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maddieireland334

Could Russia REALLY go to war with NATO? - CNN.com - 0 views

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

Russia NATO War History WWIII US

shared by maddieireland334 on 31 May 16 - No Cached
  • A new book by General Sir Richard Shirreff, NATO's deputy supreme allied commander for Europe between 2011 and 2014, evokes a potential scenario that leads to a devastating future war with Russia.
  • In his account, Russia rapidly expands its war aims by invading the Baltic States, which are NATO members, and world war ensues.
  • The latter, written at the height of the Cold War, was conceived as a "future history," supposedly looking back at the outbreak and subsequent unfolding of a full-blown NATO vs Warsaw Pact war.
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  • Russia has undoubtedly suffered economically from the global downturn in energy prices and from economic sanctions following the annexation of the Crimea, but the degree of dependence, in particular energy dependence, that Western Europe has on Russia is highly significant.
  • For example, the Nord Stream pipeline laid in international waters along the Baltic from Russia to Germany, supplies a significant -- according to EU figures, 38.7% -- proportion of Western Europe's gas needs.
  • Russia desperately needs the foreign earnings this generates
  • Consequently, while the armies and individual battles might be smaller than those in World War II, the death toll, the loss of war-making material and both sides' ability to reduce everything in their paths to rubble would make a large-scale conflict far more wide-reaching and, in terms of recovery, longer-lasting than anything we have seen before.
  • Turkey, on Russia's southern border, joined the military alliance in 1952, and since the end of the Cold War, many of Russia's former Warsaw Pact allies, including Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltic States have signed up, too.
  • It's certainly in Putin's interests that the West cuts defense spending and has a diminished appetite for brinkmanship and it is perhaps understandable that a recently retired general should push for this to be reversed.
  • However, NATO's forces are deployed globally to a far greater extent than Russia's. And even acknowledging that Russia could achieve a temporary military advantage in, say, the Baltic, for how long and at what price?
  • the likelihood of a Kursk-style pitched battle between heavy armor is highly unlikely.
  • A real-life analysis of the Russian president's actions would suggest that he is being entirely rational and that his actions are those or an arch-realist who places the needs of his country first.
  • Such a war, employing ships, submarines and aircraft with truly global reach, would indeed be a world war and would pay scant attention to the difference between military and civilian targets: this would truly be a war among the peoples.
  • Despite Shirreff's warnings, the nightmare scenario of nuclear war is highly unlikely as neither side ultimately would wish to unleash destruction on that scale.
  • This would be total war, waged on every imaginable front, from the internet and the stock market to outer space.
proudsa

The Impact of Money Bail - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...484034

bail politics impact History Crisis money

shared by proudsa on 26 May 16 - No Cached
  • More than 60 percent of people in America’s overcrowded jails are there because they can’t afford to pay their bail amou
  • ipple effect
  • questions about America’s pretrial system and the way it affects the lives of unconvicted people.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • But that correlation might exist because some of the factors in the way bail is set are likely related to guilt—so correlations found between bail and convictions have been hard to interpret in the sense that past studies have not been able to pinpoint whether those negative outcomes are really due to bail being assigned.
  • This randomness is ideal for what economists call a natural experiment
  • being assigned money bail increases the probability of conviction by about 6 percentage points and also causes a 4 percentage point increase in the risk that someone would go on to commit another crime.
  • : That paper used the same data set from Philadelphia, and concluded that pretrial detention led to a 6.6 percentage point increase in the likelihood of conviction.
  • “Many of these convictions appear to be the result of guilty pleas by detained persons,” says Ethan Frenchman, a public defender in Baltimore and co-author of the study. “Our paper further demonstrates how the American money-bail system is not only grossly unfair and irrational, but imposes far greater harms on defendants and the public than we realize.”
Javier E

"The clan leader of white Americans": Conservative David Frum perfectly explains how th... - 0 views

www.salon.com/...n_of_the_gop_has_created_trump

white demagogue crisis election conservatism gop tribal

shared by Javier E on 02 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • There are mainstream Republicans who are opting out, more than people may realize. The Stop Trump Movement boasts some major players in the GOP scene, people like Mitt Romney, George Will, Erick Erickson, David Brooks and Glenn Beck to name just a few. 
  • The more valiant among them take the threat of Trump seriously and are willing to admit the truth, such as Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal who told Fareed Zakaria over the weekend:
  • It’s important that Donald Trump and what he represents, this “ethnic conservatism or populism” be so decisively rebuked that the Republican party and Republican voters will forever learn their lesson that they cannot nominate a man so manifestly unqualified to be president in any way shape or form.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • This disconcerting breaking of the norms that make democratic governance possible has reached a critical stage.
  • In order for democracy to function you cannot depend entirely on the laws to enforce it.  It requires a common understanding and acceptance of  the rules and norms developed over a long period that guarantee a certain level of civilized interaction. We’re losing them and the consequences could be very serious.
  • Trump may lose this election and there will be some kind of reset. But even if he does, these rules and norms are very difficult to put back in place once they’ve been tossed aside. It may not happen, which raises the rather chilling question of what will be left in his wake.
Javier E

The one thing rich parents do for their kids that makes all the difference - The Washin... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-live-by-the-very-best-schools

rich schools segregation income quality education

shared by Javier E on 11 May 16 - No Cached
  • "Forty to fifty years of social-science research tells us what an important context neighborhoods are, so buying a neighborhood is probably one of the most important things you can do for your kid," says Ann Owens, a sociologist at the University of Southern California. "There’s mixed evidence on whether buying all this other stuff matters, to0. But buying a neighborhood basically provides huge advantages."
  • t wealthy parents snapping up such homes have driven the rise of income segregation in America since 1990. The rich and non-rich are less and less likely to share the same neighborhoods in the United States, a trend shaped more by the behavior of the wealthy than the poor or middle class.
  • The recent rise of income segregation, she finds, is almost entirely caused by what's happening among families with children.
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  • Along a number of divides, whether by race or poverty levels, children tend to live with more segregation than the population at large.
  • By 2010, income segregation was twice as high among families with children younger than 18 living at home as among households without them. That means that a typical childless household lives among more diverse neighbors from across the economic spectrum than does the typical family with children.
  • The nationwide phenomenon of rising income segregation is in effect the aggregate outcome of parents who can afford to jockeying for position for their kids
  • as income inequality has widened over this same time, the rich have more and more money to spend on the real estate arms race to get into wealthy neighborhoods, where everyone else is wealthy, too
  • rising income inequality hasn't translated into the same residential sorting effect for households without children. That's perhaps because the childless rich — including so-called DINKs — are spending their greater wealth on other luxuries
  • Given that school quality is embedded in the high cost of housing in many communities
  • it's also logical that households without children would decline to pay a premium for an amenity they don't plan to use.
  • Most real estate sites such as Redfin list grades for local schools right on the bottom of each property listing. So it's never been easier to make sure you're buying not only the best home, but also the public schools with the best standardized test scores
  • "We always think, well, we’re never going to have integrated schools as long as we have such highly segregated neighborhoods," she says. "I want to point out maybe we’ll never have integrated neighborhoods if we have segregated schools."
  • If we found ways to integrate schools — as former District Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) controversially proposed two years ago — that might take some of the exclusivity out of certain neighborhoods.
  • Politically, the two topics that most enrage voters are threats to property values and local schools.  So either of these ideas — wielding housing policy to affect schools, or school policy to affect housing — would be tough sells.
  • At least, she says, we are all now talking more about inequality and segregation.
Javier E

The Two Contradictory Ideas Many Americans Have About the Economy - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...480132

American idea work success inequality economic stagnation wages culture self-determination

shared by Javier E on 28 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • How do people reconcile a belief in individual autonomy with nationwide wage stagnation?
  • “Many middle-class wage earners are victims of the economy, and, perhaps, of that great, glowing, irresistible American promise that has been drummed into our heads since birth: Just work hard and you can have it all.”
  • This sentiment taunts at two sacred and quintessentially American convictions—that success is self-determined and that advancement is inevitable for anyone with a serious work ethic. According to a 2014 Pew Global Attitudes Study, people in the United States are much more likely to hold these two beliefs than many of their European counterparts.
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  • Many Americans, then, are holding two contradictory ideas in their mind at once: the optimistic belief that their success is in their hands (on display since Tocqueville’s Democracy in America) and the acknowledgement that wages have been steadily stagnating (on decline since the band America).
  • In his story, Gabler concedes that, no matter how illogical and uninformed his financial decisions might have been, he remained seduced by a superseding assumption that he “would always overcome any adversity, should it arrive.”
  • “This is the genius and the Achilles’ heel of American culture,” Newman says. “We do have a strong belief in self-determination and agency, even when our expectations fly in the face of reality.”
  • Struggling white-collar workers and managers, she says, especially stood out in her research for how likely they were to believe they were the authors of their own fate. “And if your destiny isn’t working out very well,” she says, “you only have yourself to blame,” in their telling.
  • part of what makes financial fragility so distressing in the United States is that citizens aren’t afforded the regimen of protections offered by Europe’s wealthier governments.
  • “These are social democracies that come to the rescue of people in trouble or are just more generous even if they’re not in trouble,” says Newman. “So the kind of suffering that will happen in a society like that is not one of material deprivation nearly as much as what we call in the trade ‘social exclusion.’”
Javier E

Barry Latzer on Why Crime Rises and Falls - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...487583

crime demographics culture law enforcement Policy

shared by Javier E on 20 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • Barry Latzer: The optimistic view is that the late ‘60s crime tsunami, which ended in the mid-1990s, was sui generis, and we are now in a period of "permanent peace," with low crime for the foreseeable future
  • Pessimists rely on the late Eric Monkkonen's cyclical theory of crime, which suggests that the successive weakening and strengthening of social controls on violence lead to a crime roller coaster. The current zeitgeist favors a weakening of social controls, including reductions in incarcerative sentences and restrictions on police, on the grounds that the criminal-justice system is too racist, unfair, and expensive. If Monkkonen were correct, we will get a crime rise before long.
  • the most provocative feature of your book: your belief that different cultural groups show different propensities for crime, enduring over time, and that these groups carry these propensities with them when they migrate from place to place.
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  • this idea and its implications stir more controversy among criminologists than any other. Would you state your position as precisely as possible in this brief space?
  • Latzer: First of all, culture and race, in the biological or genetic sense, are very different. Were it not for the racism of the 18th and 19th centuries, we might not have had a marked cultural difference between blacks and whites in the U.S. But history cannot be altered, only studied and sometimes deplored. 28 28
  • Different groups of people, insofar as they consider themselves separate from others, share various cultural characteristics: dietary, religious, linguistic, artistic, etc. They also share common beliefs and values. There is nothing terribly controversial about this. If it is mistaken then the entire fields of sociology and anthropology are built on mistaken premises.
  • With respect to violent crime, scholars are most interested in a group's preference for violence as a way of resolving interpersonal conflict. Some groups, traditionally rural, developed cultures of “honor”—strong sensitivities to personal insult. We see this among white and black southerners in the 19th century, and among southern Italian and Mexican immigrants to the U.S. in the early 20th century. These groups engaged in high levels of assaultive crimes in response to perceived slights, mainly victimizing their own kind.
  • This honor culture explains the high rates of violent crime among African Americans who, living amidst southern whites for over a century, incorporated those values. When blacks migrated north in the 20th century, they transported these rates of violence. Elijah Anderson's book, The Code of the Streets, describes the phenomenon, and Thomas Sowell, in Black Liberals and White Rednecks, helps explain it. 28 28
  • Theories of crime that point to poverty and racism have the advantage of explaining why low-income groups predominate when it comes to violent crime. What they really explain, though, is why more affluent groups refrain from such crime. And the answer is that middle-class people (regardless of race) stand to lose a great deal from such behavior.
  • The cultural explanation for violence is superior to explanations that rest of poverty or racism, however, because it can account for the differentials in the violent-crime rates of groups with comparable adversities
  • Frum: Let’s flash forward to the present day. You make short work of most of the theories explaining the crime drop-off since the mid-1990s: the Freakonomics theory that attributes the crime decline to easier access to abortion after 1970; the theory that credits reductions in lead poisoning; and the theory that credits the mid-1990s economic spurt. Why are these ideas wrong? And what would you put in their place? 28 28
  • both the abortion and leaded-gasoline theories are mistaken because of a failure to explain the crime spike that immediately preceded the great downturn. Abortions became freely available starting in the 1970s, which is also when lead was removed from gasoline. Fast-forward 15 to 20 years to the period in which unwanted babies had been removed from the population and were not part of the late adolescent, early adult, cohort. This cohort was responsible for the huge spike in crime in the late 1980s, early 1990s, the crack cocaine crime rise. Why didn't the winnowing through abortion of this population reduce crime?
  • Likewise, the lead removal theory. The same "lead-free" generation that engaged in less crime from 1993 on committed high rates of violent crime between 1987 and 1992.
  • As for economic booms, it is tempting to argue that they reduce crime on the theory that people who have jobs and higher incomes have less incentive to rob and steal. This is true. But violent crimes, such as murder and manslaughter, assault, and rape, are not motivated by pecuniary interests. They are motivated by arguments, often of a seemingly petty nature, desires for sexual conquest by violence in the case of rape, or domestic conflicts, none of which are related to general economic conditions
  • Rises in violent crime have much more to do with migrations of high-crime cultures, especially to locations in which governments, particularly crime-control agents, are weak.
  • Declines are more likely when crime controls are strong, and there are no migrations or demographic changes associated with crime rises
  • In short, the aging of the violent boomer generation followed by the sudden rise and demise of the crack epidemic best explains the crime trough that began in the mid-1990s and seems to be continuing even today.
  • Contrary to leftist claims, strengthened law enforcement played a major role in the crime decline. The strengthening was the result of criminal-justice policy changes demanded by the public, black and white, and was necessitated by the weakness of the criminal justice system in the late ‘60s
  • On the other hand, conservatives tend to rely too much on the strength of the criminal-justice system in explaining crime oscillations, which, as I said, have a great to do with migrations and demographics
  • The contemporary challenge is to keep law enforcement strong without alienating African Americans, an especially difficult proposition given the outsized violent-crime rates in low-income black communities.
  • Frum: The sad exception to the downward trend in crime since 1990 is the apparent increase in mass shootings
  • Should such attacks be included in our thinking about crime? If so, how should we think about them? 28 28
  • If we separate out the ideologically motivated mass killings, such as Orlando (apparently) and San Bernardino, then we have a different problem. Surveilling potential killers who share a violent ideology will be extremely difficult but worthwhile. Limiting the availability of rapid-fire weapons with high-capacity ammunition clips is also worth doing, but politically divisive.
  • of course, developments abroad will affect the number of incidents, as will the copycat effect in the immediate aftermath of an incident. This is a complex problem, different from ordinary killings, which, by the way, take many more lives.
Javier E

Who Are We? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...who-are-we.html

American idea narrative myth history trump national character

shared by Javier E on 05 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • “That’s not who we are.” So said President Obama, again and again throughout his administration, in speeches urging Americans to side with him against the various outrages perpetrated by Republicans.
  • If close to half of America voted for Republicans in the Obama years and support Trump today, then clearly something besides the pieties of cosmopolitan liberalism is very much a part of who we are.
  • This self-undermining flaw makes the trope a useful way to grasp the dilemmas facing Trump’s opponents. In seeking to reject Trump’s chauvinist vision, they end up excluding too much of what a unifying counternarrative would require.
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  • The exclusion happens by omission, in the course of telling a story about America that’s powerful but incomplete.
  • In this narrative, which has surged to the fore in response to Trump’s refugee and visa policies, we are a propositional nation bound together by ideas rather than any specific cultural traditions
  • Given this story’s premises, saying that’s not who we are is a way of saying that all more particularist understandings of Americanism, all non-universalist forms of patriotic memory, need to be transcended.
  • But the real American past was particularist as well as universalist. Our founders built their a new order atop specifically European intellectual traditions. Our immigrants joined a settler culture, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, that demanded assimilation to its norms.
  • Then for a variety of reasons — a necessary reckoning with white supremacism, a new and diverse wave of immigration, the pull of a more globalist ethos, the waning of institutional religion — that mid-century story stopped making as much sense.
  • As late as the 1960s, liberalism as well as conservatism identified with these particularisms, and with a national narrative that honored and included them. The exhortations of civil rights activists assumed a Christian moral consensus.
  • Our crisis of the house divided was a Christian civil war. Our great national drama was a westward expansion that conquered a native population rather than coexisting with it.
  • n its place emerged a left-wing narrative that stands in judgment on the racist-misogynist-robber baron past, and a mainstream liberal narrative that has room for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Alexander Hamilton (as opposed to the slightly more Trumpish genuine article) and Emma Lazarus, but feels unsure about the rest.
  • meanwhile for a great many Americans the older narrative still feels like the real history. They still see themselves more as settlers than as immigrants, identifying with the Pilgrims and the Founders, with Lewis and Clark and Davy Crockett and Laura Ingalls Wilder. They still embrace the Iliadic mythos that grew up around the Civil War, prefer the melting pot to multiculturalism, assume a Judeo-Christian civil religion rather the “spiritual but not religious” version.
  • Trump’s ascent is, in part, an attempt to restore their story to pre-eminence. It’s a restoration attempt that can’t succeed, because the country has changed too much, and because that national narrative required correction.
  • But so far we haven’t found a way to correct the story while honoring its full sweep — including all the white-male-Protestant-European protagonists to whom, for all their sins, we owe so much of our inheritance.
  • Instead liberalism, under pressure from the left, has become steadily more anxious about its political and cultural progenitors, with Woodrow Wilson joining Jackson and Jefferson in the dock
  • Meanwhile the right’s narrative has become steadily more exclusionary — religious-conservative outreach to Muslims has given way to Islamophobia, racial optimism has been replaced by white resentment.
  • Maybe no unifying story is really possible. Maybe the gap between a heroic founders-and-settlers narrative and the truth about what befell blacks and Indians and others cannot be adequately bridged.
  • But any leader who wants to bury Trumpism (as opposed to just beating Trump) would need to reach for one — for a story about who we are and were, not just what we’re not, that the people who still believe in yesterday’s American story can recognize as their own.
Javier E

The Facebook Illusion - Douthat-NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hat-the-facebook-illusion.html

facebook internet economic economic benefit employment

shared by Javier E on 27 May 12 - No Cached
  • Mark Zuckerberg’s social networking site has always struck me as one of the most noxious, dependent for its success on the darker aspects of online life: the zeal for constant self-fashioning and self-promotion, the pursuit of virtual forms of “community” and “friendship” that bear only a passing resemblance to the genuine article, and the relentless diminution of the private sphere in the quest for advertising dollars.
  • the problem is not that Facebook doesn’t make money. It’s that it doesn’t make that much money, and doesn’t have an obvious way to make that much more of it, because (like so many online concerns) it hasn’t figured out how to effectively monetize its million upon millions of users.
  • This “huge reach, limited profitability” problem is characteristic of the digital economy as a whole
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  • the Internet is a wonder when it comes to generating “cheap fun.” But because “so many of its products are free,” and because so much of a typical Web company’s work is “performed more or less automatically by the software and the servers,” the online world is rather less impressive when it comes to generating job growth.
  • the more purely digital a company’s product, the fewer jobs it tends to create and the fewer dollars it can earn per user
  • From the lowbrow to the highbrow, LOLcats to Wikipedia, vast amounts of Internet content are created by people with no expectation of remuneration. The “new economy,” in this sense, isn’t always even a commercial economy at all. Instead, as Slate’s Matthew Yglesias has suggested, it’s a kind of hobbyist’s paradise, one that’s subsidized by surpluses from the old economy it was supposed to gradually replace.
  • Despite nearly two decades of dot-com enthusiasm, the information sector is still quite small relative to other sectors of the economy; it currently has one of the nation’s higher unemployment rates; and it’s one of the few sectors where unemployment has actually risen over the last year.
  • None of this makes the Internet any less revolutionary. But it’s created a cultural revolution more than an economic one.
Javier E

China's 'Fault Lines': Yu Jie on His New Biography of Liu Xiaobo by Ian Johnson | NYRbl... - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...-fault-lines-yu-jie-liu-xiaobo

china historical intellectual influence european democracy Christianity

shared by Javier E on 24 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Yu Jie is one of China’s most prominent essayists and critics, with more than thirty books to his name. His latest work is a biography of his friend, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, that was published in Chinese in Hong Kong a few weeks ago. It is not the first time he has stirred up controversy in China. Yu first gained fame in 1
  • In 2003, Yu converted to Christianity and increasingly complemented his provocative writing with political activism of his own. He was an early signer of Charter 08, the landmark human rights manifesto, and in 2010 cemented his position as a leading political critic by writing a biography of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in which he refers to his subject as “China’s best actor.”
  • How would you describe his ideas? He’s similar to [Soviet dissident Andrei] Sakharov. He’s not just a critic of communism but also someone who promotes virtues and values. This is an important point because there are a lot of people who criticize the communists. Liu Xiaobo also has a constructive ideology too. That line—”I have no enemies”—is really important. It’s similar to Mandela.
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  • China doesn’t have apartheid. No, China doesn’t have the racial component perhaps quite as much but it has fault lines, for example between country and city. The way that rural laborers are treated in the cities is similar to how blacks were treated in South Africa. If you don’t have an ideology like Liu’s to push for peaceful change, then change could result in violence.
  • Over the past hundred years, China has studied a lot from the West but we haven’t studied the link between faith and liberty. Chinese have mainly learned from France and Germany: from France, the French Revolution, and from Germany, of course Marx and nationalism, which came to us via Japan. And from Russia we learned Leninism. But we haven’t learned much from this British-American tradition. Even in the early twentieth century we didn’t look very closely at the relationship between the political system and faith. Hu Shih, for example, never talked about the link between the separation of powers and religion. I think it’s only with our generation that we’re starting to think about this. One of the basic points is that the liberty to choose is God-given—not given by the state but by God. This means it’s higher than the state. It’s the foundation of Western democracy but many Chinese don’t understand this.
  • Chinese churches need to develop more democratic institutions. In the West, [Protestant] churches are run by committees; they are like small parliaments that are elected, just like the governments. Chinese congregations don’t know about this, so I wanted to show them. I think there will be a big change in China in the next ten or twenty years and at that point there will be some sort of religious freedom. So the bigger issue is how the congregations will manage themselves. Will they be democratically organized? Will they have a strong theological foundations? Or will they remain a new form of Chinese folk religion, a movement like the Boxers with a new foreign name plate?
Javier E

Entertainment - Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg - Why Vimeo Is the Web Video Platform to... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...258450

video creativity social networks

shared by Javier E on 17 Jun 12 - Cached
  • Vimeo continues to be the destination for content creators and viewers looking for cutting-edge videos, beautiful playback, and a remarkably positive community. A world away from cat virals, Vimeo is winning by nurturing the next generation of filmmakers (well, videomakers) and promoting their most innovative work.
  • now videomakers can get started, at least, by making good work and letting the Internet run with it.
  • . Vimeo Staff Picks, curated by Sam Morrill and Jason Sondhi, surfaces new videos of all kinds on a daily basis, and from there, many go viral. Within 24 hours of appearing on the channel, a video can receive tens of thousands views.
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  • Especially in contrast to comments on YouTube, the conversations on Vimeo are unusually positive and constructive. This is thanks, in part, to Vimeo's role as a forum for low-budget filmmaking.
  • Since Canon released its 5D Mark II DSLR, a digital still camera with HD video, in 2008, the proliferation of inexpensive cameras has driven both an explosion in high-quality video content and a cottage industry around working with the cameras. Because DSLRs aren't optimal for video production, videomakers have had to figure out workarounds
  • video equipment is now good enough that it doesn't need to need to take center stage.
Javier E

What Machines Can't Do - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oks-what-machines-cant-do.html

labor-replacement computers tech jobs emotion skills human

shared by Javier E on 05 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • certain mental skills will become less valuable because computers will take over. Having a great memory will probably be less valuable. Being able to be a straight-A student will be less valuable — gathering masses of information and regurgitating it back on tests. So will being able to do any mental activity that involves following a set of rules.
  • what human skills will be more valuable?
  • In the news business, some of those skills are already evident.
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  • Technology has rewarded sprinters (people who can recognize and alertly post a message on Twitter about some interesting immediate event) and marathoners (people who can write large conceptual stories), but it has hurt middle-distance runners (people who write 800-word summaries of yesterday’s news conference).
  • Technology has rewarded graphic artists who can visualize data, but it has punished those who can’t turn written reporting into video presentations.
  • More generally, the age of brilliant machines seems to reward a few traits.
  • First, it rewards enthusiasm. The amount of information in front of us is practically infinite; so is that amount of data that can be collected with new tools. The people who seem to do best possess a voracious explanatory drive, an almost obsessive need to follow their curiosity.
  • Second, the era seems to reward people with extended time horizons and strategic discipline.
  • a human can provide an overall sense of direction and a conceptual frame. In a world of online distractions, the person who can maintain a long obedience toward a single goal, and who can filter out what is irrelevant to that goal, will obviously have enormous worth.
  • Third, the age seems to reward procedural architects. The giant Internet celebrities didn’t so much come up with ideas, they came up with systems in which other people could express ideas: Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, etc.
  • One of the oddities of collaboration is that tightly knit teams are not the most creative. Loosely bonded teams are, teams without a few domineering presences, teams that allow people to think alone before they share results with the group. So a manager who can organize a decentralized network around a clear question, without letting it dissipate or clump, will have enormous value.
  • Fifth, essentialists will probably be rewarded.
  • creativity can be described as the ability to grasp the essence of one thing, and then the essence of some very different thing, and smash them together to create some entirely new thing.
  • In the 1950s, the bureaucracy was the computer. People were organized into technocratic systems in order to perform routinized information processing.
  • now the computer is the computer. The role of the human is not to be dispassionate, depersonalized or neutral. It is precisely the emotive traits that are rewarded: the voracious lust for understanding, the enthusiasm for work, the ability to grasp the gist, the empathetic sensitivity to what will attract attention and linger in the mind.
  • Unable to compete when it comes to calculation, the best workers will come with heart in hand.
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
  • “Innovation and Entrepreneurship” by Peter F. Drucker
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • 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.”
julia rhodes

U.S. Citizens Renouncing Skyrocket---The Tina Turner Effect - Forbes - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...yrocket-the-tina-turner-effect

economics economic politics US citizens forbes expatriate taxes

shared by julia rhodes on 16 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • America is a great land and lures immigrants worldwide, yet record numbers of U.S. citizens and permanent residents are giving up their citizenship or residency.
  • And this year that trend is up by at least 33%  from the previous high in 2011.
  • Since then, the tax and other consequences do not depend on why one leaves. Yet after Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin departed permanently for Singapore with his Facebook IPO riches, there was an angry backlash.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Meantime, are people following Tina Turner’s lead? No, and not Eduardo Saverin’s either. Most expatriations are probably motivated primarily by factors such as family and convenience. Many people like Ms. Turner have built a life somewhere else and may not plan to need a U.S. passport.
  • Although statistics are not available for why people say a final good-bye, many now find America’s global income tax compliance and disclosure laws inconvenient and nettlesome.
  • What’s more, U.S. reporting is based on their worldwide income, even though they are paying taxes in the country where they live.
  • . It requires an annual Form 8938 to be filed with income tax returns for foreign assets meeting a threshold. And foreign banks are sufficiently worried about keeping the IRS happy that many simply do not want American account holders. Americans abroad can be pariahs shunned by banks for daily banking activities.
  • To exit, you generally must prove 5 years of tax compliance in the U.S. Plus, if you have a net worth greater than $2 million or have average annual net income tax for the 5 previous years of $155,000 or more (that’s tax, not income), you pay an exit tax.
Javier E

Rush Limbaugh Knows Nothing About Christianity « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...ows-nothing-about-christianity

Christianity capitalism materialism market Pope Francis

shared by Javier E on 04 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Limbaugh is onto something. The Pope of the Catholic Church really is offering a rebuttal to the Pope of the Republican party, which is what Limbaugh has largely become. In daily encyclicals, Rush is infallible in doctrine and not to be questioned in public. When he speaks on the airwaves, it is always ex cathedra. Callers can get an audience from him, but rarely a hearing. Dissent from his eternal doctrines means excommunication from the GOP and the designation of heretic. His is always the last word.
  • And in the Church of Limbaugh, market capitalism is an unqualified, eternal good. It is the ever-lasting truth about human beings. It is inextricable from any concept of human freedom. The fewer restrictions on it, the better.
  • The church has long opposed market capitalism as the core measure of human well-being. Aquinas even taught that interest-bearing loans were inherently unjust in the most influential theological document in church history. The fundamental reason is that market capitalism measures human life by a materialist rubric. And Jesus radically taught us to give up all our possessions, to renounce everything except our “daily bread”, to spend our lives serving the poverty-stricken takers rather than aspiring to be the wealthy and powerful makers. He told the Mark Zuckerberg of his day to give everything away to the poor, if he really wanted to be happy.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • the Church in no way disputes the fact that market capitalism is by far the least worst means of raising standards of living and ending poverty and generating wealth that can be used to cure disease, feed the hungry, and protect the vulnerable. What the Church is disputing is that, beyond our daily bread, material well-being is a proper criterion for judging human morality or happiness. On a personal level, the Church teaches, as Jesus unambiguously did, that material goods beyond a certain point are actually pernicious and destructive of human flourishing.
  • Could anyone have offered a more potent critique of current Republican ideology than John Paul II? Could anything better illustrate John Paul II’s critique of radical capitalist ideology than the GOP’s refusal to be concerned in any way about a fundamental question like access to basic healthcare for millions of citizens in the richest country on earth?
  • there is a risk that a radical capitalistic ideology could spread which refuses even to consider these problems, in the a priori belief that any attempt to solve them is doomed to failure and which blindly entrusts their solution to the free development of market forces.
  • the Pope is not making an empirical observation. In so far as he is, he agrees with you. What he’s saying is that this passion for material things is not what makes us good or happy. That’s all
  • if the mania for more and more materialist thrills distracts us from, say, the plight of a working American facing bankruptcy because of cancer, or the child of an illegal immigrant with no secure home, then it is a deeply immoral distraction.
  • material goods are not self-evidently the purpose of life and are usually (and in Jesus’ stern teachings always) paths away from God and our own good and our own happiness.
  • Christianity is one of the most powerful critiques of radical market triumphalism.
Javier E

How Racism Invented Race in America - Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...372000

historiography racism race reparations history us culture

shared by Javier E on 25 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • I wish to return to one of the original features of blogging—the documentation of public thinking. I would suggest that more writers, more academics, and more journalists do this, and do so honestly.
  • It have come to believe that arguing with the self is as important as arguing with the broader world.
  • the assumption of that "something new" is happening "racially," that these terms are somehow constant is one of the great, and underestimated, barriers to understanding the case for reparations.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • In all my history classes we were treated to the dizzying taxonomy of race—mulatto and Italian, creole and quadroon, Jew and mestizo. This terminology would change quickly, change back, and then change again. And borders would change with them. Not even continents were constant. "Africa begins at the Pyrenees," we read in The Races of Europe.
  • Black Folk was the first book that made the argument that sticks with me to this day—that there is nothing particularly "natural" about viewing people with darker skin and curlier hair as inferior. Drake surveys all perceptions of people with darker skin, curlier hair, or both across history. He finds very little consistency and concludes that racism, as we know it, is basically a product of the slave trade, which is to say the seizure of power.
  • Barbara and Karen Fields's Racecraft. The book is a collection of essay, and is sometimes hard to follow, but its basic insight is brilliant. Basically, Americans talk about "race" but not "racism," and in doing that they turn a series of "actions" into a "state." This is basically true of all our conversations of this sort, left and right. You can see this in all our terminology—racial justice, racial quotas, racial discrimination, etc. But this language is ahistorical, and it obscures the current conflict.
  • But American notions of race are the product of racism, not the other way around. We know this because we can see the formation of "race" in American law and policy, and also see how formations differ across time and space. So what is "black" in the United States is not "black" in Brazil. More significantly the relevance and import of "blackness" is not constant across American history.
  • It is important to remember that American racism is a thing that was done, and a world where American racism is beaten back is not a world of "racial diversity" but a world without such terminology. Perhaps we can never actually get to that world. Perhaps we are just too far gone. But we should never forget that this world was "made." Whiteness and blackness are not a fact of providence, but of policy
  • I was dogged by Saul Bellow's challenge: "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?" I left feeling like Ralph Wiley—Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus. Wiley's point was that the entire exercise of attempting to prove the worth of humans through monuments and walls was morally flawed. This was radicalizing. It warned me away from beginning an argument with racist reasoning, by accepting its premises. The argument for racism is corrupt at its root, and must be confronted there
  • Reparations may seem impractical. Living without history, I suspect, will—in the long term—prove to be suicidal.
Javier E

The Evolvability Of Dogs: A Journey From Mongrels To Poodles : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...the-evolvability-of-dogs

dog evolution variability

shared by Javier E on 02 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • some 200 years ago, dog breeding was initiated in England, generating the highly inbred and distinctive lines we encounter today.
  • Breeding programs can only yield as much variation as is harbored in the gene pool, and the dog gene pool proved to be a gold mine.
  • organisms with higher mutation rates are said to be more evolvable than organisms with lower mutation rates.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • wolves themselves, and probably canids in general, represent a long-standing evolvable lineage. Rodents prove to be a second evolvable lineage (think mouse vs. porcupine) whereas, except for size, a cat is pretty much a cat across the board.
Javier E

What Technology Wants - 0 views

www.carnegiecouncil.org/...0329.html

technology future Technium trends scaling culture evolution

shared by Javier E on 01 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Do you know what technology is? We commonly think about technology as anything that was invented after you were born. My friend Denny Hills made kind of a version of that through his statement, "It's anything that doesn't work yet."
  • Wired, which was not about the technology, but about the culture around the technology. We like to think of ourselves as a lifestyle magazine. We are a magazine about technology culture in the way that Rolling Stone is a magazine about music culture.
  • This book came out of a little bit of my own efforts to try to understand what technology meant and where it should fit into the realm of the world. When a new technology came along, should we embrace it, or hold off?
  • ...43 more annotations...
  • What's the theory behind technology? Do we just deal with each one, one by one, or was there a kind of a framework to understand and have a perspective on technology?
  • All these technologies that we have now made are interrelated, they are codependent, and they form a kind of an ecosystem of technologies. You might even think of it as if these were species, as if it was a super-organism of technology.
  • I'm interested in this super-organism of all the technologies. I gave it a name. I call it the Technium.
  • In the larger sense, the Technium is anything that we make with our minds.
  • all these things are connected together and they form an interacting whole, a kind of a super-organism, that has in many ways its own slight bit of autonomy, and its own agenda.
  • It wants in the way that a plant wants light and so it will lean towards the light. It has an urgency to go towards light. It's not intelligent, it's not aware of it, but that's what it wants.
  • If it does want things, it means that it wants it independent of our choosing. At the same time we are making it; it is there because we exist. It's not independent of us, but it has some slight bit of autonomy.
  • Biologists are slowly coming around to admitting that there are directions in evolution. The standard orthodoxy for many years was that it was completely random, and that there was no direction whatsoever. Any ordinary person found that shocking because they could definitely see a direction in evolution.
  • We see an arc of increasing complexity in the long journey of life.
  • Along the long history there is movement towards increasing diversity.
  • There is also increasing movement towards specialization.
  • There is a trend towards increasing structure. Things become more and more complicated.
  • There is a trend towards emergence
  • There are other trends—towards ubiquity, towards energy efficiency, towards degrees of freedom.
  • What I'm suggesting is that there is a continuum, a connection back all the way to the Big Bang with these self-organizing systems that make the galaxies, stars, and life, and now is producing technology in the same way.
  • The energies flowing through these things are, interestingly, becoming more and more dense.
  • The amount of energy running through a sunflower, per gram per second of the livelihood, is actually greater than in the sun.
  • The most energy-dense thing that we know about in the entire universe is the computer chip in your computer. It is sending more energy per gram per second through that than anything we know.
  • The other thing that is evolving over time is the evolvability of the system. One of the things that life is doing is it's evolving its ability to evolve.
  • Another way to think about this is that one of the things that life likes to do is make eyeballs. Life evolution independently invented eyeballs 30 different times in different genres and taxonomies. It invented flapping wings four times. It invented venomous stings about 20 times independently, from bees, to snakes, to jellyfish. It also has invented minds many, many times.
  • we do know that the media that we have does rewire our brains. We know this by studies of people who are literate. They took scans in Peru of people who were illiterate and those who could read and write. They found that in fact their brains work differently—not just when they're reading, but just in general. After having five, ten or twenty years of education and learning to read and write, it actually changes how your brain works.
  • The reason why we want to embrace it with our full arms is because what technology brings us is an opportunity for everybody's special mix of talents to be expressed. Just as we all have different faces, we all have a different mix of aptitudes and abilities. We use technologies to express those things.
  • The question is: Was Moore's Law inevitable? What drives Moore's Law? Where is this coming from?
  • Moore's Law, not in terms of transistors, but in terms of measuring computer power, was happening long before Moore or anybody even noticed it. The effect was happening before anybody believed it.
  • this suggests is that this is actually an inherent attribute of the physics, and it suggests that it is independent of the economy. Even if the silicon chip had been invented in Stalinist Russia under a command economy, it probably would still follow exactly the same kind of curve.
  • Geoffrey West at the Santa Fe Institute looked at a whole bunch of technologies, like solar and batteries and other kinds of things, and they show this this scaling law holds true in many industries.
  • It has something to do with the basic shape of the economy and of physics, and it's not really a self-fulfilling prophecy. In this way I suggest that these kinds of curves are inevitable. One of the characteristics of the Technium is it exhibits these scaling laws.
  • We are going to fill the universe with all different kinds of thinkings, because only by having many different kinds of minds can we actually understand the universe. Our own mind is probably insufficient to completely comprehend the universe.
  • It's also very clear that if you are spending five or ten hours a day in front of a computer, that is going to change how your brain works. It is going to rewire how we're doing things.
  • We have a dependency on the alphabet. That's how we think about things. We need reading and writing. We think in terms of words. We imagine it. We see it around us. It's ubiquitous. We are dependent on the alphabet. That doesn't seem to bother us very much.
  • As these technologies become more ubiquitous and as we become dependent upon it, that's what it is. We will be dependent upon it. It will be our exobrain. We'll use it to remember. It will always be around.
  • We invented the external stomach, it's called cooking, that allows us to digest stuff that could not otherwise increase nutrition. It changed our jaw and our teeth. We are physically different people because of our inventions. While we can live on a raw diet, it's actually very hard to breed on a raw diet.
  • What we have done is become dependent on our technology, and we will become ever more so. That's just the definition of who we are. We are the first domesticated animals. We are a technology ourselves.
  • What I'm saying is that there is only a little more good in technology than bad, but a little is all we need. If we create one-tenth of a percent more than we destroy every year, we can make civilization, because that tenth of a percent compounded over centuries is all that we need.
  • Every time there's a new technology that comes along, we have the possibility to use it for harm or for good. We also suddenly have a new possibility and choice that we didn't have before. That new choice is that little tiny tenth of a percent that's better, because we have now another freedom that we didn't have before. That tips it into the good side. It's not much better, but that's all we need over the long term. That's why over the long term it's good, because it increases choices and possibilities.
  • Technology is not powerful unless it can be powerfully abused. There is going to be a learning period. There are going to be phases that people go through and then become addicted. They don't know how to use it.
  • DDT is horrible. Don't give it a job as a pesticide, and spray millions of acres of cotton fields. That's a terrible job and causes all kinds of havoc. Yet used locally and sprayed around households, DDT eliminates malaria and saves millions of lives a year, and it has very little environmental impact that way. That's a better job for this technology.
  • We want to find the right jobs for these things and the right frame. Just like there are no bad children, there are also no bad technologies. You've just got to find the right place for them.
  • My research has shown that there are very few species of technology that ever go extinct. That's the difference between biological evolution and technological evolution; in technology things don't go extinct. They can be resurrected.
  • Very few people go backwards. Why? Because we have to surrender so many choices and options.
  • As wholesome and as satisfying as those lives are, the price of going back to these places is surrendering choices and opportunities. In general, the whole arc of evolution is towards expanding those, and that's why by embracing technology we can align ourselves with this long arc throughout the cosmos into the future.
  • I did a calculation that showed three-quarters of the total energy that we use on the planet right now, at least in the United States, is used in servicing technology. Roughly, three-quarters of the gasoline that you use in your car is used to move the car and not you. You're just a minor passenger in this whole thing. We have energy used to heat the warehouses that are holding the stuff that we have or to move the stuff that we have. Already this Technium is consuming three-quarters of our energy.
  • That is also where it's going. There will be more technology used to support more technology. Most of the traffic on the Internet is not people talking to each other; it's machines talking to other machines.
Javier E

The Shadow Scholar - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...125329

plagiarism ethics cheating education highered scholar

shared by Javier E on 17 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • it's hard to determine which course of study is most infested with cheating. But I'd say education is the worst. I've written papers for students in elementary-education programs, special-education majors, and ESL-training courses. I've written lesson plans for aspiring high-school teachers, and I've synthesized reports from notes that customers have taken during classroom observations. I've written essays for those studying to become school administrators, and I've completed theses for those on course to become principals. In the enormous conspiracy that is student cheating, the frontline intelligence community is infiltrated by double agents.
  • First I lay out the sections of an assignment—introduction, problem statement, methodology, literature review, findings, conclusion—whatever the instructions call for. Then I start Googling. I haven't been to a library once since I started doing this job. Amazon is quite generous about free samples. If I can find a single page from a particular text, I can cobble that into a report, deducing what I don't know from customer reviews and publisher blurbs. Google Scholar is a great source for material, providing the abstract of nearly any journal article. And of course, there's Wikipedia, which is often my first stop when dealing with unfamiliar subjects. Naturally one must verify such material elsewhere, but I've taken hundreds of crash courses this way. After I've gathered my sources, I pull out usable quotes, cite them, and distribute them among the sections of the assignment. Over the years, I've refined ways of stretching papers. I can write a four-word sentence in 40 words. Just give me one phrase of quotable text, and I'll produce two pages of ponderous explanation. I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph. I've also got a mental library of stock academic phrases: "A close consideration of the events which occurred in ____ during the ____ demonstrate that ____ had entered into a phase of widespread cultural, social, and economic change that would define ____ for decades to come." Fill in the blanks using words provided by the professor in the assignment's instructions.
Javier E

Sarah Palin and the Media Symbiosis - NYTimes.com - 0 views

fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/...-egg-the-media-and-sarah-palin

palin media

shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • 59 percent of those who had formulated an opinion about Ms. Palin had a strong one of her, which is the highest for any figure on the list. (Mr. Obama and Mr. Bush would be next at 57 percent; followed by the former House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, at 56 percent and Mike Huckabee at 54 percent.)
  • to Mr. Douthat’s chicken-and-egg dilemma — which came first: Ms. Palin or the media’s sometimes obsessive coverage of her? — we might want to add a third actor: the audience. It’s clear that Ms. Palin triggers great interest among the public. When Ms. Palin was first announced as John McCain’s running mate in 2008, her Wikipedia page received 2.5 million views on the day of the announcement, as compared to 0.7 million for Joe Biden. Her most recent book, America By Heart, debuted at #2 on the New York Times’ Best Seller List (just behind Mr. Bush’s). Her reality show got almost 5 million viewers in its debut
  • If news coverage were based on a pure supply-and-demand model — that is, as an exercise in maximizing near-term pageviews or ratings points — it is not clear to me whether there would be less or more coverage of Ms. Palin. My guess is that there would be more
Javier E

Matt Ridley on Sugata Mitra's Web-Based Education Project - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...4584804575645070639938954.html

education autodidact schooling internet learning

shared by Javier E on 05 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • He is convinced that, with the Internet, kids can learn by themselves, so long as they are in small groups and have well-posed questions to answer. He now goes into schools and asks a hard question that he thinks the students will not be able to answer, such as: "How do you stop something moving?" or "Was World War II good or bad?" He gives them no clue where to start, but—crucially—he insists that the school restrict the number of Internet portals in the class to one for every four students. One child in front of a computer learns little; four discussing and debating learn a lot. What happens next is entirely up to the students. All they know is that Dr. Mitra is coming back to be told what they have found. He arrives with a second question that links the learning more closely to the curriculum, such as: "Who was Isaac Newton?" and then "What's the connection between Newton and stopping things moving?" The kids teach themselves the laws of motion. Of course, the Internet is fallible as a source, but so are teachers and textbooks. For the noncontroversial topics that make up the curriculum, even Wikipedia is pretty good.
  • On their own, children can get about 30% of the knowledge required to pass exams. To go further, Dr. Mitra supplements SOLE with e-mediators, or the "granny cloud" as he calls it: amateur volunteers who use Skype to help kids learn online.
  • plenty of people educate themselves. Is it possible for everybody to be an autodidact, now that knowledge is so accessible online?
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