosols; or large, liquid-laden droplets expelled by coughs or sneezes — remains a daunting task for experts in the field
  • A multitude of factors, such as past exposures to infection, can influence a person’s vulnerability to a virus. But “the fact that they only had one transmission event, compared to what the pilot study suggested, indicates that ventilation is important,
  • The researchers deliberately infected 52 volunteers with a strain of influenza, a setup called a human challenge trial. They then had these “donors” mix and socialize with 75 healthy “recipients” for four days to test how often the virus got passed to others.
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  • authors on the new paper, ran a pilot study in another group of volunteers under similar conditions in 2009: After just two days of bunking up, about 8 percent of the recipients were infected.
  • In this new experiment, the researchers doubled the number of days the study participants were allowed to mingle. But they found only one new case of flu among the 75 volunteers who hadn’t been intentionally dosed with the virus — an infection rate of just 1.3 percent.
  • The biggest difference between the two experiments, Dr. Milton said, was their backdrop. In its first iteration, the study took place in poorly ventilated hotel rooms; in its second, the researchers housed their participants in a research facility with much improved air flow. In the new study, “we had at least seven times more ventilation per person,”
  • “We’ve been studying the flu for 102 years and still don’t know for sure how it’s transmitted,”
  • While good ventilation can dilute aerosols, it is far less effective against droplets, which are much wider and heavier
  • Part of the problem is the continuum on which aerosols and droplets exist. Though they go by different names, the two categories really belong to the same group: globs of fluid that come in varying sizes. Blobs less than five micrometers in diameter are termed aerosols, which can exit the airway at the slightest breath and waft away; anything larger is a droplet, hefty enough to fall to the ground within a few feet of its source. The boundary between them is somewhat arbitrary, though generally speaking, the smaller the particle, the farther it travels.
  • When people expel fluid from their airway, it tends to manifest in a mixture, some bigger, some smaller and everything in between,
  • Even after they exit an individual, these fluidic blobs remain dynamic. Large droplets, for instance, can disperse or evaporate into little aerosols in midair. Others might scatter onto a surface or a hand, lingering for minutes or hours before encountering someone new. And the rates at which all these events occur can shift, depending on the force with which someone, maybe a loud talker, expels these droplets or the amount of air flow in an area,
  • “The reality is that there is a continuum of aerosols.”
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Finding a Way Out of the War in Ukraine Proves Elusive - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...russia-ukraine-us-endgame.html
shared by criscimagnael on 14 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • The United States accurately predicted the start of the war in Ukraine, sounding the alarm that an invasion was imminent despite Moscow’s denials and Europe’s skepticism. Predicting how it might end is proving far more difficult.
  • At the Pentagon, there are models of a slogging conflict that brings more needless death and destruction to a nascent European democracy, and others in which Mr. Putin settles for what some believe was his original objective: seizing a broad swath of the south and east, connecting Russia by land to Crimea, which he annexed in 2014.
  • And there is a more terrifying endgame, in which NATO nations get sucked more directly into the conflict, by accident or design.
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  • In interviews with senior American and European officials in recent days, there is a consensus on one point: Just as the last two weeks revealed that Russia’s vaunted military faltered in its invasion plan, the next two or three may reveal whether Ukraine can survive as a state, and negotiate an end to the war.
  • And there is the possibility that Mr. Putin, angered by the slowness of his offensive in Ukraine, may reach for other weapons: chemical, biological, nuclear and cyber.
  • Mr. Sullivan said that Russia would suffer “severe consequences” if it used chemical weapons, without specifying what those would be.
  • Quietly, the White House and the senior American military leadership have been modeling how they would respond to a series of escalations, including major cyberattacks on American financial institutions and the use of a tactical or “battlefield” nuclear weapon by Mr. Putin to signal to the rest of the world that he would brook no interference as he moves to crush Ukraine.
  • Even with Ukrainians begging for more offensive weapons and American intervention, Mr. Biden has stuck to his determination that he will not directly engage the forces of a nuclear-armed superpower.
  • The idea that we’re going to send in offensive equipment,” Mr. Biden said in Philadelphia to the House Democratic Caucus on Friday, “and have planes and tanks and trains going in with American pilots and American crews, just understand — and don’t kid yourself, no matter what you all say — that’s called ‘World War III.’ OK? Let’s get it straight here.”
  • A French government account of a call to Mr. Putin on Saturday by Mr. Macron and Mr. Scholz termed it “disappointing with Putin’s insincerity: He is determined to continue the war.”
  • no evidence from the conversations so far that Mr. Putin has changed course; he remains “intent on destroying Ukraine.”
  • Despite his military’s logistical problems, Mr. Putin appears intent on intensifying his campaign and laying siege to Kyiv, the capital; Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city; and other Ukrainian urban centers.
  • “I think Putin is angry and frustrated right now,” Mr. Burns said. He is likely to “try to grind down the Ukrainian military with no regard for civilian casualties,” he added.
  • Mr. Putin has demonstrated in past conflicts in Syria and Chechnya a willingness not only to bomb heavily populated areas but also to use civilian casualties as leverage against his enemies. Senior U.S. officials said the coming weeks could see a long, drawn-out fight with thousands of casualties on both sides, as well as among the roughly 1.5 million citizens remaining in the city.
  • “It will come at a very high price in Russian blood,” said retired Adm. James G. Stavridis, the former supreme allied commander for Europe. That high cost, he added, could cause Mr. Putin to destroy the city with an onslaught of missiles, artillery and bombs — “continuing a swath of war crimes unlike any we have seen in the 21st century.”
  • Russian forces are still subjecting Mariupol to siege and bombardment, but are close to securing that strategic southern port city and, with it, a land bridge from Crimea in the south to the Donbas region in the east that has been controlled by Russian-backed separatists since 2014.
  • And if Russia can seize Odessa, a pivotal Black Sea port city, and perhaps the remaining Ukrainian coast to the southeast, it would deprive Ukraine of important access to the sea.
  • “The most probable endgame, sadly, is a partition of Ukraine,” said Mr. Stavridis, pointing to the outcome of the Balkan wars in the 1990s as a model. “Putin would take the southeast of the country, and the ethnic Russians would gravitate there. The rest of the nation, overwhelmingly Ukrainian, would continue as a sovereign state.”
  • The fear now is that the war could expand.The more the fighting moves west, the more likely it is that an errant missile lands in NATO territory, or the Russians take down a NATO aircraft.
  • So far there are none of the procedures in place that American and Russian pilots use over Syria, for example, to prevent accidental conflict. And Mr. Putin has twice issued thinly veiled reminders of his nuclear capabilities, reminding the world that if the conflict does not go his way he has far larger, and far more fearsome, weapons to call into play.
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Inside the Struggle to Make Lab-Grown Meat - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...o-make-lab-grown-meat-12cf46ab meat alternative protein scaling challenge food
shared by Javier E on 07 May 23 - No Cached
  • “We can make it on small scales successfully,” said Josh Tetrick, chief executive officer of a rival food-technology company, Eat Just Inc.
  • What is uncertain is whether we and other companies will be able to produce this at the largest of scales, at the lowest of costs within the next decade.”
  • Mr. Tetrick said Eat Just’s Good Meat unit sells less than 5,000 pounds annually of its hybrid cultivated chicken in Singapore,
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  • Uma Valeti, the company’s CEO, said Upside has proven it can safely produce a delicious product. The company said that it has helped pioneer an industry and that it is making progress on growing larger quantities of meat, while bringing down its cost.
  • According to former employees, Upside has struggled to produce large quantities of meat. They said the company often scrambled to make enough for lab analysis and tastings. Upside for years worked to grow whole cuts of meat, which proved difficult in its bioreactors. It battled contamination in its labs. Traces of rodent DNA once tainted a chicken cell line, according to former employees, and confirmed by company executives.  
  • Today, the company is growing its marquee filet not in large bioreactors at its pilot plant but in two-liter plastic bottles akin to those used to grow cells for decades by pharmaceutical companies. 
  • “Roller bottles aren’t scalable. Too small, too labor-intensive,”
  • Upside’s pilot plant isn’t yet operating at the 50,000-pound annual capacity the company announced when it opened in 2021, according to company executives, much less its future target of 400,000 pounds. Production can accelerate once Upside receives USDA clearance, company executives said.
  • Industry champions said they are confident that steady scientific progress will help reduce production costs for cultivated meat, while climate change and global population growth will intensify the need for it.
  • “It turned out that tissue, or creating this whole-cut texture, was really challenging,” said Amy Chen, Upside’s chief operating officer
  • Upside also wrestled with problems common to other cultivated-meat makers, including a battle against bacteria, according to former employees.Growing meat requires meticulous sterilization because small quantities of bacteria can quickly overtake a bioreactor, ruining a batch.
  • The company said contamination can slow production, but doesn’t affect final cultivated products, unlike conventional meat. The company said that autoclaves sometimes require maintenance and that meat grown for consumers won’t be produced in the older building
  • Some industry officials think companies can surmount contamination problems, but that other hurdles will still abound, including those tied to growing the finicky cells and the high cost of supplies.  
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How China's buses shaped the world's EV revolution - BBC Future - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...le-revolution-began-with-buses china EV buses transport public response climate change history policy
shared by Javier E on 20 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • After around two decades of government support, China now boasts the world's largest market for e-buses, making up more than 95% of global stock. At the end of 2022, China's Ministry of Transport announced that more than three-quarters (77% or 542,600) of all urban buses in the country were "new energy vehicles", a term used by the Chinese government to include pure electric, plug-in hybrids, and fuel cell vehicles powered by alternative fuels such as hydrogen and methanol. In 2022, around 84% of the new energy bus fleet was pure electric.
  • . In 2015, 78% of Chinese urban buses still used diesel or gas, according to the World Resources Institute (WRI). The NGO now estimates that if China follows through on its stated decarbonisation policies, its road transport emissions will peak before 2030.
  • China is also home to some of the world's biggest electric bus manufacturers, such as Yutong, which has been raking up orders across China, Europe and Latin America.
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  • "China has really been at the forefront of success in conversion of all vehicles to electric vehicles, especially buses," says Heather Thompson, chief executive officer of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), a non-profit focusing on sustainable transport solutions. "The rest of the world is trying to do the same, but I think China is really out ahead."
  • At the time of China's 2001 entry into the World Trade Organisation, the international automotive industry was dominated by European, US and Japanese brands. These companies had spent decades perfecting internal combustion engine technology. To compete, Beijing decided to find a new track for its auto industry: making cars that did not use conventional engines.
  • That same year, the central government launched the so-called "863 plan" for EV research and development. There were numerous practical challenges, however, in the way of mass electrification. Not many manufacturers were making new energy vehicles, buyers were few and there was a lack of charging infrastructure in existence. The answer? Buses.
  • "The Chinese government adopted a very smart strategy," says Liu Daizong, ITDP's East Asia director. "They realised quite early on that they should drive [the EV industry] through electric buses," he notes, since their public service status meant Beijing "could have a strong hand on their electrification".
  • "Bus routes were fixed. This means when an electric bus finished a round, it could return to the depot to recharge," explains Xue Lulu, a mobility manager at the World Resources Institute (WRI) China. The typical daily mileage of a Chinese bus ­– 200km (120 miles) – was a realistic range for battery makers to meet.
  • The following year, the country began its large-scale rollout of new energy buses, with the "Ten Cities and Thousand Vehicles" programme. Over three years, the programme aimed to provide 10 cities with financial subsidies to promote 1,000 public-sector new energy vehicles in each, annually. Its goal was to have 10% new energy vehicles in the country by the end of 2012.
  • Strong policy support from both central and regional governments "gave manufacturers confidence in setting up production lines and stepping up research efforts," says Liu.
  • Together, these strong and consistent government signals encouraged Chinese manufacturers to expand their EV production capacity, bring down costs and improve their technologies. One such company was Build Your Dream, better known as BYD. The Shenzhen-based firm, the world's largest EV maker in 2022, ballooned its business a decade before by supplying electric buses and taxis for China's EV pilot cities.
  • "Back then, most buses used diesel, which was a main source of nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions," says Xue, referring to the air pollution that smothered Beijing and other Chinese cities in the early 2010s. Yet in 2013, a new plan from central government cited tackling air pollution as one of the reasons for rolling out EVs.
  • This addition proved to be critical: it not only connected EV uptake with people's health, it also indirectly tied the e-bus campaign to local officials' political performance, as the central government would soon hand air-quality targets to all provinces.
  • The years 2013 and 2014 proved to be important for China's EV push. For the first time, the central government made EV purchase subsidies available to individual consumers, not just the public sector, opening the floodgate to private ownership. Additionally, it offered discounted electricity tariffs to bus operators to make sure the cost of running electric buses would be "significantly lower than" that of their oil or gas-powered equivalents.
  • The new economic push, plus local government's determination to battle air pollution, generated great enthusiasm for e-buses. By the end of 2015, the number of EV pilot cities rocketed from 25 to 88. In the same year, the central government set a target of 200,000 new energy buses on the road by 2020 and announced a plan to phase out its subsidies for fossil-fuel-powered buses.
  • To further stimulate the market, many cities devised various local policies on top of national incentives. For example, Shenzhen, a southern city with a population of more than 17 million, encouraged government agencies to work with private companies to create a full range of renting mechanisms for bus operators
  • Different cities' bus operators also designed different charging strategies. "Buses in Shenzhen had bigger batteries, so they normally charged overnight," says Xue, of WRI China. Between 2016 and 2020, Shanghai, another electric bus hub, subsidised the electricity e-buses used -- regardless of the hours of the day -- to give them more flexibility in charging.
  • Generous financial support did lead to problems. In 2016, an EV subsidy fraud shook China, with some bus operators found to have exaggerated the number of e-buses they had purchased. So that same year Beijing shifted its EV subsidy rules so bus operators could only receive financial support when a bus's mileage reached 30,000km (19,000 miles).
  • one year later, the government announced the so-called "dual-credit" policy. This allowed new energy vehicle makers to rake up credits which they could sell for cash to those needing to offset "negative credits" generated from making conventional cars.
  • it wasn't only China's buses that had benefitted.China's e-bus campaign helped create a big and stable market for its wider EV industry, brought down the costs and created economies of scale. In 2009, the year the e-bus campaign was rolled out, the total number of new energy vehicles sold stood at 2,300; by 2022, it was 6.9 million, analysis by Huang Zheng,
  • By 2022, the country had also built the world's largest EV charging network, with 1.8 million public charging stations – or two-thirds of the global total – and 3.4 million private equivalents. This means that on average, there is one charging pillar for every 2.5 of China's 13.1 million new energy vehicles.
  • Cold weather is a problem, too, as it can make a battery's charging time longer and its range shorter. The reason China has not achieved 100% electrification for its buses is its northern regions, which have harsh winters, says Xue.
  • To make e-buses truly "green", they should also be charged with renewable power, Wang says. But last year coal power still accounted for 58.4% of China's energy mix, according to the China Electricity Council, a trade body..
  • Globally, however, China is now in a league of its own in uptake of e-buses. By 2018, about 421,000 of the world's 425,000 electric buses were located in China; Europe had about 2,250 and the US owned around 300. A
  • But earlier this year, the European Commission announced a zero-emission target for all new city buses by 2030. And some countries are increasing their overall funding for the transition.
  • In 2020, the European Commission approved Germany's plan to double its aid for e-buses to €650m (£558m/$707m), then again in 2021 to €1.25 billion euros (£1.07m/$1.3bn). And the UK, which last year had the largest electric bus fleet in Europe with 2,226 pure electric and hybrid buses, has announced another £129m ($164m) to help bus operators buy zero-emissions fleets.
  • Countries have thus responded to China's manufacturing lead in divergent ways. "While the US has opted for a more competitive angle by fostering its own e-bus production, regions like Latin America are more open to trade with China due to a more friendly trading setup through [China's] Belt and Road Initiative,"
  • In order to avoid direct competition from Chinese manufacturers, the US has come up with a "school-bus strategy", says Liu. The Chinese don't make the iconic yellow vehicles, so this could ignite American e-bus manufacturing and create a local industry chain, he suggests. Backed by the US Environmental Protection Agency's $5bn (£3.9bn) Clean School Bus Programme, the national effort has so far committed to providing 5,982 buses.
  • In contrast, many Latin American cities, such as the Colombian capital of Bogota and the Chilean capital of Santiago, are greening their traditional bus sectors with the help of Chinese manufacturers, who are the largest providers to the region. In 2020, Chile became the country that had the most Chinese e-buses outside of China, and this year Santiago's public transport operator announced it has ordered 1,022 e-buses from Beijing-based Foton Motor, the biggest overseas deal the firm had received.
  • Chinese manufacturers are likely to receive a lot more orders from Chile and its neighbours in this decade. According to latest research by the global C40 Cities network, the number of electric buses in 32 Latin American cities is expected to increase by more than seven times by 2030, representing an investment opportunity of over $11.3bn (£8.9bn)
  • In June 2023, BloombergNEF forecast half of the world's buses to be entirely battery-powered by 2032, a decade ahead of cars. And by 2026, 36% and 24% of municipal bus sales in Europe and the US, respectively, are expected to be EVs as they begin to catch up with China
  • To meet the global climate goals set by the Paris Agreement, simply switching the world's existing bus fleets might not be enough. According to ITDP, the cumulative greenhouse gas emissions from urban passenger transport globally must stay below the equivalent of 66 gigatonnes CO2 between 2020 and 2050 for the world to meet the 1.5C temperature goal. This emissions limit will only be possible when the world not only adopts electric buses, but goes through a broader shift away from private transport
  • "We can't just focus on [replacing] the buses that exist, we need to actually get many, many more buses on the streets," Thompson adds. She and her team estimate that the world would need about 10 million more buses through 2030, and 46 million more buses cumulatively through 2050, to make public transport good enough to have a shot at achieving the Paris Agreement. And all those buses will need to be electric.
  • In China therefore, even though EVs are being sold faster than ever, its central government has instructed cities to encourage public transport use, as well as walking and riding bikes.
  • In Wang's hometown, meanwhile, which has just over three million residents, the local government has gone one step further and made all bus rides free. All citizens need to do is to swipe an app, with no charge, to get onto the bus. "My aunt loves taking buses now," says Wang. "She says it is so convenient."
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Did politics cut 'systemic' from AP African American studies plan? - Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...n-american-studies-controversy African-American studies AP course syllabus controversy culture history us politics
shared by Javier E on 24 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • A politically charged adjective popped up repeatedly in the evolving plans for a new Advanced Placement course on African American studies. It was “systemic.”
  • The February 2022 version declared that students should learn how African American communities combat effects of “systemic marginalization.” An April update paired “systemic” with discrimination, oppression, inequality, disempowerment and racism. A December version said it was essential to know links between Black Panther activism and “systemic inequality that disproportionately affected African Americans.”
  • Then the word vanished. “Systemic,” a crucial term for many scholars and civil rights advocates, appears nowhere in the official version released Feb. 1. This late deletion and others reflect the extraordinary political friction that often shadows efforts in the nation’s schools to teach about history, culture and race.
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  • a senior College Board official now acknowledges the organization was mindful of how “systemic” and certain other words in the modern lexicon of race in America would receive intense scrutiny in some places.
  • Jason Manoharan, vice president for AP program development. He said the College Board worried some phrases and concepts had been “co-opted for a variety of purposes” and were being used as “political instruments.” So the organization took a cautious approach to the final edits even as it sought to preserve robust content on historical and cultural impacts of slavery and racial discrimination.
  • “We wanted this course to be adopted by 50 states, and we wanted as many students and teachers as possible to be able to experience it,” Manoharan said. His acknowledgment underscored the inherent politics behind promoting a course that deals so squarely with race in America.
  • John K. Thornton, a professor of African American studies and history at Boston University, who contributed to the planning, said he was pleased the course opens with five weeks on early Africa. But he lamented that reparations and Black Lives Matter ended up only as optional research topics. “It did upset me a little bit,” he said. “Those things obviously feel very much a part of what a college course is about.”
  • DeSantis, a potential presidential candidate, has accused the course architects of promoting “a political agenda.” He also criticized an early course plan’s references to Black queer studies and “intersectionality,” a concept that helps explain overlapping forms of discrimination that affect Black women and others.
  • Teresa Reed, dean of music at the University of Louisville, said her work as one of 13 members of the AP African American studies committee resembled similar assignments she has undertaken for other AP courses. Reed supports the African American studies course plan and said it will continue to be revised as pilot teachers give feedback. She said she saw no evidence of political meddling in the course design. “That was absolutely not my experience,”
  • Two luminaries in the field, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, both of Harvard University and both of whom advised the College Board, also issued statements vouching for the course.
  • The first 81-page draft of the course plan, in February 2022, drew topics and sources from the syllabi of introductory classes at historically Black universities, Ivy League schools and other prominent institutions. The College Board said it was produced as a preview for 200 college professors at a March 2022 symposium. Faculty recommended cutting 20 percent to 25 percent of the proposed topics, the College Board said, and as much as half of suggested readings.
  • The April version, 299 pages, was the pilot course guide, a road map for teachers before classes began in the fall. It included much more detail on goals, essential knowledge and potential source material. It also made an important switch on contemporary issues: Certain lessons on reparations, incarceration and movements for Black lives became optional and would not be covered on the AP exam. At this stage, the guide included a week of instruction on Black feminism, womanism and intersectionality, and it used the word “systemic” nine times.
  • One of the most consequential decisions made last year was to set aside significant time — ultimately, three weeks — near the end of the course for a research paper of up to 1,500 words on a topic students would choose. The project will count for 20 percent of the AP score for those who seek college credit.
  • Among 40 sample topics in the official plan are Black Lives Matter; intersectionality; reparations debates; gay life and expression in Black communities; and Black conservatism.
  • College Board officials point to the development of an extensive digital library for the course — including a 1991 text on intersectionality from Crenshaw — as evidence that they are not censoring writers or voices. Crenshaw teachers, they say, use the course framework as a starting point to design their own syllabi of readings and assignments.
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How 'Surf City USA' became California's MAGA stronghold - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...h-maga-conservative-california local politics US crisis culture partisan polarization
shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • Huntington Beach, one of Orange County’s largest cities, has long been associated with conservative beliefs, but its evolution in recent years shows how the bitter polarization of national politics has crept into even the most mundane municipal matters.
  • “It’s the tipping on its head of the old notion that all politics is local. Now, all politics are national, and I think the overall effect of that is really destructive,” said Jim Newton, a public policy lecturer at UCLA and editor of Blueprint magazine. “It takes a sharply divided country at the national level and drags that down into local disputes.”
  • Spurred by those early oil booms, the city embraced development and corporate interests, said Chris Jepsen, the president of the Orange County Historical Society, earning it “a reputation for being pro-business and ardently pro-property rights.”
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  • “Politics, Democratic or Republican, were not particularly important,” said Tom Harman, a former Republican state senator who got his start on the city council in the 1990s. “People didn’t run on party preference. They ran on what they could do in the community and how they could make the city a better place to live.”
  • It had long been a destination for surfing, but officials in the ’90s began leaning into that reputation to court the tourism industry. Huntington Beach became “Surf City USA,” a moniker pulled from a chart-topping song.
  • Two high-profile acts of white-supremacist violence — the shooting of a Black man in 1994, and the stabbing of a Native American man two years later — prompted the city to crack down on the groups who had flocked from across Southern California.
  • City police stepped up patrols, the council passed a human dignity policy condemning hate crimes, and officials started a human relations commission to combat bigotry. Ken Inouye, the founding chair of that task force and a 51-year resident of Huntington Beach, said residents from across the city “came together because we knew we were better than that.”
  • Both efforts were reversed when the current Republican majority took over the council.
  • In recent decades, sweeping demographic change has pushed Orange County to the left. But those shifts have been more subtle in Huntington Beach, and the city has retained its rightward lean. Unlike the county’s other largest cities, most residents are White and Republicans still account for the plurality of Huntington Beach’s registered voters.
  • During Donald Trump’s presidency, residents bridled at California’s pandemic restrictions, much as Trump did. Fierce protests became common, with crowds clogging the pier and Pacific Coast Highway to shout down coronavirus precautions or cheer Trump. Some of the rallies were organized by white-supremacist groups and turned violent.
  • Another inflection point came in 2021, when former mixed martial arts fighter and hard-right council member Tito Ortiz resigned from his post and the remaining members appointed a Democrat, Rhonda Bolton, in his stead. The move infuriated city Republicans, who wanted Ortiz replaced with an ideological equal.
  • “The tone of political rhetoric has gotten coarser and sillier as time has worn on,” she said. “And Huntington Beach is a reflection of what’s happening nationally.”
  • Carol Daus, who has lived in the city nearly three decades, said the council’s focus on contentious cultural debates has divided the community, pitting neighbors against neighbors. One example of the acrimony: Protect HB has hung posters across the city urging a “No” vote on the March ballot measures, but some 40 of those signs were recently vandalized with large green “Yes” stickers.
  • “This city during the past several years, following the Trump administration and covid lockdown, was like a volcano ready to explode,” Daus said. “And now it has.”
  • “I feel duped,” said Sue Welfringer, a longtime Huntington Beach resident and registered Republican. She voted for the four-person conservative slate because she liked their stances on homelessness and limiting development, but mostly she appreciated that they got along with each other.
  • “I almost don’t even want to vote at all because I don’t want to make another terrible mistake I regret,” said Welfringer, who opposes the council’s stances on issues like LGBTQ rights and voter ID. “I feel like they had a hidden agenda. And now I’m also worried what else is on their hidden agenda. I’m afraid to know what big issue is next.”
  • “Ideally, it would be wonderful if we could just focus on the roads and infrastructure,” he said. “But I think we’re in a time now where there really isn’t any such thing as a nonpartisan local focus anymore.”
  • But this dynamic has turned city council meetings into routine spectacles, where public comment drags on for hours and speakers hurl invectives at the seven members sitting on the dais.
  • Butch Twining, a candidate for city council, is one of three conservatives looking to build on the Republican majority, campaigning as a slate to replace Bolton and the council’s other two liberal members in November. A victory would give conservatives a 7-0 vise grip on the council.
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Origins of C.I.A.'s Not-So-Secret Drone War in Pakistan - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ret-drone-war-in-pakistan.html history war drone US pakistan torture
shared by Javier E on 06 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • As the negotiations were taking place, the C.I.A.’s inspector general, John L. Helgerson, had just finished a searing report about the abuse of detainees in the C.I.A.’s secret prisons. The report kicked out the foundation upon which the C.I.A. detention and interrogation program had rested. It was perhaps the single most important reason for the C.I.A.’s shift from capturing to killing terrorism suspects.
  • Mr. Helgerson raised questions about whether C.I.A. officers might face criminal prosecution for the interrogations carried out in the secret prisons, and he suggested that interrogation methods like waterboarding, sleep deprivation and the exploiting of the phobias of prisoners — like confining them in a small box with live bugs — violated the United Nations Convention Against Torture.
  • The ground had shifted, and counterterrorism officials began to rethink the strategy for the secret war. Armed drones, and targeted killings in general, offered a new direction. Killing by remote control was the antithesis of the dirty, intimate work of interrogation. Targeted killings were cheered by Republicans and Democrats alike, and using drones flown by pilots who were stationed thousands of miles away made the whole strategy seem risk-free.
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  • Not long before, the agency had been deeply ambivalent about drone warfare. The Predator had been considered a blunt and unsophisticated killing tool, and many at the C.I.A. were glad that the agency had gotten out of the assassination business long ago. Three years before Mr. Muhammad’s death, and one year before the C.I.A. carried out its first targeted killing outside a war zone — in Yemen in 2002 — a debate raged over the legality and morality of using drones to kill suspected terrorists.
  • A new generation of C.I.A. officers had ascended to leadership positions, having joined the agency after the 1975 Congressional committee led by Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, which revealed extensive C.I.A. plots to kill foreign leaders, and President Gerald Ford’s subsequent ban on assassinations. The rise to power of this post-Church generation had a direct impact on the type of clandestine operations the C.I.A. chose to conduct.
  • John E. McLaughlin, then the C.I.A.’s deputy director, who the 9/11 commission reported had raised concerns about the C.I.A.’s being in charge of the Predator, said: “You can’t underestimate the cultural change that comes with gaining lethal authority. “When people say to me, ‘It’s not a big deal,’ ” he said, “I say to them, ‘Have you ever killed anyone?’ “It is a big deal. You start thinking about things differently,” he added. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, these concerns about the use of the C.I.A. to kill were quickly swept side.
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At Kimberly-Clark, 'Dead Wood' Workers Have Nowhere to Hide - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...olid-kimberly-clark-1471798944 corporate culture efficiency HR productivity profit
shared by Javier E on 22 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • One of the company’s goals now is “managing out dead wood,” aided by performance-management software that helps track and evaluate salaried workers’ progress and quickly expose laggards. Turnover is now about twice as high it was a decade ago, with approximately 10% of U.S. employees leaving annually, voluntarily or not, the company said.
  • Armed with personalized goals for employees and large quantities of data, Kimberly-Clark said it expects employees to keep improving—or else. “People can’t duck and hide in the same way they could in the past,” said Mr. Boston, who oversees talent management globally for the firm.
  • Coca-Cola Co. KO -0.41 % in June approved pushing its new performance-management process from the pilot stage to a global rollout. The new system encourages managers to conduct a monthly “reflection” on every direct report, answering five questions that include “Given his/her performance, would you assign this associate to increased scale, scope, and responsibilities?” and “Is this associate at risk for low performance?”
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  • The changes mirror what is happening inside many large companies, where “performance management” reflects the conviction that a sharpened focus on creating a high-performing workforce is a vital tool to generate revenue and profit.
  • Performance management shifts companies away from backward-looking, once-a-year reviews framed largely as compliance requirements—a paper trail for potential job cuts and salary decisions—to a process that is real-time, continuous and focused on helping people meet ambitious goals, or move out of the company faster.
  • The last recession led many employers to rethink the nearly automatic merit raises they had been doling out, forcing them to do a better job identifying high and low performers when giving raises and bonuses. Millennial workers, meanwhile, demand more feedback, more coaching and a stronger sense of their career path.
  • systems let managers track workers’ progress via dashboards that display their goals, accomplishments, attendance, peer feedback and other data.
  • Executives’ use of phrases like “performance culture” in conference calls with analysts and investors has doubled in the past five years, according to a review of transcripts in the Factiva news database. Firms that set goals and hold workers accountable “clearly outperform,” said Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University and co-author of a recent paper that used Census data to examine more than 32,000 U.S. manufacturing plants. He said they have faster growth, higher profitability and are less likely to go bankrupt.
  • Some academics say constant monitoring can feel intrusive and threatening to workers, especially those who value stability. But human-resources experts largely agree that the traditional review process is a waste of time and needs an overhaul.
  • Remaining employees are expected to work “smarter” and meet regularly raised targets. “We have to routinely shuffle the resources and say, what’s the most important thing we need to do today, this week, this month, to drive this objective?”
  • Using the Workday tool, Kimberly-Clark’s salaried employees set goals and report their progress, record accomplishments or mistakes, and solicit and send feedback
  • The system collects and archives feedback, which can be seen by employees’ managers. It also holds data on staffers’ strengths and development needs, their performance ratings and the risk they might leave the company.
  • “It’s certainly more challenging” for employees, said Mr. Herbert, the retired sales director. “If you really don’t have the mettle, you’re asked to get on with your life’s work [elsewhere].”
  • In 2015, Kimberly-Clark retained 95% of its top performers. Among the employees whose work was rated “unacceptable” or “inconsistent,” 44% left the company voluntarily or were let go. Ms. Gottung said she is “pretty pleased” that low-performer turnover has been rising.
  • Mr. Falk, the CEO, reviews 100 senior managers’ performance plans every year to make sure their goals are ambitious and reflect company priorities. Managers are instructed to begin every meeting with a story about how someone demonstrated one of the six behaviors the company promotes, such as “build trust” or “think customer.”
  • Regular “culture of accountability” sessions train employees in giving and receiving difficult feedback. When a colleague suggests improvements, “the proper response was ‘thank you for the feedback,’ not defensiveness,” Mr. Luettgen said. Employees also practice reinforcing positive behaviors, such as praising a colleague who had given up a weekend to solve a customer complaint.
  • More than 10,000 of Kimberly-Clark’s workers used the feedback feature in Workday in 2014, and about 25% of the comments were considered “constructive,” while the rest were positive or neutral, said Sandy Allred, a senior director on the talent management team. Staffers can send feedback to peers or workers above or below them
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Americans Can Soon Buy Groceries Online With Food Stamps - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...513152 food stamps poverty usa
shared by lindsayweber1 on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced an ambitious-sounding pilot program that will give participants in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—best known by the colloquial term “food stamps”—a way to purchase their groceries online. The two-year trial, which will begin this summer, provides low-income Americans in seven states with a system to have eligible items delivered to their homes through retailers like FreshDirect, Amazon, Safeway, and ShopRite and to pay for them using federal benefits.
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Mikhail Gorbachev banned from Ukraine - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html Gorbachev Ukraine Soviet Banned
shared by maddieireland334 on 31 May 16 - No Cached
  • The Ukraine has banned Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, after he came out in support of Russia's annexation of Crimea.
  • Gorbachev's comments on Crimea are the latest wedge between Ukraine and Russia.
  • Ukraine's Security Service told CNN the ban was because of Gorbachev's "public support of military annexation of Crimea."
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  • Gorbachev's spokesman, Vladimir Polyakovm, said the former leader knew Ukraine was mulling the ban and had earlier brushed it off, saying he did not travel to the country anyway.
  • saying he would have acted the same way as Russian President Vladimir Putin on Crimea if he were Russia's leader today.
  • He also accused the United States of "rubbing its hands with glee" over the demise of the Soviet Union.
  • Gorbachev led the Soviet Union from 1985 until his resignation in 1991
  • The Crimean Peninsula was annexed through a controversial referendum, which returned a large majority in support of joining Russia.
  • The United States and Europe introduced a wide range of sanctions against Russia in an effort to pressure Moscow to back down from aggressive moves against Ukraine.
  • Most recently, the two countries bickered over Nadiya Savchenko, a Ukrainian military pilot who was detained by Russia for two years, and two Russian soldiers held in Ukraine
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A Plan in Case Robots Take the Jobs: Give Everyone a Paycheck - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-give-everyone-a-paycheck.html jobs robot work ubi inequality tech living standard crisis economic
shared by Javier E on 23 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • In Robot America, most manual laborers will have been replaced by herculean bots. Truck drivers, cabbies, delivery workers and airline pilots will have been superseded by vehicles that do it all. Doctors, lawyers, business executives and even technology columnists for The New York Times will have seen their ranks thinned by charming, attractive, all-knowing algorithms.
  • U.B.I., and it goes like this: As the jobs dry up because of the spread of artificial intelligence, why not just give everyone a paycheck?
  • While U.B.I. has been associated with left-leaning academics, feminists and other progressive activists, it has lately been adopted by a wider range of thinkers, including some libertarians and conservatives. It has also gained support among a cadre of venture capitalists in New York and Silicon Valley, the people most familiar with the potential for technology to alter modern work.
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  • tech supporters of U.B.I. consider machine intelligence to be something like a natural bounty for society: The country has struck oil, and now it can hand out checks to each of its citizens.
  • These supporters argue machine intelligence will produce so much economic surplus that we could collectively afford to liberate much of humanity from both labor and suffering.
  • As computers perform more of our work, we’d all be free to become artists, scholars, entrepreneurs or otherwise engage our passions in a society no longer centered on the drudgery of daily labor.
  • “For a couple hundred years, we’ve constructed our entire world around the need to work. Now we’re talking about more than just a tweak to the economy — it’s as foundational a departure as when we went from an agrarian society to an industrial one.”
  • “I think it’s a bad use of a human to spend 20 years of their life driving a truck back and forth across the United States,” Mr. Wenger said. “That’s not what we aspire to do as humans — it’s a bad use of a human brain — and automation and basic income is a development that will free us to do lots of incredible things that are more aligned with what it means to be human.”
  • There is an urgency to the techies’ interest in U.B.I. They argue that machine intelligence reached an inflection point in the last couple of years, and that technological progress now looks destined to change how most of the world works.
  • Wage growth is sluggish, job security is nonexistent, inequality looks inexorable, and the ideas that once seemed like a sure path to a better future (like taking on debt for college) are in doubt. Even where technology has created more jobs, like the so-called gig economy work created by services like Uber, it has only added to our collective uncertainty about the future of work.
  • people are looking at these trends and realizing these questions about the future of work are more real and immediate than they guessed,”
  • A cynic might see the interest of venture capitalists in U.B.I. as a way for them to atone for their complicity in the tech that might lead to permanent changes in the global economy.
  • they don’t see U.B.I. merely as a defense of the current social order. Instead they see automation and U.B.I. as the most optimistic path toward wider social progress.
  • When you give everyone free money, what do people do with their time? Do they goof off, or do they try to pursue more meaningful pursuits? Do they become more entrepreneurial? How would U.B.I. affect economic inequality? How would it alter people’s psychology and mood? Do we, as a species, need to be employed to feel fulfilled, or is that merely a legacy of postindustrial capitalism?
  • Proponents say these questions will be answered by research, which in turn will prompt political change. For now, they argue the proposal is affordable if we alter tax and welfare policies to pay for it, and if we account for the ways technological progress in health care and energy will reduce the amount necessary to provide a basic cost of living.
  • They also note that increasing economic urgency will push widespread political acceptance of the idea. “There’s a sense that growing inequality is intractable, and that we need to do something about it,
  • Andrew L. Stern, a former president of the Service Employees International Union, who is working on a book about U.B.I., compared the feeling of the current anxiety around jobs to a time of war. “I grew up during the Vietnam War, and my parents were antiwar for one reason: I could be drafted,” he said.
  • Today, as people across all income levels become increasingly worried about how they and their children will survive in tech-infatuated America, “we are back to the Vietnam War when it comes to jobs,
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Russian jet barrel-rolls over U.S. aircraft - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html US russian aircraft
shared by Megan Flanagan on 20 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • plane was barrel-rolled by a Russian jet over the Baltic Sea
  • when a Russian jet "performed erratic and aggressive maneuvers" as it flew within 50 feet of the U.S. aircraft's wing tip
  • "intercepted by a Russian SU-27 in an unsafe and unprofessional manner,"
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  • actions of a single pilot have the potential to unnecessarily escalate tensions between countries
  • United States is protesting with the Russian government.Read More
  • incident were "not consistent with reality"
  • encounter comes just days after the U.S. Embassy in Moscow issued formal concerns with the Russian government over an incident last week in which Russian fighter jets flew close to the USS Donald Cook in the Baltic.
  • ncounters between Russian military aircraft and U.S. warships have become increasing common in recent months
  • Department of Defense announced it was spending $3.4 billion for the European Reassurance Initiative in an effort to deter Russian aggression against NATO allies following Russia's 2014 intervention in Ukraine.
  • U.S. has deployed additional military assets throughout Europe
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Nonfiction Curriculum Enhanced Reading Skills in New York City Schools - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-in-new-york-city-schools.html reading curriculum education K-12 core
shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 12 - Cached
  • For three years, a pilot program tracked the reading ability of approximately 1,000 students at 20 New York City schools, following them from kindergarten through second grade. Half of the schools adopted a curriculum designed by the education theorist E. D. Hirsch Jr.’s Core Knowledge Foundation. The other 10 used a variety of methods, but most fell under the definition of “balanced literacy,”
  • The study found that second graders who were taught to read using the Core Knowledge program scored significantly higher on reading comprehension tests than did those in the comparison schools. It also tested children on their social studies and science knowledge, and again found that the Core Knowledge pupils came out ahead.
  • The study found that for each of the three years, students in the Core Knowledge program had greater one-year gains on a brief reading test than their peers in the comparison schools.
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  • Under the balanced literacy approach, which was used by seven of the comparison schools and remains the most popular method of teaching reading in the city’s schools, children are encouraged to develop a love of reading by choosing books that are of interest to them.
  • Reading nonfiction writing is the key component of the Core Knowledge curriculum, which is based on the theory that children raised reading storybooks will lack the necessary background and vocabulary to understand history and science texts. While the curriculum allows children to read fiction, it also calls on them to knowledgeably discuss weather patterns, the solar system, and how ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia compare.
  • The curriculum may have a particular appeal for city schools beginning to adopt the Common Core standards, which emphasize nonfiction reading and will go into effect in 2014.
  • anonymous on 23 Mar 12
     
    Though the Core Knowledge approach seems to have its merits when it comes to standardized test scores, there are certainly disadvantages. Students in the Core program are receiving higher scores on the test because they have been "trained" in that specific field. Now, as a junior, I have recently taken my first SAT. The SAT tests three areas of study (critical reading, writing, and mathematics). If my entire school experience had been based solely upon these three areas, I would be lacking much vital information. Sure, in this alternate universe, I might be a 2400 scoring genius debating between Yale, Brown, and Princeton, but does that mean I am at all prepared for such colleges? By these standards, we might as well just toss out History class (Not on standardized testing? Get rid of it!). I am not suggesting that preparation for standardized testing should be completely overlooked in school curriculum; I just think that it should not be the main objective. In the long run, reading "Ramona Quimby, Age 8" in 1st grade may not have made my scores as high as those reading Malcolm Gladwell's latest work, but it did something just as important. It, along with numerous other books of my choosing, cultivated my love for reading. This love for reading will stay with me long after standardized test scores even matter, and I might just get to that Gladwell book after all.
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E-Books on Tablets Fight Digital Distractions - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ight-digital-distractions.html book devices tablet reading tech trend
shared by Javier E on 05 Mar 12 - Cached
  • People who read e-books on tablets like the iPad are realizing that while a book in print or on a black-and-white Kindle is straightforward and immersive, a tablet offers a menu of distractions that can fragment the reading experience, or stop it in its tracks.
  • That adds up to a reading experience that is more like a 21st-century cacophony than a traditional solitary activity. And some of the millions of consumers who have bought tablets and sampled e-books on apps from Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble have come away with a conclusion: It’s harder then ever to sit down and focus on reading.
  • “The tablet is like a temptress,” said James McQuivey, the Forrester Research analyst who led the survey. “It’s constantly saying, ‘You could be on YouTube now.’ Or it’s sending constant alerts that pop up, saying you just got an e-mail. Reading itself is trying to compete.” Indeed, the basic menu for the Kindle Fire offers links to video, apps, the Web, music, newsstand and books, effectively making books (once Amazon’s stock in trade) just another menu option
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  • book buyers may switch to tablets and then discover that they just aren’t very amenable to reading. Will those readers gradually drift away from books, letting movies or the Internet occupy their leisure time instead?
  • Forrester said that it was more likely that tablets would eventually edge out black-and-white e-readers. “The historical precedent suggests that’s the case,” he said, citing the Palm Pilot, digital point-and-shoot cameras and portable GPS systems for the car as items that have been gradually displaced by multifunction devices. “There’s less and less reason to have these as stand-alone devices.
  • For Erin Faulk, a 29-year-old legal assistant and voracious reader in Los Angeles, the era of e-readers has had one major effect: she has accumulated many more books that she categorizes as “DNFs” — Did Not Finish. But she is also buying more books, she said, and she thinks that all the interruptions have, in a way, made her a more discerning reader.
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The future of jobs: The onrushing wave | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...e-long-run-employment-not-less employment technology trends innovation inequality
shared by Javier E on 20 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • drudgery may soon enough give way to frank unemployment. There is already a long-term trend towards lower levels of employment in some rich countries. The proportion of American adults participating in the labour force recently hit its lowest level since 1978
  • In a recent speech that was modelled in part on Keynes’s “Possibilities”, Larry Summers, a former American treasury secretary, looked at employment trends among American men between 25 and 54. In the 1960s only one in 20 of those men was not working. According to Mr Summers’s extrapolations, in ten years the number could be one in seven.
  • A 2013 paper by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, of the University of Oxford, argued that jobs are at high risk of being automated in 47% of the occupational categories into which work is customarily sorted. That includes accountancy, legal work, technical writing and a lot of other white-collar occupations.
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  • The impacts of technological change take their time appearing. They also vary hugely from industry to industry. Although in many simple economic models technology pairs neatly with capital and labour to produce output, in practice technological changes do not affect all workers the same way. Some find that their skills are complementary to new technologies. Others find themselves out of work.
  • The case for a highly disruptive period of economic growth is made by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, professors at MIT, in “The Second Machine Age”, a book to be published later this month. Like the first great era of industrialisation, they argue, it should deliver enormous benefits—but not without a period of disorienting and uncomfortable change
  • Their argument rests on an underappreciated aspect of the exponential growth in chip processing speed, memory capacity and other computer metrics: that the amount of progress computers will make in the next few years is always equal to the progress they have made since the very beginning. Mr Brynjolfsson and Mr McAfee reckon that the main bottleneck on innovation is the time it takes society to sort through the many combinations and permutations of new technologies and business models.
  • A startling progression of inventions seems to bear their thesis out. Ten years ago technologically minded economists pointed to driving cars in traffic as the sort of human accomplishment that computers were highly unlikely to master. Now Google cars are rolling round California driver-free
  • Even after computers beat grandmasters at chess (once thought highly unlikely), nobody thought they could take on people at free-form games played in natural language. Then Watson, a pattern-recognising supercomputer developed by IBM, bested the best human competitors in America’s popular and syntactically tricksy general-knowledge quiz show “Jeopardy!” Versions of Watson are being marketed to firms
  • Text-mining programs will displace professional jobs in legal services. Biopsies will be analysed more efficiently by image-processing software than lab technicians. Accountants may follow travel agents and tellers into the unemployment line as tax software improves. Machines are already turning basic sports results and financial data into good-enough news stories.
  • A taxi driver will be a rarity in many places by the 2030s or 2040s. That sounds like bad news for journalists who rely on that most reliable source of local knowledge and prejudice—but will there be many journalists left to care? Will there be airline pilots? Or traffic cops? Or soldiers?
  • Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University and a much-read blogger, writes in his most recent book, “Average is Over”, that rich economies seem to be bifurcating into a small group of workers with skills highly complementary with machine intelligence, for whom he has high hopes, and the rest, for whom not so much.
  • the second machine age will make such trial and error easier. It will be shockingly easy to launch a startup, bring a new product to market and sell to billions of global consumers (see article). Those who create or invest in blockbuster ideas may earn unprecedented returns as a result.
  • Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics, argues along similar lines that America may be pioneering a hyper-unequal economic model in which a top 1% of capital-owners and “supermanagers” grab a growing share of national income and accumulate an increasing concentration of national wealth
  • The rise of the middle-class—a 20th-century innovation—was a hugely important political and social development across the world. The squeezing out of that class could generate a more antagonistic, unstable and potentially dangerous politics.
  • The current doldrum in wages may, like that of the early industrial era, be a temporary matter, with the good times about to roll (see chart 3). These jobs may look distinctly different from those they replace. Just as past mechanisation freed, or forced, workers into jobs requiring more cognitive dexterity, leaps in machine intelligence could create space for people to specialise in more emotive occupations, as yet unsuited to machines: a world of artists and therapists, love counsellors and yoga instructors.
  • though growth in areas of the economy that are not easily automated provides jobs, it does not necessarily help real wages. Mr Summers points out that prices of things-made-of-widgets have fallen remarkably in past decades; America’s Bureau of Labour Statistics reckons that today you could get the equivalent of an early 1980s television for a twentieth of its then price,
  • owever, prices of things not made of widgets, most notably college education and health care, have shot up
  • As innovation continues, automation may bring down costs in some of those stubborn areas as well, though those dominated by scarcity—such as houses in desirable places—are likely to resist the trend, as may those where the state keeps market forces at bay. But if innovation does make health care or higher education cheaper, it will probably be at the cost of more jobs, and give rise to yet more concentration of income.
  • Adaptation to past waves of progress rested on political and policy responses. The most obvious are the massive improvements in educational attainment brought on first by the institution of universal secondary education and then by the rise of university attendance. Policies aimed at similar gains would now seem to be in order. But as Mr Cowen has pointed out, the gains of the 19th and 20th centuries will be hard to duplicate.
  • Boosting the skills and earning power of the children of 19th-century farmers and labourers took little more than offering schools where they could learn to read, write and do algebra. Pushing a large proportion of college graduates to complete graduate work successfully will be harder and more expensive. Perhaps cheap and innovative online education will indeed make new attainment possible. But as Mr Cowen notes, such programmes may tend to deliver big gains only for the most conscientious students.
  • Everyone should be able to benefit from productivity gains—in that, Keynes was united with his successors. His worry about technological unemployment was mainly a worry about a “temporary phase of maladjustment” as society and the economy adjusted to ever greater levels of productivity
  • However, society may find itself sorely tested if, as seems possible, growth and innovation deliver handsome gains to the skilled, while the rest cling to dwindling employment opportunities at stagnant wages.
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