George Zimmerman, the acquitted shooter in the death of Trayvon Martin, listens to defense counsel Daniel Megaro (L) during a first-appearance hearing on charges including aggravated assault stemming from a fight with his girlfriend on November 19, 2013. Zimmerman, 30, was arrested after police responded to a domestic disturbance call at a house. By Joe Burbank-Pool/Getty Images.
Peter Marber says it’s time to stop relying on property taxes:
This is hugely controversial, but it has clearly shaped much of the American experience for a century. Property taxes have largely financed American public education, with very little federal funding. As wealthy zip codes can spend more on education, the overall system becomes uneven and reinforces skill gaps and socio-economic divides.
If we could start with a blank slate and look around the world, we would probably institute state and federal funding in public education like virtually every other country, and not fund education largely through property taxes. This would create a far more even system. For those who want to opt out of the public system, there will always be private alternatives. A political impossibility? Maybe, but not insurmountable if implemented over a 30-year period, for example, with re-balancing over time from real estate taxes towards state and local income taxes.
For lovers of women who love books:
Ever wonder why most people around the world don’t refrigerate their eggs? Robert T. Gonzales provides the surprising explanation:
[E]ggs run the risk of getting feces on them. Whether that feces contains traces of Salmonella or not, it stands to reason that if an egg gets poop on it, you should wash it off. And, in America, that’s exactly what we do. In an elaborate automated process involving in-line conveyor belts, massive egg-scrubbing machinery, high-volume air-filtration systems and – last but not least – chlorine misters, American eggs are washed, rinsed, dried, and sanitized in an effort to remove as much dirt, poop and bacteria as possible, all while leaving the shells intact. (Read the details in the USDA’s Egg-Grading Manual.)
Or rather, almost intact. When a hen lays an egg, she coats it in a layer of liquid called the cuticle. It dries in just a few minutes, and is incredibly effective at protecting the egg from contamination, providing what European egg marketing regulations describe as “an effective barrier to bacterial ingress with an array of antimicrobial properties.” America’s egg-washing systems strip eggs of this natural protection. “Such damage,” the EU guidelines note, “may favor trans-shell contamination with bacteria and moisture loss and thereby increase the risk to consumers, particularly if subsequent drying and storage conditions are not optimal.” Washing eggs is therefore illegal throughout much of Europe.
Plus, America is home to some sick-ass chickens:
The other reason Americans tend to refrigerate their eggs: our risk of Salmonella poisoning is often significantly higher than it is overseas, because our chickens are more likely to carry it. In the UK, for instance, it is required by law that all hens be immunized against Salmonella. This protection measure, enacted in the late 1990s, has seen Salmonella cases in Britain drop from 14,771 reported cases in 1997 to just 581 cases in 2009.
There is no such law in the United States, and while more farmers are electing to immunize their hens in the wake of a massive Salmonella-related recall in 2010, Salmonella infection remains a serious public health issue. Even in spite of our egg-washing and our refrigeration habits, FDA data indicates there are close to 150,000 illnesses reported every year due to eggs contaminated by Salmonella.
Drunk selfie @Kirahrice pic.twitter.com/KJbXJXhGxP
— w▲de (@AFADEDWHiTEKiD) October 15, 2013
The Oxford Dictionaries have made it their neologism of the year. Defined as:
a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.
Its usage has increased 17,000 percent in the last twelve months. Did you know it came from Down Under?
Oxford Dictionaries revealed this week the earliest known usage is from a 2002 online ABC forum post. The next recorded usage is also from Australia with the term appearing on a personal blog in 2003. “It seems likely that it may have originated in the Australian context,” dictionary editor Katherine Martin said. “The earliest evidence that we know of at the moment is Australian and it fits in with a tendency in Australian English to make cute, slangy words with that ‘ie’ ending.”
And yes, said Aussie was shit-faced at the time:
Um, drunk at a mates 21st, I tripped ofer [sic] and landed lip first (with front teeth coming a very close second) on a set of steps. I had a hole about 1cm long right through my bottom lip. And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie.
Wait, there’s more:
It has since produced an array of spinoffs, including helfie (hairstyle self), belfie (bum selfie), welfie (workout selfie), drelfie (drunken selfie), and even bookshelfie – a snap taken for the purposes of literary self-promotion.
The Commonwealth Fund quietly eviscerates America’s medical system with some basic facts. Two of the more remarkable ones:
In 2013, more than one-third (37%) of U.S. adults went without recommended care, did not see a doctor when they were sick, or failed to fill prescriptions because of costs, compared with as few as 4 percent to 6 percent in the United Kingdom and Sweden.
Roughly 40 percent of both insured and uninsured U.S. respondents spent $1,000 or more out-of-pocket during the year on medical care, not counting premiums. High deductibles and cost-sharing, along with no limits on out-of-pocket costs, may explain why even insured people in the U.S. struggled to afford needed health care, the researchers said.
I’m sympathetic to the ideas of Ponnuru and Levin, and if they had been seriously proposed by the GOP at some point, would have been open to them. But I can’t see them truly changing the core equation – where the US pays far more and gets far less in healthcare than any other comparable country.
When a private sector system means you have ten times as many people failing to get basic treatment as in Britain’s uber-socialized NHS, you realize just how great the market failure is. I’m all for markets, but the facts seem to me to reveal that in healthcare, they are toxic to most people’s actual, you know, health. In what other area does socialism work so much better than capitalism? Isn’t that a first order question conservatives should address?
Victoria Turk explains how anthropologist Jamshid Tehrani is using the tools of evolutionary science to discover the origins of folk stories:
In his introduction to [his] study, published in the journal PLOS One, Tehrani explained that the common historic-geographic method of classifying folktales into “types” was flawed owing to a tendency to lump stories with a few similar plot points together despite dissimilarities they might have, as well as a sampling bias resulting from a focus on European tales over other folklore traditions. Essentially, it’s all very tenuous and subjective.
So he turned to evolution. He used phylogenetic analysis, a technique developed to analyze the evolutionary relationships among biological species, to analyze links between similar folktales. Just as you might map the evolution of an animal by looking at species with similar traits, Tehrani set out to make a tree graph of Little Red Riding Hood’s ancestry based on characteristics it shares with folk stories through history.
Tehrani elaborates on his method:
The idea is to use a biologist’s tool to investigate the evolution of folktales. This is because folktales not only evolve through similar processes as biological species (variation, selection and inheritance), but the problems of reconstructing them are also comparable. Just as the fossil record bears witness to a tiny proportion of extinct ancestral species, the literary record provides scarce textual evidence about early forms of folktales because they have been mainly transmitted through oral means. Phylogenetics can fill these gaps by using information about the past that has been preserved through the mechanism of inheritance.
His findings:
[There’s a] long-running debate about the relationship between Little Red Riding Hood and similar tales from other regions of the world. These include East Asian tales in which a group of sisters are home alone when they hear a knock at the door. It is a tiger (or leopard, or some other predator) disguised as their grandmother. Despite her suspicious appearance (“Granny, why are your eyes so big?!”) they let her in. That night they share a bed, and the tiger eats the youngest girl to the horror of her sisters, who manage to escape.
Another tale, from central and southern Africa, involves a young girl who is tricked by an ogre pretending to be her brother. When her brother finds out he tracks down the ogre, kills him and cuts her out of the villain’s belly. Both these tales bear a clear resemblance to Little Red Riding Hood. But they are also similar to another well-known international type tale: “The Wolf and the Kids,” in which a group of goat kids are devoured by a wolf who gets into their house by impersonating their mother.
By analyzing variables in the plots and characters of 58 folktales using three methods of phylogenetic analysis, I was able to establish, in a paper just published in PLOS ONE, that the African tales are clearly more closely related to The Wolf and the Kids than they are to Little Red Riding Hood. The East Asian tales evolved by blending together elements from both these tales and from local folktales.
You might want to look at this:
Dickerson contends that Obama’s credibility has taken a major hit:
The complexity of the repair job and the history of broken promises means [the Obama team] probably shouldn’t even be guaranteeing the site will be working by a hard date. In a battle for credibility, these claims don’t send calm—they send a warning that another disappointment is coming. Baby please take me back, this time I promise. … Obama’s credibility challenges won’t stop when his incompetently mismanaged health care website is finally repaired. Once that gets fixed, the president will ride another credibility roller coaster: truthfully describing whether the Affordable Care Act is working as designed.
Tomasky’s gives advice to the president:
Actions are needed now. Obama should be up there—not Kathleen Sebelius, and not the website’s Mr. Fix It Jeffrey Zients; Obama—on a daily or near-daily basis explaining to people, “Here’s what we did today to make this better.” He needs to be (non-sports analogy ahead!) like a mayor handling a snowstorm or a garbage strike. That’s what this is. Citizens need to know stuff. They need to feel someone is in charge. One press conference is defense. Daily updates on what’s getting better make for offense.
Of course he’s not going to. If he were that kind of hands-on manager, this mess might not have happened in the first place.
My thoughts on the subject here.
American MOOCs are in high demand abroad:
Sixty-eight percent of Coursera’s users come from outside the United States, with India, China, Brazil, and Mexico all in the top 10. In these countries, enrollment in tertiary education is growing by leaps and bounds. Public systems aren’t equal to the demand, and private for-profit options are seen as offering a subpar product.
Anya Kamenetz worries that MOOCs will steamroll local universities:
For example, Kepler, a U.S.-based endeavor, announced its intention to offer an education superior to any available at a Rwandan university for a lower cost. This may benefit a small group of Rwandans in the short term, but it does not assist President Paul Kagame’s struggle to improve education and technology in that country over the long term. It’s easy to imagine a future in which the educational equivalent of reruns of Baywatch – a limited menu of glossy American fare – comes to dominate the cultural landscape in developing countries around the world, making it more difficult for cash-starved universities in those countries to pursue scholarship relevant to local contexts.
Update from a reader:
I’m a long-time reader and cofounder of Kepler, which Kamenetz referenced in her Slate article about the negative impact of MOOCs in Africa. Rwanda’s Ministry of Education has been tremendously supportive of Kepler so far, since they’re curious to know whether a model like ours – online courses, in-person seminars led by Teaching Fellows, job training – can lower cost and improve outcomes within their own university system. African universities are already struggling with low graduation and employment rates, and thanks to the coming, uh, youth bulge, demand is going to increase faster than anywhere else in the world. So while MOOCs aren’t the entire solution, online content is going to be part of any scalable solution. Traditional higher ed is just way too expensive to accommodate exploding demand across Africa. Most governments realize this and are looking at projects like Kepler for innovative solutions.
Previous Dish on massive open online courses here.
The Dish 