Source: NYT > U.S.
The former intelligence contractor did not let federal intelligence agencies vet his book before it was published in breach of his agreements with the agencies, the judge said.
Source: Hacker News
Source: Inside Higher Ed (news)
Harsher grading policies in science, technology, engineering and math courses disproportionately affect women -- because women value good grades significantly more than men do, according to a new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
What to do? The study’s authors suggest restricting grading policies that equalize average grades across classes, such as curving all courses around a B grade. Beyond helping close STEM’s gender gap, they wrote, such a policy change would boost overall enrollment in STEM classes.
Using administrative data coupled with thousands of students’ course evaluations from the University of Kentucky from the fall of 2012, the study’s authors determined that students spent one hour more per week studying for a STEM course than for a non-STEM course, on average. At the same time, they earned lower grades in STEM courses.
The STEM classes in the sample were almost twice as large as their non-STEM counterparts and associated with grades that were 0.3 points lower. They were also associated with a 40 percent more study time.
Women in the sample had higher grades in both STEM and non-STEM courses than men. But they were significantly underrepresented in STEM.
Trying to explain that lack of representation, the authors created a demand-side model of course choice, in which students selected classes and exerted effort based on their disciplinary preferences, perceived “costs” of studying and expected grades.
The study examined supply-side issues in STEM enrollment as well, and posits that professors give lower grades, in part, to prevent overenrollment (which is costly to them, in terms of time). But based their supply-side model, the authors found that requiring the same mean grade across classes led to a substantial increase in the number of STEM classes taken by women.
The authors note that many factors contribute to the STEM gender gap, not just grades. But it is a major factor, they argue -- and one that is arguably easier to do something about than other cultural issues.
Noting that professors generally all have different grading policies, the study proposes that curving all courses around a B grade would increase overall STEM participation by 7.2 percent overall and women’s participation, in particular, by 11.3 percent.
Grading along a curve -- any curve -- is itself a controversial idea. Some professors say it's bad pedagogical practice. And it’s hard to see how to get professors across fields to agree on a grading scheme without an administrative directive to do so. That, in turn, would likely spark concerns about academic freedom, as teaching, including grading, is widely understood to be the domain of the faculty.
Yet attracting more women to STEM by standardizing grading is relatively straightforward and affordable, the study says, as compared to longer-term cultural and curricular efforts.
Enrolling more women in STEM this way could also lead to other changes that make the natural sciences “more hospitable to women,” the study says, “creating a positive feedback loop.”
Co-author Thomas Ahn, assistant professor of manpower and economics at the Naval Postgraduate School, said that the paper is fundamentally about how colleges and universities can encourage more women -- and men -- to take STEM courses. Among the reasons that they should, he said, is that STEM careers tend to be more lucrative than non-STEM careers, and so have implications for the gender wage gap.
Echoing the paper, Ahn said that compared to other efforts on this front, “tweaks” to grading curves can be done at the school or department level “quickly, without the need for federal or state-level intervention.” Faculty members already alter their grading standards from year to year, he added.
“If we’re worried about the overall deficit in graduating skilled workers in STEM and the gender gap,” he said, academe shouldn’t “wait and hope for a big, comprehensive, expensive fix. We have the ability to effect change now.” Ahn's co-authors are Peter Arcidiacono, Amy Hopson and James R. Thomas.
Source: Hacker News
Source: Hacker News
Source: Boing Boing
Twitter is advertising for "a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media" with the goal of becoming "a client of that standard."
It's a pretty seismic move, albeit one that's short on details and binding promises. Twitter was originally designed to be part of a federated network, but over the years, the company has tightened controls over its APIs and other elements in such a way as to make it progressively harder to create federated or third-party tools to interact with Twitter users. Sometimes, this was undertaken in the name of privacy or security (and indeed, there were some privacy and security gains through those moves) and sometimes it was just presented as a fait accompli, and either way, it's transformed Twitter into another centralized platform -- albeit one that is more generous about linking and embedding that its primary rival, the walled gardens of Facebook and its subsidiaries, whose goal is to enclose and snuff out the open internet.
Twitter CEO @Jack explains:
First, we’re facing entirely new challenges centralized solutions are struggling to meet. For instance, centralized enforcement of global policy to address abuse and misleading information is unlikely to scale over the long-term without placing far too much burden on people.
Second, the value of social media is shifting away from content hosting and removal, and towards recommendation algorithms directing one’s attention. Unfortunately, these algorithms are typically proprietary, and one can’t choose or build alternatives. Yet.
Third, existing social media incentives frequently lead to attention being focused on content and conversation that sparks controversy and outrage, rather than conversation which informs and promotes health.
Finally, new technologies have emerged to make a decentralized approach more viable. Blockchain points to a series of decentralized solutions for open and durable hosting, governance, and even monetization. Much work to be done, but the fundamentals are there.
Twitter Makes A Bet On Protocols Over Platforms [Mike Masnick/Techdirt]
Source: Hacker News
Source: The Week: Most Recent Home Page Posts
The war in Afghanistan is lost, and has been for years. That's not just my opinion — it is also that of top officials in the American occupation, according to a vast document trove obtained by Craig Whitlock for The Washington Post. It calls the project The Afghanistan Papers — a reference to the famous Pentagon Papers, a secret Pentagon report about the Vietnam War leaked by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971. "What are we trying to do here? We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking," Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, Afghan war adviser to both President Bush and President Obama, told a government interviewer.
Yet the only major new information here is the identity of those making the criticisms. They come from "Lessons Learned," a confidential report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) that collected testimony from top government officials that the Post obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. It's good to know, but anyone with eyes to see has known for years that the war in Afghanistan is hopeless.
Whitlock notes that SIGAR has previously produced several "Lessons Learned" reports, but that they were "written in dense bureaucratic prose and focused on an alphabet soup of government initiatives, left out the harshest and most frank criticisms from the interviews." And they do demonstrate that SIGAR left out the most unsparing criticism from top officials — particularly regarding the deception of the American public. But it's also true that overall, SIGAR has painted in its reports a picture of unrelenting disastrous failure — particularly in the summary emails sent to reporters.
Searching my inbox, I find 56 emails summarizing dozens of different SIGAR reports since July 2016, when someone added me to the distribution list. Picking a few at random:
Again, these are just a few among 56 reports detailing a litany of corruption, failure, and waste. One will struggle to find a single positive word in any of them.
Quarterly SIGAR reports to Congress found rampant corruption in both the Afghan government and the U.S. reconstruction effort, steadily increasing Taliban control of the country, and as a result, huge numbers of civilian casualties and internally-displaced refugees. The actual reports, it's true, are a bit more leaden and obscure — but one doesn't have to do much reading between the lines (I have used SIGAR's work over and over and over to argue that the war is lost) to see the obvious truth that the occupation has been a disaster from start to finish. Just reading the PR emails will do just fine.
Whitlock has done a great service showing that the top military brass can see this truth as well yet, like Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War, have lied to the American people. "Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public," he writes. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and multiple top generals publicly said things they knew to be false. Head of SIGAR John Sopko admitted to the Post that "the American people have constantly been lied to."
"If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction … 2,400 lives lost," General Lute told SIGAR interviewers. "Who will say this was in vain?" But all the lies did not work — the American people have already decisively turned against the war. Indeed, even veterans now say the war was not worth fighting — 58 percent of former soldiers as compared to 59 percent of all adults. One doesn't have to be a master military strategist to see that America's longest war — which as Whitlock notes has cost more than the entire Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe after the Second World War in inflation-adjusted terms — is not going to be won. It is only the D.C. Blob that refuses to accept the inevitable.
Both this new report and all previous SIGAR reports show the American occupation has been a disaster for both the U.S. and Afghanistan. American forces are enabling corruption and fueling conflict instead of the opposite. It's time to realize that and get out.
Source: Hacker News
Source: Ars Technica
Enlarge / The Yahoo Groups home page (for now). (credit: Yahoo)
An ad-hoc group scrambling to archive as much content as possible from Yahoo Groups ahead of the site's final demise next week is running into trouble as more than a hundred volunteer archivists say Yahoo's parent company, Verizon, has banned their accounts.
Yahoo Groups has been on the wane for years, but Verizon announced its official date of death two months ago. Users were blocked from uploading or posting new content to the site as of October 28, and all content currently on the site is slated to be deleted on December 14—less than one week from now.
Members of the Archive Team have been working rapidly to preserve content from as many groups as possible in that six-week time frame. The volunteers have been using "semi-automated" scripts to join groups rapidly and are using a third-party tool known as PGOffline to access messages, photos, and files not captured by Verizon/Yahoo's data download or export tool. They estimate that as a result of this weekend's blocks, they have now lost access to 80 percent of the material they were attempting to preserve.
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