Dear Commons Community,

Jefferson Pooley, a professor of media and communication at Muhlenberg College, had an op-ed in yesterday’s Chronicle of Higher Education entitled, MIT and Harvard Have Sold Higher Education’s Future.   The focus of his piece is that handing over edX to a private company (2U) is a betrayal of their original intent and does not bode well for the academy.  Below is the entire op-ed.  It is a dire warning.

Tony

——————————————————————————————-

The Chronicle of Higher Education

MIT and Harvard Have Sold Higher Education’s Future

Jefferson Pooley

July 6, 2021

Last week Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sold their edX platform to a for-profit company for $800 million. Founded by the two institutions nearly a decade ago, edX was higher education’s answer to the venture-backed start-ups jostling for an online-course windfall. With the sale to one of those firms, Maryland-based 2U, Harvard and MIT have surrendered. Their decision to fold is a major, and potentially fateful, act of betrayal.

Alan Garber, Harvard’s provost, adopted the language of edX’s profit-maximizing rivals in conceding defeat. “Taking full advantage of [online learning’s] potential,” he told The Harvard Gazette, “will require capital investments at greater scale than is readily attainable for a nonprofit entity like edX.” The decision to sell comes as investor interest in higher education has swelled during the pandemic. Coursera, the Silicon Valley online-course provider, went public in March, and Instructure — the maker of the popular learning-management software Canvas — filed for an IPO last week. The Covid Zoom boom has brought the inevitable wave of start–ups hoping to cash in on the virtual college classroom. So it’s no surprise that the market value of 2U, after the edX announcement, surged past $3 billion.

Before the sale, edX was academe’s public option — a mission-aligned satellite of the brick-and-mortar campus. Now all the major players in the sector are profiteers, legally obligated to maximize shareholder return. As universities offer more web-based courses and degree programs, most of them will turn to online program managers like 2U and Coursera. 2U already runs over 500 such programs for 80 university “partners,” numbers that — with the edX acquisition — will more than double. The press–release boast is that the combined firm will reach over 50 million learners.

Harvard and MIT have, in effect, auctioned off the lecture halls of the future. It’s a short-sighted move reminiscent of another infrastructure transfer, in scholarly publishing. As early as the 1950s, academic societies began to mimic the new sales-based commercial model of for-profit publishers. By the turn of the millennium, most societies had handed over their journals to be published by the big commercial players, in exchange for a share of profit. Now most scholarship is published by an oligopolist quintet of information conglomerates that, in turn, charge their college customers usurious fees.

That industry is among the most profitable in the world, in part because academics write and review for free. As the historian Aileen Fyfe has shown, there was nothing inevitable about the joint custody — nonprofit colleges and for-profit publishers — we’ve ended up with. We owe our current predicament, in part, to the decisions of learned societies who chose short-term cash over their scholar-members’ long-term interests. Harvard and MIT have just made the same disastrous miscalculation.

Nonprofits aren’t supposed to flip like this. The edX deal seems to have met the letter, if not the spirit, of nonprofit law by selling off its assets — and by parking the $800 million in a new Harvard-MIT nonprofit with a gauzy “inclusive learning and education” mission. The splashy, doth-protest-too-much site detailing the merger states that 2U plans to operate edX as a “public benefit entity,” a toothless designation.

Compare the public statements from Harvard, MIT, and edX with 2U’s backstage messaging to investors. At the press conference, Harvard’s Garber said that the partnership with 2U “indeed is mission-aligned,” while the two institutions’ presidents, in a joint statement, said the merger would “carry forward” the edX mission on a “whole new scale.” With “online education rapidly changing,” they added, “it’s the right moment for this leap of evolution for edX.”

2U, on the other hand, touts the expected post-merger boost in “TAM” (total available market) and “ROIC” (return on invested capital). The company promises to leverage edX’s “strong brand equity” — from “initial marketplace experience through the student lifecycle.” The nonprofit’s “geographic footprint” will enable 2U to expand its “addressable market,” which — in a concentric-circle chart — is pegged to $7.3 trillion dollars. The materials claim, unblushingly, that the pandemic has boosted expected “CAGR” (compound annual growth rate) by 2 points. There’s even reference to “increasing share of wallet,” which doesn’t roll off the tongue quite like Veritas.

2U’s mission is fundamentally misaligned with the university tradition. 2U, Coursera, and their venture-funded competitors are built to squeeze profit from our students, using our faculty and course offerings. Harvard and MIT had no right, in the meaningful sense, to sell us off. None of us — not faculty members, not students — signed up for edX to increase Silicon Valley’s wallet share. We will look back on this careless abrogation of stewardship as the tragic squandering that it is.

Eric Adams

Dear Commons Community,

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams is the projected winner in  the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City after appealing to the political center and promising to strike the right balance between fighting crime and ending racial injustice in policing.

A former police captain, Adams would be the city’s second Black mayor if elected.

He triumphed over a large Democratic field in New York’s first major race to use ranked choice voting. Results from the latest tabulations released yesterday showed him leading former city sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia by 8,426 votes, or a little more than 1 percentage point.  As reported by several news media outlets.

“While there are still some very small amounts of votes to be counted, the results are clear: an historic, diverse, five-borough coalition led by working-class New Yorkers has led us to victory in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York,” Adams said in a statement.

He said he was running to “deliver on the promise of this great city for those who are struggling, who are underserved, and who are committed to a safe, fair, affordable future for all New Yorkers.”

Adams will be the prohibitive favorite in the general election against Curtis Sliwa, the Republican founder of the Guardian Angels. Democrats outnumber Republicans 7-to-1 in New York City.

Adams’ closest vanquished Democratic rivals included Garcia, who campaigned as a technocrat and proven problem-solver, and former City Hall legal advisor Maya Wiley, who had progressive support including an endorsement from U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Andrew Yang, the 2020 presidential candidate known for his proposed universal basic income, was an early favorite but faded in the race.

Voting in the primary ended June 22. Early returns showed Adams in the lead, but New Yorkers had to wait for tens of thousands of absentee ballots to be counted and for rounds of tabulations done under the new ranked choice system.

Under the system, voters ranked up to five candidates for mayor in order of preference. Candidates with too few votes to win were eliminated and ballots cast for them redistributed to the surviving contenders, based on the voter preference, until only two were left.

The city’s first experience with the system in a major election was bumpy. As votes were being tallied on June 29, elections officials bungled the count by inadvertently including 135,000 old test ballots. Erroneous vote tallies were posted for several hours before officials acknowledged the error and took them down.

The mistake had no impact on the final outcome of the race.

Adams, Garcia and Wiley all filed lawsuits last week seeking the right to review the ranked choice tally.

Wiley said in a statement Tuesday that the board “must be completely remade following what can only be described as a debacle.” As for herself, she said her campaign would have more to say soon about “next steps.”

Adams, 60, is a moderate Democrat who opposed the “defund the police” movement.

“We’re not going to recover as a city if we turn back time and see an increase in violence, particularly gun violence,” Adams said after three people including a 4-year-old girl were shot and wounded in Times Square in May.

“If Black lives really matter, it can’t only be against police abuse. It has to be against the violence that’s ripping apart our communities,” he told supporters the night of the primary.

But Adams is a study in contradictions who at different times has been a defender of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, a registered Republican and a Democratic state senator thriving in a world of backroom deals.

Adams speaks frequently of his dual identity as a 22-year police veteran and a Black man who endured police brutality himself as a teenager. He said he was beaten by officers at age 15.

Adams became a police officer in 1984 and rose to the rank of captain before leaving to run for the state Senate in 2006.

While in the police department, he co-founded 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, a group that campaigned for criminal justice reform and against racial profiling.

After winning a state Senate seat from Brooklyn in 2006, Adams made an impression with an impassioned speech favoring same-sex marriage rights in 2009, two years before New York’s state legislators passed a marriage equality bill.

Adams also weathered a few controversies, including a 2010 report from the state inspector general that faulted his oversight of the bidding process to bring casino gambling to the Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens. Adams had accepted campaign contributions from a politically connected group bidding for the gambling franchise.

Adams was elected in 2013 as Brooklyn borough president, his current job.

Adams is a vegan who credits a plant-based diet with reversing his diabetes. He has a 25-year-old son, Jordan Coleman, with a former girlfriend. His current partner is Tracey Collins, an educator who holds an administrative job in the city’s public school system.

Journalists raised questions during the race about where Adams lived. He was born in Brooklyn, walked the beat there as a cop, owns real estate there and represented it in the state Senate. But he slept in his office in Brooklyn Borough Hall for months during the pandemic and opponents noted that he shares a place with his partner in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

Adams gave reporters a tour of a basement apartment in Brooklyn that he said was his primary residence.

Congratulations to Mr. Adams!

Tony

Nikole Hannah-Jones

Dear Commons Community,

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Black investigative journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for her ground-breaking work on the bitter legacy of slavery in the U.S. announced yesterday that she will not join the faculty at the University of North Carolina following an extended tenure fight, and instead will accept a chaired professorship at Howard University.

The dispute over whether North Carolina’s flagship public university would grant Ms. Hannah-Jones a lifetime faculty appointment has prompted weeks of outcry from within and beyond its Chapel Hill campus. Numerous professors and alumni voiced frustration, and Black students and faculty questioned during protests whether the predominantly white university values them. As reported by the Associated Press.

“These last few weeks have been very dark. To be treated so shabbily by my alma mater, by a university that has given me so much and which I only sought to give back to, has been deeply painful,” Hannah-Jones said in a written statement. 

Hannah-Jones — who won the Pulitzer Prize for her work on The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project focusing on America’s history of slavery — said that her tenure application had stalled after political interference by conservatives and objections by a top donor at the journalism school. She lamented the “political firestorm that has dogged me since The 1619 Project published,” with conservatives including former President Donald Trump criticizing the work. 

Hannah-Jones will instead accept a tenured position as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at Howard, a historically Black university in Washington, D.C., which also announced that it had recruited award-winning journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates to join its faculty. 

Coates won a National Book Award for “Between the World and Me,” which explores violence against Black people and white supremacy in America. Both have been given MacArthur “genius” grants for their writings. 

Hannah Jones’ tenure application at UNC’s journalism school was submitted to the school’s trustees last year, but it was halted after a board member who vets the appointments raised questions about her nonacademic background, university officials have said. Instead, she was initially offered a five-year contract. Then last week, amid mounting pressure, the trustee board finally took up her submission and voted to offer her tenure.

“To be denied it (tenure) to only have that vote occur on the last possible day, at the last possible moment, after threat of legal action, after weeks of protest, after it became a national scandal, it’s just not something that I want anymore,” Hannah-Jones said on “CBS This Morning,” which first broke the news of her decision.

Officials at UNC didn’t immediately respond to emails seeking comment. Its enrollment is approximately 60% white and 8% Black, according to university data. 

Hannah-Jones and Coates’ Howard appointments are being supported by nearly $20 million donated by the Knight Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Ford Foundation, as well as by an anonymous donor, to support Howard’s continued education of and investment in Black journalists, the university said.

“It is my pleasure to welcome to Howard two of today’s most respected and influential journalists,” Howard President Wayne A. I. Frederick said in a news release. “At such a critical time for race relations in our country, it is vital that we understand the role of journalism in steering our national conversation and social progress.”

Coates celebrated his return to Howard, which is his alma mater.

“I heard a wise man once say, ‘A man who hates home will never be happy.’ And it is in the pursuit of wisdom and happiness that I return to join the esteemed faculty of Howard University. This is the faculty that molded me. This is the faculty that strengthened me,” Coates said. “Personally, I know of no higher personal honor than this.”

UNC had announced in April that Hannah-Jones, who received a master’s degree from the university, would be joining the journalism school as a Knight Chair. It was later revealed that she had been given a contract position, despite the fact that her predecessors were granted tenure when appointed.

Yesterday, Hannah-Jones cited political interference and the influence of a powerful donor to the journalism school, a reference to Arkansas newspaper publisher Walter Hussman, who has acknowledged in past interviews that he had emailed university leaders challenging her work as “highly contentious and highly controversial” before the process was halted. 

Hussman, whose name adorns the UNC journalism school after he pledged a $25 million donation, said in a phone interview Tuesday that he respected Hannah-Jones’ decision but that he still has concerns about The 1619 Project.

“I really felt a sense of regret that we were never able to get together and never had a chance to sit down and talk to her,” he said.

In explaining her decision, Hannah-Jones said: “I cannot imagine working at and advancing a school named for a man who lobbied against me, who used his wealth to influence the hires and ideology of the journalism school, who ignored my 20 years of journalism experience, all of my credentials, all of my work, because he believed that a project that centered Black Americans equaled the denigration of white Americans.” 

“Nor can I work at an institution whose leadership permitted this conduct and has done nothing to disavow it,” she said.

Congratulations to Ms. Hannah-Jones on her decision.  It is UNC’s loss and Howard’s gain!

Tony

Susan Del Percio

Dear Commons Community,

Susan Del Percio, a political  strategist who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats is speaking out against the rise of the extreme right inside the GOP. 

“I’ve been looking for a new word for ‘Trumpism’ because I hate it,” Susan Del Percio told MSNBC’s Joy Reid yesterday. “I think it goes deeper than just Donald Trump within the Republican Party.”

She said there’s one word she keeps coming back to. 

“It’s neofascism,” she declared. “Forget Trumpism. It’s neofascism. That’s what the grassroots of the party looks like right now.”

Del Percio was asked specifically about former Rep. Allen West (R-Tex.), a far-right figure in the party who said he will challenge Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in the primary next year. 

“He may win,” she said. “And if he wins, he will be a very weak challenger to whoever the Democrats put up.” 

Del Percio noted that other far-right extremists are running in other races throughout the country. 

“The wackiest wackies are gonna win the Republican primary, but they’re going to lose in general elections,” she said, and eventually the GOP will get the message… although it may take a few years.  

“After enough losses, we can see maybe normal returning because those neofascists will be out of the party,” she said. 

Del Percio has it right but more of the Republican Party leadership needs to listen to her.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The current issue of Scientific American has an article entitled, AI Designs Quantum Physics Experiments Beyond What Any Human Has Conceived that describes artificial intelligence programs that are creating experiments that no scientists have been able to developed.  Here is an except.

“Quantum physicist Nora Tischler, who was a Ph.D. student working with Anton Zeilinger on an unrelated topic when the MELVIN Algorithm was being put through its paces, was paying attention to these developments. “It was kind of clear from the beginning [that such an] experiment wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been discovered by an algorithm,” she says.

Besides generating complex entangled states, the setup using more than two crystals with overlapping paths can be employed to perform a generalized form of Zeilinger’s 1994 quantum interference experiments with two crystals. Aephraim Steinberg, an experimentalist at the University of Toronto, who is a colleague of Mario Krenn’s but has not worked on these projects, is impressed by what the AI found. “This is a generalization that (to my knowledge) no human dreamed up in the intervening decades and might never have done,” he says. “It’s a gorgeous first example of the kind of new explorations these thinking machines can take us on.”

The entire article is below and is a valuable read for anyone interested in how AI is taking the lead in science experimentation.

Tony   

 ———————————————–

Scientific American

AI Designs Quantum Physics Experiments Beyond What Any Human Has Conceived

Originally built to speed up calculations, a machine-learning system is now making shocking progress at the frontiers of experimental quantum physics

By Anil Ananthaswamy on July 2, 2021

Quantum physicist Mario Krenn remembers sitting in a café in Vienna in early 2016, poring over computer printouts, trying to make sense of what MELVIN had found. MELVIN was a machine-learning algorithm Krenn had built, a kind of artificial intelligence. Its job was to mix and match the building blocks of standard quantum experiments and find solutions to new problems. And it did find many interesting ones. But there was one that made no sense.

“The first thing I thought was, ‘My program has a bug, because the solution cannot exist,’” Krenn says. MELVIN had seemingly solved the problem of creating highly complex entangled states involving multiple photons (entangled states being those that once made Albert Einstein invoke the specter of “spooky action at a distance”). Krenn, Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna and their colleagues had not explicitly provided MELVIN the rules needed to generate such complex states, yet it had found a way. Eventually, he realized that the algorithm had rediscovered a type of experimental arrangement that had been devised in the early 1990s. But those experiments had been much simpler. MELVIN had cracked a far more complex puzzle.

“When we understood what was going on, we were immediately able to generalize [the solution],” says Krenn, who is now at the University of Toronto. Since then, other teams have started performing the experiments identified by MELVIN, allowing them to test the conceptual underpinnings of quantum mechanics in new ways. Meanwhile Krenn, working with colleagues in Toronto, has refined their machine-learning algorithms. Their latest effort, an AI called THESEUS, has upped the ante: it is orders of magnitude faster than MELVIN, and humans can readily parse its output. While it would take Krenn and his colleagues days or even weeks to understand MELVIN’s meanderings, they can almost immediately figure out what THESEUS is saying.

“It is amazing work,” says theoretical quantum physicist Renato Renner of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, who reviewed a 2020 study about THESEUS but was not directly involved in these efforts.

Krenn stumbled on this entire research program somewhat by accident when he and his colleagues were trying to figure out how to experimentally create quantum states of photons entangled in a very particular manner: When two photons interact, they become entangled, and both can only be mathematically described using a single shared quantum state. If you measure the state of one photon, the measurement instantly fixes the state of the other even if the two are kilometers apart (hence Einstein’s derisive comments on entanglement being “spooky”).

In 1989 three physicists—Daniel Greenberger, the late Michael Horne and Zeilinger—described an entangled state that came to be known as “GHZ” (after their initials). It involved four photons, each of which could be in a quantum superposition of, say, two states, 0 and 1 (a quantum state called a qubit). In their paper, the GHZ state involved entangling four qubits such that the entire system was in a two-dimensional quantum superposition of states 0000 and 1111. If you measured one of the photons and found it in state 0, the superposition would collapse, and the other photons would also be in state 0. The same went for state 1. In the late 1990s Zeilinger and his colleagues experimentally observed GHZ states using three qubits for the first time.

Krenn and his colleagues were aiming for GHZ states of higher dimensions. They wanted to work with three photons, where each photon had a dimensionality of three, meaning it could be in a superposition of three states: 0, 1 and 2. This quantum state is called a qutrit. The entanglement the team was after was a three-dimensional GHZ state that was a superposition of states 000, 111 and 222. Such states are important ingredients for secure quantum communications and faster quantum computing. In late 2013 the researchers spent weeks designing experiments on blackboards and doing the calculations to see if their setups could generate the required quantum states. But each time they failed. “I thought, ‘This is absolutely insane. Why can’t we come up with a setup?’” says Krenn says.

To speed up the process, Krenn first wrote a computer program that took an experimental setup and calculated the output. Then he upgraded the program to allow it to incorporate in its calculations the same building blocks that experimenters use to create and manipulate photons on an optical bench: lasers, nonlinear crystals, beam splitters, phase shifters, holograms, and the like. The program searched through a large space of configurations by randomly mixing and matching the building blocks, performed the calculations and spat out the result. MELVIN was born. “Within a few hours, the program found a solution that we scientists—three experimentalists and one theorist—could not come up with for months,” Krenn says. “That was a crazy day. I could not believe that it happened.”

Then he gave MELVIN more smarts. Anytime it found a setup that did something useful, MELVIN added that setup to its toolbox. “The algorithm remembers that and tries to reuse it for more complex solutions,” Krenn says.

It was this more evolved MELVIN that left Krenn scratching his head in a Viennese café. He had set it running with an experimental toolbox that contained two crystals, each capable of generating a pair of photons entangled in three dimensions. Krenn’s naive expectation was that MELVIN would find configurations that combined these pairs of photons to create entangled states of at most nine dimensions. But “it actually found one solution, an extremely rare case, that has much higher entanglement than the rest of the states,” Krenn says.

Eventually, he figured out that MELVIN had used a technique that multiple teams had developed nearly three decades ago. In 1991 one method was designed by Xin Yu Zou, Li Jun Wang and Leonard Mandel, all then at the University of Rochester. And in 1994 Zeilinger, then at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, and his colleagues came up with another. Conceptually, these experiments attempted something similar, but the configuration that Zeilinger and his colleagues devised is simpler to understand. It starts with one crystal that generates a pair of photons (A and B). The paths of these photons go right through another crystal, which can also generate two photons (C and D). The paths of photon A from the first crystal and of photon C from the second overlap exactly and lead to the same detector. If that detector clicks, it is impossible to tell whether the photon originated from the first or the second crystal. The same goes for photons B and D.

A phase shifter is a device that effectively increases the path a photon travels as some fraction of its wavelength. If you were to introduce a phase shifter in one of the paths between the crystals and kept changing the amount of phase shift, you could cause constructive and destructive interference at the detectors. For example, each of the crystals could be generating, say, 1,000 pairs of photons per second. With constructive interference, the detectors would register 4,000 pairs of photons per second. And with destructive interference, they would detect none: the system as a whole would not create any photons even though individual crystals would be generating 1,000 pairs a second. “That is actually quite crazy, when you think about it,” Krenn says.

MELVIN’s funky solution involved such overlapping paths. What had flummoxed Krenn was that the algorithm had only two crystals in its toolbox. And instead of using those crystals at the beginning of the experimental setup, it had wedged them inside an interferometer (a device that splits the path of, say, a photon into two and then recombines them). After much effort, he realized that the setup MELVIN had found was equivalent to one involving more than two crystals, each generating pairs of photons, such that their paths to the detectors overlapped. The configuration could be used to generate high-dimensional entangled states.

Quantum physicist Nora Tischler, who was a Ph.D. student working with Zeilinger on an unrelated topic when MELVIN was being put through its paces, was paying attention to these developments. “It was kind of clear from the beginning [that such an] experiment wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been discovered by an algorithm,” she says.

Besides generating complex entangled states, the setup using more than two crystals with overlapping paths can be employed to perform a generalized form of Zeilinger’s 1994 quantum interference experiments with two crystals. Aephraim Steinberg, an experimentalist at the University of Toronto, who is a colleague of Krenn’s but has not worked on these projects, is impressed by what the AI found. “This is a generalization that (to my knowledge) no human dreamed up in the intervening decades and might never have done,” he says. “It’s a gorgeous first example of the kind of new explorations these thinking machines can take us on.”

In one such generalized configuration with four crystals, each generating a pair of photons, and overlapping paths leading to four detectors, quantum interference can create situations where either all four detectors click (constructive interference) or none of them do so (destructive interference).

But until recently, carrying out such an experiment remained a distant dream. Then, in a March preprint paper, a team led by Lan-Tian Feng of the University of Science and Technology of China , in collaboration with Krenn, reported that they had fabricated the entire setup on a single photonic chip and performed the experiment. The researchers collected data for more than 16 hours: a feat made possible because of the photonic chip’s incredible optical stability, something that would have been impossible to achieve in a larger-scale tabletop experiment. For starters, the setup would require a square meter’s worth of optical elements precisely aligned on an optical bench, Steinberg says. Besides, “a single optical element jittering or drifting by a thousandth of the diameter of a human hair during those 16 hours could be enough to wash out the effect,” he says.

During their early attempts to simplify and generalize what MELVIN had found, Krenn and his colleagues realized that the solution resembled abstract mathematical forms called graphs, which contain vertices and edges and are used to depict pairwise relations between objects. For these quantum experiments, every path a photon takes is represented by a vertex. And a crystal, for example, is represented by an edge connecting two vertices. MELVIN first produced such a graph and then performed a mathematical operation on it. The operation, called “perfect matching,” involves generating an equivalent graph in which each vertex is connected to only one edge. This process makes calculating the final quantum state much easier, although it is still hard for humans to understand.

That changed with MELVIN’s successor THESEUS, which generates much simpler graphs by winnowing the first complex graph representing a solution that it finds down to the bare minimum number of edges and vertices (such that any further deletion destroys the setup’s ability to generate the desired quantum states). Such graphs are simpler than MELVIN’s perfect matching graphs, so it is even easier to make sense of any AI-generated solution.

Renner is particularly impressed by THESEUS’s human-interpretable outputs. “The solution is designed in such a way that the number of connections in the graph is minimized,” he says. “And that’s naturally a solution we can better understand than if you had a very complex graph.”

Eric Cavalcanti of Griffith University in Australia is both impressed by the work and circumspect about it. “These machine-learning techniques represent an interesting development. For a human scientist looking at the data and interpreting it, some of the solutions may look like ‘creative’ new solutions. But at this stage, these algorithms are still far from a level where it could be said that they are having truly new ideas or coming up with new concepts,” he says. “On the other hand, I do think that one day they will get there. So these are baby steps—but we have to start somewhere.”

Steinberg agrees. “For now, they are just amazing tools,” he says. “And like all the best tools, they’re already enabling us to do some things we probably wouldn’t have done without them.”

Adam Kinzinger

Dear Commons Community,

Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger was interviewed over the weekend by New York Times Magazine columnist David Marchese.  He comments on the moral failure of Republicans, the Big Lie, and the January 6th insurrection. Below is the entire interview.  We surely could  use a few more Kinzingers in the Republican Party.

Tony

———————————————————————————————————————-

Since the horrifying events at the Capitol on Jan. 6, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois has been a consistent, if lonely, Republican voice speaking out against the big lie that the presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. After the sidelining of Representative Liz Cheney from leadership, Kinzinger, a 43-year-old Air Force veteran who was first elected to the House in 2010, was further entrenched as one of the most influential sitting Republican politicians willing to regularly and publicly denounce that dangerous fiction. Inhabiting that position is just about the last thing Kinzinger ever imagined his job would entail. “I made the decision early in my career that I would be willing to take a potentially career-ending vote,” says Kinzinger, one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for inciting the attempted insurrection. “But I thought that vote would be for something like a Social Security reform bill. I never thought it would be for defending democracy.”

How does it feel to have your job these days? I could imagine there’s an even greater sense of purpose. I could also imagine it being demoralizing. 

You pretty much nailed it. The job has changed because there is so much mistrust. Both within the party and between parties. But yes, there is a sense of aggressive purpose. On the one hand, it’s important for me to do what I’m doing and to speak out. On the other hand, you look around since the election and not many more people have joined me in speaking out about the big lie, and that is a little discouraging.

Have you had any meaningful communication with party leadership — Kevin McCarthy, Elise Stefanik, Steve Scalise — since Liz Cheney was voted out of her position?

 No. I haven’t had meaningful communication since Jan. 6. Kevin gave a great speech the week after that, and then he went to Mar-a-Lago and charged the paddles and brought Trump back to life.

That’s the moment when I realized, Oh, man, this is a problem. You come to understand that when the party and party leaders talk about unity, and in the same breath say that Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party, what they’re talking about isn’t unity. They’re talking about capitulation. When under the guise of unity, you act like Jan. 6 was just whatever you want to make of it, that is capitulating to a false narrative and to a dangerous attack on democracy. I will certainly talk to Kevin if he wants to. But I don’t see how we’re ever going to come eye-to-eye on this until there is a recognition that we can’t be the party of insurrection.

What do you make of all the vacillating McCarthy did in regards to both Trump and Cheney? He took some seemingly positive steps and then walked them back.

 It’s: “I want to be speaker, and whatever it is on a given day that I’ve got to do, I’ll do it.” Part of me doesn’t blame him, because he’s not going to be a senator, he’s not going to be governor. Being speaker is a huge deal. I think in his mind, once he’s speaker, he will be in a position to maybe lead the party differently. But the problem is that this is the moment where opinions of our base voters and our party are being baked in. This is the moment where history is being written as to whether something like Jan. 6 can happen again. I think he made the decision early on that he will take a fund-raising hit if he turns against Trump, that the Freedom Club will throw him under the bus. Had he done the Mitch McConnell — Who’s this guy Trump you speak of? — we probably as a party would be more moved on. But for him, it’s all about how you become speaker.

I saw an interview with Liz Cheney where she was asked about the recent G.O.P. moves to restrict voting. She said she didn’t see them as being in response to the big lie. Do you see a connection between stolen-election rhetoric and these new, more restrictive voting laws? 

I’m going to both-sides this real quick. The Democrats made a huge mistake by calling the Georgia law Jim Crow. It wasn’t Jim Crow stuff. That was overreach to say that. I want a tight voting system in which only eligible people should be able to vote. I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with voter-ID requirements. Anyway, let’s be honest about why all this is happening: It is a de facto acceptance of the big lie. If they were saying, “Look, we noticed that in mail-in voting, there was this challenge and that challenge,” that’d be one thing. But when they’re like, “We’re doing this because we don’t want another stolen election,” then that’s wrong. Anybody who is eligible to vote should be able to vote. It is also easier now for people to vote than it has ever been at any time in American history. You have mail-in voting, absentee voting, same-day voting, early voting. If you’re losing a race, it’s your fault. It’s not because all the people you don’t want to vote are voting.

You were in favor of establishing an independent commission to investigate the Capitol attack, which the Senate didn’t pass. One argument against it was that other investigations and subcommittees already looking into Jan. 6 made a new commission redundant. What other information were you hoping a commission might reveal? 

You have this [expletive] narrative that it wasn’t an armed insurrection. Well, it takes two seconds to realize that nobody was arrested for carrying weapons that day because you had no place to put them. You couldn’t read them Miranda rights, and you couldn’t cuff them — because you were fighting to survive if you were a law enforcement officer. So we don’t know how many guns were there. We do know the Oath Keepers were talking about storing guns in Virginia. We do know that of the more than 500 cases that the D.O.J. has since filed, some 50 of them involved weapons, including bear spray, tasers, etc. So that would have been definitively laid out. I also want to know what members of Congress knew and were involved prior to this happening.

Do you suspect that some members of Congress were aware of what was going to happen that day and supported it? 

I won’t name names, but yes, I do have that suspicion. I will say, if you just looked at Twitter — the whole reason I brought my gun and kept my staff home and told my wife to stay in the apartment was looking at Twitter. I saw the threats. When Lauren Boebert — I will call her out by name — tweeted “Today is 1776,” I don’t know what that meant other than this is the time for revolution. Maybe it was a dumb tweet that she didn’t mean. Fine. I’ll give her that credit for now. But if you have members of Congress who were involved in nurturing an insurrection, heck yeah, we need to know.

There’s a strain of contemporary Republican politicians — people like Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene — who seem more about performative politics than policy. Do you ever have policy discussions with those folks? Or discussions at all? 

No, not those. Marjorie Taylor Greene, I give her credit for probably achieving what she intended to achieve, which is: I don’t care about the damage I’m doing; I want to be famous and raise money. Congratulations. That’s not a serious legislator. She’s not on committees. She’s a freshman. No offense to freshmen, but I have no legislative need to have conversations with her. I also see what she’s doing as dangerous to the country, and so I have no need to be her friend. I’m not going to go sit down in a corner and convince her of my side. And if I do, then about 10 minutes later she’ll be taken over again by the desire to raise money. But I get along with the vast majority of the Republican conference. I think the vast majority agree with my position; they just aren’t speaking out. I don’t blame them all for that, but I wish more would. 

Why wouldn’t you blame them for such cynical behavior? 

When I say I don’t blame, I mean that I can understand. If you’re scared to tell the truth to people, I understand, but you need to find a different line of work. On something as existential as this, as threatening to the Constitution — my goodness. I understand that fear, but I do fully blame them. Because you signed up and ran for the job, and this job comes with tough times.

Do you believe there are ways in which Democrats could be more helpful in enabling more Republican lawmakers to feel they’re in a position to reject Trumpism? 

Yeah. Let’s say a Republican member of Congress decides to turn against Trump; they’re going to be kicked out of their tribe. I know that feeling. But let’s quit playing this game on the left of “not enough, too late.” Because that’s when people are like, “Fine, then I’m just going to pick my tribe and stick with them.” As you move forward, it’s about how we address this challenge today, not by looking back. In my case, I didn’t vote for Trump in ’16. I voted for him in ’20. I would take that back if I could, but I had no idea there was going to be an insurrection or a threat to the legitimacy of an election. So let’s support folks that are going to go out and fight that challenge and not sit here and keep looking back and blaming. Because guess what, Democrats. Republicans will be in control sometime, maybe soon, and you and I would both much prefer saner Republicans than conspiracy-driven ones.

What’s your sense of whether Trump was sui generis or a particularly bad symptom of trends that had already been going on in the Republican Party? 

The best analogy I can give: He’s like a gangrenous limb. But then that limb gets cut off, and now you don’t have a leg. He’s a symptom of what probably was about a quarter of the party that was always kind of conspiracy-driven but was generally suppressed by most normal Republicans. But everybody has fear in their heart, and when somebody, especially somebody in authority, speaks to the darkest parts of your heart, your fears, your racism — it gives you permission to let those things overtake you. That’s what happened with a lot of the rest of the party.

Do you have ideas for how, just in people’s day-to-day lives, we could be talking to one another about politics without descending into vitriol? Or put another way: How do we avoid getting into a situation like the one you wound up in, where members of your own family are sending you a letter accusing you of doing the devil’s work?

First off, it’s a big failure of the church. There are lots of great pastors, but there are a lot that have failed their flock and convinced them that prophecy said Trump would get back in office and all that kind of stuff. But here’s a start: If you’re on the right and don’t have a friend from the left, go make one. And if you’re on the left and don’t have a friend from the right, go make one. Talk about your fears. Everybody’s fear is the same: There will be no place for me in this country. If a liberal hears a conservative say, “No, we do want you here,” and a conservative hears a liberal say, “You may be a crazy conservative, but I still want you here” — that’s how you start to build trust.

What caused that failure on the part of some pastors? 

When you spend your day thinking about good versus evil and, to you, abortion is the ultimate evil and, in your mind, Donald Trump did good things on abortion, then nothing else matters. You can convince yourself that God has said to tell your flock that on Jan. 6, he’s going to be reinstated. But as I’ve gotten to study in the New Testament, I don’t think Jesus ever talked about the government. The only thing he ever said about that was to give Caesar that coin and give God his coin and live your life. His teachings weren’t about overthrowing the government.

Are you hopeful that, moving forward, more evangelical Christians will give as much credence, politically speaking, to teachings about grace and forgiveness as about literally demonizing political opponents? 

Look, there are a lot of great churches. But those that are saying Adam Kinzinger took pieces of silver from Nancy Pelosi because I voted to impeach Trump — Franklin Graham said that.  I look at it as two things. No. 1, I do sense a chilling out a little in the community, particularly from the younger generation. And second, the whole point of Christianity is that we are flawed people and despite those flaws are loved. But I’m going to tell you: If I were the devil, the best thing I could do is use the church to do exactly what’s being done with spreading all these conspiracy theories and stuff and try to discredit it that way.

Are politicians who knowingly perpetuate the big lie committing a sin? 

That’s between them and God, but I think God probably wouldn’t be cool with it.

Let’s pretend we live in a fantasy land where we could ignore all the things we just discussed. What are the other issues that you wish more people were paying attention to?

America’s role in the world. Everything we have that’s of benefit was a result of us understanding that defending freedom matters, defending democracy. It’s giving hope and opportunity outside our shores. That’s how you defeat terrorism, not through a gun — though there’s a place for that. Also, the rise in competition with China is a little frightening. And since we are in this political environment, I would say internal division is actually the thing that I fear the most right now. I jokingly say — but I’m not really joking — if China nuked California, a lot of Republicans would be like, “Good, we can win.” And if they nuked Texas, there might be a lot on the left saying, “Good, we can win.” I say that facetiously, but that’s how it feels at moments, and that’s a big concern.

Dear Commons Community,

My colleague from the University of Central Florida, Chuck Dziuban, and I have just put the  finishing touches on a chapter in our upcoming book, Blended Learning:  Research Perspectives Volume 3 (Routledge/Taylor & Francis) that will be available in late September.   The chapter speculates on the future of research in education technology as we move into what some of us are describing as the “blended university.”  Chuck wrote a section of this chapter that references an op-ed that appeared in 2019 in Nature entitled, Scientists rise up against statistical significance, written by Valentin Amrhein, Sander Greenland, Blake McShane and supported by more than 800 signatories.  The focus of the article is that the time has come for researchers to consider limiting the use of statistical significance as a standard for hypothesis testing.

The authors of the op-ed advocate:

“We are not calling for a ban on P values. Nor are we saying they cannot be used as a decision criterion in certain specialized applications (such as determining whether a manufacturing process meets some quality-control standard). And we are also not advocating for an anything-goes situation, in which weak evidence suddenly becomes credible. Rather, and in line with many others over the decades, we are calling for a stop to the use of P values in the conventional, dichotomous way — to decide whether a result refutes or supports a scientific hypothesis.”

The article goes on to make the case that statistical significance is overused to categorize complex social phenomena and reduces them to oversimplified yes/no interpretations.  The authors of this article conclude:

“The misuse of statistical significance has done much harm to the scientific community and those who rely on scientific advice. P values, intervals and other statistical measures all have their place, but it’s time for statistical significance to go.”

This op-ed is a provocative piece and should be of interest to researchers throughout the academy.

Tony

PS:  As an aside, Chuck has a PhD in statistics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and I have taught advanced quantitative analysis in a doctoral program at the City University of New York.

Dear Commons Community,

Cautiously, I think we can enjoy and celebrate our country’s birthday.  Surely we are in a much safer place than one year ago.  We are moving slowly passed the coronavirus pandemic although some parts of the country have to stay on alert especially where many people remain unvaccinated.  However, those of us who are vaccinated can venture out to be with family and friends and maybe watch a fireworks display.

Have a Happy and Safe 4th of July!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The economy delivered the strongest one-month employment gain since last summer.

Yesterday the  government reported that employers added 850,000 workers in June, the largest monthly gain since August.

Wages jumped for the third month in a row, a sign that employers are trying to attract applicants with higher pay and that workers are gaining bargaining power.

Rising Covid-19 vaccination rates and a growing appetite for travel, dining out, celebrations and entertainment gave a particular boost to leisure and hospitality businesses. The biggest chunk of June’s gains — 343,000 — could be found there.

“I think it’s a very solid and strong report,” said Kathy Bostjancic, chief U.S. financial economist for Oxford Economics.   As reported by The New York Times.

The economic healing from the pandemic is, however, far from finished. The unemployment rate rose slightly, to 5.9 percent, and the share of the working-age population active in the labor force was unchanged at 61.6 percent, showing that millions who dropped out have yet to return. An accelerated rate of early retirements means that some of those workers will never come back.

“Today there are more job openings than before the pandemic and fewer people in the labor force,” said Becky Frankiewicz, president of the staffing company ManpowerGroup North America. “The single defining challenge for employers is enticing American workers back to the work force.”

The report follows several promising economic developments this week. Consumer confidence, which surged in June, is at its highest point since the pandemic’s onset last year. Stocks closed out the first half of the year at record highs. And the Congressional Budget Office said Thursday that the economy was on track to recover all the jobs lost in the pandemic by the middle of next year.

But economists cautioned against trying to divine the complex currents crisscrossing the labor market from a single month’s data, particularly given how much the pandemic has disrupted employment patterns.

There are 6.8 million fewer jobs than there were before the pandemic. Last month’s gains fell below the one million mark that the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome H. Powell, has said he would like to see. The number of people unemployed for more than six months also rose. That group now accounts for roughly four out of every 10 jobless workers.

Black and Hispanic workers, who were disproportionately affected by the coronavirus and by job losses, are having trouble regaining their foothold. Black unemployment is 9.2 percent, compared with 5.2 percent for white workers. And participation in the labor force remains lower than it was before the pandemic among all major racial and ethnic groups.

“This is a trickier phase of the recovery,” said Sarah House, a senior economist with Wells Fargo. Last year, millions of workers were laid off only temporarily and went back to their jobs with little delay once reopening began.

Now, she said, employers and workers are “having to make new matches and new connections, and that just takes more time.”

Economists also point to a widespread reallocation of labor — like rounds of musical chairs on a mammoth scale — in which workers are re-evaluating their options. During the pandemic, many workers who had held restaurant and retail jobs may have taken positions in warehouses and factories.

In addition, the pandemic-driven demand for workers like couriers and grocery store workers is ebbing.

There was a hefty increase in education jobs, although seasonal adjustments could have inflated the estimated gains. Because of pandemic-related changes in school schedules and hiring this year, the rise last month may reflect smaller-than-expected layoffs rather than big gains. Over a longer period, employment in both public and private education remains significantly below its prepandemic level.

There was a hefty increase in education jobs, although seasonal adjustments could have inflated the estimated gains. Because of pandemic-related changes in school schedules and hiring this year, the rise last month may reflect smaller-than-expected layoffs rather than big gains. Over a longer period, employment in both public and private education remains significantly below its prepandemic level.

Retailers, day care providers and warehouses posted gains as well. Temporary jobs, which can be a bellwether for the broader labor market, also grew, partly reversing unexpected declines in the previous two months.

Overall payroll gains in April and May fell below expectations and fueled worries that the labor market’s recovery was disappointingly slow. Revisions for those months, included in the report on Friday, added only 15,000 to previously reported totals.

The stronger-than-expected increases for June, though, helped blunt some of the worries about the pace of hiring and gave President Biden the opportunity to claim credit for the progress. “Our economy is on the move,” he said in remarks from the White House.

The June figures are unlikely to allay the concerns of small-business owners and managers who complain about the difficulty finding workers. Nearly half report that they cannot fill openings, according to a recent survey by the National Federation of Independent Business.

The competition for workers has pushed up wages. Average hourly earnings climbed 3.6 percent in the year through June and 0.3 percent over the month. Low-wage workers seem to be the biggest beneficiaries of the bump in pay.

Very good economic news as America gets set to celebrate the 4th of July!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Speaking at the National Education Association, President Joe Biden said yesterday that the pandemic has given America’s parents the “ultimate education” on the challenges of the teaching profession. But even more, he said, the last year has proved that teachers across the U.S. deserve higher pay.

“You deserve a raise, not just praise,” Biden said in remarks at the NEA’s annual meeting in Washington. “Every parent in this country who spent the last year educating their children at home understands that you deserve a raise.”  As reported by the Associated Press.

Biden made the case while selling his proposed legislative priorities and budget for next year, which includes $20 billion in new funding that aims to spur states to increase teacher pay. A close ally of teachers unions, the president went on to describe educators as “the single most important component of America’s future.”

Biden and first lady Jill Biden gave remarks at a mostly empty Washington Convention Center while union members watched virtually. Biden is the first president in recent history to address the labor group, whose 3 million members include his wife, a longtime community college professor.

After a year in which some teachers unions were villainized for slowing the return to the classroom, the president and his wife had nothing but praise. Jill Biden called teachers heroes who adapted overnight to support students and families.

“You spoke out for safely reopening schools and more student support,” she said. “You carried families through the darkest year in modern history with patience, compassion and care. And you did it all while you worried about your own families’ health and education and safety.”

The president mostly used the speech to push his proposals. He made the case for the bipartisan infrastructure deal, including its plan to improve broadband access. He said the problem was laid bare last year as many children struggled to access remote classes offered by their schools.

He promoted his American Families Plan, which would offer two years of free community college to all Americans, along with two years of preschool for all 3- and 4-year-old children. And he pitched further investments for teachers, including a proposal to double the amount of a federal grant for aspiring teachers and to boost career training for current teachers.

Both of the nation’s major teachers unions endorsed Biden as a presidential candidate, and he has kept close ties with them since his election. While introducing Biden, NEA President Becky Pringle applauded Biden for nominating Miguel Cardona, a former teacher and principal, to lead the Education Department.

Some Republicans have accused Biden of being too close to the powerful unions, saying he should have taken stronger action to press teachers to return to in-person instruction. And some said his goal to have most elementary and middle schools reopened within 100 days — a goal he achieved in May — was not ambitious enough.

Biden addressed the union days before a July Fourth holiday that he said should be celebrated as a “summer of freedom” as the nation recovers from the coronavirus. He drew attention to a recent survey by the teachers union finding that 84% of its members had been vaccinated. But he also looked forward to challenges as schools work to recover from the pandemic.

“On Sunday we’ll celebrate our independence as a nation, as well as our progress against the virus,” he said. “In the days ahead, we have a chance to make another beginning, the beginning of a stronger, fairer education system. But it can’t be done without you.”

Well stated!

Tony