Author Archives: Nomi Steen

M. Night Shyamalan Steps Into the Education Wars

by Nomi Steen Posted on December 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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This is kind of weird. M. Night Shyamalan has apparently gotten a little bored with making movies, and has instead spent the past year or so writing a book. About education. And unlike other folks who parachute into the ed debates with the usual silver bullets (more charter schools! higher standards! fewer teachers unions!), he actually diagnoses the problem correctly:

You know how everyone says America is behind in education, compared to all the countries? Technically, right now, we’re a little bit behind Poland and a little bit ahead of Liechtenstein, right? So that’s where we land in the list, right? So that’s actually not the truth. The truth is actually bizarrely black and white, literally, which is, if you pulled out the inner-city schools — just pull out the inner-city, low-income schools, just pull that group out of the United States, put them to the side — and just took every other public school in the United States, we lead the world in public-school education by a lot.

And what’s interesting is, we always think about Finland, right? Well, Finland, obviously, is mainly white kids, right? They teach their white kids really well. But guess what, we teach our white kids even better. We beat everyone. Our white kids are getting taught the best public-school education on the planet. Those are the facts.

This is true. If you compare American white kids to, say, Finnish or Polish or German white kids, we do just as well. But we do an execrable job of teaching our black and Hispanic kids. In ed conversations, this usually gets referred to as the “achievement gap”—a deliberately watery term that Shyamalan has no use for. He calls it “education apartheid,” and what it means is that our schools qua schools are basically fine. It’s mostly our inner city schools with big low-income black and Hispanic populations that fail us:

So what are Shyamalan’s solutions? He’s got five:

Get rid of the bottom 2-3 percent of truly terrible teachers.
Make the principal the chief academic and head coach. Let another person handle school operations.
Constant feedback to teachers and students.
Small schools (not small classes).
Increased instructional time. Extend the school day and do away with summer vacation.

I don’t want to pretend that Shyamalan has all the answers here, or that his five interventions are themselves silver bullets. But I’ll say this: based on my sense of the literature and the endless number of n-point plans I’ve read over the years, Shyamalan’s sounds pretty reasonable. At the very least, his book is a welcome addition to the debate.

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M. Night Shyamalan Steps Into the Education Wars

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Democratic Super-PAC Targets GOP “Crybabies” With Hilarious Ad

by Nomi Steen Posted on October 7, 2013

Mother Jones

Here’s a political ad that gets right to the point.

House Majority PAC, the super-PAC angling to win back the House for the Democrats next year, is on the airwaves with a new TV ad depicting a crying baby and likening a crew of House Republican lawmakers to petulant children. The ad targets House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and a crew of tea party lawmakers—including Reps. David Joyce (R-Ohio), Gary Miller (R-Calif.), Mike Coffman (R-Colo.), Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), and Mike Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.)—saying these GOPers are, well, big crybabies throwing a temper tantrum over their failed efforts to derail Obamacare.

“Speaker John Boehner didn’t get his way on shutting down health-care reform,” the ad’s narrator says. “So he shut down the government and hurt the economy.” The ad features the Twitter hashtag #GOPTemperTantrum.

The partial shutdown of the federal government now enters its second week, with no resolution in sight. On ABC’s This Week, Boehner said he would not move to reopen the government until President Obama agrees to negotiate over Obamacare, the centerpiece of which went into effect last Tuesday. Asked whether the nation was set to default on its obligations in mid-October when it hits the government’s borrowing limit, Boehner replied, “That’s the path we’re on.” Obama, of course, refuses to enter talks about weakening or defunding his health insurance overhaul.

Don’t be surprised, then, to see more crying babies on your TV set in the days ahead.

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Democratic Super-PAC Targets GOP “Crybabies” With Hilarious Ad

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New Yorkers exposed to more pesticides than rural residents

by Nomi Steen Posted on October 4, 2013

New Yorkers exposed to more pesticides than rural residents

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New Yorkers can eat all the organics that they want — but that won’t be enough to protect them from the Big Apple’s stubborn pesticide problem.

Despite living in a dense city with only tiny patches of agriculture (much of it organic, local, and ad-hoc), New York City residents have higher exposure levels than most Americans to two toxic classes of pesticide, according to a new study.

And the poisons are not just hitchhiking in on the produce.

Researchers studied data from samples taken from New York City residents in 2004 and found that “exposure to pyrethroids and dimethyl organophosphates were higher in NYC than in the US overall.”

These are the two most widely used insecticides used on farms and in homes. They work by screwing up the insects’ nervous system — and once they make it into humans they can wreak havoc with our growth and development and our reproductive systems.

Here’s an explanation for the finding from the study, which was published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives:

Widespread use of these compounds to control building infestations in New York City (NYC) may have caused higher exposure than in less urban settings.

That’s right, folks, think roaches and bed bugs — and the knockout poisons that the city’s ample fleet of exterminators use to kill them.

Residential broadcast spraying is an important source of non­dietary exposure in NYC, where confined indoor and limited outdoor space increases the potential for contact with residual chemical. Risk of exposure is amplified indoors because compounds are slower to degrade when not subject to sunlight, rain, and soil microbial activity.

The indoor use of dimethyl organophosphates was phased out more than a decade ago because of its health impacts, but that wasn’t enough to flush city dwellers of the poisons in the years that followed the ban. The chemicals continue to be used outdoors on farms and in gardens — tens of millions of pounds every year are sprayed in America.

Both classes of pesticides can cling to fruit and vegetables — with studies cited in the paper revealing that more than 40 percent of produce can be affected. And although pyrethroids are registered as “professional use only” in New York, the researchers reported that such products are sold illegally on the streets and in stores.

If you’re a New Yorker, you’re probably wondering how you can lower your risk. The researchers found that concentrations of the poisons were higher in older residents, in those who work with insecticides, and in those who ate the most fruit. So be sure to not age, to avoid using pesticides, and to scrub the hell out of your apples.

While concerns have been growing about pesticide impacts on farmworkers, the researchers say their findings show “the importance of considering pest and pesticide burdens in cities when formulating pesticide use regulations.”


Source
Population-Based Biomonitoring of Exposure to Organophosphate and Pyrethroid Pesticides in New York City, Environmental Health Perspectives

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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New Yorkers exposed to more pesticides than rural residents

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Bombing Syria: A Running Guide to the Debate

by Nomi Steen Posted on September 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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When President Barack Obama announced that he would seek congressional authorization for a limited military strike against the Syrian regime in retaliation for its presumed use of chemical weapons, he turned the ongoing op-ed tussle over Syria into an official debate. Since the August 21 chemical weapons attack outside Damascus, foreign policy experts, columnists, cable news commentators, bloggers, and others have been arguing over what to do about Syria, and it was hard to know how much any of this policy wonk combat mattered because the decision appeared to rest with one man, the commander in chief. But with Obama recognizing Congress’ role in war-related decision-making, the ensuing debate in the House and Senate—and the external, surrounding debate that could well affect congressional deliberations—will shape how the United States responds to events in Syria.

Below is our running guide to the Syria debate raging on and off Capitol Hill. As Congress moves toward a vote, we will track commentary within Congress and within the commentariat, and gather it in one handy place. (To jump to the latest updates, click here.)

Helping Syria could destroy it. The day before Obama gave his Rose Garden statement calling for a congressional vote—and declaring the United States needed to hit Bashar al-Assad’s regime to deter it and others from using chemical weapons—Steven Cook, a senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, published a piece in the Washington Post on Friday contending that an assault on Syria would do far more damage than good. Cook, who previously had recognized a case for intervention, wrote:

The formidable U.S. armed forces could certainly damage Assad’s considerably less potent military. But in an astonishing irony that only the conflict in Syria could produce, American and allied cruise missiles would be degrading the capability of the regime’s military units to the benefit of the al-Qaeda-linked militants fighting Assad—the same militants whom U.S. drones are attacking regularly in places such as Yemen. Military strikes would also complicate Washington’s longer-term desire to bring stability to a country that borders Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Israel. Unlike Yugoslavia, which ripped itself apart in the 1990s, Syria has no obvious successor states, meaning there would be violence and instability in the heart of the Middle East for many years to come.

“It is on occasions like this that I am grateful that I am no longer a White House aide.” Gary Sick, who served on the National Security Council during the Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations, wrote this on his Tumblr on Saturday. He presents the White House’s conundrum as such:

Imagine that you are a White House adviser and you have been asked to calibrate a military intervention that will send an unmistakeable message to Assad that his use of CW was a serious error and persuade him that any such action in the future would be unacceptably costly to Syria generally and to the Assad government in particular.

However, the attack should not change the fundamental balance of power in the civil war — specifically it should not empower the radical Sunni opposition forces that are potentially worse than Assad. The strike should not be so great that it inspires reckless behavior by other states or parties in the region — specifically it should not provoke retaliation, for example, by either Hezbollah or Syria against Israeli targets.

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Bombing Syria: A Running Guide to the Debate

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Senate Zeroes In On Border Security Compromise

by Nomi Steen Posted on June 20, 2013

Mother Jones

The controversial border security amendment authored by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), derided by Democrats as a “poison pill,” was voted down Thursday on the Senate floor. That leaves the door open for a less restrictive border security compromise brokered this week with the bipartisan Gang of Eight by Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and John Hoeven (R-N.D.). The measure would require doubling the number of border patrol agents to 40,000 and expanding a southern border fence to 700 miles at a cost of $30 billion.

After his amendment was tabled, Cornyn told Mother Jones that he wouldn’t decide whether to endorse the Corker-Hoeven compromise until he saw the full text. “They have helped focus attention on border security and why it’s so important to the bill, but I’m going to reserve any comments, obviously, until I have a chance to actually read it,” Cornyn said.

“How much more is it going to cost?” Cornyn later asked Hoeven on the floor. Hoeven, citing Tuesday’s Congressional Budget Office report on the immigration bill that projected a $197 billion federal deficit reduction over 10 years, said that would more than pay for the amendment’s $30 billion price tag. (Cornyn’s bill just called for a reallocation of $6.5 billion of border security funds already in the bill.) Others, like Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.)—who introduced a multi-billion dollar proposal of his own that was rejected in committee—dismissed the Corker-Hoeven amendment as something that “will just throw money at the border.” (If recent history is any indication, Sessions is probably right.)

The Gang of Eight nevertheless believes that the Corker-Hoeven amendment will attract around 10 more conservative votes, but even if the Senate bill passes with the 70 votes the gang wants in order to pressure the House to pass a comprehensive companion bill, it’s not clear the lower chamber will move in that direction. Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), who chairs the judiciary committee, is opposed to a comprehensive bill; on Tuesday his committee began deliberations on a series of piecemeal bills on law enforcement issues. On Thursday, Goodlatte expressed skepticism about the Corker-Hoeven compromise, telling reporters that simply beefing up border security wouldn’t address issues such as immigrants who enter the country legally but stay after their visas expire. (Later, Corker said on the Senate floor that he hoped the House would add such a measure.)

“I think the House is a whole different animal,” Cornyn said, asked if he thought the successful passage of the Corker-Hoeven amendment might get a majority of House Republicans—the minimum level of support that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said it would take before he allowed a vote on comprehensive immigration reform—to take up the Senate bill. “They’re going to produce their own bill. It’s all about getting to conference committee,” where differences between the House and Senate bills would be resolved.

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Senate Zeroes In On Border Security Compromise

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Know Much More Regarding Solar Panels

by Nomi Steen Posted on June 11, 2013

Typically, solar power could be referred to as the power that is actually obtained through the direct sunlight and turned using a technical origin for house use. It is actually less costly and dependable for functions since the sun is readily accessible. Alternatively, solar panels are the mechanically created components whose major objective is to turn solar energy to electrical utility. These guys are constructed through an element termed silicon. This is the central role of the silicon aspect to covert the solar power to electrical power. The solar energy can easily either be directly or even in a roundabout way gotten from the sunshine. When it’s over cast the intensity of the solar energy given perfectly, the photovoltaic solar components supply sunlight rays into electrical power and the solar thermal receiver alters the solar power onto warmth solvents, such as oil as well as water. This form of energy is utilized in, iPod battery chargers, fee electric batteries water heating systems, cell phone chargers and spacecrafts.

Just how perform panels operate? These guys almost handle the photovoltaic innovation. Its title is actually come from the technological innovation made use of, which is actually also referred to as PV, which is made from silicon component. These professionals are primarily semiconductors produced from sand constructed onto large computer chips. When sun beams falls on the PV options, the PN junction in this with its steel conductor helps generate electricity. At this position, the PN junction is actually the beneficial and also unfavorable costs that help to make electric present. Solar energy is obtainable in different systems, network network, inverters and also power storage. In a different system, the PV uses up sizable room skyward the roofing to produce even more electricity. This could also be actually built on property room as well as create up to 5-9 Megawatts per hr. These guys may also be useful in road lighting.

How are solar panels created? They are actually essentially made through three-dimensional aspects; the crystalline silicon production, the crystalline silicon panels and the shapeless silicon panels This stand of the solar-energy production is the things is made use of in the present. In the clear silicon development, for instance, when the silicon factor is melted and also sufficed is called the poly clear silicon. In its additional form when it is actually constructed and also slashed, it comes to be mono-crystalline silicon. In both instances, these professionals have to do with; a hundred percentage pure silicon. In the second case of the crystalline silicon panels, they are typically gotten into parts then afterwards cut, lastly being actually refined using doping products. This changes the state of electric fee inside them to units. The amorphous silicon panels are made through silicon alloys mixed along with multilayer units for utility development. This combination illustrates exactly how the solar energy is created.

Just what are most current innovations of panels? The newest technology of solar power has actually arised in a comprehensive selection of belongings. This starts with the eco-friendly energy alternatives which prevails for house usage. The various other area of it is the Electric cooling and heating systems in residences.

The high-technology device and also periodic lighting in your home is actually the some other good examples of solar-energy development. New laptops progression for smart residences is likewise neglected of the most up to date ideas of the renewable energy.

Yusuf Chy composes thoroughly on how to build solar panels.

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