i’m sure there’s some karmic reason i deserve to have this in my life or whatever, and so it is, right?
read the bling ring and watched 6 episodes of “pretty wild.” unsure whether i should set the world on fire or go shoplift marc jacobs handbags.
A paper published in Psychological Science in the Public Interesthas evaluated ten techniques for improving learning, ranging from mnemonics to highlighting and came to some surprising conclusions. (Neurobonkers | Big Think)
Preventing Youth Violence and Dropout: A Randomized Field Experiment -
Improving the long-term life outcomes of disadvantaged youth remains a top policy priority in the United States, although identifying successful interventions for adolescents – particularly males – has proven challenging. This paper reports results from a large randomized controlled trial of an intervention for disadvantaged male youth grades 7-10 from high-crime Chicago neighborhoods. The intervention was delivered by two local non-profits and included regular interactions with a pro-social adult, after-school programming, and – perhaps the most novel ingredient – in-school programming designed to reduce common judgment and decision-making problems related to automatic behavior and biased beliefs, or what psychologists call cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). We randomly assigned 2,740 youth to programming or to a control group; about half those offered programming participated, with the average participant attending 13 sessions. Program participation reduced violent-crime arrests during the program year by 8.1 per 100 youth (a 44 percent reduction). It also generated sustained gains in schooling outcomes equal to 0.14 standard deviations during the program year and 0.19 standard deviations during the follow-up year, which we estimate could lead to higher graduation rates of 3-10 percentage points (7-22 percent). Depending on how one monetizes the social costs of crime, the benefit-cost ratio may be as high as 30:1 from reductions in criminal activity alone.
A mess with which I am comfortable -
Having established that survey weighting is a mess, I should also acknowledge that, by this standard, regression modeling is also a mess, involving many arbitrary choices of variable selection, transformations and modeling of interaction. Nonetheless, regression modeling is a mess with which I am comfortable and, perhaps more relevant to the discussion, can be extended using multilevel models to get inference for small cross-classifications or small areas.
“When I read stories about disability scams [such as the recent Disney debacle] I shrug. The outrage expressed puzzles me. I have had my civil rights violated in a myriad of ways. For instance, I have been refused entry to restaurants in New York City; no wheelchairs I am told. I have had many a taxi pass me by to pick up a bipedal customer. I have had bus drivers lie to me and say the lift is not working or that they do not know how to use it. I have had rental companies assure me a car with hand controls is available only to find out the car is “lost” in transit. When such incidents take place non disabled people look away. I cannot recall anyone ever coming to my defense when I suffered gross inequities at let’s say an airport. I cannot recall a single person that expressed outrage when I was being denigrated by someone who clearly held power. Hence, I shrug about Disney and the angst expressed. It is misplaced emotion. I wonder where are these people when the school board decides not to put a lift on a bus? Where are these people when the special education budget is cut? Where are these people when Mayor Bloomberg selected an inaccessible taxi of tomorrow? Where are these people when technology for people with a vision impairment is deemed too costly? Where are these people when a new facility is constructed but does not meet ADA requirements? Where are these people? Nowhere to be found and silent.” —
“Misplaced Outrage: On the Disney disability controversy” | Bad Cripple »
… In addition to a stunning level of ignorance about disability in general, I have an additional concern. As noted in my previous post about the Disney is the emergence of able bodied outrage. Here I refer to a multitude of stories that question what I would classify as a reasonable accommodation for people with a disability. The most well known story about what a treat it is to have a disability pertains to airport security lines. More often than not, people with a disability do not wait on line. We are shuttled off to a different and shorter line. This is a reasonable accommodation and mitigates a multitude of different disabilities. People see this and think oh man you are so lucky. Well I do not feel lucky when I am the very first person on the plane and the very last person off the plane. I do not feel lucky when my wheelchair comes back from the belly of the plane and is damaged. I do not feel lucky when a supposedly trained person asks me to “walk just a little bit”. This too is a reasonable accommodation one I find decidedly unreasonable
At issue for me is how do we raise the level of understanding. How do we get all people to think disability rights and civil rights are one in the same? Disability studies has been ineffectual. The disability rights movement has stagnated in recent years. ADAPT demonstrations are utterly ignored by the press. So how do we educate and make the bipedal masses see disability for what it really is? I have no clue. And that is problem number one.
(via socialismartnature)
(via scaredystark)
Calvert’s research is designed to answer a series of very responsible, high-minded questions: Can toddlers learn from iPads? Can they transfer what they learn to the real world? What effect does interactivity have on learning? What role do familiar characters play in children’s learning from iPads? All worthy questions, and important, but also all considered entirely from an adult’s point of view. The reason many kids’ apps are grouped under “Education” in the iTunes store, I suspect, is to assuage parents’ guilt (though I also suspect that in the long run, all those “educational” apps merely perpetuate our neurotic relationship with technology, by reinforcing the idea that they must be sorted vigilantly into “good” or “bad”). If small children had more input, many “Education” apps would logically fall under a category called “Kids” or “Kids’ Games.”
“The war is over. The natives won.” So says Marc Prensky, the education and technology writer, who has the most extreme parenting philosophy of anyone I encountered in my reporting. Prensky’s 7-year-old son has access to books, TV, Legos, Wii—and Prensky treats them all the same. He does not limit access to any of them. Sometimes his son plays with a new app for hours, but then, Prensky told me, he gets tired of it. He lets his son watch TV even when he personally thinks it’s a “stupid waste.” SpongeBob SquarePants, for example, seems like an annoying, pointless show, but Prensky says he used the relationship between SpongeBob and Patrick, his starfish sidekick, to teach his son a lesson about friendship. “We live in a screen age, and to say to a kid, ‘I’d love for you to look at a book but I hate it when you look at the screen’ is just bizarre. It reflects our own prejudices and comfort zone. It’s nothing but fear of change, of being left out.”
After I read the news of Yahoo!’s massive Tumblr acquisition, I had trouble wrapping my head around what a massive amount of money a billion dollars is, so I came up with this:
Picture an area the size of Rhode Island. Now picture, inside that, a football field full of Statues of Liberty. Stretching to the moon and back. A blue whale. Now picture a billion dollars.
How to factor polynomials. Which I haven’t done since, let’s say, 1996.
WHAT ELSE IS INSIDE YOU, BRAIN?
Fashion models are almost twice as likely to get their visas as computer programmers, by one rough measure.
More poor live in suburbs than in urban areas, research shows -
Bucking longstanding patterns in the United States, more poor people now live in the nation’s suburbs than in urban areas, according to a new analysis. As poverty mounted throughout the nation over the past decade, the number of poor people living in suburbs surged 67% between 2000 and 2011 — a much bigger jump than in cities, researchers for the Brookings Institution said in a book published today. Suburbs still have a smaller percentage of their population living in poverty than cities do, but the sheer number of poor people scattered in the suburbs has jumped beyond that of cities.
More poor people moved to the suburbs, pulled by more affordable homes or pushed by urban gentrification, the authors said. Some used the increased mobility of housing vouchers, which used to be restricted by area,to seek better schools and safer neighborhoods in suburbia. Still others, including immigrants, followed jobs as the booming suburbs demanded more workers, many for low-paying, service-sector jobs.
Change also came from within. More people in the suburbs slipped into poverty as manufacturing jobs disappeared, the authors found. The housing boom and bust also walloped many homeowners on the outer ridges of metropolitan areas, hitting pocketbooks hard. On top of that, the booming numbers of poor people in the suburbs were driven, in part, by the exploding growth of the suburbs themselves.
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Does cellphone coverage make violence more likely in Africa? -
Overall, our quantitative models demonstrate a clear positive association between cell phone coverage and the occurrence of violent organized collective action. This effect persists when controlling for a series of standard explanations of violence, as well as unobserved, time-invariant factors at the country and even grid level. Plainly, our results suggest that local cell phone coverage facilitates violent collective action on the African continent.
Further problems with ACA implementation -
Employers are increasingly recognizing they may be able to avoid certain penalties under the federal health law by offering very limited plans that can lack key benefits such as hospital coverage. Benefits advisers and insurance brokers—bucking a commonly held expectation that the law would broadly enrich benefits—are pitching these low-benefit plans around the country. They cover minimal requirements such as preventive services, but often little more. Some of the plans wouldn’t cover surgery, X-rays or prenatal care at all. Others will be paired with limited packages to cover additional services, for instance, $100 a day for a hospital. Federal officials say this type of plan, in concept, would appear to qualify as acceptable minimum coverage under the law, and let most employers avoid an across-the-workforce $2,000-per-worker penalty for firms that offer nothing. Employers could still face other penalties they anticipate would be far less costly.
“the gossip game” on vh1. peter rosenberg accusing some gossip columnist named angela of leaking information about him to media takeout and her claiming it was because she donated her phone and someone texted from the donated phone. mind-numbingly useless and gratingly shrill.