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Bo Xilai's Ouster Exposes Chinese Fault Lines - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...poses-chinese-fault-lines.html China politics crisis
shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • There is wide agreement among outsiders that Mr. Bo’s downfall points to perhaps the most serious division in the party elite since the leadership upheavals during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
  • But to many, neither Mr. Bo nor the explanation of his collapse is so clear-cut. They see a collision between a Communist Party that prizes stability and secrecy in choosing its leaders, and a new kind of leader who set his own political agenda and thrived on public adulation.
  • “His style of politicking was antithetical and threatening to a political oligarchy that was trying to keep the competition among themselves hidden from the general public.”
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Amy Chua Profiles Four Female Tycoons in China - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...r-female-tycoons-in-china.html women China entrepreneur success
shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 12 - Cached
  • Zhang sees a lack of innovation as a persistent problem for China. “Going forward, we need people who can invent. The reason China doesn’t have a Steve Jobs is because of the education system, which needs reform, along with health care and the political system. China does not train enough people to think.”
  • “In China nowadays, teachers are desperate,” Yang Lan told me over lunch. With her upswept hair and porcelain skin, Yang radiated celebrity power. “They’re worried that all the only children—‘little emperors’—are spoiled and self-centered and no longer appreciate their parents.” She told me how one school had invited 1,000 parents to sit on chairs on the playground, “then asked the kids to wash their parents’ feet in front of everyone—a sign of filial piety.”
  • China’s “little emperors” are coddled in a distinctly Chinese way. While doted on and catered to, they are also loaded up with the expectations of parents who have invested all their dreams—not to mention money—in their only child. These “spoiled” children often study and drill from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day.
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  • China’s political sphere remains male-dominated: women are starkly underrepresented in China’s Parliament and the Communist Party’s Central Committee. In fact, many young Chinese women, disillusioned about their prospects in an economy many see as navigable only by those with money or connections, say the best hope for a woman is “to marry a rich man.” On a popular TV dating show, a model rebuffed an endearing but poor suitor by saying, “I’d rather cry in a BMW than laugh on the back seat of a bicycle.” In a survey of more than 50,000 single women, as reported in China Daily, 80 percent agreed that “only men who make more than 4,000 yuan [$634] a month deserve to have a relationship with a woman.”
  • at least in business, women and men in China operate largely on a level playing field. “Sixty years of communism,” said Yu, “did one really good thing: bring true equality between the sexes. I think people in China are brought up believing that women are just as capable as men.”
  • the Mao era was a deviation for China: anti-intellectual, anti-Confucian, collectivist rather than family-oriented. Thus, as China sheds its communist mantle, it is not only Westernizing but also Sinicizing, rediscovering its traditional values.
  • These values, however, are mutating. The traditional Chinese family, for example, was a pyramid, with a few revered elders at the pinnacle and many younger generations below. In a typical Chinese family today, the pyramid has been inverted, with a “little emperor” only child at the bottom, doted on and catered to by parents and grandparents. At the same time, while the intense competitive pressures of Confucian China have returned, the countervailing Confucian values—selflessness, compassion, honor, and rectitude—have not. As a result, many worry that the China emerging from communism will know no values other than wealth and materialism.
  • “When we were growing up,” says Yang, “we wanted to be nurses, doctors, astronauts, teachers. Today people are suspicious of anything noble or grand. Kids just want to be rich or powerful.” In 2009, schoolchildren in Guangzhou City were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up. A viral Internet video—later blocked and deleted—showed an adorable 6-year-old giving her answer: “A corrupt official.”
  • the four women I interviewed are a new breed. Progressive, worldly, and open to the media, they are in many ways not representative of China, past or present. Perhaps they are merely the lucky winners of the 1990s free-for-all in China, a window that may already be closing. Or perhaps they are the forerunners of a China still to come, in which paths to success are far more open.
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Peak Intel: How So-Called Strategic Intelligence Actually Makes Us Dumber - Eric Garlan... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...255413 intelligence strategic planning management
shared by Javier E on 05 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • the culture of intelligence has been in free-fall since the financial crisis of 2008. While people may be pretending to follow intelligence, impostors in both the analyst and executive camps actually follow shallow, fake processes that justify their existing decisions and past investments.
  • three trends are making this harder
  • the explosion of cheap capital from Wall Street has led major industries to consolidate. Where a sector such as pharmaceuticals or telecommunications (and, of course, banking) might have had dozens of big players a couple of decades ago, now it has closer to five. When I began in the intelligence industry 15 years ago, I did projects for Compaq, Amoco, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, and Cingular -- all of which have since been rolled into the conglomerates of Hewlett Packard, British Petroleum, Pfizer, and AT&T. There are fewer firms for an intelligence analyst to track, and their behavior has to be understood on totally different terms than when this discipline was created.
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  • One cannot predict the future of a marketplace by trend analysis alone, because oligopolies do not compete the same way as do firms in free markets. 
  • industry consolidations have created gigantic bureaucracies. Hierarchical organizations have a very different logic than smaller firms. In less consolidated industries, success and failure are largely the result of the decisions you make, so intelligence about the reality of the marketplace is critical. Life is different in gigantic organizations, where success and failure are almost impossible to attribute to individual decisions.
  • In large, slow-moving bureaucracies, conventional thinking and risk avoidance become paramount
  • , the world's economy is today driven more by policy makers than at any time in recent history. At the behest of government officials, banks have been shielded from the consequences of their market decisions, and in many cases exempt from prosecution for their potential law-breaking. Nation-state policy-makers pick the winners in industries
  • How can you use classical competitive analysis to examine the future of markets when the relationships between firms and government agencies are so incestuous and the choices of consumers so severely limited by industrial consolidation?
  • Companies still need guidance, but if rational analysis is nearly impossible, is it any wonder that executives are asking for less of it? What they are asking for is something, well, less productive.
  • executives today do not do well when their analysts confront them with challenging, though often relatively benign, predictions. Confusion, anger, and psychological transference are common responses to unwelcome analysis.
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Physical attractiveness and careers: Don't hate me because I'm beautiful | The Economist - 1 views

www.economist.com/21551535 beauty jobs envy
shared by Javier E on 01 Apr 12 - Cached
  • AT WORK, as in life, attractive women get a lot of the breaks. Studies have shown that they are more likely to be promoted than their plain-Jane colleagues. Because people tend to project positive traits onto them, such as sensitivity and poise, they may also be at an advantage in job interviews. The only downside to hotness is having to fend off ghastly male colleagues; or so many people think. But research by two Israelis suggests otherwise.
  • Attractive females were less likely to be offered an interview if they included a mugshot. When applying directly to a company (rather than through an agency) an attractive woman would need to send out 11 CVs on average before getting an interview; an equally qualified plain one just seven.
  • Mr Ruffle considered what he calls the “dumb-blonde hypothesis”—that people assume beautiful women to be stupid. However, the photos had also been rated on how intelligent people thought each subject looked; there was no correlation between perceived intellect and pulchritude.
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  • Human resources departments tend to be staffed mostly by women. Indeed, in the Israeli study, 93% of those tasked with selecting whom to invite for an interview were female. The researchers’ unavoidable—and unpalatable—conclusion is that old-fashioned jealousy led the women to discriminate against pretty candidates.
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The Revenge of Wen Jiabao - By John Garnaut | Foreign Policy - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...the_revenge_of_wen_jiabao china leadership politics faction conflict ideology
shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 12 - Cached
  • From his leftist or "statist" perch, Bo has been challenging the "opening and reform" side of the political consensus that Deng Xiaoping secured three decades ago. Wen Jiabao, meanwhile, who plays the role of a learned, emphatic, and upright Confucian prime minister, has been challenging the other half of Deng consensus -- absolute political control -- from the liberal right. He has continuously articulated the need to limit government power through rule of law, justice, and democratization. To do this, he has drawn on the symbolic legacies of the purged reformist leaders he served in the 1980s, particularly Hu Yaobang, whose name he recently helped to "rehabilitate" in official discourse. As every Communist Party leader knows, those who want a stake in the country's future must first fight for control of its past.
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So you want to get into a political science Ph.D. program... Episode I | Daniel W. Drezner - 0 views

drezner.foreignpolicy.com/...l_science_phd_program_part_one phd program admissions political science
shared by Javier E on 27 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • if getting a Ph.D. is so great, how does one get accepted into a doctoral program in political science? 
  • competition to get into top-tier grad schools is still quite high.  So, how do you get in? 
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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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The Decline of American Nationalism: Why We Love to Hate Kony 2012 - Max Fisher - Inter... - 2 views

www.theatlantic.com/...254929 US policy nationalism neocolonialism white man's burden paternalism
shared by Javier E on 23 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • On news sites like this one, in newspapers, and even on TV, Americans have been grappling with concepts that normally don't get mentioned outside of a comparative literature class or liberal arts college symposium: neocolonialism, white man's burden, paternalism.
  • Maybe this is a conversation that started with the decline of the Iraq war. A February 2003 poll estimated that nearly 60% of Americans supported an invasion. By May 2007, 61% said the U.S. should have stayed out. The lessons were about more than the limits of American power or the wisdom of this particular conflict (although those are both important), but, underneath all of the questions and national soul-searching, the first hints in a century of American dominance that maybe our power isn't always and necessarily a force of good
  • during the two weeks of wall-to-wall American media coverage of the Egyptian revolution, hardly 10 minutes of cable news could go by without someone mentioning U.S. support for Mubarak. Americans were rooting for Egyptian protesters but, at the same time, they were helping to prop up Mubarak by participating in an American system that proudly promotes American hegemony by backing guys like him. The big contradiction in how Americans see our role in the world, obvious for so long to people in Africa and Asia and the Middle East, was finally becoming clear to us.
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  • If a decade of failed war has taught us to question whether or not the world shares our excitement for American hegemony, and the Arab Spring led us to wonder if American power can in fact be a cause for real harm in the world, then the U.S. financial crisis has humbled even the assumption that the U.S. will stay on top forever. The Kony 2012 video, in which a bunch of eager white kids make transparently self-aggrandizing and short-sighted assumptions about the power and goodness of their own involvement in a far-away society that doesn't really want them, brought all of these anxieties together.
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The Cause Of Inequality: Institutions, Culture Or Taxes? - The Dish | By Andrew Sulliva... - 1 views

andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/...itutions-culture-or-taxes.html US economics research policy culture politics inequality causes
shared by Javier E on 23 Mar 12 - Cached
  • It’s therefore wrong to interpret public outrage about CEO pay as a protest against high compensation in and of itself. This outrage is not driven by the class envy about which the GOP presidential candidates so frequently complain. It is, rather, a protest against rationing, corruption, sweetheart deals, and foxes guarding the henhouse. It is a protest, in other words, against the corruption of markets by power.
  • It doesn’t make much sense to think about rents and market failures when inequality is mainly a product of our impoverished ideas about autonomy, community, and solidarity. The failures here are political, not economic, and they are likely to be remedied only by a politics of cross-class and cross-race solidarity
  • the top tax rate could be as high as 83 percent—as opposed to 57 percent in the pure supply-side model—without harming economic growth.
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Forget the Money, Follow the Sacredness - NYTimes.com - 0 views

campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/...he-money-follow-the-sacredness politics narrative sacred group selection evolution
shared by Javier E on 18 Mar 12 - Cached
  • Despite what you might have learned in Economics 101, people aren’t always selfish. In politics, they’re more often groupish. When people feel that a group they value — be it racial, religious, regional or ideological — is under attack, they rally to its defense, even at some cost to themselves. We evolved to be tribal, and politics is a competition among coalitions of tribes.
  • The key to understanding tribal behavior is not money, it’s sacredness. The great trick that humans developed at some point in the last few hundred thousand years is the ability to circle around a tree, rock, ancestor, flag, book or god, and then treat that thing as sacred. People who worship the same idol can trust one another, work as a team and prevail over less cohesive groups. So if you want to understand politics, and especially our divisive culture wars, you must follow the sacredness.
  • A good way to follow the sacredness is to listen to the stories that each tribe tells about itself and the larger nation.
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  • The Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith once summarized the moral narrative told by the American left like this: “Once upon a time, the vast majority” of people suffered in societies that were “unjust, unhealthy, repressive and oppressive.” These societies were “reprehensible because of their deep-rooted inequality, exploitation and irrational traditionalism — all of which made life very unfair, unpleasant and short. But the noble human aspiration for autonomy, equality and prosperity struggled mightily against the forces of misery and oppression and eventually succeeded in establishing modern, liberal, democratic, capitalist, welfare societies.” Despite our progress, “there is much work to be done to dismantle the powerful vestiges of inequality, exploitation and repression.” This struggle, as Smith put it, “is the one mission truly worth dedicating one’s life to achieving.”This is a heroic liberation narrative. For the American left, African-Americans, women and other victimized groups are the sacred objects at the center of the story. As liberals circle around these groups, they bond together and gain a sense of righteous common purpose.
  • the Reagan narrative like this: “Once upon a time, America was a shining beacon. Then liberals came along and erected an enormous federal bureaucracy that handcuffed the invisible hand of the free market. They subverted our traditional American values and opposed God and faith at every step of the way.” For example, “instead of requiring that people work for a living, they siphoned money from hard-working Americans and gave it to Cadillac-driving drug addicts and welfare queens.” Instead of the “traditional American values of family, fidelity and personal responsibility, they preached promiscuity, premarital sex and the gay lifestyle” and instead of “projecting strength to those who would do evil around the world, they cut military budgets, disrespected our soldiers in uniform and burned our flag.” In response, “Americans decided to take their country back from those who sought to undermine it.”This, too, is a heroic narrative, but it’s a heroism of defense. In this narrative it’s God and country that are sacred — hence the importance in conservative iconography of the Bible, the flag, the military and the founding fathers. But the subtext in this narrative is about moral order. For social conservatives, religion and the traditional family are so important in part because they foster self-control, create moral order and fend off chaos.
  • Part of Reagan’s political genius was that he told a single story about America that rallied libertarians and social conservatives, who are otherwise strange bedfellows. He did this by presenting liberal activist government as the single devil that is eternally bent on destroying two different sets of sacred values — economic liberty and moral order. Only if all nonliberals unite into a coalition of tribes can this devil be defeated.
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Limbaugh's Advertiser Exodus Expands Exponentially | Media Matters for America - 0 views

mediamatters.org/...201203100003 social media politics activism advertiser media
shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Radio-Info.com reported on Friday that 98 advertisers have told Premiere Radio Networks, which syndicates Rush Limbaugh's radio show, that they want to avoid advertising on Limbaugh's show and other programs with content "deemed to be offensive or controversial": The list includes carmakers (Ford, GM, Toyota), insurance companies (Allstate, Geico, Prudential, State Farm) and restaurants (McDonald's, Subway).
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Students Seek Books For a Peopled Planet - NYTimes.com - 0 views

dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/...eek-books-for-a-peopled-planet books US education activism core ecology
shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • His goal is to build a resource guide (to books, films, news reports and more) for students of any age eager to smooth the human transition from spike (the last 200 years, both in terms of numbers and resource appetites) to whatever comes next.A prime focus at the moment is developing a collection of informative, provocative or inspiring books.
  • Leading environmental figures like Paul Hawken and David Orr have joined students and faculty at NJIT in creating a streamlined resource network of inspiring books and films on issues like climate science, sustainability, social justice, and human nature.
  • Trusted advisers and role models have shown us that education without a greater emotional context — without community, purpose, and wonder — is next to useless, and often a detriment to society and the environment.
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Kony 2012 is a Distraction From Issues Ordinary Ugandans Care About - NYTimes.com - 0 views

latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/...s-ordinary-ugandans-care-about activism Africa social media
shared by Javier E on 10 Mar 12 - Cached
  • hardly anyone in Uganda is talking about him. I spent most of February in Kampala and environs, and there Kony was a whisper on nobody’s lips.
  • In an earlier post I wrote about the Ugandan government’s gay-bashing as a smokescreen for other issues facing this society, especially governmental corruption. The Kony video is a similar distraction.
  • Unfortunately, the mundane march of progress in poor countries is what “awareness” campaigns often miss. And when, as in this case, success is determined by action from outside the region, cries of a new imperialism should be taken seriously. Few international NGOs working in Africa define success properly — as putting themselves out of business. Invisible Children seems no better.
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Colleges and Elitism - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...colleges-and-elitism.html education humility arrogance class resentment elite
shared by Javier E on 09 Mar 12 - Cached
  • SAT scores (a big factor in college admissions) correlate closely with family wealth. The total average SAT score of students from families earning more than $100,000 per year is more than 100 points higher than for students in the income range of $50,000 to $60,000.
  • a mere 3 percent of students in the top 150 colleges, as defined by The Chronicle of Higher Education, come from families in the bottom income quartile of American society.
  • Only a very dogmatic Social Darwinist would conclude from these facts that intelligence closely tracks how much money one’s parents make. A better explanation is that students from affluent families have many advantages — test-prep tutors, high schools with good college counseling, parents with college savvy and so on.
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  • Yet once the beneficiaries arrive at college, what do they learn about themselves? It’s a good bet that the dean or president will greet them with congratulations for being the best and brightest ever to walk through the gates.
  • To the stringent Protestants who founded Harvard, Yale and Princeton, the mark of salvation was not high self-esteem but humbling awareness of one’s lowliness in the eyes of God. With such awareness came the recognition that those whom God favors are granted grace not for any worthiness of their own, but by God’s unmerited mercy — as a gift to be converted into working and living on behalf of others.
  • In secular terms, this means recognizing that people with good prospects owe much to their good fortune — and to fellow citizens less fortunate than themselves.
  • Benjamin Franklin, who founded the University of Pennsylvania, once defined true education as “an Inclination join’d with an Ability to serve Mankind, one’s Country, Friends, and Family; which Ability ... should indeed be the great Aim and End of all Learning.”
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Ugandan Rebel, Kony, Soars to Topic No. 1 in Online Video - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nflict-soar-to-topic-no-1.html activism Africa social media
shared by Javier E on 09 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Mr. Russell, a co-founder of Invisible Children, acknowledges that he has not made the most nuanced or academic of films. The video charts his personal odyssey to tell the world about Mr. Kony’s reign of terror and bring it to an end. He may have boiled down the issues, but that is what it takes to captivate so many people, he contends.
  • “Along with sharing the movie online, Invisible Children’s call to action is to do three things: 1) sign its pledge, 2) get the Kony 2012 bracelet and action kit (only $30!), and 3) sign up to donate,” a deconstruction of the film on the Web site of Foreign Policy reads.
  • Some have called the video a pitch-perfect appeal to so-called slacktivism, a pejorative term for armchair activism by a younger generation, often online.
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  • Activism in conflict zones has long brought both benefits and unforeseen consequences. It clearly helped make the crisis in Sudan’s Darfur region an international issue. But many analysts also argue that the one-sided way activists painted the conflict — highlighting the Sudanese government’s crimes against villagers while largely ignoring the atrocities committed by rebels — ultimately made it harder to negotiate an end to the crisis
  • some experts said Invisible Children’s campaign, while oversimplified, could help add to the international resolve to stop the killing.
  • Invisible Children “is essentially distilling a very complicated 26-year war into something that’s consumable and understandable by mass media.”
  • as a filmmaker, he said he had already received plaudits from producers in Hollywood. “They are getting in touch with the Academy Awards. They want this to be up for an Oscar.”
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