Kruse Kronicle

Don't Forget the Good Stuff

It is easy to become obsessed with challenges and threats we see before us today. It is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture and to see the tremendous good that is happening in the world. Here are six social indicators pointing to improving quality of life for billions around the globe. Setbacks and momentary reversals are certain but increasingly the challenges we face are of our own making; like tribalism and authoritarianism. Let us be vigilant in addressing the challenges we face without losing sight of the bigger picture.

Younger Americans’ Library Habits and Expectations

Pew Internet: Younger Americans’ Library Habits and Expectations

Younger Americans—those ages 16-29—exhibit a fascinating mix of habits and preferences when it comes to reading, libraries, and technology. Almost all Americans under age 30 are online, and they are more likely than older patrons to use libraries’ computer and internet connections; however, they are also still closely bound to print, as three-quarters (75%) of younger Americans say they have read at least one book in print in the past year, compared with 64% of adults ages 30 and older. ...

A snapshot of younger Americans’ reading and library habits

Reading habits

Some 82% of Americans ages 16-29 read at least one book in any format in the previous 12 months. Over the past year, these younger readers consumed a mean (average) of 13 books—a median (midpoint) of 6 books.

• 75% of Americans ages 16-29 read at least one book in print in the past year
• 25% read at least one e-book
• 14% listened to at least one audiobook

Library use

As of November 2012:

• 65% of Americans ages 16-29 have a library card.
• 86% of those under age 30 have visited a library or bookmobile in person; over half (58%) have done so in the past year.
• 48% of those under age 30 have visited a library website; 28% have done so in the past year.
• 18% of those under age 30 have visited library websites or otherwise accessed library services by mobile device in the past 12 months.

Among recent library users under age thirty (that is, Americans ages 16-29 who have visited a library, library website, or library’s mobile services in the past year), 22% say their overall library use has increased over the past five years. Another 47% said it had stayed about the same, and 30% said it had decreased over that time period.

Saturday Links

1. The Economist has an interesting graph showing the captialism has led to greater happiness in member countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (former Soviet Union countries excluding the three baltic countries.)

2. AEI has an informative piece on economic mobility in the United States: How’s the American Dream doing? Well, which one?

There are two ways to define economic mobility: 1) absolute mobility, whether each generation is financially better off than the one before; and 2) relative mobility, whether you can change your income rank  vs. your parents. Most Americans probably think both measures important. We want to be more prosperous than mom and dad, but also be able to change our circumstances and make our dreams come true. ...

... A San Francisco Fed study – using data tracking families since 1968 — looks at both versions of the American Dream, finding one healthier than the other. Looking at absolute mobility, researchers Leila Bengali and Mary Daly find the United States “highly mobile.” Over the sample period, 67% of US adults had higher family incomes than their parents, including 83% of those in the lowest birth quintile, or bottom 20% (versus 54% for children born into the top quintile, or top 20%.) ...

3. Concerning gender income inequality, Mark Perry says ‘Studies’ that compare average wages by gender, without controlling for demographic factors, can’t be taken seriously

4. Clive Crook thinks an ownership society may be the answer to reducing wealth inequality: Liberals Should Embrace the Ownership Society

... It’s true that conservatives’ standard proposals for privatizing Social Security and voucherizing Medicare would shift risk onto beneficiaries -- but this plainly isn’t a necessary consequence of the basic principle. I agree with Konczal that adequate insurance against economic risk, underwritten by the government, is essential. I also agree that most conservatives aren’t interested in providing that guarantee. That’s exactly why liberals ought to take up the ownership society themselves.

Ownership entails risk, it’s true, but insurance can minimize it. Ownership also provides control, independence and self-respect -- things it wouldn’t hurt liberals to be more interested in. And when it comes to inequality and stagnating middle incomes, ownership can give wage slaves a stake in the nation’s economic capital.

Done right, an equity component in government-backed saving for retirement could be the best idea liberals have had since the earned-income tax credit (oh, sorry, that started out as a conservative idea as well). ...

5. Scientific American: Massive Open Online Courses, aka MOOCs, Transform Higher Education and Science

6.Scientific American also has interesting piece on how Brain Researchers Can Detect Who We Are Thinking About

FMRI scans of volunteers' media prefrontal cortexes revealed unique brain activity patterns associated with individual characters or personalities as subjects thought about them.

7. Gizmodo reports that Sex in Space Could Be Deadly.

Researchers already knew humans, animals and plants have evolved in response to Earth's gravity and they are able to sense it. What we are still discovering is how the processes occurring within the cells of the human and plant bodies are affected by the more intense gravity, or hypergravity, that would be found on a large planet, or the microgravity that resembles the conditions on a space craft.

8. Walgreens Building First Self-Powered Store

According to estimations, engineers expect the the store to generate around 265,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) per year. Store operation will only require 200,000 kWh, so perhaps that extra wattage could be pumped back into the grid or used to power nearby utilities.

9. CNN reports on How online ruined dating ... forever

When people can browse potential dates online like items in a catalog, geo-locate hook-ups on an exercise bike just seven feet away, arrange a spontaneous group date with the app Grouper or arrange a bevy of blind dates in succession with Crazy Blind Date, it makes me wonder if all this newfound technological convenience has, in fact, made romance that much more elusive. Now, we may be more concerned with what someone isn't rather than what they are. And as that twenty-something entrepreneur reminded me over coffee, services like OkCupid, and even Facebook, sap a lot of the mystique out of those first few dates. So, sure, it may be easier than ever to score a date, but what kind of date will it really be?

10. Interesting piece on Why Do People Use Nope Even Though No Is Shorter?

11. Is the New Pope More Liberal Than the Last Two? Why It's Hard to Tell. Emily Chertoff offers some insightful analysis.

12. Michael Bird offer this quote from Michael Goheen and Craig Bartholomew's "The Drama of Scripture" in his post The Importance of the Narrative of Scripture.

Many of us have read the Bible as if it were merely a mosaic of little bits – theological bits, moral bits, historical-critical bits, sermon bits, devotional bits. But when we read the Bible in such a fragmented way, we ignore it’s divine author’s intention to shape our lives through its story. All humanity communities live out some story that provides a context for understanding the meaning of history and gives shape and direction to their lives. If we allow the Bible to become fragmented, it is in danger of being absorbed into whatever other story is shaping our culture, and it will thus cease to shape our lives as it should. Idolatry has twisted the dominant cultural story of the secular Western world. If as believers we allow this story (rather than the Bible) to become the foundation of our thought and action, then our lives will manifest not the truths of Scripture, but the lies of an idolatrous culture. Hence the unity of Scripture is no minor matter: a fragmented Bible may actually produce theologically orthodox, morally upright, warmly pious idol worshippers! (p. 12).

13. Scot McKnight has a great piece on what constitutes legalism: Legalism: Old and New Perspectives

14. Thom S. Rainer on Ten Things Pastors Wish They Knew Before They Became Pastors

1. I wish someone had taught me basic leadership skills. “I was well grounded in theology and Bible exegesis, but seminary did not prepare me for the real world of real people. It would have been great to have someone walk alongside me before my first church.”
2. I needed to know a lot more about personal financial issues. “No one ever told me about minister’s housing, social security, automobile reimbursement, and the difference between a package and a salary. I got burned in my first church.”
3. I wish I had been given advice on how to deal with power groups and power people in the church. “I got it all wrong in my first two churches. I was fired outright from the first one and pressured out in the second one. Someone finally and courageously pointed out how I was messing things up almost from the moment I began in a new church. I am so thankful that I am in the ninth year of a happy pastorate in my third church.” ...

Read the whole thing.

15. Joseph Sunde rates the 5 TV Shows That Demonstrate the Importance of Ordinary Work

Saturday Links

1. Conventional wisdom says wearing the red shirt in Star Trek will get you killed. Not so fast. Statistical analysis in Significance Magazine disagrees. (Keep your redshirt on: a Bayesian exploration)

"... In spite of wearing a redshirt, there is only an 8.6% chance of a member of the operations or engineering departments becoming a casualty. These personnel should ensure that their life insurance plans are based on their departments and not their uniform color.

Although Enterprise crew members in redshirts suffer many more casualties than crew members in other uniforms, they suffer fewer casualties than crew members in gold uniforms when the entire population size is considered. Only 10% of the entire redshirt population was lost during the three year run of Star Trek. This is less than the 13.4% of goldshirts, but more than the 5.1% of blueshirts. What is truly hazardous is not wearing a redshirt, but being a member of the security department. The red-shirted members of security were only 20.9% of the entire crew, but there is a 61.9% chance that the next casualty is in a redshirt and 64.5% chance this red-shirted victim is a member of the security department. The remaining redshirts, operations and engineering make up the largest single population, but only have an 8.6% chance of being a casualty.

Red uniform shirts are safe, as long as the wearer is not in the security department."

 2. Interesting piece on automation in the Economist: Robocolleague

Robots are getting more powerful. That need not be bad news for workers. ...

... Historically, technological advances have been relatively benign for workers. Labour-market trends through the 19th and 20th centuries show surprising continuity, according to Lawrence Katz of Harvard University and Robert Margo of Boston University. In recent decades, for example, computerisation and automation have displaced “middle-skilled” workers at the same time as employment among high- and low-skilled workers has increased. This “hollowing out” is not new, Messrs Katz and Margo note. Early industrialisation had similar effects. Middle-skilled artisans, like trained weavers, were put out of work by industrial textile production, but the fortunes of less-skilled factory workers and white-collar factory managers steadily improved. Mechanisation’s insatiable appetite for routine work of all types has yet to create mass unemployment. Quite the opposite.

The worry is that technology now has its sights set on non-routine tasks as well as mundane ones. Yet Mr Autor notes that just because a skilled job can be automated does not mean it will be. The number of workers used to build Nissan vehicles varies a lot between Japan, where labour is expensive, and India, where it is abundant and cheap. The relative cost of different types of workers matters for firms as they choose how to deploy new technologies. ...

3. Speaking of technology and its impact on industries Technology Upends Another Industry: Homebuilding

4. Businessweek has a piece about Indie Capitalism

Indie Capitalism has three foundational principles:

• Creativity generates economic value. Creativity is the source of profit. Yes, efficiency can squeeze more out of what exists, but creativity gives us originality, which translates into a market advantage and big margins.

• Creativity drives capitalism. These past few years we have been victimized by the disastrous results of “creativity” applied to the financial sector (mortgage-backed securities, for starters). What we lost sight of is that the scaling of creativity to actually make things of value sold in the marketplace is the true heart of our economic system. It is the true generator of net new jobs, wealth, and tax revenue.

• Creative destruction is crucial to economic growth. Crony capitalism, which relies on monopoly and political power, is antithetical to entrepreneurial capitalism. A faster cycle of birth, growth, and death of companies boosts creativity, economic value, and growth.

5. Business Insider reports on Why Manufacturing Jobs Are Returning To America For The First Time In Decades

 The bottom line: For the first time in decades, several key economic drivers have created a competitive advantage for the U.S. that will encourage corporate strategic decisions on capital allocation and acquisitions for generations to come.

Here's why:

1. Cheap and abundant natural gas. ...

2. Innovation. Despite talk of a brain drain, the U.S. remains the global innovation leader, maintaining a position enjoyed for 50 years. ...

3. Rule of law. Without the means to protect intellectual property, it cannot be exploited for competitive advantage. ...

4. Human capital. The wage gap between the U.S. and China has been shrinking. ...

5. De-complexity. Western multinationals continue to struggle with management of operations in developing countries. ...

6. Public policy and abundance. The federal government appears to be seizing the opportunity to promote job growth at home.

7. Credit, currency and the coming wave of mergers and acquisitions.

6. 3-D Printed Car Is as Strong as Steel, Half the Weight, and Nearing Production.

"Picture an assembly line not that isn’t made up of robotic arms spewing sparks to weld heavy steel, but a warehouse of plastic-spraying printers producing light, cheap and highly efficient automobiles.

If Jim Kor’s dream is realized, that’s exactly how the next generation of urban runabouts will be produced. His creation is called the Urbee 2 and it could revolutionize parts manufacturing while creating a cottage industry of small-batch automakers intent on challenging the status quo. ..."

7. And more about 3-D Printing. 3D Printing On The Frontlines — Army Deploying $2.8M Mobile Fabrication Labs.

Throughout history, war and innovation have gone hand in hand, whether it’s breakthroughs out of heavily funded R&D programs or makeshift contraptions thrown together with spare parts. Soldiers are trained to use the technology on hand to get the job done, one way or the other.

But how would military operations change if soldiers on the battlefield could have the best of both worlds: access to expert engineers able to fabricate custom-designed fixes right on-the-spot and in very little time? ...

8. And how about 4-D printing? 4D Printing Is The Future Of 3D Printing And It’s Already Here

"It may sound strange and far out, but it’s actually quite simple. 4D printing is being billed as a process where synthetic objects can change and adapt themselves to the environment. In a recent TED interview, Tibbits compared the process of 4D printing to the process of natural adaptation:

Natural systems obviously have this built in — the ability to have a desire. Plants, for example, generally have the desire to grow towards light and they generate energy from the translation of photosynthesis, carbon dioxide to oxygen, and so on. This is extremely difficult to build into synthetic systems — the ability to “want” or need something and know how to change itself in order to acquire it, or the ability to generate its own energy source. If we combine the processes that natural systems offer intrinsically (genetic instructions, energy production, error correction) with those artificial or synthetic (programmability for design and scaffold, structure, mechanisms) we can potentially have extremely large-scale quasi-biological and quasi-synthetic architectural organisms."

7. The New York Times reports that Music Industry Sales Rise, and Digital Revenue Gets the Credit

The music industry, the first media business to be consumed by the digital revolution, said on Tuesday that its global sales rose last year for the first time since 1999, raising hopes that a long-sought recovery might have begun.

The increase, of 0.3 percent, was tiny, and the total revenue, $16.5 billion, was a far cry from the $38 billion that the industry took in at its peak more than a decade ago. Still, even if it is not time for the record companies to party like it’s 1999, the figures, reported Tuesday by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, provide significant encouragement.

The Economist also posted this chart this week:

8. Teleworking: The myth of working from home from the BBC. "Yahoo has banned its staff from "remote" working. After years of many predicting working from home as the future for everybody, why is it not the norm?"

9.  Europe's Youth Unemployment Nightmare Started Long Before The Euro Crisis 

"Reasons for high unemployment among the young include ineffective education systems (the share of early school dropouts is 20% in Italy and 30% in Spain) and dual labour markets with highly protected jobs for older employees. The good performance of Germany is not least a result of the German apprenticeship system, which facilitates labour market access for school leavers by lowering the company’s costs for employing them. The OECD’s latest “Going for Growth” report recommends reforms to strengthen the vocational training systems as one of the most effective ways to fight structural youth unemployment. This would also be a reasonable starting point for the EU’s youth employment programme."

10. Benjamin Wright - Book Review: God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life by Gene Edward Vieth, Jr.

11. Rough Type: Students to e-textbooks: no thanks

"What’s most revealing about this study is that, like earlier research, it suggests that students’ preference for printed textbooks is reflects the real pedagogical advantages they experience in using the format: fewer distractions, deeper engagement, better comprehension and retention, and greater flexibility to accommodating idiosyncratic study habits. Electronic textbooks will certainly get better, and will certainly have advantages of their own, but they won’t replicate the particular advantages inherent to the tangible form of the printed book."

12. How Many Ph.D.'s Actually Get to Become College Professors?

13. Top 10 Causes of Death in the U.S.

14. ABC reports that Young Hispanics Leaving Catholic Church for Protestant Faith

The Catholic Church has struggled to bring in young members in the United States. Less than half of U.S. Hispanics between 18 and 29 identify as Catholic, compared with the 60+ percent of Hispanics older than 50.

15. Robert Jones says Don't write off mainline Protestants

The narrative of decline in the mainline church underestimates the continuing influence of its members, says a religion researcher.

16.Some interesting observations by NYU psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He says we tend to process our social world through three lenses: Social distance, hierarchy, and disgust. Conservatives tend to have a lower threshold of revulsion while liberals, and praticularly libertarians, have a higher threshold.

17. Bruce Fieler has an interesting piece in the Atlantic. Want to Give Your Family Value and Purpose? Write a Mission Statement

What the Public Knows - In Pictures, Maps, Graphs and Symbols

Pew Research: What the Public Knows - In Pictures, Maps, Graphs and Symbols

The latest update of the Pew Research Center’s regular News IQ quiz uses a set of 13 pictures, maps, graphs and symbols to test knowledge of current affairs. (To take the quiz yourself before reading this report, click here.) At the high end, nearly nine-in-ten Americans (87%) are able to select the Star of David as the symbol of Judaism from a group of pictures of religious symbols. And when shown a picture of Twitter’s corporate logo, 79% correctly associate the logo with that company.

At the low end, just 43% are able to identify a picture of Elizabeth Warren’s from a group of four photographs of female politicians, among them Nancy Pelosi, Tammy Baldwin and Deb Fischer. And when presented with a map of the Middle East in which Syria is highlighted, only half are able to identify the nation correctly.

Overall, majorities correctly answer 11 of 13 questions in the new quiz, which was conducted online January 18-24, 2013, among a random sample of 1,041 adults by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

The quiz includes several items about leading political figures. When shown a picture of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, 73% identified Christie from a list that included Newt Gingrich, Scott Walker and Rush Limbaugh. An identical percentage identified John Boehner in a question with a similar format. To see how each question was presented, see the attached survey topline.

Seven of the 13 items were answered correctly by two-thirds or more of the survey’s respondents. These included identifying the Star of David as the symbol for Judaism (87%), the corporate logo for Twitter (79%), the map of states won in 2012 by President Obama (75%), the photos of Christie and Boehner (73% each), a graph of the unemployment rate (70%) and the symbol for the Euro (69%).

About six-in-ten (62%) could identify the new secretary of state, John Kerry, from a photo lineup of four people. When shown a list of four state maps, and asked which of the states had approved the legalization of same-sex marriage last year, 60% correctly chose the state of Washington. But just 50% were able to identify Syria as country highlighted on a map of the Middle East.

On average, quiz takers correctly answered 8.5 of the 13 questions, a score of 65% correct when graded like a classroom test. ...

Several interesting tables presented in this article. Take a look.

About That Overpopulation Problem

Five years ago I wrote a piece called, Technophysio Evolution and Demographic Transition, explaining the dynamics and trends of global population growth and decline. Slate has and excellent article explaining the Demographic Transition Model.

Slate: About That Overpopulation Problem

Research suggests we may actually face a declining world population in the coming years.

The world’s seemingly relentless march toward overpopulation achieved a notable milestone in 2012: Somewhere on the planet, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, the 7 billionth living person came into existence.

Lucky No. 7,000,000,000 probably celebrated his or her birthday sometime in March and added to a population that’s already stressing the planet’s limited supplies of food, energy, and clean water. Should this trend continue, as the Los Angeles Times noted in a five-part series marking the occasion, by midcentury, “living conditions are likely to be bleak for much of humanity.”

A somewhat more arcane milestone, meanwhile, generated no media coverage at all: It took humankind 13 years to add its 7 billionth. That’s longer than the 12 years it took to add the 6 billionth—the first time in human history that interval had grown. (The 2 billionth, 3 billionth, 4 billionth, and 5 billionth took 123, 33, 14, and 13 years, respectively.) In other words, the rate of global population growth has slowed. And it’s expected to keep slowing. Indeed, according to experts’ best estimates, the total population of Earth will stop growing within the lifespan of people alive today.

And then it will fall. ...

... Why is this happening? Scientists who study population dynamics point to a phenomenon called “demographic transition.”

“For hundreds of thousands of years,” explains Warren Sanderson, a professor of economics at Stony Brook University, “in order for humanity to survive things like epidemics and wars and famine, birthrates had to be very high.” Eventually, thanks to technology, death rates started to fall in Europe and in North America, and the population size soared. In time, though, birthrates fell as well, and the population leveled out. The same pattern has repeated in countries around the world. Demographic transition, Sanderson says, “is a shift between two very different long-run states: from high death rates and high birthrates to low death rates and low birthrates.” Not only is the pattern well-documented, it’s well under way: Already, more than half the world’s population is reproducing at below the replacement rate. ...

... One of the most contentious issues is the question of whether birthrates in developed countries will remain low. The United Nation’s most recent forecast, released in 2010, assumes that low-fertility countries will eventually revert to a birthrate of around 2.0. In that scenario, the world population tops out at about 10 billion and stays there. But there’s no reason to believe that that birthrates will behave in that way—no one has every observed an inherent human tendency to have a nice, arithmetically stable 2.1 children per couple. On the contrary, people either tend to have an enormous number of kids (as they did throughout most of human history and still do in the most impoverished, war-torn parts of Africa) or far too few. We know how to dampen excessive population growth—just educate girls. The other problem has proved much more intractable: No one’s figured out how to boost fertility in countries where it has imploded. Singapore has been encouraging parenthood for nearly 30 years, with cash incentives of up to $18,000 per child. Its birthrate? A gasping-for-air 1.2. When Sweden started offering parents generous support, the birthrate soared but then fell back again, and after years of fluctuating, it now stands at 1.9—very high for Europe but still below replacement level.

The reason for the implacability of demographic transition can be expressed in one word: education. One of the first things that countries do when they start to develop is educate their young people, including girls. That dramatically improves the size and quality of the workforce. But it also introduces an opportunity cost for having babies. “Women with more schooling tend to have fewer children,” says William Butz, a senior research scholar at IIASA. ...

Saturday Links

1. Building Congregations Around Art Galleries and Cafes as Spirituality Wanes

"... Although the number of evangelical churches in the United States declined for many years, the trend reversed in 2006, with more new churches opening each year since, according to the Leadership Network’s most recent surveys. This wave of “church planting” has been highest among nondenominational pastors, free to experiment outside traditional hierarchies.

“I hear a lot of pastors say, ‘I’m not just trying to be creative and avant-garde, I think this is maybe the last chance for me,’ ” said Doug Pagitt, the founder of Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis.

Mr. Pagitt has written several books on church innovations, many of which were first developed in the “emergent” church movement of the last decade or among “missional” churches whose practices focus on life outside the church.

Many of their innovations are being adopted by an increasing number of pastors in the mainstream.

..."

2. Signs of Changes Taking Hold in Electronics Factories in China

... But in March, unbeknown to Ms. Pu, a critical meeting had occurred between Foxconn’s top executives and a high-ranking Apple official. The companies had committed themselves to a series of wide-ranging reforms. Foxconn, China’s largest private employer, pledged to sharply curtail workers’ hours and significantly increase wages — reforms that, if fully carried out next year as planned, could create a ripple effect that benefits tens of millions of workers across the electronics industry, employment experts say.

Other reforms were more personal. Protective foam sprouted on low stairwell ceilings inside factories. Automatic shut-off devices appeared on whirring machines. Ms. Pu got her chair. This autumn, she even heard that some workers had received cushioned seats.

The changes also extend to California, where Apple is based. Apple, the electronics industry’s behemoth, in the last year has tripled its corporate social responsibility staff, has re-evaluated how it works with manufacturers, has asked competitors to help curb excessive overtime in China and has reached out to advocacy groups it once rebuffed.

Executives at companies like Hewlett-Packard and Intel say those shifts have convinced many electronics companies that they must also overhaul how they interact with foreign plants and workers — often at a cost to their bottom lines, though, analysts say, probably not so much as to affect consumer prices. As Apple and Foxconn became fodder for “Saturday Night Live” and questions during presidential debates, device designers and manufacturers concluded the industry’s reputation was at risk. ...

3. Yet another reflection on the impact of 3-D printing in Spiegel: Technology May Bring New Industrial Revolution

4. Some states are no longer requiring that cursive writing be taught. The Wall Street Journal laments The Lost Art of the Handwritten Note

5. Speaking writing, an e-company has come up with a new spin on celebrity autographs: Is This Really the Future of the Autograph?

"...Launched in July, the Seattle-based Egraphs' business model is simple, but pretty clever. Fans can peruse the company website to see if their favorite athlete has partnered up with Egraphs. Each player's section has a number of professionally shot action photographs included, typically priced between $25 and $50. The fan pays and sends the athlete a message through the website, including some personal details or memories.

The athlete then receives that message on his custom iPad app, using the the information provided to write a personalized note and electronic autograph on the selected photo. The photo is then sent electronically to the fan, who can save it digitally, share it on social media or order a physical print. Revenue is split between company and athlete. ..."

6. Hispanic Pregnancies Fall in U.S. as Women Choose Smaller Families

7. Huffington Post ponders whether or not Biblical Baby Names Falling In Popularity

8. This month is the 40th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling, legalizing abortion across the country. Time magazine has a feature article about the Pro-Choice movement this week that suggests 1973 may have been the high-water mark for the movement. Unfortunately, the article is behind a pay wall. Here is a short clip summarizing their take.

9. Why Are College Textbooks So Absurdly Expensive?

"...Academic Publishers will tell you that creating modern textbooks is an expensive, labor-intensive process that demands charging high prices. But as Kevin Carey noted in a recent Slate piece, the industry also shares some of the dysfunctions that help drive up the cost of healthcare spending. Just as doctors prescribe prescription drugs they'll never have to pay for, college professors often assign titles with little consideration of cost. Students, like patients worried about their health, don't have much choice to pay up, lest they risk their grades. Meanwhile, Carey illustrates how publishers have done just about everything within their power to prop up their profits, from bundling textbooks with software that forces students to buy new editions instead of cheaper used copies, to suing a low-cost textbook start-ups over flimsy copyright claims. ..."

10. Feeling thirsty? Consider that Bottled Water Is More Dangerous Than Tap Water.

11. Good news for history mystery buffs. Amelia Earhart Plane And Flight 19 Wreckage Could Be Found By New NOAA Technology

12. Baseball Pitchers like Phil Niekro, Tim Wakefield, and now, R. A. Dickey did their magic throwing a knuckleball. Pitchers who master usually do very well and it puts less stress on the arm. So why don't more pitchers throw it? Why the Knuckleball Isn’t Thrown by More Pitchers in Major League Baseball

(Like the Kruse Kronicle at Facebook.)

How Religion Is Making a Comeback on College Campuses

The Daily Beast: How Religion Is Making a Comeback on College Campuses

A dramatic shift in the global landscape has made religion a pressing issue on college campuses again. Douglas and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen, authors of No Longer Invisible: Religion in University Education, on how higher education found faith.

One in three Americans under the age of 30 reports being religiously unaffiliated, so it may be a surprise to learn that religion is making a comeback on American campuses. It’s not that campuses have become holy places, and religious zealots are not calling the shots. But religion is no longer marginalized from campus life as it was in the late 20th century. A generation ago, many Americans and most colleges and universities could live with the myth that religion was a purely private matter, but today no one questions that religion can have powerful effects on individuals and societies. ...

Saturday Links

Like the Kruse Kronicle at Facebook if you want links to daily posts to appear in your Facebook feed.

Here are this week's Saturday links.

1. To celebrate the Christmas season, Deck the Halls with Macro Follies

2. The Explosion of 15th Century Printing: A Data Visualization

"... Drawing on data from the [Harvard] university's library collections, the animation below maps the number and location of printed works by year. Watch it full screen in HD to see cities light up as the years scroll by in the lower left corner. ..."

3. Drive-through fast-food not convenient enough for you? Burger King delivery: A new front in the fast-food wars?

4. There is a U-shaped happiness curve, consistent across cultures, that shows happiness declines from childhood until about our mid-forties and then begins to improve as me grow old. It appears it may hold true in primates as well. Our ability to discount bad news, even when we shouldn't, follows the same U-shaped curve. Our brains and experience are optimal for discerning bad news in middle-age. Turns out that ignorance (or maybe denial) truly is bliss. Viewpoint: How happiness changes with age. On a related note, it appears that Elderly Brains Have Trouble Recognizing Untrustworthy Faces.

5. The holiday season is in full swing and many people falsely believe this a time of elevated suicide rates. Actually, spring and summer have the highest rates and Nov - Jan have the lowest. In 2010, July was highest and December was lowest. Holiday suicide myth persists, research says

6. French sperm count 'falls by a third' but still within normal range. Researchers don't seem to know why.

7. The Atlantic has interesting article on Why Don't Parents Name Their Daughters Mary Anymore? It includes this graph.

"Michael" was in the top 3 names for boys from 1953-2010. It dropped to sixth last year. Want to know how your name ranks for each year since 1880? Go to the Social Security Online's Popular Baby Names. The Baby Name Wizard is also pretty cool.

8. More Dads Buy the Toys, So Barbie, and Stores, Get Makeovers.

"For the first time in Barbie’s more than 50-year history, Mattel is introducing a Barbie construction set that underscores a huge shift in the marketplace. Fathers are doing more of the family shopping just as girls are being encouraged more than ever by hypervigilant parents to play with toys (as boys already do) that develop math and science skills early on.

It’s a combination that not only has Barbie building luxury mansions — they are pink, of course — but Lego promoting a line of pastel construction toys called Friends that is an early Christmas season hit. The Mega Bloks Barbie Build ’n Style line, available next week, has both girls — and their fathers — in mind.

“Once it’s in the home, dads would very much be able to join in this play that otherwise they might feel is not their territory,” said Dr. Maureen O’Brien, a psychologist who consulted on the new Barbie set...."

And this reminds me of last year, or the year before, when cooking sets were becoming big with boys. They've been watching Emeril Lagasse on the Food Network. "Bam!" New merchandising angle.

9. Instead of indiscriminately sending kids off to college and saddling them with huge debt, maybe a New push for two-year degrees could be smart move for US, report says.

10. Business Insider lists The 12 Most Corrupt Countries In The World.

11. Love them or hate them, the Koch brothers are intriguing. Many political junkies know of them but few others seem to know about them. Forbes has an interesting feature article in the most recent issue on the Koch empire and its influence: Inside The Koch Empire: How The Brothers Plan To Reshape America

12. Is the two party system fracturing? Coalition Is to Control State Senate as Dissident Democrats Join With Republicans

13. How is this economic recovery different from others? The Scariest Jobs Chart Ever

14. "Data-driven healthcare won't replace physicians entirely, but it will help those receptive to technology perform their jobs better." Technology will replace 80% of what doctors do

15. Another bright idea. New plastic lighting saves energy. Goodbye, fluorescent lights?

"Scientists have designed an energy-efficient light of plastic packed with nanomaterials that glow. The shatterproof FIPEL technology can be molded into almost any shape, but still needs to prove it's commercially viable."

16. Yet another good story about the rise of vertical farming. Salad in the sky: The rise of the vertical farm?

17. The Conservation Law Center has an interesting piece about the potential changes nanotechnology will bring to use of resources and the economy. Nanotechnology: The Potential to Make Every Industry Sustainable

"... Last month, at the first ever conference of the Sustainable Nanotechnology Organization in Washington DC, Michail Roco of the National Science Foundation, and architect of the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative provided a response. He said, “every industrial sector is unsustainable…and nanotechnology holds the promise of making every one of them sustainable.”

It’s my belief that that is true: nanotechnology, or the ability to manipulate matter at a scale of one billionth of a meter, has far-reaching implications for the improvement of sustainable technology, industry and society.

Already, it is being used widely to enable more sustainable practices. Safer manufacturing, less waste generation, reusable materials, more efficient energy technologies, better water purification, lower toxicity and environmental impacts from chemotherapy agents to marine paints are all current applications of nanotechnology. There is no reason for this technology to develop in an unsustainable manner.

In the past, a lack of foresight has resulted in costs to society – people, businesses, and governments, and— that could have been avoided by proactive efforts to manage risks. Today, the tools to develop safer technologies and less harmful products exist. Let us not miss this opportunity. ..."

18. The American Enterprise Institute has an interesting summary of a Nielson report about social media usage. 8 fun facts about the incredible rise of social media

19. Death On Facebook Now Common As 'Dead Profiles' Create Vast Virtual Cemetery

"It used be that news of death spread through phone calls, and before that, letters and house calls. The departed were publicly remembered via memorials on street corners, newspaper obituaries and flowers at grave sites. To some degree, this is still the case. But increasingly, the announcements and subsequent mourning occur on social media. Facebook, with 1 billion detailed, self-submitted user profiles, was created to connect the living. But it has become the world's largest site of memorials for the dead."

20. From the "That's just not right!" file. Harvard Economics Department does their version of "Call me maybe."

Saturday Links

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. There a few less links this week. Enjoy!

1. The last typewriter rolls off the assembly line.

2. Abraham Lincoln's spirituality has been a constant topic of debate among historians. The new Lincoln movie has resurfaced the debate. Film revives questions about Abraham Lincoln’s faith, but offers few answers.

3. What impact will computer/internet technology have on our daily lives? Glimpse of your life in 2020 thanks to the Internet of Things.

"What if all objects were interconnected and started to sense their surroundings and communicate with each other? The Internet of Things (IoT) will have that sort of ubiquitous machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity. Since there are estimates that between 50 billion to 500 billion devices will have a mobile connection to the cloud by 2020, here’s a glimpse of our possible future.

Your alarm clock signals the lights to come on in your bedroom; the lights tell the heated tiles in your bathroom to kick on so your feet are not cold when you go to shower. The shower tells your coffee pot to start brewing. Your smartphone checks the weather and tells you to wear your gray suit since RFID tags on your clothes confirm that your favorite black suit is not in your closet but at the dry cleaners. After you pour a cup of java, the mug alerts your medication that you have a drink in-hand and your pill bottle begins to glow and beep as a reminder. Your pill bottle confirms that you took your medicine and wirelessly adds this info to your medical file at the doctor’s office; it will also text the pharmacy for a refill if you are running low.

Your smart TV automatically comes on with your favorite news channel while you eat breakfast and browse your tablet for online news. After you’ve eaten, while you are brushing your teeth, your dishwasher texts your smartphone to fire up your vehicle via the remote start. Because your “smart” car can talk to other cars and the road, it knows what streets to avoid due to early morning traffic jams. Your phone notifies you that your route to work has been changed to save you time. And you no longer need to look for a place to park, since your smartphone reserved one of the RFID parking spaces marked as "open" and available in the cloud. Don’t worry about your smart house because as you exited it, the doors locked, the lights went off, and the temperature was adjusted to save energy and money.

Does it sound too farfetched for 2020? It shouldn’t since a good part of that is in the works now. ..."

4. Speaking of computers, technology lovers will appreciate that the World’s Oldest Computer Gets a Reboot.

5. Should Students Use Wikipedia? Maybe it depends on how they use it and what the objective is.

6. Does the United States essentially have a flat tax? Economist Greg Mankiw thinks maybe do. The U.S. has a flat tax (in effect)

"The Congressional Budget Office has a new study of effective federal marginal tax rates for low and moderate income workers (those below 450 percent of the poverty line).  The study looks at the effects of income taxes, payroll taxes, and SNAP (the program formerly known as Food Stamps).  The bottom line is that the average household now faces an effective marginal tax rate of 30 percent.  In 2014, after various temporary tax provisions have expired and the newly passed health insurance subsidies go into effect, the average effective marginal tax rate will rise to 35 percent.

What struck me is how close these marginal tax rates are to the marginal tax rates at the top of the income distribution.  This means that we could repeal all these taxes and transfer programs, replace them with a flat tax along with a universal lump-sum grant, and achieve approximately the same overall degree of progressivity."

7.  What are the conservative streams and thinkers that are likely to influence the evolving future of conservatism in the United States. David Brooks has some interesting insights into The Conservative Future.

8.  Did you know that You Are Most Likely to Die at 11 a.m.?

9. This would never appeal to me. I like to know exactly what I'm buying. Would drop some coins in this thing?

The BIBLIO-MAT from Craig Small on Vimeo.

10. The High Calling has a review of R. Paul Stevens new book, Work Matters, Lessons from Scripture. I hope to read it next month.

11. Good news on the crime front in Washington, D. C.: D.C. on pace for fewer than 100 homicides in 2012

Why College May Be Totally Free Within 10 Years

Time: Why College May Be Totally Free Within 10 Years

... Yet if Wadhwa is right the student debt problem will take care of itself—at least as it relates to the next generation and those that follow. Online courses will proliferate to such a degree that acquiring knowledge will become totally free. There will still be a cost associated with getting a formal degree. But most universities, he says, “will be in the accreditation business.” They will monitor and sanction coursework; teachers will become mentors and guides, not deliver lectures and administer tests. This model has the potential to dramatically cut the cost of an education and virtually eliminate the need to borrow for one, he says.

This isn’t an argument that Thiel was ready to entertain. His focus is on skipping college altogether unless you can get into a top-tier school and are certain to enter a highly paid field. He believes we are experiencing a “psycho-social” bubble in higher education. Everyone believes they have to have a college degree and so they will borrow and pay any amount to get one from any school.

Most families view a college degree as insurance; something they can buy to guarantee that they do not fall through society’s cracks, Thiel says. But what they are really buying is “a dunce hat in disguise” because employers have less respect than ever for a degree that comes from a second-tier university. Such a degree, in Thiel’s view, brands a graduate as mediocre.

Summers, a former president of Harvard, agrees that higher education is in transition. But he thinks Thiel is “badly wrong” about his bubble theory and that Wadhwa is severely underestimating the value of the total university experience. The gap between what college graduates and high school graduates earn is only widening, which speaks to the continuing value of a college degree—no matter what it costs. And, says Summers, “If you think higher education is expensive, try ignorance.”...

... For his part, Wadhwa allows that there will always be students able and willing to pay for a traditional college experience and for them it will be a worthwhile investment. But for the vast majority, from a financial standpoint that kind of education makes no sense and is fast becoming unnecessary. He believes the higher education revolution is coming soon and will happen fast—perhaps fast enough to keep the next generation from finishing school with debts they may never be able to pay.

I think what Wadhwa says in the last paragraph is probably true.

Princeton Theological Seminary Names New President

Planet Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary Names New President

The Rev. M. Craig Barnes, a professor of pastoral theology and  the pastor of a large Pittsburgh congregation, has been named the  seventh president of Princeton Theological Seminary.

A 1981 graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, Barnes has also served as a trustee of the seminary. He is currently the Robert Meneilly Professor of Pastoral Ministry and Leadership at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and the pastor of the 1,100-member Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh

Barnes will begin in his role as president and professor of pastoral ministry on January 1. He will succeed the Reverend Dr. Iain Torrance, who has served as president of Princeton Theological Seminary since 2004 and announced his intention to retire from this role last year. ...

I always like it when our seminaries name people with extensive experience pastoring to the president's position. Congratulations to Dr. Barnes. ...

Introducing Development Economics at Marginal Revolution University

Economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrock have begun developing online economics classes at Marginal Revolution University. (You can find their popular blog at Marginal Revolution.) Their first class is Development Economics. As the Kronciler's educational background includes a strong emphasis in economic development, you might guess I'm thrilled about this class. You're right!

In the coming days, I will periodically publish their YouTube class sessions here at the Kruse Kronicle. I don't know that I will use them all but we'll see if my readers find the videos helpful. Today I'm including the video that introduces the class and their first session, "Basic Facts of Growth and Development."

Here is the Introduction:

Here is "Basic Facts of Growth and Development":

How a Teacher Made $1 Million Selling Lesson Plans

BusinessWeek: How a Teacher Made $1 Million Selling Lesson Plans

Jump is just one of some 15,000 teachers currently marketing their original classroom materials through the online marketplace, TeachersPayTeachers (TPT). Since signing on to the site, she has created 93 separate teaching units and sold 161,000 copies for about $8 a pop. “My units usually cover about two weeks’ worth of material,” she says. “So if you want to teach about dinosaurs, you’d buy my dinosaur unit, and it has everything you need from language arts, math, science experiments, and a list of books you can use as resources. So once you print out the unit, you just have to add a few books to read aloud to your class, and everything else is there, ready to go for you.”

To be fair, no one else on TPT has been as wildly successful as Jump, but at least two other teachers have earned $300,000, and 23 others have earned over $100,000, according to site founder Paul Edelman. “Of the 15,000 teachers who are contributing, about 10,000 make money in any given quarter,” he adds. ...

The future of education in Africa is mobile

BBC: The future of education in Africa is mobile

Over the coming months, A Matter of Life and Tech will feature a range of voices from people building Africa’s tech future. This week, United Nation’s mobile learning specialist Steve Vosloo argues phones could be the future of education on the continent.

... If mobile learning is to have a real impact, we need to also rethink what we mean by education, schooling and what skills it delivers.

Recently, a United Nations task team led by UNESCO produced a think piece on education and skills beyond 2015. The piece predicts there will be a shift away from teaching in a classroom-centred paradigm of education to an increased focus on learning, which happens informally throughout the day. A core feature of mobiles is that they support ‘anywhere, anytime’ learning. Because they are personal and always at hand, they are perfectly suited to support informal and contextual learning.

The report also predicts that there will be an increased blurring of the boundaries between learning, working and living. Mobiles already support skills development in a range of fields including agriculture and healthcare, and provide paying job opportunities for mobile-based ‘microwork’.

In addition to education basics such as literacy and numeracy, the reports says, there will be a need for digital and information literacy, as well as critical thinking and online communication skills. With the guidance of teachers, mobiles provide a medium for developing these skills for millions of Africans who go online ‘mobile first’ or even ‘mobile-only’.

On a continent where education change – what should be taught, how it should be delivered and assessed, and where learning happens – is inevitable, and mobiles are more affordably and effectively networking people to each other and information than ever before, the combined promise is bigger than the sum of the parts. Mobile learning is here to stay and will only influence and enable learning more and more.

What does this Ashford University ad tell us about the future of higher education?

Lenoard Sweet says that higher education is where the Roman Catholic Church was on the eve of the Reformation. Go to the Ashford page at youtube to see their other videos.

Ministers With MBAs

Inside Higher Ed: Ministers With MBAs

... In the past five years, programs that combine master’s degrees in divinity with business credentials have sprung up, Aleshire says. He sees two reasons: leadership studies have become more common as an academic field, and Christian ministry has expanded beyond the church into nonprofit organizations and social entrepreneurship -- start-up businesses that try to serve a larger good.

But many joint business and divinity programs are intended for students who want to work for religious nonprofits, or for Christian students studying for professional degrees -- like business or law -- who want some theological background.

Seattle Pacific University’s School of Theology offers an M.B.A., but recommends it for students who want to “serve in the marketplace as a Christian grounded in the Scriptures and theology” or be a business manager for a church or religious nonprofit. Palmer Theological Seminary and Eastern University offer an M.B.A. for seminary students who want to work with the poor. Duke University has an option for students to pursue a seminary credential and a law degree.

In most cases, “they’re going to be using it in the broader ministries, where the work of the church and the broader culture intersect and the alternative to the divinity degree is an asset,” Aleshire says. ...

I had the option of doing the joint M.B.A. and M.Div. degree offered by Eastern University and Palmer Seminary (then Eastern Baptist Seminary) back in the late 1980s but went with the M.B.A. option that included theological education at Palmer but not the full M.Div. It ruined me life! ;-) My education there is what me put my on the path to exploring the intersection between faith and economics and I haven't been able to shake it sense.

More About the Future of Higher Education

Black, White, and Gray: The Shifting Educational Terrain  George Yancey

We get comfortable with the way things have been. Change does not come easy for most of us. But to expect things to stay the way they have been sets us up for nasty surprises. Those of us in academia would do well to remember this. Over the past couple of weeks I have been considering some of the changes occurring to the institutions of higher education. I do not have solutions to these potential changes but those of us who draw our paychecks from academia need to think about what these changes may mean. In no particular order here is what I see as potential changes that we should consider.

1. The Coming Financial Crisis – Austerity is not merely coming to Greece. It is coming to academia. ...

2. Being Online – ...

3. Political Trouble – In my last blog I made the argument that we have allowed our politics to distort our science. I have no need to revisit that argument but we have to think about the implications of academic political activism. ...

4. Job Training – The emphasis in academia from liberal arts to occupational training likely comes in cycles. ...

The Future of Higher Education?

Daphne Koller: What we're learning from online education

Religious life thriving on on campuses, say authors

United Methodist Reporter: Religious life thriving on on campuses, say authors

Religion is back on campus, but in forms that might surprise those thinking only in terms of the traditional roles of organized churches in higher education.

The science-oriented Massachusetts Institute of Technology has hired its first paid chaplain, overseeing 22 volunteer chaplains, whose goal is to make sure students of all faiths are comfortable with each other.

At the University of Southern California, a young Hindu lawyer is dean of the Office of Religious Life; his predecessor was a female rabbi.

Even the Mormon church’s Brigham Young University has a prayer room for the small number of Muslim students who have enrolled there, taking comfort in the school’s conservative values.

These are among the findings from two professors at Messiah College in Grantham, Pa., who spent four years visiting 50 public and private schools of higher education, ranging from small community colleges to large research universities. ...

Global Socio-Demographic Trends Over the Next Twenty Years

EUISS: Global Trends 2030

According to the United Nations (UN), by 2030 the world population will reach 8.3 billion. Millions of these individuals are being empowered by the social and technological progress of the last decades. The main drivers of this trend are, first and foremost, the global emergence of the middle class, particularly in Asia, near-universal access to education, the empowering effects of information and communications technology (ICT), and the evolution in the status of women in most countries. These transformations are increasing the autonomy of individuals and powerful non-state actors vis-à-vis the state.

In 1990, about 73 percent of the world population was literate. In 2010, global literacy rates reached 84 percent and the literacy rate may pass the 90 percent mark in 2030. Women are becoming empowered throughout the world, a trend that is likely to continue into the future. Women now have better access to education, information, and economic and political opportunities, all of which contribute to greater gender equality. However, progress is very uneven from region to region and between different social groups, with girls, indigenous, immigrant or low-caste women remaining especially vulnerable.

The middle class will increase in influence as its ranks swell to 3.2 billion by 2020 and to 4.9 billion by 2030. The middle class will be the protagonist of the universal spread of information societies. Citizens will be interconnected by myriad networks and greater interpersonal trans-national flows. It can therefore be assumed that the citizens of 2030 will want a greater say in their future than those of previous generations.

More and more people will live in the ‘information age’ as improved technology that is more portable and affordable makes information more universally accessible. The digital divide will not disappear over the next 20 years, but it will narrow considerably. By 2030, it is estimated that more than half of the world’s population will have internet access. However, new information technologies will remain unavailable to many people because of illiteracy and lack of access to electricity, although in regions as deprived as Sub-Saharan Africa the availability of mobile phones may compensate for limited access to electricity. (12-13)

16 Ways Educators Use Pinterest

From: Online Universities Blog

Cristo Rey: Schools that work

Faith & Leadership: Cristo Rey: Schools that work

With demanding academics and an innovative work-study program, Cristo Rey Catholic schools have thrived, sending thousands of disadvantaged students to college and creating a new and sustainable model of Catholic education.

... Today, 6,900 students, mostly Hispanic and African-American, are enrolled in Cristo Rey Network schools in 17 states and the District of Columbia.

How successful are they?

Last year, every member of the Cristo Rey class of 2011 nationwide was accepted into a two- or four-year college. For the classes of 2008 through 2010, 85 percent enrolled in college, far above the matriculation rate for all high school students nationally, and more than twice the rate for African-American and Hispanic students. After two years, almost all -- 88 percent -- are still in school. They don’t drop out.

The key to Cristo Rey’s success is a work-study initiative pioneered at that first Cristo Rey school. Under the program, students work at paid internships five days a month in law firms, banks, hospitals and other professional settings. The internships not only introduce students to the workplace; they generate revenue -- currently about $32 million a year -- that covers the majority of the students’ education. ...

... More than 1,500 partner businesses provide the internships for Cristo Rey, including such blue-chip names as Blue Cross Blue Shield, Deloitte, JPMorgan Chase, Raytheon and Wells Fargo. The companies tend to be thoroughly satisfied with the students, with 93 percent re-enlisting for the program each year. When businesses do pull out, it’s usually not because they’re dissatisfied but because they have moved, been sold or gone out of business.

O’Keefe, Lyons & Hynes, a Chicago tax and corporate law firm, has participated in the Cristo Rey work-study program from the beginning and currently employs eight Cristo Rey students.

“The moment I heard the concept, I was all for it,” said Mike Heaton, a partner at the firm.

Heaton said he never worried that the kids from Pilsen and Little Village could do the work. He had seen his own teenage children and those of his partners do the same jobs as summer interns.

“Having our own kids down here convinced us that the kids of Cristo Rey could come in and do the job,” he said.

The law firm doesn’t consider the internships a charitable contribution to Cristo Rey, Heaton said. The students actually solve a big problem for the firm. In today’s workplace, answering phones, filing and making copies is difficult work that most adults don’t want to do.

But when four students share the job, it becomes a learning experience for them, he said.

In many instances, interns move up to roles with additional responsibility, such as doing research. One former Cristo Rey student, Cristina Garcia, a graduate of Marquette University, is currently working at the firm for a few months before starting law school in the fall.

“They do good work,” Heaton said.

The students, though, aren’t the only ones who learn from the work-study program. As Pilsen teens and downtown corporate lawyers get to know each other, eyes are opened, attitudes changed.

“It goes both ways,” Heaton said. “There’s no doubt these students have changed the perceptions of some of our staff and the lawyers. At the same time, we see the students change and become more relaxed and confident by the time they’re juniors and seniors. When they first arrive, they’re shy and perhaps wondering what kind of ogres we might be.” ...

There is a Cristo-Rey High School just a few blocks from my house here in Kansas City. I had a chance to do a site visit and tour last year. It is truly an amazing program.

 

Instruction for Masses Knocks Down Campus Walls

New York Times: Instruction for Masses Knocks Down Campus Walls

... Welcome to the brave new world of Massive Open Online Courses — known as MOOCs — a tool for democratizing higher education. While the vast potential of free online courses has excited theoretical interest for decades, in the past few months hundreds of thousands of motivated students around the world who lack access to elite universities have been embracing them as a path toward sophisticated skills and high-paying jobs, without paying tuition or collecting a college degree. And in what some see as a threat to traditional institutions, several of these courses now come with an informal credential (though that, in most cases, will not be free).

Consider Stanford’s experience: Last fall, 160,000 students in 190 countries enrolled in an Artificial Intelligence course taught by Mr. Thrun and Peter Norvig, a Google colleague. An additional 200 registered for the course on campus, but a few weeks into the semester, attendance at Stanford dwindled to about 30, as those who had the option of seeing their professors in person decided they preferred the online videos, with their simple views of a hand holding a pen, working through the problems.

Mr. Thrun was enraptured by the scale of the course, and how it spawned its own culture, including a Facebook group, online discussions and an army of volunteer translators who made it available in 44 languages.

“Having done this, I can’t teach at Stanford again,” he said at a digital conference in Germany in January. “I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill, and you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill, and I’ve seen Wonderland.” ...

Man Down: The future isn’t rosy for American males

AdWeek: Man Down: The future isn’t rosy for American males

Not only have male serum testosterone levels dropped by 20 percent over recent decades (New England Research Institute, 2007), but the gender is also less likely to do well in high school, to graduate college, or to find a job. Not just by a few percentage points, but by a landslide.

According to Department of Education data, in 1975, men earned about 60 percent of all college degrees. By 1985, there was equal distribution by gender. But by 2009, the pendulum had swung in women’s favor. Of the more than 3 million college degrees for the Class of 2009, women earned close to 60 percent of those degrees (1,849,200), or almost 149 degrees for every 100 degrees earned by men. By 2017, Department of Education forecasts suggest that women will earn more than 160 degrees for every 100 earned by men.

The future isn’t rosy in the employment arena either. As recently as 2008, around 3 million more men than women had jobs, but that difference was closer to 1.5 million by the end of 2011 (having flirted with parity at the trough of the recession in 2009, at which time 82 percent of all job losses were male), according to Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics stats. ...

OpenStax College plans free textbooks for popular college courses

Kurzweil: OpenStax College plans free textbooks for popular college courses

The Rice University-based open-education platform Connexions today unveiled a bold plan to shake up the $4 billion college textbook industry by providing free online publisher-quality textbooks for five of the country’s most-attended college courses.

The OpenStax College textbook initiative, which is funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the 20 Million Minds Foundation and the Maxfield Foundation, will publish its first two books — College Physics and Introduction to Sociology — in March. Two biology textbooks — one for majors and one for non-majors — and a textbook for introductory anatomy and physiology will be published this fall.

“If we capture just 10 percent of the market with these first five textbooks, an estimated 1 million college students in the United States could save $90 million over the next five years,” said Rice’s Richard Baraniuk, the founder and director of Connexions. ...

The Three Laws of Future Employment

New Geography: The Three Laws of Future Employment

... Let’s start with the three Laws of Future Employment. Law #1: People will get jobs doing things that computers can’t do. Law #2: A global market place will result in lower pay and fewer opportunities for many careers. (But also in cheaper and better products and a higher standard of living for American consumers.) Law #3: Professional people will more likely be freelancers and less likely to have a steady job.

Usually taken for granted is that future jobs depend on STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and math). This view is eloquently expounded by Thomas Friedman, who argues that the US is falling behind China and India in educating for STEM careers. ...

So here is my career advice to today’s students:

• If you passionately like something and are good at it, then do that. STEM, for example, will always have a place for smart, hardworking people. Likewise, good writing can’t be computerized, but you need both talent and passion to be successful.
• Start work on the 10,000 hours. Your education may help, but very little you do in school contributes to the total. Be it car detailing, truck driving, computer programming, drawing, writing – acquire an expert skill in something. Write a novel.
• Empathize if you can. Computers can’t do that. Jobs that involve empathy (along with other skills) will always be in demand.
• If you got it, flaunt it. That’s something else computers can’t do. Beauty has value, especially for women but also for men. This is wonderfully described in Catherine Hakim’s book, Erotic Capital. Even if you don’t got it, take advantage of youth. Acquire a fashion sense, take care of yourself, look as good as you can.

Stanford Professor Gives Up Teaching Position, Hopes to Reach 500,000 Students at Online Start-Up

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Stanford Professor Gives Up Teaching Position, Hopes to Reach 500,000 Students at Online Start-Up

... Sebastian Thrun, a research professor of computer science at Stanford, revealed today that he had given up his teaching role at the institution to found Udacity, a start-up offering low-cost online classes. He made the surprising announcement during a presentation at the Digital–Life–Design conference, in Munich, Germany. The development was first reported earlier today by Reuters.

During his talk, Mr. Thrun explored the origins of his popular online course at Stanford, which initially featured videos produced with nothing more than “a camera, a pen, and a napkin.” Despite the low production quality, many of the 200 Stanford students taking the course in the classroom flocked to the videos because they could absorb the lectures at their own pace. Eventually, the 200 students taking the course in person dwindled to a group of 30. Meanwhile, the course’s popularity exploded online, drawing students from around the world. The experience taught the professor that he could craft a course with the interactive tools of the Web that recreated the intimacy of one-on-one tutoring, he said.

Mr. Thrun told the crowd his move had been motivated in part by teaching practices that evolved too slowly to be effective. During the era when universities were born, “the lecture was the most effective way to convey information. We had the industrialization, we had the invention of celluloid, of digital media, and, miraculously, professors today teach exactly the same way they taught a thousand years ago,” he said.

He concluded by telling the crowd that he couldn’t continue teaching in a traditional setting. “Having done this, I can’t teach at Stanford again,” he said. ...

Creativity: Asset or Burden in the Classroom

Creativity Research Journal: Creativity: Asset or Burden in the Classroom (HT: Marginal Revolution)

One of the most consistent findings in educational studies of creativity has been that teachers dislike personality traits associated with creativity. Research has indicated that teachers prefer traits that seem to run counter to creativity, such as conformity and unquestioning acceptance of authority (e.g., Bachtold, 1974; Cropley, 1992; Dettmer, 1981; Getzels & Jackson, 1962; Torrance, 1963). The reason for teachers’ preferences is quite clear creative people tend to have traits that some have referred to as obnoxious (Torrance, 1963). Torrance (1963) described creative people as not having the time to be courteous, as refusing to take no for an answer, and as being negativistic and critical of others. Other characteristics, although not deserving the label obnoxious, nonetheless may not be those most highly valued in the classroom.

….Research has suggested that traits associated with creativity may not only be neglected, but actively punished (Myers & Torrance, 1961; Stone, 1980). Stone (1980) found that second graders who scored highest on tests of creativity were also those identified by their peers as engaging in the most misbehavior (e.g., “getting in trouble the most”). Given that research and theory (e.g., Harrington, Block, & Block, 1987) suggest that a supportive environment is important to the fostering of creativity, it is quite possible that teachers are (perhaps unwittingly) extinguishing creative behaviors.

I knew it! That is why I had so much problem in school. The teachers disliked me for my creative genius. ;-)

The study does raise interesting questions. I also remember that a disproportiante number of teachers are Myers-Briggs SJs. Not always a happy experience for we NFs and NTs (me).

Princeton goes open access to stop staff handing all copyright to journals – unless waiver granted

The Conversation: Princeton goes open access to stop staff handing all copyright to journals – unless waiver granted

Prestigious US academic institution Princeton University will prevent researchers from giving the copyright of scholarly articles to journal publishers, except in certain cases where a waiver may be granted.

The new rule is part of an Open Access policy aimed at broadening the reach of their scholarly work and encouraging publishers to adjust standard contracts that commonly require exclusive copyright as a condition of publication.

Universities pay millions of dollars a year for academic journal subscriptions. People without subscriptions, which can cost up to $25,000 a year for some journals or hundreds of dollars for a single issue, are often prevented from reading taxpayer funded research. Individual articles are also commonly locked behind pay walls.

Researchers and peer reviewers are not paid for their work but academic publishers have said such a business model is required to maintain quality.

At a September 19 meeting, Princeton’s Faculty Advisory Committee on Policy adopted a new open access policy that gives the university the “nonexclusive right to make available copies of scholarly articles written by its faculty, unless a professor specifically requests a waiver for particular articles.”

“The University authorizes professors to post copies of their articles on their own web sites or on University web sites, or in other not-for-a-fee venues,” the policy said.

“The main effect of this new policy is to prevent them from giving away all their rights when they publish in a journal.” ...

The Secret Language Code

Scientific American: The Secret Language Code

Psychologist James Pennebaker​ reveals the hidden meaning of pronouns

... Much to my surprise, I soon discovered that the ways people used pronouns in their essays predicted whose health would improve the most. Specifically, those people who benefited the most from writing changed in their pronoun use from one essay to another. Pronouns were reflecting people’’s abilities to change perspective.

As I pondered these findings, I started looking at how people used pronouns in other texts -- blogs, emails, speeches, class writing assignments, and natural conversation. Remarkably, how people used pronouns was correlated with almost everything I studied. For example, use of  first-person singular pronouns (I, me, my) was consistently related to gender, age, social class, honesty, status, personality, and much more. Although the findings were often robust, people in daily life were unable to pick them up when reading or listening to others. It was almost as if there was a secret world of pronouns that existed outside our awareness. ...

... PENNEBAKER: Almost everything you think you know is probably wrong. Take this little test. Who uses the following words more, women or men?

 > 1st person singular (I, me, my)
 > 1st person plural (we, us our)
 > articles (a, an, the)
 > emotion words (e.g., happy, sad, love, hate)
 > cognitive words (e.g., because, reason, think, believe)
 > social words (e.g., he, she, friend, cousin)

Most people assume that men use I-words and cognitive words more than women and that women use we-words, emotions, and social words more than men. Bad news. You were right if you guessed that women use social words more. However, women use I-words and cognitive words at far higher rates than men. There are no reliable differences between men and women for use of we-words or emotion words (OK, those were trick questions). And men use articles more than women, when you might guess there’d be no difference.

These differences hold up across written and spoken language and most other languages that we have studied. You can’t help but marvel at the fact that we are all bombarded by words from women and men every day of our lives and most of us have never “heard” these sex differences in language. Part of the problem is that our brains aren’t wired to listen to pronouns, articles, prepositions, and other “junk” words. When we listen to another person, we typically focus on what they are saying rather than how they are saying it.

Men and women use language differently because they negotiate their worlds differently. Across dozens and dozens of studies, women tend to talk more about other human beings. Men, on the other hand, are more interested in concrete objects and things. To talk about human relationships requires social and cognitive words. To talk about concrete objects, you need concrete nouns which typically demand the use of articles. ...

... In my own work, we have analyzed the collected works of poets, playwrights, and novelists going back to the 1500s to see how their writing changed as they got older. We’ve compared the pronoun use of suicidal versus non-suicidal poets. Basically, poets who eventually commit suicide use I-words more than non-suicidal poets. ...

... One of the most interesting results was part of a study my students and I conducted dealing with status in email correspondence. Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher status uses I-words less (yes, less) than people who are low in status. The effects were quite robust ...

... Across four years, we analyzed the admissions essays of 25,000 students and then tracked their grade point averages (GPAs). Higher GPAs were associated with admission essays that used high rates of nouns and low rates of verbs and pronouns. The effects were surprisingly strong and lasted across all years of college, no matter what the students’ major.

To me, the use of nouns -- especially concrete nouns -- reflects people’s attempts to categorize and name objects, events, and ideas in their worlds. The use of verbs and pronouns typically occur when people tell stories. Universities clearly reward categorizers rather than story tellers. ...

 

 

New Book: "Upside: The Suprising Good News About the State of Our World" by Brad Wright

Bradley Wright's Weblog: My new book, Upside, is now available

My second book has been released. It’s entitled Upside: Surprising Good News about the State of Our World, and it’s available on Amazon, Christian bookstores, and various other places… if there are any left ;-)

The guiding question for this book is whether the world is getting better or worse. Now, I realize that you’re probably thinking right now that that’s too narrow of a topic, but bear with me, it’s a question worth asking. ...

... My book develops two paradoxes. One, many, many things in the world are getting better, but most people are convinced that things are getting worse. Two, most people think that their lives are getting better, but their community and nation is getting worse. In my book I explore the reasons for these paradoxes.

After that—since I’m a data-driven guy—I present information about what’s happening in the world. I cover areas that most people take as important, such as income and poverty, health, education, happiness, crime, freedom, faith, marriage, families, and the environment.

In each of these areas, I present the best available data about how things are changing. The data come from sources such as the US Census Bureau, the World Bank, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency, and various sociological surveys.

I finish with examining various explanations for why so many things are getting better, and what we should do in response. ...

I can't wait to read this book! As long time Kronicle readers know, I've visited this topic over and over again at my blog. I did a World Social Indicators - 2008 series that details some of these issues. The incredible amount of pessimism in the face of the greatest expansion of global prosperity and physical well-being in the history of the world is just astounding.

 

Drain or gain?

Economist: Drain or gain?

Poor countries can end up benefiting when their brightest citizens emigrate

... Lots of studies have found that well-educated people from developing countries are particularly likely to emigrate. By some estimates, two-thirds of highly educated Cape Verdeans live outside the country. A big survey of Indian households carried out in 2004 asked about family members who had moved abroad. It found that nearly 40% of emigrants had more than a high-school education, compared with around 3.3% of all Indians over the age of 25. This “brain drain” has long bothered policymakers in poor countries. They fear that it hurts their economies, depriving them of much-needed skilled workers who could have taught at their universities, worked in their hospitals and come up with clever new products for their factories to make.

Many now take issue with this view (see article). Several economists reckon that the brain-drain hypothesis fails to account for the effects of remittances, for the beneficial effects of returning migrants, and for the possibility that being able to migrate to greener pastures induces people to get more education. Some argue that once these factors are taken into account, an exodus of highly skilled people could turn out to be a net benefit to the countries they leave. Recent studies of migration from countries as far apart as Ghana, Fiji, India and Romania have found support for this “brain gain” idea. ...

A Decade Makes All the Difference (College Education)

New York Times Economix: A Decade Makes All the Difference

Only 45% of college grads under 25 years old have a job that requires a college degree. That compares to 60% in 2000.

E-Readers Fail At Education

Fast Company: E-Readers Fail At Education

Is our desire for gadgetry getting ahead of what our brains actually need?

... A recent University of Washington study interviewed 39 first-year graduate students in the university's Department of Computer Science & Engineering, which participated in a pilot study of Amazon's Kindle DX (a large-screen e-reader). By seven months into the study, fewer than 40% of the students did their schoolwork on the Kindle. The problem: the Kindle has poor note-taking support, doesn't allow for easy skimming, and makes it difficult for students to look up references (in comparison with computers and textbooks). As a result, some of the students interviewed kept sheets of paper with their Kindle case to take notes, and other read near computers so that they could easily look up references.

There's another, larger problem, according to the U of W:

The digital text also disrupted a technique called cognitive mapping, in which readers used physical cues such as the location on the page and the position in the book to go back and find a section of text or even to help retain and recall the information they had read.

Except for the cognitive mapping issue, these are all are technical problems that could all be fixed in future Kindle upgrades. The other problem is larger: Are we getting excited about a future that our brains aren't ready for? Could books have developed not simply because they were the available technology, but because they actually convey information to our brains in a more efficient way? If we're pushing technologies for learning that, cognitively, make it harder to learn, we need to take a step back. ...

Why churches are a hotbed for finance education?

Christian Science Monitor: Why churches are a hotbed for finance education

Personal finance classes offered by churches are often well-attended by the congregation. Some of the things that make these classes successful can be helpful to people who don't attend church, too.

Over the last few years, I couldn’t help but notice that several churches in my local area have run personal finance programs of various kinds, such as Financial Peace University and so on. Having sat in on a few of them, I can certainly say that they’re often well-attended, with enthusiastic people taking notes and often asking good questions, too.

This left me wondering why churches are such a hotbed for personal finance education. I’m not so much interested in the reasons why churches would host such events, but why churches happen to be the place where such events find great success. More importantly, is there anything useful in that relationship that could be applied to those who seek financial success without such groups?

In order to figure this out, I’ve had conversations with a few different pastors and a lot of different church members over the past year along these lines. Why does your church host personal finance programs? Do you feel they’re successful? Why do you feel that they’re successful?

The answers were actually pretty consistent – and fairly insightful. ...

Is It Time to Write the Eulogy?: The Future of Seminary Education

Patheos: Is It Time to Write the Eulogy?: The Future of Seminary Education

Our seminaries are dying and the Master of Divinity degree has been discredited. Will we make the necessary changes to better prepare leaders for the Church, or will we limp and wander into the future?

Our seminaries are dying and the Master of Divinity degree has been discredited.

Bishops and other church leaders once believed both were essential to effective ministry, but today they are considered one of several routes to ordination and an increasing number of church leaders are arguing that attending seminary may actually be detrimental to the process they once considered the gold standard.

A large number of the mainline seminaries are selling their buildings and property, cutting faculty, and eliminating degree programs. Those that are not, are competing for a shrinking pool of prospective students and rely on scholarships and lower academic standards to attract the students that they do have.

There are countless reasons for the crisis, some of them as old as the professional preparation of clergy itself.

In the quest for academic respectability, seminaries have not always remembered that preparing clergy was the mission and lifeblood of their institutional life. Some have focused on preparing scholars, which though essential, is secondary to its primary ministry of preparing new generations of spiritual leaders. Some have prepared students who lacked the practical skills to effectively lead a congregation. Others have produced students who were so poorly grounded in the Christian faith that they lacked the necessary spiritual formation to be effective. ...

A lengthy but interesting article. He gives his own prescription at the end. What do you think?

 

Is There Real Competition Between Universities?

David Leonhardt writes:

...If someone asked your grandparents 50 years ago to name the country’s best colleges, they would have come up with a list that looks very much like the list you’d come up with today. Can you think of any other industry in which that’s the case?

Or go back only to 1983, the year the U.S. News college rankings began, and compare the stability in that ranking with the turnover in the Fortune 500 since then. The top of the 1983 Fortune 500 is filled with companies that don’t exist today (Texaco, Nabisco, Beatrice) or that have been humbled (General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Xerox). See Tyler Cowen for more on this point.

It’s hard to look at this picture and conclude that higher education is a bastion of intense competition. ...

Interesting point.

Are Prepaid Debit Cards Bad for Teens?

US News Money: Are Prepaid Debit Cards Bad for Teens?

With two teenagers in the house, my wife and I spend a considerable amount of time discussing family finances. And for this reason, a recent article by Sheryl Nance-Nash caught my attention. In the article she argues that prepaid debit cards are a bad idea for teenagers. Our children do not carry a prepaid card, but it’s something I’ve given a lot of thought.

So we put together a list of factors to consider if you are thinking about a prepaid card for your teenager. ...

Interesting advice.

Social Scientist Sees Bias Within

New York Times: Social Scientist Sees Bias Within

SAN ANTONIO — Some of the world’s pre-eminent experts on bias discovered an unexpected form of it at their annual meeting.

Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”

It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.” ...

On Evolution, Biology Teachers Stray From Lesson Plan

New York Times: On Evolution, Biology Teachers Stray From Lesson Plan

Teaching creationism in public schools has consistently been ruled unconstitutional in federal courts, but according to a national survey of more than 900 public high school biology teachers, it continues to flourish in the nation’s classrooms.

Researchers found that only 28 percent of biology teachers consistently follow the recommendations of the National Research Council to describe straightforwardly the evidence for evolution and explain the ways in which it is a unifying theme in all of biology. At the other extreme, 13 percent explicitly advocate creationism, and spend at least an hour of class time presenting it in a positive light.

That leaves what the authors call “the cautious 60 percent,” who avoid controversy by endorsing neither evolution nor its unscientific alternatives. In various ways, they compromise.

The survey, published in the Jan. 28 issue of Science, found that some avoid intellectual commitment by explaining that they teach evolution only because state examinations require it, and that students do not need to “believe” in it. Others treat evolution as if it applied only on a molecular level, avoiding any discussion of the evolution of species. And a large number claim that students are free to choose evolution or creationism based on their own beliefs. ...

U.S. Schools Are Still Ahead—Way Ahead

Bloomberg: U.S. Schools Are Still Ahead—Way Ahead

...Meanwhile, the perception is that American children live a relatively easy life and coast their way through school. They don't do any more homework than they have to; they spend an extraordinary amount of time playing games, socializing on the Internet, text-messaging each other; they work part time to pay for their schooling and social habits. And they party. A lot. These stereotypes worry many Americans. They believe the American education system puts the country at a great disadvantage. But this is far from true.

The independence and social skills American children develop give them a huge advantage when they join the workforce. They learn to experiment, challenge norms, and take risks. They can think for themselves, and they can innovate. This is why America remains the world leader in innovation; why Chinese and Indians invest their life savings to send their children to expensive U.S. schools when they can. India and China are changing, and as the next generations of students become like American ones, they too are beginning to innovate. So far, their education systems have held them back.

My research team at Duke looked in depth at the engineering education of China and India. We documented that these countries now graduate four to seven times as many engineers as does the U.S.The quality of these engineers, however, is so poor that most are not fit to work as engineers; their system of rote learning handicaps those who do get jobs, so it takes two to three years for them to achieve the same productivity as fresh American graduates.As a result, significant proportions of China's engineering graduates end up working on factory floors and Indian industry has to spend large sums of money retraining its employees. After four or five years in the workforce, Indians do become innovative and produce, overall, at the same quality as Americans, but they lose a valuable two to three years in their retraining. ...

The End of the College Textbook as We Know It?

Carpe Diem: The End of the College Textbook as We Know It?

From today's Chronicle of Higher Education, a possible solution? 

"Here's the new plan: Colleges require students to pay a course-materials fee, which would be used to buy e-books for all of them (whatever text the professor recommends, just as in the old model).

Why electronic copies? Well, they're far cheaper to produce than printed texts (MP: $25-30 vs. $150-300), making a bulk purchase more feasible. By ordering books by the hundreds or thousands, colleges can negotiate a much better rate than students were able to get on their own, even for used books. And publishers could eliminate the used-book market and reduce incentives for students to illegally download copies as well.

Of course those who wanted to read the textbook on paper could print out the electronic version or pay an additional fee to buy an old-fashioned copy—a book."

Sheryl WuDunn: Our century's greatest injustice

"Sheryl WuDunn's book "Half the Sky" investigates the oppression of women globally. Her stories shock. Only when women in developing countries have equal access to education and economic opportunity will we be using all our human resources."

Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age

New York Times: Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age

At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.

At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.

And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.

Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.

But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.

It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism.

Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.

“Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.” ...

Why did feds claim Kindle violates civil rights?

Washington Examiner: Why did feds claim Kindle violates civil rights?

Did you know the Justice Department threatened several universities with legal action because they took part in an experimental program to allow students to use the Amazon Kindle for textbooks?

Last year, the schools -- among them Princeton, Arizona State and Case Western Reserve -- wanted to know if e-book readers would be more convenient and less costly than traditional textbooks. The environmentally conscious educators also wanted to reduce the huge amount of paper students use to print files from their laptops.

It seemed like a promising idea until the universities got a letter from the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, now under an aggressive new chief, Thomas Perez, telling them they were under investigation for possible violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

From its introduction in 2007, the Kindle has drawn criticism from the National Federation of the Blind and other activist groups. While the Kindle's text-to-speech feature could read a book aloud, its menu functions required sight to operate. "If you could get a sighted person to fire up the device and start reading the book to you, that's fine," says Chris Danielsen, a spokesman for the federation. "But other than that, there was really no way to use it."

In May 2009, Amazon announced the pilot program, under which it would provide Kindle DX readers to a few universities. It wasn't a huge deal; Princeton's plan, for example, involved three courses and a total of 51 students, and only in the fall semester of that year. University spokeswoman Emily Aronson says the program was voluntary and students could opt out of using the Kindle. "There were no students with a visual impairment who had registered for the three classes," says Aronson.

Nevertheless, in June 2009, the federation filed a complaint with the Justice Department, accusing the schools of violating the ADA. Perez and his team went to work.

"We acted swiftly to respond to complaints we received about the use of the Amazon Kindle," Perez recently told a House committee. "We must remain vigilant to ensure that as new devices are introduced, people with disabilities are not left behind." ...

And if the books that are being read on Kindle are presented in print, that isn't discrimination??? I assume the way they get around print versions is audio books, braille books, or a paid readers. How does the book being electronic thwart these solutions?

The moralistic bureaucratic regulatory mind never ceases to amaze me.

Garment Factories, Changing Women’s Roles in Poor Countries

New York Times - Economix: Garment Factories, Changing Women’s Roles in Poor Countries

While visiting garment factories in Bangladesh on assignment recently, I met young women who had migrated from villages to the city in search of jobs that they needed to support their families back home. It is a fairly standard story in this part of the world.

What struck me, however, was how their journeys had changed them and their views about life. Take Maasuda Akthar, who moved to Gazipur, a town 30 miles outside  Dhaka, when she was 16 with her sister. (I wrote about her in this article about how the Bangladesh garment industry was benefiting from increased labor costs in China.) She married a man whom she met at the factory. As an experienced seamstress, she now makes more money than him. Ms. Akthar, 21, told me that her husband had offered to become the sole breadwinner in the home so that she could stay at home and “be comfortable,” but she refused because she enjoys working. Not only that, she told me she did not plan to have children for a few years.

My conversations with Ms. Akthar and the other woman appeared to confirm what economists, policy makers and businessmen had told me: By giving women an independent source of livelihood, Bangladesh’s garment industry has changed this conservative Muslim country’s society in immeasurable ways. (More than 80 percent of the three million people who work in the industry are women.) ...

... Mr. Mobarak also found that girls who live in villages with garment factories tend to marry later and have children later than the girls who grow up in villages without factories. In other countries, this has typically happened as women get more educated, but Mr. Mobarak’s survey of 1,500 families suggests that it is happening slightly differently in Bangladesh, which has a literacy rate of just 55 percent.

“Girls do seem to take advantage of these jobs at 17 to 19 years old, and that allows them to delay marriage and child bearing,” Mr. Mobarak told me in a telephone interview. “Even if it’s not happening through education, it is happening through work.” ...

... Wages in Bangladesh’s garment industry are among the lowest in the world. The minimum wage, which the government is expected to increase soon, is just 1,662 taka (about $23) a month. Labor groups are demanding a sharp increase and their protests and clashes with the police have periodically shut down factories in recent weeks.

Still hundreds of thousands of women flock to Dhaka and other garment hubs in Bangladesh every year because factories pay more than the women could earn in villages. ...

Minorities and the Recession-Era College Enrollment Boom

Pew Research: Minorities and the Recession-Era College Enrollment Boom

The recession-era boom in the size of freshman classes at four-year colleges, community colleges and trade schools has been driven largely by a sharp increase in minority student enrollment, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of new data from the U.S. Department of Education.

Freshman enrollment at the nation's 6,100 post-secondary institutions surged by 144,000 students from the fall of 2007 to the fall of 2008. This 6% increase was the largest in 40 years1, and almost three-quarters of it came from minority freshman enrollment growth.

From 2007 to 2008 (the first year of the recession), the freshman enrollment of Hispanics at post-secondary institutions grew by 15%, of blacks by 8%, of Asians by 6% and of whites by 3%.  ...

One religious institution that isn't so post-racial

CNN Belief Blog: One religious institution that isn't so post-racial

Even as the communities that churches serve become more diverse, there’s some religious quarters where people of color remain dramatically underrepresented: the nation’s seminaries.

About one-third of all accredited theological schools lack a single minority faculty member, according to leaders with the Fund for Theological Education, a nonprofit group that offers mentoring and financial support for minority doctoral students at seminaries.

The fund is co-hosting a leadership conference this weekend at the Chicago Theological Seminary aimed at producing more African-American students at the doctoral level in theological schools.

Jonathan Walton, an assistant professor of African-American religions at Harvard Divinity School, says minority students who are identified as gifted at the college level are encouraged to go into law or medicine because of those fields' financial rewards.

Walton, who personally received financial and mentoring support from the Fund for Theological Education, says America’s future religious leaders won’t be able to serve their communities as well if they don’t receive training from a diverse seminary faculty.

“You want your training ground for America’s clergy to be as diverse as the country itself,” he says.

Kansas City Needs to Support Covington

I don't use this blog for promoting political causes that often but today I'm making an exception. Kansas City School Board Superintendent John Covington led the board to make a long overdue reduction in the number schools a few weeks ago. The consolidation will reduce overhead and it is a move toward improving the quality of education in one of the most dysfunctional school districts in the nation. Some school board candidates are running in order to undo Covington's courageous decision. It is time to get behind Covington. Therefore, I want to encourage all my Kansas City, MO, readers to get out there today and vote for the reform candidates who support Covington.

4th District:

Joseph Jackson

At-Large:

Kyleen Carroll
Crispin Rea