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Many more readers fuel the thread:

“The obvious question is: Code what? And the fact that it apparently isn’t being asked suggests that those pushing this are massively ignorant of the IT field they are trying to prepare their kids for.” This reader’s argument is awfully reductive. When I think of introducing “coding” to public education, it’s not the process of learning a programming language; it’s the process of learning computational thinking. There are questions that can be answered through computation. How many homework assignments can I skip without sacrificing my A? How much money will my husband and I have to save before we are ready to have a child? Teaching the methods of computational thinking is certainly worthwhile.

Being concerned that programming languages are different and new ones are being created is akin to cautioning a child from learning the flute because there are so many different instruments. It’s not the fluting that’s important; it’s the music.

Another:

I suspect that you’re going to get a lot of feedback about the reader who stated this:

In addition, there are new computer languages appearing every year.  Some of them will catch on; others never will.  And any language that is currently in use is subject to massive obsolescence as new ones come along – quite possibly before the kids are even out of school.  So how do you decide which one to teach the kids?  Until someone can answer that question sensibly, any argument for teaching coding is built on sand.

My mouth gaped open when I read this, because this statement is just quite simply completely backwards.  I have a computer science degree and have been developing software for a dozen years and of course there are always new languages to learn, but the thing is, languages are tools.  What you are really learning when you learn how to code is the art of molding an inanimate machine to do what you want.  You have a computer that speaks only in 0s and 1s, and you need to get it to do extraordinarily complex tasks.  Put the language aside; doing this requires a very different way of thinking than what a lot of people are used to.

To learn this art, you first need a tool – a programming language.  Yes, you have to pick one, and I’m sure that there are better or worse choices for a first language, but in the scheme of things, which language you pick is far less important then getting going with the concepts that are involved in programming.  Once you learn one of those tools and you start learning how to think like a computer and how to compose a program to instruct the computer, learning another language is like learning another tool, a tool that is still used to accomplish the same task of instructing an inanimate machine.

That doesn’t mean that learning another programming language is trivial (some languages are more alike than others, so it really depends on which ones you know and which ones you are trying to learn), but knowing any one language and having some experience using it is a massive step towards learning other languages in the future.

Another reader:

I’m sure your mailbox is overflowing with experts on the topic of teaching kids to code; here’s one more.  Yes, kids should absolutely get some instruction in coding, but it should be around 8th grade, not college, and it will not lead to your kid coding for a living.

What you have to understand is that “coding” is a very vague term, like “math”.  The hard stuff (assembly code, drivers, OSes, low-level C++, etc) is incredibly difficult, and it really doesn’t matter if you teach it in high schools because about 99% of the population simply can’t do it well, no matter how much instruction they get.  However, that should not stop schools from teaching kids the easy stuff, like simple web design and scripting, which are no more difficult than algebra.  They won’t get your kid a sweet job at Google, but the odds that she will go through life without ever having a need to tweak some code in a web page or manipulate the data in a textfile is vanishingly small.

Today’s teens should learn basic coding for the same reason our grandparents learned to balance a checkbook – it’s a useful skill that will help them in almost any profession.  However, if your kid is destined to be a professional programmer, they’re very likely going to learn the skills they need in their bedroom at 2 AM, not from a high school teacher.

Another:

For teaching kids, I recommend just letting them have fun and try to imitate what they see on their computers and phones. Classes make learning boring. That’s how it was for me. I wanted to create those applications myself. There’s tons of environments for kids to play with, but if I was asked for one, I would recommend the Squeak language, which comes with an interactive programmable, graphical environment.

Another:

I’m teaching faculty in computer science at a state university. We do outreach to help K12 schools in the region that want to offer CS courses. One of the hurdles we encounter is that in our state, computer science doesn’t count as a science toward meeting state standards in the same way that chemistry or physics do. Likewise, while there’s mathematical reasoning involved, it’s not a math topic. There are teachers who want to teach it and students who want to learn it, but in the age of No Child Left Untested, it’s hard to add coursework that doesn’t directly meet the various mandates they’re under.  Yes, this is essentially a problem of politics and finding the will to make it happen, but deciding everyone should have some exposure to the subject is only the first step.

One more:

I happened to watch “Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview” on Netflix last night.  He’s is at once an endlessly fascinating man and a huge penis. But germane to the Dish, this quote:

[Writing computer programs] had nothing to do with using them for anything practical.  It had to do with using them to be a mirror of your thought process. To actually learn how to think … I think everybody this country should learn how to program a computer, should learn a computer language because it teaches you how to think. It’s like going to law school. I don’t think anybody should be a lawyer but I think going to law school would actually be useful because it teaches you to think in a certain way, in the same way computer programming … teaches you to think.

(It should be noted I copied this text from the video using the voice recognition on my iPhone.  It should also be noted that the only error the VR program made was translating “I don’t think anybody should be a lawyer” as “I don’t think anybody should be white”.)

Anthropologist Natasha Dow Schull talks about her research on gambling addiction:

New kinds of machines are key. With multi-line slot machines, say you put in a hundred coins. If you’re betting on 100 lines of play, you’ll always ‘win’ something back. If you put in 40 coins and get 30 back, that’s a net loss, a ‘false win’, but the machine responds as if you’ve won: The lights go off, you get the same audiovisual feedback. Almost every hand, you get the same result— there are no dry spells.

On the attraction of slot machines, which account for 80 percent of casino revenue in Las Vegas:

Even though slot machines are considered to be a light form of gambling due to their relatively low stakes, ease of play and historical popularity with women, they are actually the most potent. There are three reasons why: Playing on slot machine is solitary, rapid, and continuous. You don’t have interruptions like you would in a live poker game, waiting for cards to be dealt or waiting for the other players. You can go directly from one hand to the next—there’s no clear stopping point built into the game. You don’t even have to stop to put bills in the machine; the machines take credit or barcoded tickets.

Drum notes that hospitals “routinely charge uninsured patients rates that are 3-4x higher than those paid by insured patients”:

It’s shameless and obscene. It’s like kicking a beggar and stealing his coat just because you know the cops will never do anything about it. This is something that Obamacare goes a long way toward fixing. If you’re covered by private insurance through an exchange, you’re not just protected against catastrophic illness. You’re also protected against being charged outrageous rates for non-catastrophic problems—broken legs, asthma attacks, etc.—just because hospitals have the brute power to do so.

New ACA regulations are also supposed to combat this problem. Steven Brill explains:

Section 9007 of the Affordable Care Act instructs the Internal Revenue Service to take away the tax exemption for nonprofit hospitals like Yale–New Haven unless they become aggressive about informing patients clearly of the availability of financial aid and take steps to learn whether patients need such assistance before they hand over their bills to lawyers or debt collectors.

More important for Gilbert and hundreds of thousands of patients like her, Section 9007 says the IRS can now take away a hospital’s tax exemption if it tries to charge patients who needed financial aid more than the average amount paid for services by insurance companies and Medicare. In other words, hospitals cannot try to make people like Gilbert pay the inflated chargemaster prices.

But, for some reason, these regulations have yet to be implemented:

Since Obamacare was signed into law, there have been more than 3.5 million personal bankruptcies filed in the U.S. Some 60%, or more than 2 million, are estimated to have involved medical debt as a key factor. So the delay in writing these regulations has likely had an enormous toll in bankruptcy filings and in damaged credit ratings.

Relatedly, Evan Soltas considers why emergency rooms charge such high prices for minor procedures:

One candidate is that emergency rooms have high fixed costs. It makes no difference whether the patients who turn up in the ER have life-threatening conditions that require medically complex care, or whether they’re there for a few stitches. The staff is on hand 24/7, along with suites full of expensive equipment, sufficient to handle the most serious cases. You pay for all that whether you need it or not. The itemized bills that [Elisabeth] Rosenthal mentions are misleading.

And here’s another way of looking at it. It’s not as though the actual value of a single stitch is $500. Rather, that price reflects the opportunity cost to the hospital of treating you rather than someone with graver (and more expensive) medical needs. And that opportunity cost could very well be thousands of dollars, even for just an hour of medical attention. A recent study in Health Affairs found that between 13.7 percent and 27.1 percent of emergency room visits could have been safely managed at retail clinics and urgent-care centers, saving $4.4 billion a year.

Landon Palmer wonders whether “the extensive viral and cross-promotional marketing of Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues might be more innovative than it initially seems”:

What’s striking about the exceeding cross-promotion for Anchorman 2 (in both conventional and viral ads) is that it seems to have entirely replaced direct advertising for the film itself. Having not yet seen it, I have no way of knowing whether the movie actually incorporates any of these products besides Paul Rudd’s [Jockey-made] “retro-briefs” …. But if the film utilizes relatively little product placement, and presents its few niche products solely in a winking, self-reflexive manner, then Anchorman 2 will have achieved something altogether different in the evolving conflict between advertising and filmmaking: reverse product placement.

“This might be good for moviegoing,” continues Palmer:

If the primary complaint about the relationship between advertising and filmmaking is the conspicuous placement of products in films, then a close second is the way that films themselves are advertised. Roger Ebert likely wielded the biggest megaphone on this point, regularly voicing that movie trailers reveal too much information about the film itself, contributing to both the overcalculating tendencies of a risk-averse industry and a spectatorship anathema to the possibility of surprise. But if commercials for other products do the advertising for films, then reverse product placement can perhaps solve both of these problems: the ad/brand/product can be used to advertise the film (while not necessarily [being] incorporated into the film), and in return promotional efforts for the film itself won’t reveal every damn joke and plot point. … While one can easily grow tired of these cross-promotional efforts, they have no essential bearing on the film itself. Reverse product placement, then, offers Hollywood something that has long been missing: the potential for the actual movie to feel somewhat fresh and surprising when it finally hits screens.

Chris Beam visits Aba County, a rural part of Sichuan province where rather than censor the Internet, the Chinese government has turned it off altogether :

Aba was first stripped of its connection in 2008, after riots in Tibet led to unrest in this place known for its wide grasslands and Buddhist monasteries. Both mobile phone signals and the Web have been erratic ever since, coming back for months at a time only to disappear again, usually after a Tibetan monk sets him or herself on fire in protest. For example, the Internet returned last December and January and then, according to residents, disappeared again in February. With politically charged “incidents” occurring as recently as September, no one knows when—or if—the information blackout will end for good.

Beam’s hosts explain what life is like for them:

Over tea, [22-year-old Shuangquan Zou] told me that he arrived in Aba last year and found the transition jarring. He had missed some big announcements—his friends threw a huge graduation party without him, because he never saw the invitation—and had trouble keeping in touch. Relationships, he explained, become stratified by communications tools: There are close friends and family, whom you call; less intimate friends, whom you text; then still less intimate ones, whom you message on QQ or WeChat. Removing social media doesn’t mean you start texting and calling those less intimate friends. It just means you lose touch.

The latest revelation from the documents leaked by Edward Snowden is that the NSA has been snatching up cell phone location records by the billions:

The NSA has no reason to suspect that the movements of the overwhelming majority of cellphone users would be relevant to national security. Rather, it collects locations in bulk because its most powerful analytic tools — known collectively as CO-TRAVELER — allow it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.

Amy Davidson finds this development especially horrifying:

What would Joseph McCarthy have done if he could have looked up who had been in a particular college dorm room on a day, twenty years before, when students were talking about socialism?

What if people got used to the idea that the government could and would do this, and so picked up the pace and turned away when they saw people gathering to listen to a speaker, or reading a sign on a wall, and never heard or saw what was being said? (The freedom to assemble is linked, in the First Amendment, to the right “to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”) You would know that the government was taking attendance at your church. (This is one reason that the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles has brought suit against the N.S.A., with the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.) You would think again before showing up at a talk by a lawyer representing someone the government has called a terrorist. If you were a reporter, or a source, you would wonder how you could safely meet. You might never at all.

Meanwhile, in a lengthy piece on the NSA’s ever-expanding powers, Lizza paints a picture of a compliant Senate Intelligence Committee that has acted by and large as a rubber stamp, or even a lobbying group, for the intelligence community:

[O]n October 29th, the Senate Intelligence Committee retreated to its secret chambers, on the second floor of the Hart Office Building. The room has vaulted doors and steel walls that keep it safe from electronic monitoring; the electricity supply to the room is reportedly filtered, for the same reason. The committee’s fifteen members, eight Democrats and seven Republicans, debated [Sen. Dianne] Feinstein’s intelligence-reform bill, the fisa Improvements Act, for three hours. As Congress and the public have digested the details of Snowden’s disclosures, the legislative debate has narrowed to three big questions: Should Congress reform the e-mail and phone tapping allowed by Section 702 to insure that the communications of innocent Americans are not getting swept up in the N.S.A.’s targeting of terrorists? Should the N.S.A. end the bulk collection of phone metadata now authorized by Section 215? Should the fisa court be reformed to make it less deferential to the government?

The committee’s answer to all three questions was no. By a vote of 11–4, it endorsed the Feinstein bill.

He muses on the NSA’s place in the era of “big data”:

In recent years, Americans have become accustomed to the idea of advertisers gathering wide swaths of information about their private transactions. The N.S.A.’s collecting of data looks a lot like what Facebook does, but it is fundamentally different. It inverts the crucial legal principle of probable cause: the government may not seize or inspect private property or information without evidence of a crime. The N.S.A. contends that it needs haystacks in order to find the terrorist needle. Its definition of a haystack is expanding; there are indications that, under the auspices of the “business records” provision of the Patriot Act, the intelligence community is now trying to assemble databases of financial transactions and cell-phone location information. Feinstein maintains that data collection is not surveillance. But it is no longer clear if there is a distinction.

Waldman doubts it will pay major dividends:

If that serious challenger to Clinton does emerge, he or she is going to need to do a whole lot more than run to the former secretary of state’s left, because in presidential politics, ideological crusades almost always fail. In the last half-century, spanning 13 presidential elections and 26 nominees, there are only three candidates one could plausibly argue became a party’s nominee by being the most ideologically true candidate. All three—Barry Goldwater in 1964, George McGovern in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1980—ran superlative primary campaigns. And none had to overcome a candidate with the strength Clinton would have in 2016.

In a later post, he expands his argument:

As they approach the end of the Obama years, Democrats are going to have to hash out who they are, what they believe, and where they want to go. But the reason being the most liberal candidate is insufficient is that primary voters aren’t ideological maximizers, they’re ideological satisficers.

Satisficing is a term originated in the 1950s by economist Herbert Simon, who argued that the classical understanding of economic actors seeking to maximize utility not only didn’t make much sense (because obtaining all relevant information to reach that maximal point can involve huge costs), but didn’t reflect the way people and firms acted in the real world. Instead of making the best choice, people often search for something that is good enough. After some threshold of acceptability is reached, they stop their search. If there’s a reasonably good taqueria down the block, you’re not going to spend weeks searching for the best burrito in the state; you’ll just get your burritos there. And subsequent research suggests you’ll be happier for it.

A snapshot of the expanding crisis:

Football may have the highest number of concussions by sport because of the roster size, but many other sports see higher occurrence rates per athletic exposure. According to a National Academy of Sciences report released last month, field hockey, lacrosse, soccer, wrestling, ice hockey, and basketball have all proved about as dangerous or more so than football in recent years. That’s why, a year after the Ivy League decreed limited contact in football practice, its members did the same for  lacrosse, soccer, and ice hockey. The league, in conjunction with the Big Ten Conference, also launched a cross-institutional research project to study the effects of head injuries in multiple sports.

Former Northwestern goalkeeper Anna Cassell describes how she had to retire from soccer after multiple head injuries:

Unfortunately, the harm of these concussions extend beyond the field. I suffered severe headaches, bouts of anxiety and depression, and balance problems, which all contributed to my falling weeks behind in my pre-med studies. As I think about this sad trend, I am struck by two things. The first is the lack of convincing research regarding concussion prevention. … I am also bothered by the lack of consequences for the opposing players who commit fouls that cause concussions. While referees are instructed to “protect the goalkeeper,” neither of the players who gave me my concussions had any sort of meaningful consequences, despite the fact that both were flagrant fouls where neither of them made any contact with the ball. While their team merely lost possession of the ball, I was losing my soccer career.

Read the related thread on head injuries in professional football here.

Joshua Tucker uses political science to downplay it. Stephen Dyson counters:

Why do political scientists place less emphasis on the importance of individual leaders? One reason is that science means moving from studying specific phenomena to developing general explanations. Why South Africa democratized leads to the question of why countries democratize. The more instances of democratization that there are to explain, the less the vivid details of each case – such as a monumental leader – seem to matter. Explanations of many events cannot logically rest on the idiosyncrasies of one event.

The distinctive features of a leader – Evan Lieberman identified Mandela’s remarkable self-restraint – are also harder to measure than factors like the economy.

Why it’s worth focusing on individuals:

Tucker draws our attention to the dangers of the “great leader” view of politics: it promotes apathy and resignation as we wait for superheroes to appear and fix all of our problems. Yet there are also dangers in minimizing the role of leaders, and they go beyond missing important causes of major events, although this is a clear risk. In the explanations of historians, the reporting of journalists, and the political decisions of citizens, leaders often play the role of personifying abstract trends, ideas, and forces, and offering a human connection between politics and life. People learn, understand, and are motivated to take action by compelling narratives, and compelling narratives involve individual human beings. A worthy goal of science is to provide systematic, rigorous knowledge about issues of social importance. But science should also engage with the moral and empathetic possibilities that come from taking leaders seriously.

Alas, political science – a misnomer from the get-go (and I say that with a PhD in it) – is terrified of human nature, individual character, the unknowable biographical and psychological factors that bear down on any leader’s decisions, and anything that, effectively, cannot be quantified. But a huge amount of human behavior cannot be quantified. Which is why I often thought, as I sat through another stats class, that we’d do better to study Shakespeare than mere regressions to the mean.

(Photo: This file photo taken 15 October 1990 shows African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela sitting beneath Mahatma Gandhi portrait in New-Delhi.  By P Mustafa/Getty. I don’t think Mandela is asleep.)