Bell Curved

explore-blog:

Page from the 1946 pamphlet The Races of Mankind, in which two Columbia University anthropologists present, in simple language and charming cartoons, a scientific case against racist beliefs.

theweekmagazine:

Most college-bound high school seniors will know by May 1 if they got accepted to the school of their choice, or at least made the waitlist. But here’s a hard reality check: For most students, being waitlisted is “not much better than a rejection,” admissions consultant Elizabeth Heaton tells The Wall Street Journal. Other experts call the waitlist just plain ”mean.” 

Just how bad are your chances of advancing past the waitlist? The numbers at elite universities are pretty grim: Yale took in 103 (out of 996), Carnegie Mellon accepted six (out of 5,003), Stanford took 13 (out of 1,078), and Cornell, zero (out of 2,998). Harvard, which won’t specify the size of its waitlist, admitted just 31. And it’s getting worse, says Caralee Adams at Education Week. More colleges are relying on waitlists — 48 percent in 2010, versus 34 percent in 2009 — and admitting a lower percentage of waitlisted students: 28 percent nationally in 2010, down from 34 percent in 2009. At more selective colleges, your odds are at about 11 percent.

So, what do you do if you’re placed in admissions limbo?

cartoonpolitics:

Student loan debt, at $830 billion, now exceeds total US credit card debt, itself bloated to the bubble level of $827 billion.  More here..

(via catladysoul)

newsweek:

Conservative trust in science just keeps going down, and down, and down, and down.

thedailyfeed:

A new for-profit private school in New York City is planning a network of campuses around the world and a global curriculum where Spanish and Mandarin are taught from nursery school on up. 

Unlike its competitors, whose brands are based on tradition and pedigree, the new kid on the block is a for-profit venture with plans to open a global network of sister schools around the world — including outposts in Shanghai and Sao Paulo.

More than 2,000 students have already applied to Avenues: The World School — double the number of available spots in the nursery through ninth-grade program.

theatlantic:

What’s More Expensive Than College? Not Going to College

College has its skeptics, and the skeptics make good points. Does a four-year university make sense for every student? Probably not. Is the modern on-site college education necessarily the ideal means to deliver training after high school? Maybe not. Vocational training and community colleges deserve a place in this discussion. And we happen to be living through a quiet revolution in higher education.

Here are three quick examples. First, beginning this year, students at MITx can take free online courses offered by MIT and receive a credential for a price far less than tuition if they demonstrate mastery in the subject. Second, the University of Southern California is experimenting with online classrooms that connect students across the country in front of a single professor. Third, there’s Western Governors University, a non-profit, private online university that’s spearheading the movement toward “competency-based degrees” that reward what students can prove they know rather than how many hours or credits they amass. 

Some of these experiments will fail, and some will scale. What’s important is that they offer higher ed and retraining that is cheap, creative, and convenient. If we can win the marketing war in neighborhoods blighted by NEETs and deliver a post-high school education to some of those 7 million young people who have disengaged with education and work, we will be spending money to save money. 

Take out a globe and give it a spin. I challenge you to land on a region where education gains aren’t translating to productivity and income gains. The highest-income countries have the highest rates of enrollment in secondary school and the smallest share of informal employment that is vulnerable to an economic downturn. There is a cost to not educating young people. The evidence is literally all around us.

Read more.

theweekmagazine:

It is apparently quite common for school districts to request that standardized tests not include certain words that students might find offensive. But New York City’s list of some 50 banned test topics is twice as long as national sensitivity lists, and stands out as “a bizarre case of political correctness run wild,“ says Yoav Gonen in the New York Post. 

Here, a look at some of the blacklisted topics, and why they might have been deemed problematic:

1. Birthdays
Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t celebrate birthdays

2. Dinosaurs
Some students don’t believe in evolution

3. Halloween
Suggests paganism

4. Religious holidays and festivals
Could offend students who don’t celebrate one or more of the holidays

5. TV, celebrities, and video games
To “avoid giving offense or disadvantage any test takers by privileging prior knowledge” like pop culture, Robert Pondiscio at the Core Knowledge Foundation tells the New York Post.

6. Computers in the home
Not all students have computers at home 

More banned items

1950sunlimited:

School of Tomorrow

May 5, 1958 edition of Arthur Radebaugh’s Sunday comic, Closer Than We Think

(via atompunk)

dataanxiety:

joqueneth:

themathkid:

Non-orientability of the Klein bottle.

It’s like a super Mobius strip

Yes! Maybe the infinity symbol is 2-dimensional, Moebius strip is 3-D and a Klein bottle is 4-D?

I love the representation, with all those red arrows, like the spines on a stegosaurus’s back!

(via thatandycohen)