I really enjoy the anonymous sharing app Secret, as the posts are quite often hilarious and I’m usually able to narrow down a sharer’s identity to two or three people. (Those Engadget in-jokes are a real telltale.) For the same reasons that I like…
A new lower price alone may not have moved the Xbox One past the PS4 on the sales chart, but Microsoft is still keeping up with its quick update cycle. The August update preview is arriving for testers, and one of the areas getting a lot of attention…
A strange sinkhole at “the end of the world” has scientists baffled. Nobody knows quite why it’s there, or what could have prompted its formation. Early theories suggest it’s an effect of global warming, though no specific cause has been identified. Other speculate space debris could be to blame. Not yet officially measured, the crater is believed to be roughly … Continue reading
If you’ve got an iPhone, there is a good chance you also have a MacBook. The MagSafe charger on Apple’s laptop offerings is easy to use, leading some to want an iPhone with the same functionality. A recently funded Kickstarter is attempting to bring it to us, and even slaps in a battery pack for good measure. The draw for … Continue reading
In the wake of Marvel Comics’ recent announcements that an African American character will take over the mantle of iconic Captain America (after the regular guy loses his super powers in battle with an arch foe), and that a woman will be Thor in future comics, I think it’s time for DC Comics to get into the act before they get left behind.
The most logical and sensational choice would be for them to find a man to take over the role of Wonder Woman. Not only would this surprise readers, but define a modern paradigm for superheroes never seen before. To preserve the integrity of the character, not to mention the marketing potential of a brand name like Wonder Woman, they should make sure to preserve Wonder Woman’s current costume, replete with the star-spangled Speedos, red bustier and golden bracelets. After all, just because a man will fill those high heels doesn’t mean that the public won’t want to see the same Wonder Woman they have grown to love and worship.
Of course, there will be some challenges, such as filling the bustier, but in an age of padded bras and other clever devices for creating illusions, that should hardly be a challenge that the DC Comics team can’t tackle. The same goes for the lower part of the costume where a beer gut and a pair of hairy legs will certainly add a twist to a familiar tale and delight readers with pleasures that they never saw coming.
So is this idea as ridiculous as it sounds? Yes, but so is the stunt casting by Marvel Comics of its major characters. To be clear, it is great that the powers that be at Marvel Comics are finally paying attention to underrepresented minorities in their stories but by simply plugging them into the costumes and legends of established characters, they are not so much elevating minorities as using them to sell more comics in a progressive age.
If they really wanted to introduce minority characters into their comics, the right and responsible way to do it would be to introduce new characters that are just as powerful and charismatic as Captain America or Thor, and to develop them from the ground up as African American or female. By meddling with characters whose physical imagery has already been ingrained into pop culture psyche for more than half a century, all Marvel Comics is really doing is extending brands that are past their prime and/or trying to be politically correct in the silliest way possible.
Now Marvel Comics supporters might argue that casting minorities in the tights of major superheroes will force us to think differently about those icons, but what’s the point of that? Isn’t the point to define firm and powerful identities for an African American man in his own right or a woman in her own right rather than hoping that they will somehow be taken more seriously in the reflected glory of famous characters?
Does an example of the latter come to mind? Yes. Wonder Woman — a fantastic character that stands in her own right as a member of the DC pantheon of Gods and on par with Superman and Batman. That to me is giving respect to minorities, not what Marvel Comics is doing.
Otherwise, we could well wind up with a hirsute guy in blue underwear, giving us a gratuitous view of his superhero assets while flying above our heads in an invisible plane…
Students pay dearly for a long summer break from school: On average, they return in the fall a month behind where they were at the close of the prior academic year, and kids from low-income households typically slip even further.
Now a new report suggests that when it comes to summer enrichment programs, the opportunities that might help slow that academic slide for struggling students are out of reach for many families.
Among the spotlighted early findings from the Afterschool Alliance’s forthcoming America After 3pm report, which was drawn from a survey of nearly 14,000 households nationally:
Why does summer learning loss matter? Researchers contend that how students spend their time during the long break should be part of any conversation about overall school improvement. Consider this: One long-term study found that students learn at about the same rate during the course of the traditional 180-day academic year, regardless of their socioeconomic status. The achievement gap has been found to narrow between fall and spring, and then widens again over the summer. (For more on academic calendars and why year-round schooling isn’t necessarily the best option for many districts or students, check out Education Week’s recent piece on a new Congressional Research Service report.)
As Stanford education Professor Sean Reardon posited in his opinion piece for the New York Times last year, “it may seem counterintuitive, but schools don’t seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students. … The more we do to ensure that all children have similar cognitively stimulating early childhood experiences, the less we will have to worry about failing schools.”
An often-cited study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that that two-thirds of the achievement gap between rich and poor ninth graders could be attributed to inequities in access to summer opportunities. Wealthier students were more likely to read books, participate in field trips, and take part in organized sports. “Overall, they had a more expansive realm of experiences,” said Johns Hopkins sociology professor Karl Alexander, one of the study’s lead authors, in a research brief on the project. Need more reasons to take summer learning seriously? Of the students who were tracked from first through 12th grade in the long-range study, 40 percent failed to earn diplomas. “It’s a problem of monumental proportions,” Alexander said.
In an EWA webinar with reporters to discuss these issues, Sarah Pitcock, chief executive of the National Summer Learning Association, called the slowdown in learning during the summer “the faucet theory.”
During the traditional academic year, schools provide an open faucet of resources and services for all students, Pitcock said. But when summer break arrives, “for low-income kids that faucet is shut off when their school is not open,” Pitcock said. Suddenly there’s a dearth of age-appropriate books to read, the free and low-cost cafeteria meals many kids rely on, adult mentors to turn to, and even safe places to play outdoors. Middle class and more affluent families, however, continue to provide these basic needs and enrichment opportunities to their children outside of the school setting because they’re likelier to have the resources.
There is growing agreement that summer learning loss needs to be addressed – what a robust program looks like is less clear. As NPR reported, there’s little consensus on what a “good” summer learning program looks like, and states aren’t keeping records on student achievement during those months.
“It’s been one of my pet peeves for years,” Kathy Christie, vice president of knowledge and information management at the nonprofit Education Commission of the States, told NPR. “There’s just been so little attention paid to what effect that this extra three, four, five, six weeks make.”
The Wallace Foundation (an EWA funder) and RAND Corp. have teamed up on a five-year demonstration project of summer learning programs to try and identify the hallmarks of those that produce meaningful gains for students. A 2013 report detailed some of the early lessons gleaned from challenges faced by six school districts participating in the project, each offering full-day summer learning programs that run between five and six weeks. Among those lessons: Start planning early in the year, make sure the teachers are well trained, and provide a convenient transportation option for parents. If necessary, it’s better to limit student enrollment in a program rather than dilute the quality — and the eventual impact — by trying to serve too many kids, the RAND report concluded.
For school districts, it’s not enough to build support for summer programs — securing the resources is vital, too. To that end, many cash-strapped districts are turning to public-private partnerships because public dollars are scarce, which raise a host of new questions about expectations and accountability.
Summer learning can mean different things for different students, said Chris Smith, executive director of Boston After School & Beyond, a nonprofit that helps facilitate enrichment programs. While one program might opt to use its resources to promote arts and leadership development, across town another one is focusing on teaching students about environmental conservation. Students are encouraged to seek out what interests them, and often learn in an environment that’s significantly different from their bricks-and-mortar school experience.
Teachers in the programs might have more freedom to try out new instructional techniques but it’s essential to still have clear expectations and accountability measures in place, Smith told the EWA webinar audience. The Boston Summer Learning Project — part of the Wallace Foundation’s pilot study — tracks not just the academic achievement of students in its summer programs, but also their social-emotional development.
“All of these programs are rigorous enough to count for academic credit, but they’re engaging enough to attract kids and their families voluntarily,” Smith said.
So what’s next? The AfterSchool Alliance’s full report on the supply and demand for enrichment opportunities will be out this fall. And the Wallace Foundation will have its first analysis of the multi-city pilot program in December. Those findings could go a long way toward helping educators identify what works best for students, and how to make sure more of them have access to high-quality summer enrichment opportunities.
Bonus read: EWA’s Michael Zinshteyn on how After-School Advocates Hope Research Leads to More Federal Dollars.
Don’t have a backyard big enough to get your green thumb on? Look up, and you might find all the space you need.
This approach, known as vertical gardening, has been used to maximize space in urban environments and to enhance landscapes when there is no land. Granted, not every vertical garden will reach the impressive height of 24 stories and cover 24,638.59-square-feet like the appropriately-named Treehouse in Singapore, which recently earned the Guinness World Record for largest green wall. But it’s nice to know the effect can be achieved, even if it is on a (much) smaller scale.
Just consider it a form of container gardening, using the wall as your container. Here’s some inspiration from around the world to get you started and a step-by-step tutorial if you’re serious about taking your gardening skills to new heights.
Paris, France
Bangalore, India
Madrid, Spain
London, England
Copenhagen, Denmark
Mexico City, Mexico
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At the cutting edge of new social innovation financing are social impact bonds (SIBs), a potentially transformative idea. SIB transactions merge traditional public/private partnerships and performance based contracting. Private investors invest in demonstrated social programs, with a promise from government to repay that investment, plus a profit, if predetermined performance targets are met.
The deals transfer risk from the government to the private sector and generate new capital to invest in evidence-based interventions that would otherwise go unfunded.
But on their current path, they are unlikely to fully achieve their promise. Today’s deals are bespoke, complex and have large transactional costs. They also replicate current mistakes in how government purchases services, rather than reforming that process.
Today’s deals are mainly efforts to fund well-intentioned programs that are appealing to all parties to the transaction: the government, investors, and social service providers. But in order to satisfy the interests of all parties whose incentives are not aligned, rather than creating real reform, they end up funding the lowest common denominator — something that sounds good, is low risk, but does not solve big problems.
There is a better way to use these transactions to create broader and deeper systems reform, using the SIB development process as the mechanism for reform.
The deals funded by social innovation financing should be the product of a real, intensive strategic planning process, rather than a one-off response to a particular opportunity.
Step one should be an effort to understand what drives the most frustrating costs to government: individuals, families, and places that cycle endlessly through our systems.
Who are these “frequent flyers” who continually touch many systems and generate disproportionately high expenses for taxpayers? Examples include:
Step two is to determine why government is ineffective in treating these frequent flyers. The answer is deceptively simple: Government knows what it spends, but not what it buys. That is, we know what is in the budget, but in today’s system, we don’t know what outcomes that spending produces. The current procurement process creates no incentives to prioritize outcomes over outputs. A SIB requires that the outcomes are explicit.
Step three is to determine if there are evidence-based interventions that would alleviate the problem. It’s important to remember that not every significant problem has an evidence-based solution. Today, research evidence is generally constrained to a single problem, such as the effectiveness of drug treatment. There is much less evidence around broad social phenomena, like increasing high school completion. Care is thus warranted in prioritizing interventions for SIB funding.
For the final step, a clear-eyed decision must be made about whether SIBs are the right financing mechanism. It should be noted that SIBs are not the answer to every undercapitalized intervention. For example, some frequent flyer populations are so small that a reasonable comparison group cannot be found, and thus it is impossible to determine if outcome targets were met.
The social innovation field is currently in an evolutionary stage, with a focus on building a SIB-ready sector, which simply means educating and experimenting across all parties involved in these transactions.
In order to get to a stage where these innovations are scaled and serve high proportions of targeted populations, a much more strategic approach is required.
And that process is worth doing, even if no SIB is ever financed. The simple process of government articulating what its problems are, what its goals are, and what the potential solutions could be would be a tremendously positive reform in its own right.
Photo: Steve Pepple / Shutterstock
I have this brother-in-law who is impossibly good-looking. I mean, stupid hot. He’s a bachelor on the “the dirty side of 30” and sometimes, this means he gets a little guff about when he’s going to settle down. I was at a party with him one time when things turned on a dime and became an interrogation into his autonomy the likes of which has not been seen since Mumbles got the heat lamp treatment from Dick Tracy. In the midst of all the clamor, one word kept popping up: selfish. “You’re probably just too selfish to be in a relationship. If you weren’t so used to having things your way, then you’d be ready. And, what about kids? Isn’t it selfish to not want children?”
During the indecision that marked the months before Mary and I decided to take the plunge (gross!), I heard similar diatribes about the hobgoblin of selfishness. I never could understand the force of reason and emboldened zeal with which people — often random people — would level this charge against my reluctance to sire. At times it left me thinking, “Geez, it is really important to you that I have unprotected sex! Pervert.” After giving the whole thing quite a bit of examination, I came up with a rant that offers a corrective to the “selfishness issue.” It goes like:
1. Thinking that voluntary childlessness is selfish = fundamentally illogical. How can one be “selfish” if there is no other “self” to be considered? Think about it. Selfishness is morally deleterious because of an imbalance whereby the good of one is improperly subjugated to the good of another. But, in the case of whether or not to have kids, there is no other self to be accounted for. The question is exactly whether or not to introduce another self into the scenario. How can one be selfish towards a thing that only exists as a possibility? This is like saying I’m selfish for not inviting my mother to brunch… when she lives 700 miles away.
2. The unconscious corollary to this indictment against the child-free is that having children is unselfish. Parenting is difficult and it does cost you much. We often like to pretend that we’re automatic martyrs, miniature gods who have given the miracle of Life as pure gift. But, that’s bullsh*t. People have had children to secure marriages and to save them, to bolster an identity and belong, to vouchsafe their virility, out of blind Darwinian compulsion and entirely by accident. Oh, and the fact that I feel an overwhelming love for something that I created with someone whom I love and who is, quite literally, comprised of me… sounds a lot more like idol worship than self-sacrifice. It’s easy to have affection for those ones that bear our image. Call it, “creatorial obligation.” If you make it, you pretty much have to like it.
3. Whether or not we are selfish, with a quiver full or none at all, is dependent on who we are and nothing else. There are childless people who shun their fellow man, just as there are parents who shun their children.
The disease of selfishness doesn’t have a demographic.
Presuming that parentage bestows a kind of immediate nobility betrays the facts and makes light of the spiritual discipline necessary to keep an ego from eating its young.
4. There are other ways to give yourself away. I had a graduate professor once tell me that he and many of his colleagues never felt much desire for children, due in large part to the sense of progeny that they already experienced in their students and study. Again, it is a popular idea (particularly among parents, go figure) that there is no higher calling than being a parent. After all, what greater gift could one give than life? But, life isn’t simply a preponderance of days in which one is biologically viable and persons aren’t just created by genes. The world into which we bring our children has been painstakingly crafted by artists, scientists, thinkers, revolutionaries, politicians, captains of industry, inventors, writers, poets, historians, holy men and women and this world will shape them. In many ways, we owe a debt of gratitude to these “grand architects” for helping bring about a world full of beautiful art and ideas, one into which we are glad to bring new life. These folks, for instance…
Susan B. Anthony
Louie Armstrong
Jane Austen
Francis Bacon
Ludwig Van Beethoven
Julia Child
Nikolai Copernicus
Simone de Beauvoir
Leonardo Da Vinci
Emily Dickinson
T.S. Eliot
Elizabeth I
Immanuel Kant
Helen Keller
Sir Isaac Newton
Florence Nightingale
Georgia O’Keefe
Rosa Parks
Plato
Beatrix Potter
Sally Ride
Jean-Paul Sartre
George Bernard Shaw
Eudora Welty
Walt Whitman
Oprah Winfrey
The Wright Brothers
Mother Teresa
… none of whom had children. Commitment to a craft, a cause, a critique, a country, a composition or even a cash cow can be just as or more vocational and self-giving as the enterprise of parenting. I, for one, am not about to call Mother Teresa “selfish.”
In point of fact, many of the minds above were selfless just insofar as they cut themselves off from the joy and social ease of having children, giving themselves over to an even more vital work.
5. There are plenty of other reasons for foregoing the physically creative act. The giftedness and sublimity of life alone is enough to capture a solitary soul for all time. The countenance of others, the wonder of nature, the mystery of God, the sky and seasons or the taste of a mango are all enough. And, you never know what is driving that “selfishness” we so tritely ascribe.
For the girl whose youth was stolen…
For the young man who is petrified for the fate of becoming his father…
For the sensitive soul who already feels too much of the world’s suffering…
For those children at heart who are so enrapt with Life that they, like children, bear no seed…
For all those child-free who have been stung by quizzical looks and loaded questions…
This is for you.
This post originally appeared on The Dad Issues. To become aware of new content, follow me on Facebook.
What happens when a 5’9 tennis player loses to a 6’10 opponent? An awesome post-match hug.
This is exactly what happened when Dudi Sela was defeated by Ivo Karlovic at the Claro Open Colombia in Bogota on Thursday. Sela would not have needed a chair to congratulate his towering opponent with a handshake. But since they are friends, he wanted to hug it out. The moment made for one amazing photo.
Sela and Karlovic embrace on equal terms (sort of) at the net. #atp pic.twitter.com/3sD3WrSsBs
— Douglas Robson (@dougrobson) July 17, 2014
“We’re good friends and I really like him, he’s a very nice guy,” Sela said after his 7-6, 7-6 defeat, via the official website of the ATP Tour. “I always wanted to hug him, but I didn’t have the chance, and today I think was a good moment. I saw the chair and I thought it would be nice to finish the match like this with a hug, so the crowd will see it’s okay.”
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