Links for 2011-07-21

“Here’s what I want and I think maybe a lot of people, both Americans and otherwise, want. I want what my colleagues Barry Schwartz and Ken Sharpe call “good enough”. I don’t want to grab for the brass ring, be the alpha male, see my name in lights, have the penthouse apartment on the East Side. I don’t want to write out a lengthy policy manifesto on what American foreign policy towards 21st Century African states should be and then spend the next ten years taking meetings and writing op-eds to push my plan. I just want to do a good job as a teacher and a colleague and a father and a husband and a person. I want to earn a good living and enjoy what pleasures come my way without scheming every day for a better living and pleasures I can never have on what I earn now.”

“In discussing their study, White and Tesfaye ask

Did something in the earlier science curriculum discourage girls from more advanced physics? Or was it the general belief, widely embraced in our culture, that girls just don’t “do” hard sciences?
Given that physics is traditionally taught in the last two years of US high schools, that “something in the earlier science curriculum” might be an inaccurate, prejudged impression of physics rather than physics itself–which makes me wonder: Would more girls take AP Physics if they encountered physics earlier in their educational careers, maybe even as their first science course?”

“Given limited resources, possible interventions compete with each other for funding and attention. The dilemma goes something like this:

Generalized interventions tend to affect everyone a little bit, but they don’t close achievement gaps. Narrowly targeted interventions make large differences on a small scale; they help close gaps, but they don’t do much for the overall completion number.

I’m trying to find a happy medium by looking at interventions that affect everyone in a positive way, but that disproportionately affect the most disadvantaged. “

“When seesaws and tall slides and other perils were disappearing from New York’s playgrounds, Henry Stern drew a line in the sandbox. As the city’s parks commissioner in the 1990s, he issued an edict concerning the 10-foot-high jungle gym near his childhood home in northern Manhattan.
“I grew up on the monkey bars in Fort Tryon Park, and I never forgot how good it felt to get to the top of them,” Mr. Stern said. “I didn’t want to see that playground bowdlerized. I said that as long as I was parks commissioner, those monkey bars were going to stay.”

His philosophy seemed reactionary at the time, but today it’s shared by some researchers who question the value of safety-first playgrounds. Even if children do suffer fewer physical injuries — and the evidence for that is debatable — the critics say that these playgrounds may stunt emotional development, leaving children with anxieties and fears that are ultimately worse than a broken bone.”

“My predecessor gave me the following advice. Don’t stand out. Don’t speak up, don’t try to do any stories. Just get on with it. Be the gray man.

For foreign correspondents over the last 10 years or so, the gray man is an important image. It’s what were told to do on our hostile environment courses if kidnapped. The gray man blends in, doesn’t say much, is easily forgotten and always left alone. The gray man bides his time and endures.

Steve Farrell, formely of the Times of London and now the New York Times, told me years ago in Iraq, back when he had only been taken hostage once, said it was a load of bollocks.

The gray man routine is what they tell soldiers. We are journalists he said, act like one or they’ll think you’re a spy, so when he was kidnapped in Faluja in 2004, he waved his arms about and talked a lot and tried to convince his captors that as journalist he should be released so that he could explain their side of the story.”