Month: March 2011

Rollo Romig marvels:

Mobile-phone technology is like fire: as soon as a society gets it, it can’t imagine life without it. In the current issue, Ken Auletta writes about the Sudanese billionaire Mo Ibrahim, whose former company, Celtel, brought the cell-phone boom to Africa, where the number of cell phones “has grown from fewer than four million in 1998 to more than four hundred million today—almost half the population of the continent.” Despite their expense, inconvenience, and even danger, they’ve proven invaluable in Liberia, a country entirely without landline service, where people need all the tools they can get to face the overwhelming task of rebuilding from nothing.

Several readers are recommending links on the subject. One writes:

I trust you saw the recent NYT op-ed by Samuel Culbert?  It's directly relevant to your post about teacher evaluation. Definitely food for thought as the drumbeat in favor of abolishing tenure and due-process protections gets louder. (And no, I'm not a teacher.)

Another:

I've enjoyed watching your jabs at Malcolm Gladwell regarding Facebook, but your recent post about firing tenured teachers made me think of an article he wrote in December 2008. Basically, it discusses a major problem: what makes a good teacher and how do we evaluate that? 

I also recommend checking out a great book by John Taylor Gatto called "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling."  I don't agree with everything in it, but it'll give you a taste of the anger and resentment many teachers feel, and it offers a few inspired ideas about a different way that education could be done.

Another:

Don't forget this astonishing chart [pdf] from Reason a few years back, and its accompanied blog post. It conveys the same message of teacher bureaucracy as the other chart you posted but in more detail.

Another:

The Daily Show wins again. Stewart and company devoted two-thirds of their show to teachers.  In the interview segment, Diane Ravitch makes some interesting points about the "bad teacher" issue.  Sure, we have bad teachers.  But, being human, we have bad everything (doctors, journalists, risk managers at global banking institutions).  But as she points out in this clip, the real problem is socioeconomic.  In general, kids from wealthy families perform well in school – better, in fact, than almost anywhere else in the world – but poor students rarely succeed.  I hear that refrain time and again from the teachers I know.

Another:

I'm not sure if you've seen this recent post by Kevin Drum, but I think it is very pertinent to your discussion. The paper [pdf] that Drum refers to, by Nobel Prize-winning economist David Heckman and released just a few weeks ago, makes a compelling case that most of the achievement gap between poor children and their higher income peers goes back to early childhood and is already firmly entrenched by the time these kids start kindergarten. Heckman concludes that the low-hanging fruit for improving education and alleviating poverty in this country is early childhood education.

I work at a small early childhood education center in DC's Adams Morgan neighborhood (I have seen your husband out walking the beagles once or twice), where we work with a micro population in this rapidly gentrifying neighborhood that is persistently impoverished, and where children are severely impacted by the sorts of factors in the home environment which the Heckman paper refers to. It is well worth considering by anyone who is concerned with the state of education in this country, and I hope it receives a wide reading.

David Hoffman sets the scene:

What would a president of the United States say to the country if thousands of people were dying from a disease or trapped in a massive blackout and he did not know who caused it? A ballistic missile leaves a trajectory that can indicate its origins. An airline hijacker might be caught on video or leave behind a ticket or other telltale clue to his identity. When someone is shot with a weapon, the bullet and firearm can be traced. Not so for many cyber and bio threats. 

Michael Joseph Gross has a full profile of the Stuxnet worm:

Because cyber-weapons pose an almost unsolvable problem of sourcing–who pulled the trigger?–war could evolve into something more and more like terror. Cyber-conflict makes military action more like a never-ending game of uncle, where the fingers of weaker nations are perpetually bent back. The wars would often be secret, waged by members of anonymous, elite brain trusts, none of whom would ever have to look an enemy in the eye. For people whose lives are connected to the targets, the results could be as catastrophic as a bombing raid, but would be even more disorienting. People would suffer, but would never be certain whom to blame.

Stuxnet is the Hiroshima of cyber-war. That is its true significance, and all the speculation about its target and its source should not blind us to that larger reality. We have crossed a threshold, and there is no turning back.

A Libyan rebel fighter readies himself before heading to battle against pro-Qaddafi forces, some 40 kilometers down the road of the northcentral city of Ras Lanuf on March 4, 2011. Forces loyal to Qaddafi have regained control of Zawiyah, near Tripoli, from rebel hands, state television reported. By Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images.

Weigel relays what he's hearing from Republican members of congress:

It's unanimous: The shutdown talk is a Democratic distraction tactic. Republicans don't want to shut the government down, no matter what some of their more battle-ready members said before the election, or as late as last week.

This is not just the GOP's line. It also has the benefit of being true. The party is getting most of what it wants right now by taking advantage of the existential dread of a government shutdown and of the Democrats' failure, in 2010, actually to pass a budget. They're not getting everything they want, but in conversations this week, Republicans suggested that they could get most of it without shutting down anything.

 

In 2004 Reason ran an editorial advocating for an individual healthcare mandate. Chait pounces:

How to explain this? Well, health care policy is complicated. And the role of the market and government policy are so difficult to separate, meaning the same policy can easily be framed either as more socialism or as more free market. The upshot is that right-wingers tend to view whatever health care reform proposed by Democrats as socialism, but they also see the need to rally around an alternative. Yet when Democrats embrace such policies, it's very easy for people on the right to interpret those as socialism, too.

Deborah Fallows wonders why they are taunted so much:

When we lived in Shanghai a few years ago, I happened to be walking behind a dwarf, on a lane near where we lived. Everyone coming our way slowed down to point and laugh at him. Later many people explained to me that laughing is the behavior of embarrassment, and that the Chinese were uncomfortable and embarrassed at seeing someone who looked unusual and so different from the norm.

OK, maybe, but I don't think this can be the whole story. I think there has to be something more.

… I asked around a little about dwarves in China. One of most interesting comments came just today from a young woman in her 30s whom I would describe as a modern, youthful, savvy nationalist. She said she thinks the reaction to dwarves is part of a traditional mindset where beliefs run deep, even subliminal. It's about Buddhism, she said. Doing good in this life is rewarded. Doing bad is punished, in this lifetime or the next. Maybe, she said, seeing a dwarf makes people wonder for the briefest instant whether this diminished stature is somehow "deserved," and makes them uncomfortable because of the negative history that might be attached to such a person.

A new Tumblr whose time has come. Runner-up: Wyatt Cenac.

Thomas Bowles, who covered NASCAR for Sports Illustrated, describes one of the greatest races he ever witnessed:

500 feet before the finish line of the 53rd Daytona 500, Trevor Bayne started cruising towards an impossible dream. He was about to become the youngest winner of the Great American Race, driving a car whose co-owner, Glen Wood, is on the short list for the NASCAR Hall of Fame despite last winning nearly a decade ago. As a record-setting race (74 lead changes, 16 caution flags, Valentine’s Day-like two-car drafts) came to a close, it was clear these memorable few seconds transcended them all.

That’s when the atmosphere at NASCAR’s 2.5-mile oval changed into something rare; fans of all 43 drivers uniting as one, they stood and roared in approval of the type of achievement you don’t see in person but once a lifetime. So as that No. 21 Ford crossed the finish line, the walls of the infield couldn’t keep out 21 years of passion for motorsports in my own heart. Before I could control it, my hands were coming together to join them, caught up with fans and media alike in a moment we could all appreciate – but one fans and media are told never, ever to experience together. That day marked my first and last claps working as a NASCAR reporter for SI.com.

Yes, they fired him for clapping! Somebody give this man a job.

Your infographic of the day.