Tag Archives: blackwell

Obama’s Plan to Save the Monarch Butterflies’ Epic Migration

by HollisService Posted on May 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Earlier this week, amid negotiating major trade deals and joining Twitter, Obama put forth a major infrastructure project: a highway for monarch butterflies.

That’s right, monarch butterflies. The pollinators are crucial to the health of our ecosystems but, like bees, their populations have seen startling drops. Some groups are even calling for their protection under the Endangered Species Act. The Obama administration wants to do something about it as part of its strategy to protect pollinating insects, but that turns out to be a tricky task given the monarch’s complex life cycle.

Each year, millions of monarch butterflies complete a 2,000-mile migration circuit from Mexico to the border of the United States and Canada that is so epic it has inspired poetry, a novel and documentary after documentary.

The whole process revolves around the butterflies’ favorite plant, milkweed, on whose leaves they lay eggs. Milkweed grows in the northern United States and southern Canada, so each spring they migrate north from Mexico (a process that requires multiple generations), resting along the way on trees like this.

Rebecca Blackwell/AP

Rebecca Blackwell/AP

The generation that arrives up north has just enough energy to lay eggs on milkweed leaves before dying themselves. The new generation, bolstered by the milkweed, then grows up with the strength to make make the autumn trip back to Mexico before the cold, continuing the cycle.

Noradoa/Shutterstock

But a mixture of climate change, development, and herbicide use has wiped out the milkweed-hungry monarchs. The US Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that nearly one billion butterflies have died since 1990, a 90 percent population decline.

Enter Obama. As part of his “National Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and Other Pollinators,” his administration has introduced a plan to restore the monarch butterflies’ habitat and increase their population by 225 million. The centerpiece of the plan is a “flyway” along Interstate 35, which stretches from Texas to Minnesota. The plan calls for turning federally owned land along the interstate corridor into milkweed refuges for the butterflies.

Will it work? Many don’t think it’s enough, including Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The goal the strategy sets for the monarch butterfly migration is far too low for the population to be resilient,” she said in an email adding more protection and a ban of harmful pesticides are needed to save them.

One source of hope for the insect is its beauty. No one wants to see these iconic butterflies go away.

Jean-Edouard Rozey/Shutterstock

Rebecca Blackwell/AP

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Obama’s Plan to Save the Monarch Butterflies’ Epic Migration

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Today Is the 151st Birthday of All-Around Feminist Badass Nellie Bly

by JaniBesskhuhnk Posted on May 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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Today would be the 151st birthday of Elizabeth Cochran—the groundbreaking journalist better known as Nellie Bly. In 1885, Bly wrote a furious letter to a Pittsburgh newspaper denouncing a column titled “What Girls Are Good For” that described the working woman as a “monstrosity” and said that women were best suited for domestic chores.

Impressed by Bly’s letter, Pittsburgh Dispatch editor George Madden hired her as a full-time reporter under the pen name Nellie Bly. She was a trailblazing journalist, an unwavering champion for women and the working poor, and a brilliant muckracker. One of her most famous assignments was for the the New York World where she posed as a mentally ill woman and exposed the horrors of a women’s asylum on Blackwell’s Island.

Bly also achieved worldwide fame with her 1889 trip around the world, which was inspired by Jules Verne’s novel “Around the World in Eighty Days.” She completed her journey in seventy-two days. Below is the front page of the New York World from January 26, 1890 and the lead article was about her record-setting trip:

AP

To celebrate Bly’s birthday today, Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s has written a song in her honor, which is featured in a lovely Google Doodle created by artist Katy Wu.

Google

“We gotta speak up for the ones who’ve been told to shut up,” the lyrics go. “Oh Nellie, take us all around the world and break those rules cause you’re our girl.”

To check out the song and animation, skip to Google’s homepage here.

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Today Is the 151st Birthday of All-Around Feminist Badass Nellie Bly

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Kids Who Have to Share iPads Learn Better Than Kids Who Have Their Own

by SteffenLindrum Posted on April 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Students who share digital devices do better academically than their peers who have their own devices or no devices at all, a team from Northwestern University has found.

The study, conducted by communications Ph.D. candidate Courtney Blackwell, focused on three Chicago-area elementary schools. One school had iPads for each of its 100 kindergartners, another had roughly one iPad for every five students, and a third had no iPads at all. Blackwell found that the kindergartners who shared iPads scored 28 percent higher on a standardized literacy test at the end of the year compared to the beginning. Kids who had their own devices improved their scores by 24 percent, and those who had no devices at all increased their scores by 20 percent. Though the differences seem small, they are statistically significant, according to Blackwell.

Blackwell attributes the success of the sharing group to “the collaborative learning around the technology.” As an example, she pointed to an activity where students were instructed to find various shapes (squares, rectangles, circles, etc.) in their classroom and report their findings using their device’s microphone and recorder function. “In the shared classroom, two kids would share an iPad so there was much more talk and negotiation,” Blackwell told me. “If one kid pointed and said, ‘I found a square,’ another kid may say, ‘Oh, well that’s not a square—it’s a rectangle.'”

That collaboration enhances learning may seem obvious. But the implications of the study—that students don’t need their own digital devices—could be far-reaching, especially as many districts make major sacrifices in order to be able to afford technology. Take for example, North Carolina’s Mooresville Graded School District, which in 2009 decided to cut 65 staff members, including 37 teachers, in order to buy laptops for all of its students. (While the New York Times reported three years later that the district’s test scores had improved, it attributed the success to other factors as well.)

Probably the most infamous example of the intertwined relationship between tech and tests is the bungled Los Angeles Unified Schools District iPad initiative, which included a $1.3 billion contract with Apple and the testing and curriculum company Pearson. In the 2013-14 school year, the district, which is the second largest in the nation, began rolling out the program, which would outfit its 64,000 students with their own iPads. The effort was quickly deemed a failure—not only were there a lack of basic accessories like keyboards, but students were hacking their iPad security settings to they could spend class time scoping out Facebook and other off-limit sites. By the following summer, the district’s contract with Apple was annulled. Then, last October, the superintendent resigned amid rumors—which the FBI is currently investigating—that he and other administrators had connections with both Apple and Pearson that may have influenced the contract.

While Blackwell’s findings—that kids learn better when they engage with one another—aren’t earth shattering, they do serve as a reminder of the influence that the $7.9 billion educational technology sector holds over schools. It’s not clear yet whether the one-device-per-student approach is in the best interest of kids—or just the companies that make the devices and supply their content.

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Kids Who Have to Share iPads Learn Better Than Kids Who Have Their Own

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