Dear Commons Community,

Today is one of those days when there was just too many interesting things happening in the news to blog about.

First, Libyan rebels have basically taken control of Tripoli and have ended the dictatorship of  Col. Muammar Qaddafi.  The big question though is what happens next.

Second, the stock market rebounded yesterday with the Dowd Jones Industrial Average gaining 322 points.

Third, the NY Daily News is reporting that cheating by teachers and administrators in the NYC public schools has tripled since mayoral control was instituted.  There were 225 reports of cheating in 2010 versus  68 in 2003.

Fourth, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. dropped the rape charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn citing the victim has made too many falsehoods.

Oh and lastly, there was an EARTHQUAKE in New York.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial opened to the public on the National Mall.  The official dedication will be on August 28th, 48 years to the day that Dr. King gave his legendary “I Have a Dream” speech.  The Washington, D.C. Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial will be the first memorial on the Mall dedicated to an African-American and the first solo memorial for a non-president.  He deserves his place with Presidents Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.

Surely Dr. King’s Memorial is another reason to make a visit to our nation’s capital.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Joel Balkan, a law professor at the University of British Columbia, and the author of a new book Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children, has piece today in the op-ed section of the New York Times. He summarizes the main theme of  his book  that the United States has moved from a society that sought to protect children in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries to a society that has allowed corporations to exploit children in the latter part of the 20^th century and the present.   A review of his book by Benjamin R. Barber, author of Consumed: How Markets Infantilize Adults, Corrupt Children and Swallow Citizens Whole, summarizes  Balkan’s position well.

“Our new century of unlimited private profits has put an end to the era of publicly protected childhood.  Separated by corporate design from their parents, kids have become capitalism’s newest and most lucrative (and most vulnerable) consumers. In his Childhood Under Siege, Joel Bakan offers an angry but careful analysis of how the market flourishes today by selling our children everything from dangerous drugs, toxic plastics and unhealthy snack foods to violent and addictive video games and for-profit standardized tests. The villains here are not playground stalkers but supposedly “child-friendly” companies like Nickelodeon, Facebook, Pfizer and Edison Schools, along with a trillion dollar children’s marketing machine and a “government is the problem” ideology that has made public regulation of the interests of children all but impossible. If they read Bakan carefully, once they get over their rage, both parents and policy makers may be ready to lift the corporate siege that is threatening not just our children but childhood itself”.

Young mothers and fathers should heed Balkan’s concerns!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Huffington Post has an article on Republican presidential candidate John Huntsman who “blasted” fellow Republican candidate Rick Perry on his stands on evolution and global warming.   Mr. Huntsman on ABC’s This Week is quoted as saying that:

“When we take a position that isn’t willing to embrace evolution, when we take a position that basically runs counter to what 98 of 100 climate scientists have said, what the National Academy of Science has said about what is causing climate change and man’s contribution to it, I think we find ourselves on the wrong side of science, and, therefore, in a losing position,”

Huntsman said he couldn’t remember a time when “we actually were willing to shun science and become a party that was antithetical to science. I’m not sure that’s good for our future and it’s not a winning formula,” according to interview excerpts released Saturday ABC. The full interview is set to air today Sunday.”

Huntsman is on target in warning that what plays to extreme elements of the Republican Party will never appeal to a majority of the electorate and especially independent voters who will likely decide the 2012 election.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Charles Blow’s column in the NY Times today is entitled, Obama in the Valley, and asks what has happened to the Barack Obama who electrified crowds during the election campaign in 2008.   He sees Obama as becoming more of a robot responding to questions mechanically and without any emotion.  He starts his piece by taking a few shots at the Republican candidates who repeat the same responses and who never deviate from their scripts:

“It can be found in the “Artificial Intelligence” of Michele Bachmann and her pull-the-string-in-the-middle-of-my-back compulsion to repeat the same red-meat responses no matter the question. It’s the Buzz Lightyear-come-to-life bravado of Rick Perry, complete with delusions of grandeur and accomplishment. And it’s pretty much everything about the mechanical “I, Republican” Mitt Romney.”

But he saves most of his comments for President Obama to take us to the “mountaintop” and not to the valley.

“The country needs the president to rise to this crisis in word, spirit and deed. We need him to reach out of his nature and into the nation’s need. We are on the precipice. .. The unspeakable truth is that we may well be on the leading edge of a prolonged period of national stagnation, if not decline. …A robotic Sustainer-in-Chief with an eerie inhumanity will not satisfy.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Education Week is reporting that the proportion of American high school graduates in 2011 meeting all four of the ACT’s college-readiness benchmarks continued to rise this year, driven largely by improvements in performance on the mathematics and science portions of the exam, according to data released today.  The annual report from ACT examines the scores of students in the 2011 graduating class who took that college-entrance exam at some point in high school. This year’s report shows that 25 percent of those students produced scores in English, reading, math, and science that correlate with higher chances of earning B’s or C’s in entry-level college courses. That figure has grown steadily in recent years; it was 21 percent in 2005.

The flip side of the good news, however, was also clear:  75% of U.S. students fall short of the ACT’s definition of being prepared for a university education in all four subjects.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

MSNBC News is reporting on a study that finds “watching an hour of TV after the age of 25 can shorten the viewer’s life by just under 22 minutes, according to researchers in Australia”.

“Scientists at the School of Population Health at the University of Queensland studied 11,000 Australian adults who were aged at least 25 in the year 2000.   The academics checked their data against an estimate from 2008 that Australians aged 25 or above watched TV for 9.8 billion hours. This was associated with the loss of 286,000 years of life….An extrapolation of these figures found that a single hour of TV was responsible for the loss of just under 22 minutes of life…Smoking two cigarettes has approximately the same effect.”

The problem is not actually TV itself but the lack of activity by the viewer for long periods. Cardiovascular disease, diabetes, excess weight and other health problems are associated with a sedentary lifestyle.

In sum, we need to plan more time for physical activity and exercise.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

This film and investigation connects the dots and reveals why the Koch brothers are trying to end public education and how their wealth winds up in the hands of Jim Crow.   It is a telling production of how billionaires in this country can buy public policy by financing a school board election in Wake County, North Carolina.   An article about this story is available at the Huffington Post at:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/14/the-battle-for-wake-count_n_926799.html?icid=maing-grid7|main5|dl2|sec3_lnk2|86605

If you are bothered by this film, think about it the next time you go to Lincoln Center and see the David H. Koch Theater (formerly the New York State Theater) .  As much as I enjoy Lincoln Center, I will never step foot in the Koch Theater as long as this family’s name is above its doors.  The Board of Directors of Lincoln Center which includes David H. Koch, should re-examine the qualifications of its membership and consider human decency as a qualification and not simply the size of one’s bankbook.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The NY Times has an article today describing a course on artificial intelligence that has enrolled more than 58,000 students worldwide – a class nearly four times the size of Stanford’s entire student body.  It  is one of three free courses being offered experimentally by the Stanford computer science department to extend technology knowledge and skills beyond this elite campus to the entire world.

The two instructors, Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig,  said they had been inspired by the recent work of Salman Khan, an M.I.T.-educated electrical engineer who in 2006 established a nonprofit organization to provide video tutorials to students around the world on a variety of subjects via YouTube.

“The vision is: change the world by bringing education to places that can’t be reached today,” said Dr. Thrun.

Hal Abelson, a computer scientist at M.I.T. said the Stanford course showed how rapidly the online world was evolving.

“The idea that you could put up open content at all was risky 10 years ago, and we decided to be very conservative,” he said. “Now the question is how do you move into something that is more interactive and collaborative, and we will see lots and lots of models over the next four or five years.”

We will indeed!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Mike Lupica, the popular sports writer who also does political commentary for the New York Daily News, likens Governor Rick Perry to  George W. Bush in his column today.    Below is a sample.

“So here comes the second coming of George W. Bush out of the governor’s mansion in Texas, Rick (Dubya) Perry.

Or maybe just call him W2.

Perry is taller, has much better hair, seems to believe he has an even better pipeline to God than Bush did. ..Whether Dubya Perry is holier than Michele Bachmann, the new President of Ames, Iowa, remains to be seen. For now, though, Perry and Bachmann are the headliners of the moment in the Republican Party. Barack Obama must be rooting like crazy for both of them, at the beginning of a campaign where fringe Republicans might do a better job of saving Obama than he can of saving himself.”

Scary!!!

Tony