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Texting While Walking Is Obviously Dumb. So Why Can’t We Stop Doing It?

by AlbertinaK62 Posted on December 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last year, it was reported that a small city in China had created a texting-only lane for pedestrians. The story went viral before it was somewhat debunked—turns out the lane is in a theme park, and it’s just 100 feet long—but there’s a reason it got eyeballs: everybody’s worried about “texting while walking,” and no one knows what to do about it.

According to a 2012 Pew study, most grownups have bumped into stuff while looking at their phones, or been bumped by someone else on their phone. A Stony Brook University study in 2012 found that texting walkers were 61 percent more likely to veer off course than undistracted ones, a finding backed up by other researchers.

Greatest “hits” compilations abound on YouTube. One woman tumbled into a mall fountain, another off a pier. A man nearly collided with a roaming bear. While pride suffered most in those cases, more than 1,500 pedestrians landed in emergency rooms due to a cell-phone related distracted walking injury in 2010—a nearly 500 percent jump since 2005—according to a recent study from Ohio State University.

Jack Nasar, professor of urban planning at Ohio State University and one of the study’s co-authors, said the real number of injuries could be much, much higher. “Not every pedestrian who gets injured while using a cell phone goes to an emergency room,” he told Mother Jones. Some lack health insurance or (erroneously) decide their injuries aren’t serious. Others will deny a phone had anything to do with their injury. “People who die from cell-phone distraction also don’t show up in the emergency room numbers,” says Nasar.

Of course, pedestrians aren’t the only ones with their noses in their phones. According to a 2013 University of Nebraska Medical Center study, the rate of pedestrians getting hit by distracted drivers grew by about 45 percent between 2005 and 2010. The good news is that 44 states, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico have banned texting and driving for all drivers, but the bad news is that texting and walking is potentially more dangerous and has proved harder to ban.

For one thing, local governments often define “pedestrian” quite broadly. In San Diego, anyone who chooses to “walk, sit, or stand in public places” is a pedestrian; so would a ban mean no more texting at the bus stop? With the endless variation in how people use their phones, and phone technology changing all the time, it’s hard for lawmakers to keep up. And for some politicians, proposed bans raise “nanny-state” hackles. Utah State Rep. Craig Frank, a Republican who opposed a ban in Utah in 2012, said at the time, “I never thought the government needed to cite me for using my cell phone in a reasonable manner.”

Statewide bans have failed in Arkansas, New York, and Nevada. Some cities have made progress; despite opposition from Frank and others, the Utah Transit Authority imposed a $50 civil fine for distracted walking near trains in 2012—including phone use—and it seems to be working. Rexburg, Idaho, has a ban on texting in crosswalks, and Fort Lee, New Jersey, added distracted walking to its finable violations under jaywalking. San Francisco and Oregon are using public awareness campaigns to get the word out. And some advocacy groups have created their own PSAs, like this highly dramatic one from AAA’s Operation Click road-safety campaign:

Melodrama aside, the video raises the obvious question: is it really that hard for pedestrians to police themselves? A July 2014 experiment by National Geographic in Washington, D.C. set up a texting-only lane at a busy DC intersection, but found that most people just ignored the markings. And there’s the rub: If walking and texting is inherently distracting, would people even notice a cell-phone-only lane, or other environmental cues? “I think there is good evidence out there that engaging a phone after a ring or vibration is a trained and conditioned response,” says Dr. Beth Ebel, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington. She co-authored a study in 2012 that found that people texting and walking were four times less likely to look before crossing a street, or obey traffic signals or cross at the appropriate place in the road. “This compulsive nature applies to all of us,” she says.

Maybe the answer lies in the phones. An app called Type n Walk lets you text while the phone’s camera shows you what’s in front of the phone (but doesn’t work with Apple’s iMessage). Another app in the works is Audio Aware, which interrupts your music if it hears screeching tires, a siren, or other street sounds. Then there’s CrashAlert, a proof-of-concept developed by researchers at the University of Manitoba in 2012, which would use the front-facing camera on your phone to scan for obstacles in your path (but isn’t currently in development). It’s too soon to say whether these apps will take off, or how well they’d work.

For the time being, Ebel isn’t advocating we abandon our phones—”We don’t have to go backwards. I love my phone.”—but that at the very least we have honest conversations with ourselves about our phone use and the risks we’re taking. As for critics who fly the “nanny state” banner whenever texting-and-walking bans come up, Ebel says they’re downplaying the danger. “From a law enforcement perspective, this is a form of impairment. It needs to be treated as such.”

Additional reporting by Maddie Oatman and Brett Brownell.

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Texting While Walking Is Obviously Dumb. So Why Can’t We Stop Doing It?

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No, There Really Isn’t Much We Can Do To Retaliate Against North Korea

by Ellie77Vgachfw Posted on December 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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A couple of days ago I wrote a post suggesting that there might not really be much we can do to retaliate against North Korea for the Sony hack. So I was curious to read “A Reply to Kim’s Cyberterrorism,” a Wall Street Journal editorial telling us what options we had. I figured that if anyone could make the best case for action, it was the Journal.

Unfortunately, they mostly just persuaded me that there really is very little we can do. After clearing their throats with a couple of suggestions that even they admit are mostly just symbolic, they get to the meat of things:

Earlier this year Rep. Ed Royce introduced the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act, which gives Treasury the power it needs to sanction banks facilitating North Korea’s finances. It passed the House easily in July but has since been locked up in Harry Reid’s Senate at the behest of the Obama Administration. Mr. Royce tells us he plans to reintroduce the bill as a first order of business in the new Congress. New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez has introduced similar legislation in the Senate; a bill could be on Mr. Obama’s desk by the second week in January.

So….that’s it. And even this is weaker tea than the Journal suggests. For starters, the bill has a serious structural problem because it puts severe limits on the president’s power, which is why Obama hasn’t supported it in the past. It’s a bad idea in foreign relations for Congress to mandate sanctions that can then be lifted only by Congress. This makes it almost impossible for presidents to negotiate future agreements because they have no carrots to offer in return for good behavior.

But that could be fixed. What can’t be fixed is the fact that North Korea learned a lesson from our previous attempt at tightening economic sanctions in 2007, when we cut off the US links of Banco Delta Asia, a Macau-based bank suspected of doing business with North Korea. This in turn panicked other Macau banks into cutting off their relationships with North Korea, which severely restricted the regime’s access to dollars. As the Journal notes, this genuinely hurt North Korea, and the Bush administration agreed to resolve the BDA issue during the Six-Party nuclear talks later that year.

Unfortunately for us, sanctions like this would hurt North Korea a lot less now than they did back in 2007. Stephan Haggard explains:

Post-BDA, and since the ascent of Kim Jong-un in particular, North Korea has also sought to diversify its trade, investment and financial links. The KPA and its associates have developed relationships with financial entities that are not concerned with access to the U.S. market, both in China and outside it; Russia will be particularly interesting to watch in this regard but there is also the open field of the Middle East….While this legislation might raise the costs of proliferation activities if implemented, it is unlikely to staunch them completely and could simply forge new networks beyond the law’s reach.

Another question is whether the sanctions will have the broader strategic effect of moving the North Koreans toward serious negotiation of its nuclear program….The paradoxical feature of sanctions is that they rarely have the direct effect of forcing the target country to capitulate. The HR 1771 sanctions will have effect only when coupled with strong statements of a willingness to engage if North Korea showed signs of interest in doing so. The legislation provides plenty of sticks; the administration will have to continue to articulate the prospective carrots in a way that is credible. Strong sanctions legislation makes that difficult to do if the legislation places a series of binding constraints on the president’s discretion. Why negotiate with the U.S. if there is no return from doing so?

With changes, Royce’s sanctions bill might be an appropriate response to the Sony hack. However, it’s unlikely to have a severe effect on North Korea. Even worse, past history shows that a single-minded “get tough” attitude toward the DPRK can backfire badly, as it did on George Bush when his refusal to negotiate with Pyongyang in 2002 led in short order to the ejection of UN inspectors and the construction of plutonium bombs from a stockpile that had previously been kept under lock and key.

As the cliche goes, there are no good options here, just bad and less bad. I wouldn’t necessarily oppose a modified version of the sanctions bill, but it’s unlikely to have a major impact. It might even make things worse. If this is the best we can do, it’s pretty much an admission that there’s not really much we can do.

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No, There Really Isn’t Much We Can Do To Retaliate Against North Korea

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Here’s Two and a Half Cheers for No-Drama Obama

by DeanneEddie Posted on October 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Saturday I promised to both agree and disagree with Matt Yglesias, but I never quite got around to the agreeing part. So let’s do that today. Yglesias was writing in response to a fairly typical complaint from Josh Green that President Obama is too aloof, too cerebral, and too technocratic to satisfy the public’s “emotional needs” in a national leader. But Yglesias points out that Obama’s firm, low-key disposition served him well when the rest of the world went into panic mode over the passage of Obamacare after Democrats lost control of the Senate in 2010:

There’s no single optimal temperament for all times and all places. Obama, by temperament, is a cool cucumber. I am not. At times, Obama might have been better served by a more emotional approach and an itchier trigger finger. But Obama was right during the political crisis of January 2010.

He was also right back in October of 2008 when the American banking sector seemed to be collapsing….Obama’s opponent, John McCain, was never one to underreact. Most observers greatly appreciated the younger senator’s ability to keep things in perspective and his evident dedication to trying to learn the relevant facts….Similarly, two months earlier, McCain was proclaiming “we are all Georgians now” in response to Putin’s incursion into South Ossetia. A systematic overreactor would have had his finger much more on the public pulse when Ebola first arrived in Dallas. But he also might have embroiled the country in a nuclear war with Russia.

….Journalists have systematic professional incentives to overreact….The hot temperament consequently tends to dominate in the ranks of the media….But more than a political pose, an aversion to purely symbolic action has genuinely served Obama well at critical moments….Obama’s approach to the economy has been far from flawless, but it’s not a coincidence that the USA has performed better since 2008 than Europe or the United Kingdom and weathered its financial crisis far better than Japan did in the 1990s.

The Deepwater Horizon crisis passed. The American Ebola crisis will also pass. HealthCare.gov got fixed. The Russian economy is reeling in the face of sanctions. Osama bin Laden is dead. The economy is growing. Obama hasn’t always been a very effective pundit-in-chief (acute crisis moments aside, his inability to articulate public anger at Wall Street has been remarkable) but that’s not actually his job. On the big stuff, he’s been effective. And that’s not a coincidence.

I always find it difficult to strike just the right tone on this. Unlike Yglesias, I am a fairly cool cucumber, and I’m frankly relieved to have a president whose temperament is roughly in sync with my own. At the same time, I’m well aware that I’m not typical, and that like it or not, the presidency is a bully pulpit that often demands a certain demonstrativeness in order to resonate with the public. Overtly emotional appeals worked well for Bill Clinton and overtly nationalistic ones worked well for George Bush. In Obama’s case, however, it really is sometimes hard to tell if he’s truly engaged with problems the way he should be. Occasional leaks from White House insiders that Obama is “furious” about something or other doesn’t get the job done.

That said, Obama has good reason to be contemptuous of the 24/7 news cycle and the way it’s affected politics. Obviously reporters aren’t much interested in writing “Problem X continues to be steadily addressed” day after day. They want action! They want news! And these days, they don’t even want it daily. They pretty much want it hourly.

But that’s a crappy attitude toward problem solving. There have been times and places when Obama probably has been a little too disengaged, either in the planning process or in responding to crises. Healthcare.gov is an example of the former, and the sequester/debt limit/fiscal cliff battles may be examples of the latter. For the most part, though, his approach has been pretty sound. There was little the government could do about Deepwater Horizon, and high-profile interference probably would have been as counterproductive as the recent panic-stricken Ebola quarantine orders from the governors of New Jersey, New York, and Florida. Obama has instead been radiating calm and working behind the scenes to prevent Ebola from becoming just another partisan football. He’s urging us to adopt evidence-based responses that don’t undermine the longer-term fight against Ebola, and that’s the right call.

America is a big place. The world is even bigger. We have big problems that don’t get solved in a day. I don’t want to pretend that Obama has an ideal management style, when he plainly doesn’t. But given what he’s dealing with, Obama’s management style is pretty damn good. And you know what? The dirty little secret of management is that half the battle—maybe more!—is avoiding lots of stupid stuff that you have to clean up afterward.

Obama may not always give us the emotional sustenance we want, or mount a pretense of whirlwind action to satisfy the cable nets, but he gets things done. Anyone who can count on their fingers can pretty easily figure out, for example, that he’s had a more successful presidency than either Clinton or Bush. Slow and steady doesn’t win every race, but it wins a lot of them.

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Here’s Two and a Half Cheers for No-Drama Obama

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Climate Change Is Kicking the Insurance Industry’s Butt

by olikellopas Posted on October 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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In the months after Hurricane Sandy, insurance companies spooked by rising seas dropped coastal policies in droves.

That could become an increasingly common story, according to the largest-ever survey of how insurance companies are dealing with climate change, released today. Global warming is increasing the risk of damage to lives and property from natural disasters beyond what many insurers are willing to shoulder. And most insurance companies aren’t taking adequate steps to change that trend, the survey found. That’s a problem even if you don’t live by the coast: When private insurers back out, the government is left to pick up much of the damage costs; already, the federal flood insurance program is one of the nation’s largest fiscal liabilities.

Ceres, an environmental nonprofit, evaluated the climate risk management policies of 330 large insurance companies operating in the United States. The results are worrying. Only nine companies, 3 percent of the total, earned the highest ranking.

The insurers that scored highly on the survey (including several of the world’s biggest, such as Munich Re, Swiss Re, and Prudential) were those that have adopted a broad range of climate-conscious products and services, such as rate pricing plans that account for potential climate impacts like storms and fires. Some insurers are also investing in high-end climate modeling software to better understand where their risks really are. Others offer environmentally friendly plans like mileage-based car insurance and encourage their customers to rebuild damaged homes using green technologies. And some insurance companies are making significant efforts to monitor and reduce their own carbon footprint.

However, the report finds that one major way insurance companies are adjusting to climate change is by not insuring properties that are threatened by it, said Washington State Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler, a lead author of the report.

“As a regulator, it’s very bad to see markets being abandoned because of the threat that exists,” he said.

Certainly the threat is real. Globally, average annual weather-related losses have increased more than tenfold in the last several decades, from $10 billion per year in the period 1974-1983 to $131 billion in 2004-2013, according to the report. The insurance industry is not keeping pace: The proportion of those damages that are insured is steadily declining:

Tim McDonnell

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Climate Change Is Kicking the Insurance Industry’s Butt

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"Ex-Gay" Conversion Therapy Group Rebrands, Stresses "Rights of Clients"

by GordonLudwick Posted on August 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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As the “ex-gay therapy” movement suffers major legal and legislative blows, one of its leading proponents has undergone a major rebranding effort.

On Wednesday, in a bizarre, décolletage-heavy, news-style video, the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH)—the professional organization for conversion therapists—reestablished itself as the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity (ATCSI). In what it calls a “major expansion of our mission,” ATCSI claims it will continue “preserving the right of individuals to obtain the services of a therapist who honors their values, advocating for integrity and objectivity in social science research, and ensuring that competent licensed, professional assistance is available for persons who experience unwanted homosexual (same-sex) attractions.”

NARTH’s makeover, along with a similar rebranding effort by Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays (PFOX), comes in response to growing national opposition to conversion therapy. ATCSI’s new website says the group has become “increasingly involved in legal and professional efforts to defend the rights of clients to pursue change-oriented psychological care as well as the rights of licensed mental health professionals.”

Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH), another ex-gay therapy organization run by former NARTH Board Member (and convicted fraudster) Arthur Abba Goldberg, is currently being sued for a different kind of fraud—accepting money but failing to deliver on the conversion promised.

Meanwhile, California and New Jersey‘s bans on ex-gay therapy for minors have held up in court. Michigan may be next to pass a similar bill. Many conversion therapy groups have shut down in recent years, including Love in Action, Evergreen International, Love Won Out, and Exodus International; The latter’s president issued an apologetic open letter to the LGBT community last summer. In July, nine remorseful former leaders in the ex-gay therapy movement penned a joint letter condemning ex-gay therapy as an “ineffective and harmful” practice that “reinforces internalized homophobia, anxiety, guilt, and depression.”

Conversion therapy, which is discredited by the American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Medical Association, and the American Counseling Association, has been shown to increase risks of suicide, depression, drug abuse, and HIV/STDs. Its damaging effects have led to the creation of “ex-ex-gay” survivor groups.

Despite this growing tide of opposition, ex-gay therapy is not a thing of the past. Proposed youth bans similar to California’s and New Jersey’s have failed to pass in Virginia, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, Washington, Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, Hawaii and Rhode Island. The Republican Party of Texas even endorses the practice in its draft 2014 platform.

In a press release regarding NARTH’s makeover, LGBT activist nonprofit Truth Wins Out (TWO) warns “not to be fooled” by the “cynical branding effort,” calling the group’s literature “anti-gay hate speech wrapped in medical language.” TWO Executive Director Wayne Besen calls ATCSI “the same old swine peddling junk science to desperate and vulnerable people.”

TWO’s press release also points out some of NARTH’s stranger recommendations: The group has encouraged clients to increase their manliness by drinking Gatorade and calling their friends “dude.”

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Is Montana More Corrupt Than Miami?

by JaimeFunkhouser Posted on July 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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For such a sparsely populated state, Montana has managed to generate some outsized headlines lately. There’s the GOP Senate candidate who made news by suggesting that creationism should be taught in public schools. Then there’s Missoula’s reputation as the “rape capital” of the world, thanks to, among other things, serious allegations of sexual assault committed by University of Montana football players. And continuing that theme, there’s also the Justice Department’s investigation of the Missoula County Attorney’s office alleging that prosecutors had been systematically discriminating against female sexual abuse victims.

Now comes new data showing that Montana is leading the country in public corruption prosecutions, suggesting that the state’s reputation for graft (dating back to the days of the Copper Kings) hasn’t changed much. Clocking in with 18 active cases, the federal judicial district of Montana has had more public corruption prosecutions in 2014 than those in south Florida, southern California, and even New Jersey, according to data crunched by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

How is it that such a small state has so many prosecutions? “Why prosecutors do what they do is a mystery,” says TRAC’s David Burnham. But the prosecutors in Montana have a good explanation: They’ve recently organized a major crackdown on corruption on American Indian reservations, of which the state has seven.

A recent AP investigation concluded that, nationally, tribal governments are five times more likely to have “material weaknesses” in their administration that make corruption possible, and reporters for years have been sounding alarms that federal prosecutors have largely turned a blind eye to these problems. Montana decided to change that trend, at a time when millions in additional federal dollars have flowed into tribal governments thanks to the federal stimulus package enacted after the financial collapse in 2008.

In 2011, the US Attorney’s office launched a task force, dubbed the Guardians Project, with the FBI, the IRS, and inspectors general of various federal agencies, to target corruption on American Indian reservations. The results have been telling: In 2012, Montana had only one official corruption prosecution, but by August of last year, the Guardians Project had netted 25 indictments against people who’d allegedly done all sorts of devious things to keep federal money from reaching those it was supposed to help.

Prosecutors promised there would be more to come, and there have been. Just last month, four members of the Blackfeet tribe were sentenced to prison for involvement in a scheme to steal federal mental health and substance abuse treatment funds from a $9 million contract. More than $225,000 intended for the program ended up being spent on travel and gambling, among other things.

Six people have pleaded guilty to embezzling federal dollars from a $361 million pipeline project designed to bring freshwater to the Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation. Another seven people from the Crow reservation were indicted for stealing at least half a million dollars from the tribe in a double-billing scheme operated out of the tribe’s historic preservation office. One of the people convicted in the scheme allowed a coal company to take a backhoe to a 2,000-year-old sacred bison burial site. The corruption investigations have already ensnared a former state representative and Chippewa Cree tribe official, Tony Belcourt, who in April pleaded guilty to bribery, theft and tax-evasion charges related to the water project, as well as construction of a multi-million dollar clinic.

Overall, though, Montana itself probably isn’t more scandal-plagued than New Jersey or Miami. Montana’s US Attorney has just taken a harder line on prosecuting the abuses on its reservations, and all those cases have added up to boost Montana to the top of the rankings in terms of public corruption prosecutions. “These figures from Syracuse reflect only a portion of our effort,” US Attorney Mike Cotter said in a statement Tuesday. “Many of the public corruption indictments brought in Montana were initiated before last October. Relatively speaking, Montana is a small office; a David among Goliaths. But the Guardians have done truly remarkable work. Their efforts have unearthed widespread criminal activity and flagrant abuses of trust with regard to federal programs and grants designed to provide for the common good of our Indian communities.”

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Is Montana More Corrupt Than Miami?

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The West Antarctic glaciers are breaking up with us

by AllieMcdaniels Posted on May 12, 2014

merlot point

The West Antarctic glaciers are breaking up with us

By

Ed Mandarina

|

Evgeny Kovalev spb

It’s Monday, and you probably wanted to ease into the week with a post about cute animals or something. Instead, today scientists broke the news that the West Antarctic ice sheet is now in irreversible collapse, meaning a likely 10 to 15 foot global sea-level rise in coming centuries.

Before you get cranking on that ark (maybe you can have those cute animals after all!), let’s take a deep breath. There’s still uncertainty about how cataclysmic this particular cataclysm is. New York Times blogger Andy Revkin points out that “collapse” is a relative term in geological affairs. Both sets of researchers behind the two separate studies, upcoming in the journals Science and Geophysical Research Letters, agree that we could have a good century or two of continued incremental rise before the melt starts to really speed up. It might take anywhere between 200 and 1,000 years before the ice in question is totally gone and the seas have swallowed all the low-lying land from the Jersey Shore to the Philippines.

But according to this new research, there’s no question that it’s going to happen. An upwelling of warm ocean water has made this ice sheet in western Antarctica, which is the largest cache of grounded ice left in the world, particularly unstable. It already releases as much glacial melt every year as leaked by the whole of Greenland. The tepid upwelling that is causing the trouble is the result of high winds over Antarctica, probably intensified by climate change; atmospheric warming and ozone depletion over the continent can’t have helped either.

NASA/Eric RignotCritical glaciers in Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea, including Thwaites, which scientists have identified as the cork in this proverbial wine bottle. Click to embiggen.

None of this should come as a total shock. Scientists have been predicting the possible collapse of these tricky glaciers for years, most notably glaciologist John Mercer, who in 1968 called the West Antarctica sheet a “uniquely vulnerable and unstable body of ice.”

Now scientists report they have proof that the process is well and truly under way. The main warning sign was an accelerated glacial flow in the past few decades, which suggests that ice loss is happening fast enough it will be impossible to arrest, as the New York Times explains:

At this point, a decrease in the melt rate back to earlier levels would be “too little, too late to stabilize the ice sheet,” said Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington and lead author of the new paper in Science. “There’s no stabilization mechanism.”

We “have passed the point of no return,” affirmed the second study’s lead author, Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at UC Irvine and NASA. In a press conference Monday morning, Rignot invoked the image of wine in a corked bottle. The glaciers, which rest in a scoop of land that dips below sea level, are separated from the Southern Seas by a little bit of ice on the edge of the shelf — the stopper. Once that melts away, there’s little to prevent the remaining ice from flowing out and floating into deeper waters, where it will be exposed to more upwelling warm seawater.

“We can tell that the bottle has been uncorked,” Rignot said in the press conference — giving the sentence a grimmer spin than it tends to get at your average picnic or dinner party. Now it’s just a matter of how fast the wine, a.k.a top vintage Antarctic meltwater, runs out into the oceans. Plus, ice is still streaming off the rest of Antarctica and Greenland, where other glaciers may not be far from chronic instability themselves. The total sea-level rise, whenever it happens, stands to kick us out of our coastal cities once and for all.

All of which has me thinking I could use a glass myself.


Source
Scientists Warn of Rising Oceans as Antarctic Ice Melts, New York Times
Western Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapse Has Already Begun, Scientists Warn, The Guardian
The “Unstable” West Antarctic Ice Sheet: A Primer, NASA

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Is it Time to Replace the Cult of Finland With the Cult of New Jersey?

by JonathonSundber Posted on April 3, 2014

Mother Jones

Vikram Bath takes on the cult of Finland today. What’s that? You didn’t realize Finland had a cult? Well, it does in the education community, where Finland’s consistently high scores on the international PISA test make it the go-to destination for education writers looking for agreeable junkets they can turn into long-form thumbsuckers about how American schools are doing everything wrong.

But Bath points out that Finland isn’t actually the world’s top performer on the PISA test. Shanghai does better. So does Hong Kong. Now, maybe those are cherry-picked examples that owe their success to government authorities who game the tests, and therefore deserve to be ignored. But Japan does better too. And South Korea. And Taiwan. So why have they fallen out of vogue lately in the popular press? Why do we hear endless tributes to Finland instead? Bath suggests the reason we like Finland is fairly obvious:

“Be like Shanghai” is for the Wall Street Journal crowd. Shanghai is rote memorization and beating your kids and no bathroom breaks and pretending you aren’t numbed by classical music. Finland is culture and castles and liking classical music because you’d be a better person and maybe windmills.

Fine. Asian countries are culturally different. Maybe it makes sense to look instead at countries that are more similar to America. The problem is, Finland isn’t really much like America either. It’s ethnically pretty homogeneous and has extremely low rates of poverty. Obviously tackling poverty would be great, but facts are facts: we’re not likely to reduce our poverty rate to 3 percent anytime soon. So does that mean we’re stuck with no place to aspire to at all?

No. There is still a much, much better non-Asian model. It’s Massachusetts.

14% of children in Massachusetts live in relative poverty. That’s still below the US average, but much more American-like than Finland.

Unlike Finland, Massachusetts has already figured out how to deal with all the existing regulations imposed by the US government.

Unlike Finland, Massachusetts has figured out how to cooperate productively with US teachers unions.

Unlike Finland, Massachusetts has demonstrated how to get results from US-trained teachers rather than masters holders from Finnish research schools, of which the world only has so many.

Unlike Finland, Massachusetts has experienced success teaching real American students who go home every day to be subjected to American parenting styles.

I’d add a fairly large caveat to this: When you disaggregate scores, Massachusetts still does well, but not spectacularly well. Judging from the latest NAEP scores for eighth graders, Massachusetts does a great job with its white students, a good job with its black students, and a fairly mediocre job with its Hispanic students. Overall, they perform pretty well, but part of that is due to the fact that Massachusetts has a very high proportion of white students and apparently does a superb job of teaching them.

Nevertheless, Bath’s point is well taken. But you might want to choose a different state: New Jersey, which has a high composite score not because it’s mostly white (it’s about 60 percent white), but because it does an outstanding job of teaching kids of all colors. Judging by NAEP scores, it ranks among the top four states in both math and reading for whites, blacks, and Hispanics.

Of course, New Jersey’s poverty rate is pretty low, and we know that poverty is a prime cause of poor educational outcomes. This helps account for New Jersey’s high scores, and also acts as an object lesson in not fetishizing particular countries, states, or programs. This stuff is complicated, and there’s no point in just substituting one simplistic analysis for another. That said, I’d say Bath is worth listening to. We should take good ideas from wherever we can find them, but there’s not much reason to go haring around the world looking for educational lodestars to emulate. We have 51 laboratories of democracy right here at home, all of which are more culturally similar to each other than any foreign country is. And some of them do pretty well, already working within the framework of American culture, American laws, American ethnic makeup, and American parents. Why not study them instead?

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Is it Time to Replace the Cult of Finland With the Cult of New Jersey?

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Ohio lawmakers: All right, folks, we guess it’s okay for you to buy Teslas

by HelaineAtchison Posted on March 27, 2014

Ohio lawmakers: All right, folks, we guess it’s OK for you to buy Teslas

By

Tesla

If you live in Ohio, your lawmakers are poised to allow you to purchase a Tesla from a sales center — without forcing you to drive outside the borders of the Buckeye State to do your eco-friendly spending.

But legislative efforts to placate the Ohio Automobile Dealers Association will nonetheless cap the number of sales offices Tesla is allowed to operate inside the state at three – and other auto manufacturers will be barred outright from hawking their wheel-spinning wares direct to buyers. Here’s the news, courtesy of NJTV:

An Ohio Senate committee approved a bill formally barring automakers from selling directly to consumers except for a maximum of three outlets for electric-car builder Tesla Motors Inc.

The measure was a compromise between the company and the Ohio Automobile Dealers Association, which had sought to block Tesla from selling without a middleman, according to state Sen. Scott Oelslager, the committee chairman.

Tesla, based in Palo Alto, Calif., operates Ohio stores in Columbus and Cincinnati and will be permitted to add a third as long as the company isn’t sold or acquired and doesn’t produce anything other than all-electric vehicles, under the legislation worked out yesterday.

Why are states getting into the strange business of banning a wildly hyped, pretty cool, awfully expensive electric car manufacturer? Tesla’s direct sales model has drawn opposition from car salesmen — middlemen who fear becoming superfluous as Tesla champions a direct-to-consumer auto-marketing model. That opposition has led to sales bans in five states and restrictions in two others.

In New Jersey, for example, Grist’s Ben Adler explains that Gov. Chris Christie’s administration is forcing the electric-auto maker to shut down its two sales offices. The promising news there is that a Democratic assemblyman recently introduced a bill that would unshackle Tesla from Christie’s new ban on its sales model.


Source
Tesla may be nearer to a compromise in Ohio, NJTV

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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Ohio lawmakers: All right, folks, we guess it’s okay for you to buy Teslas

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Christie’s new woe: Court rules he illegally dumped climate protections

by IonaMartinelli Posted on March 26, 2014

Christie’s new woe: Court rules he illegally dumped climate protections

By

Gage Skidmore

As if New Jersey governor Chris Christie didn’t have enough problems!

A three-judge panel ruled Tuesday that Christie’s administration broke state law in 2011 when it withdrew New Jersey from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

That’s because it didn’t bother going through any formal rulemaking procedures before pulling out of the carbon-cutting program. Instead, administration officials stated on a government website that the state wouldn’t participate in the program — and then argued in court that the online statement was sufficient public outreach under state law.

“The Christie administration sidestepped the public process required by law,” said Doug O’Malley of Environment New Jersey, one of two nonprofits that sued the government over its hasty withdrawal from RGGI, following Tuesday’s Superior Court ruling. “New Jerseyans support action to reduce the impacts of global warming. We hope that today’s ruling will help their voices be heard.”

The RGGI is a carbon-trading program that caps greenhouse gas emissions from power plants in nine Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states. The RGGI has sold about $1 billion worth of carbon pollution permits since 2009, reinvesting much of that money in clean energy and energy efficiency initiatives, resulting in estimated lifelong energy savings of about $2 billion — all the while cutting carbon pollution.

The ruling doesn’t automatically push New Jersey back into the RGGI, and it remains to be seen whether the state rejoins of the program.

“The court gave the administration 60 days to initiate a public process around any changes to the climate change pollution rules,” said attorney Susan Kraham, who represented the environmental groups. “Neither Governor Christie nor the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection can simply repeal state laws by fiat.”

Perhaps Christie could take a couple hours to quietly mull his anti-environmentalism, his opposition to the RGGI, and his faltering presidential aspirations during a leisurely drive in a Tesla over the George Washington Bridge.


Source
NJ Court: Gov. Christie Illegally Repealed Climate Change Pollution Rules, NRDC
Tuesday’s court ruling, Superior Court

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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Christie’s new woe: Court rules he illegally dumped climate protections

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