Ameca can speak using responses generated by OpenAI’s GPT-3. Engineered Arts

Dear Commons Community,

Ameca, a humanoid robot says it can “simulate” dreams by conjuring up various scenarios, which helps it learn about the world.

Ameca was asked in a recent video (below) shared on YouTube by its creator, Engineered Arts, if it could dream. It responded, “Yeah last night I dreamt of dinosaurs fighting a space war on mars against aliens.”

It then added, “I’m kidding, I can’t dream like humans do but I can simulate it by running through scenarios in my head that help me learn about the world.”

In another video shared online, Ameca said the “saddest day” in its life was when it realized it would “never experience something like true love.”   As reported  by Business Insider.

Ameca’s responses to questions have been generated by OpenAI’s GPT-3, which it then performs. GPT-3 also relays the appropriate facial expressions to make when it delivers the answers.

“It’s a language model, it is not sentient, it has no long-term memory,” Engineered Arts CEO Will Jackson told Insider. “Next time will be the first time. Remember, this is a machine and it runs on code. It’s tempting to apply human attributes and capabilities, but they are not there. It’s an illusion, sometimes quite a powerful one.”

First revealed publicly in December 2021, the humanoid robot Ameca can also draw, do impressions from movies, and speak multiple languages. It also has human-like facial expressions.

Ameca’s latest AI-generated remarks come amid several recent developments in the space of the humanoid-robotics market. Agility Robotics is set to open what it describes as the first humanoid robot factory in Oregon later this year. The company said it would produce hundreds of its Digit robots in the first year and eventually scale to build more than 10,000 robots each year.

Digit was designed to operate in warehouse environments and it can walk, crouch, and perform work tasks. These include moving packages and unloading trailers.

It’s not the only humanoid robot that was created to be a member of the workforce. Rum producer Dictador made a humanoid robot called Mika its chief last year. Its tasks include helping to spot potential clients and selecting artists to design its bottles.

Last year, NASA signed a partnership with humanoid robot creator Apptronik. “These robots will first become tools for us here on Earth, and will ultimately help us move beyond and explore the stars,” the CEO and cofounder Jeff Cardenas said at the time.

One step closer to a robot world!

Tony

A member of Israel’s Communications Ministry during a private prayer service in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Oct. 3. Credit…Spokesman’s Office, Israeli Communications Ministry

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times columnist, Tom Friedman, has a piece today that must be read if you want to have a keen insight into the issues facing Israel as it starts its retaliation against Hamas’ atrocities over the weekend.  

The entire column is below.

Tony

——————————————————————

The New York Times

Opinion

Thomas L. Friedman

October 10, 2023

Israel Has Never Needed to Be Smarter Than in This Moment

Oct. 10, 2023

I have covered this conflict for almost 50 years, and I’ve seen Israelis and Palestinians do a lot of awful things to one another: Palestinian suicide bombers blowing up Israeli discos and buses; Israeli fighter jets hitting neighborhoods in Gaza that house Hamas fighters but also causing massive civilian casualties. But I’ve not seen something like what happened last weekend: individual Hamas fighters rounding up Israeli men, women and children, looking them in the eyes, gunning them down and, in one case, parading a naked woman around Gaza to shouts of “Allahu akbar.”

The last time I witnessed that level of face-to-face barbarism was the massacre of Palestinian men, women and children by Christian militiamen in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982, where the first victim I encountered was an older man with a white beard and a bullet hole in his temple.

While I have no illusions about Hamas’s long-established commitment to the destruction of the Jewish state, I am nonetheless asking myself today: Where did this ISIS-like impulse for mass murder as the primary goal come from? Not the seizing of territory, but plain murder? There is something new here that is important to understand.

Since I can’t interview the Hamas leadership, I’m drawing on my experience in the region, and here’s how I see it.

While this operation was surely planned by Hamas leaders months ago, I think its emotional origins can be explained in part by a photograph (above) that appeared in the Israeli press on Oct. 3. A few Israeli government ministers had gone to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for their first official visit ever, to attend international conferences in late September and early October, and it got a lot of coverage in the Israeli press.

But having lived in both Beirut and Jerusalem, I was struck most by that unusual photo — an image that I knew would trigger completely different emotional reactions in both worlds.

It was taken by the team of Israel’s communications minister, Shlomo Karhi, who was attending a U.N. postal conference in Riyadh, as they were conducting a prayer service in their hotel room for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. One of them took a picture of a colleague wearing a traditional Jewish prayer shawl and yarmulke while holding up a Torah scroll with the Riyadh skyline in the window beyond.

For Israeli Jews, that picture is a dream come true — the ultimate expression of finally being accepted in the Middle East, more than a century after the start of the Zionist movement to build a modern democratic state in the biblical homeland of the Jewish people. To be able to pray with a Torah in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam and the home of its two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, is a level of acceptance that touches the soul of every Israeli Jew.

But that same photo ignites a powerful and emotional rage in many Palestinians, particularly those affiliated with the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. For them, that picture is the full expression of the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s supreme goal: to prove to all naysayers, indeed to rub their noses in the fact, that he can make peace with all the Arab states — even Saudi Arabia — and not have to give the Palestinians a single inch.

As far as diplomacy goes, that has been Netanyahu’s life’s mission: to prove to everyone that Israel can have its cake — acceptance by all the surrounding Arab states — and eat the Palestinians’ territory, too.

I have no idea whether the Hamas leadership saw that particular picture, but they have been fully aware of the ongoing evolution it reflects. I believe one reason Hamas not only launched this assault now — but also seemingly ordered it to be as murderous as possible — was to trigger an Israeli overreaction, like an invasion of the Gaza Strip, that would lead to massive Palestinian civilian casualties and in that way force Saudi Arabia to back away from the U.S.-brokered deal now in discussion to promote normalization between Riyadh and the Jewish state. As well as to force the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, which were part of the Abraham Accords produced by the Trump administration, to take a step back from Israel.

The essence of Hamas’s message to Netanyahu and his far-right ruling coalition of Jewish supremacists and ultra-Orthodox is this: You will never be at home here — no matter how much of our land our gulf Arab brothers sell you. We will force you to lose your minds and do crazy things to Gaza that force the Arab states to shun you.

Pay attention: Hamas did not send operatives to the Israeli-occupied West Bank (and it has plenty there) to attack Jewish settlements. It focused its onslaught on Israeli villages and kibbutz farms that were not part of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

“These were the homes of the people of pre-1967 Israel, democratic Israel, liberal Israel — living in peaceful kibbutzim or going to a life-loving disco party,” the Israeli writer Ari Shavit remarked to me. For Hamas, “Israel’s mere existence is a provocation,” he said. In one kibbutz alone, Be’eri, at least 108 people, including children, were just gunned down.

So how can America best help Israel now, besides standing behind its right to protect itself, as President Biden so forcefully did in his speech today? I think the U.S. needs to do three things.

First, I hope the president is asking Israel to ask itself this question as it considers what to do next in Gaza: What do my worst enemies want me to do — and how can I do just the opposite?

What Israel’s worst enemies — Hamas and Iran — want is for Israel to invade Gaza and get enmeshed in a strategic overreach there that would make America’s entanglement in Falluja look like a children’s birthday party. We are talking house-to-house fighting that would undermine whatever sympathy Israel has garnered on the world stage, deflect world attention from the murderous regime in Tehran and force Israel to stretch its forces to permanently occupy Gaza and the West Bank.

Hamas and Iran absolutely do not want Israel to refrain from going into Gaza very deep or long.

Nor does Hamas want the U.S. and Israel to proceed instead as fast as possible with negotiations to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia as part of a deal that would also require Israel to make real concessions to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which has accepted Israel as part of the Oslo peace accords.

But for Israel to do what is most in its interests, not those of Hamas and Iran, will likely require some very tough love between Biden and Netanyahu. One must never forget that Netanyahu always seemed to prefer to deal with a Hamas that was unremittingly hostile to Israel than with its rival, the more moderate Palestinian Authority — which Netanyahu did everything he could to discredit, even though the Palestinian Authority has long worked closely with Israeli security services to keep the West Bank quiet, and Netanyahu knows it.

Netanyahu has never wanted the world to believe that there are “good Palestinians” ready to live side by side with Israel in peace and try to nurture them. For years now he’s always wanted to tell U.S. presidents: What do you want from me? I have no one to talk to on the Palestinian side.

That’s how Israel reached a stage where the increasingly costly — morally and financially — Israeli occupation of the West Bank has not even been an issue in the last five Israeli elections.

Or as Chuck Freilich, a former deputy Israeli national security adviser, wrote in an essay in Haaretz on Sunday: “For a decade and a half Prime Minister Netanyahu has sought to institutionalize the divide between the West Bank and Gaza, undermine the Palestinian Authority, the P.A., and conduct de facto cooperation with Hamas, all designed to demonstrate the absence of a Palestinian partner and to ensure that there could be no peace process that might have required territorial compromise in the West Bank.”

Lastly, I hope Biden is telling Netanyahu that America will do everything it can to help democratic Israel defend itself from the theocratic fascists of Hamas — and their soul brothers of Hezbollah in Lebanon, should they enter the fight.

But Netanyahu’s side of the bargain is that he has to reconnect himself with liberal democratic Israel, so the world and the region sees this not as a religious war but as a war between the frontline of democracy and the frontline of theocracy. That means Netanyahu has to change his cabinet, expel the religious zealots and create a national unity government with Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid.

Unfortunately, Netanyahu is still prioritizing his coalition of zealots, whom he needs to protect him from his corruption trial and to complete his judicial coup that would neuter the Supreme Court of Israel. That’s really messed up.

And it is a very important reason Israel was caught off guard in the first place. Netanyahu was so wedded to this personal agenda that he was ready to divide Israeli society like never before — and splinter his own army and air force in the process — to get control of the courts.

I promise you that if and when there’s an inquiry into how the Israeli Army could have so missed this Hamas buildup, investigators will discover that the Israeli Army leadership had to spend so much time just keeping its air force pilots and reserve officers from boycotting their service to protest Netanyahu’s judicial coup — not to mention the time, attention and resources they had to devote to preventing extremist settlers and religious zealots from doing crazy things in Jerusalem and the West Bank — that they took their eyes off the ball.

America cannot protect Israel in the long run from the very real threats it faces unless Israel has a government that reflects the best, not the worst, of its society, and unless that government is ready to try to forge compromises with the best, not the worst, of Palestinian society.

Dear Commons Community,

More than 50 years after astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission, the U.S. space agency is planning another lunar visit — only this time, it will reportedly be a permanent one.

According to The New York Times, NASA believes that by 2040, Americans will be living in houses on the moon. While some in the scientific community are skeptical that the feat is overly ambitious, NASA scientists insist the 2040 goal for lunar living is entirely attainable.

“We’re at a pivotal moment, and in some ways it feels like a dream sequence,” Niki Werkheiser, NASA’s director of technology maturation, told the Times. “In other ways, it feels like it was inevitable that we would get here.”

Werkheiser said NASA’s increasing openness to collaborate with academics and other leading experts in the field puts the goal that much closer in reach.

“We’ve got all the right people together at the right time with a common goal, which is why I think we’ll get there,” she explained. “Everybody is so ready to take this step together, so if we get our capabilities developed, there’s no reason it’s not possible.”

NASA has named its mission to return to the moon Artemis.

To make it happen, NASA will send a 3-D printer to the moon, to build housing structures using dust, rocks and mineral fragments found on the moon’s cratered surface to make a concrete-like material, according to CBS News.

Interestingly, while the noxious dust has long been considered a significant hindrance to life on the moon, NASA thinks it could also be the solution. According to the Times, 3-D printing the houses from the moon’s own surface materials would allow the dwellings to withstand the moon’s extreme temperature swings and toxic combination of micrometeorites and radiation.\

For the plan to materialize, NASA has laid out a schedule of key benchmarks for its mission, which has been named Artemis for the twin sister of Apollo. In November 2024, four human crew members will be rocketed up to orbit the moon. One year following that trip, NASA plans to land humans on the moon for a second time in history.

For the construction side of the endeavor, NASA has partnered with ICON, a Texas-based construction technology company. After an initial round of funding from NASA in 2020, ICON announced in 2022 that it had secured an additional $60 million for a construction system that could be used in outer space.

Architects from the Bjarke Ingels Group and SEArch+ have also been tapped to dream up designs and concepts for the lunar homes.

Another significant challenge for the project is making sure all of the necessary construction materials and tools are in place on the moon, per CBS News, particularly as rockets need to travel light.

Patrick Suermann, interim dean of the School of Architecture at Texas A&M University, which is working closely with NASA to develop a robot-operated space construction system, said transporting supplies from earth to the moon is “unsustainable.”

“And there’s no Home Depot up there. So you either have to know how to use what’s up there or send everything you need,” he told the Times.

Before anything is shipped to the moon, however, NASA will rigorously test the tools and materials down here on earth, including the 3-D printer and the lunar concrete.

“The first thing that needs to happen is a proof of concept. Can we actually manipulate the soil on the lunar surface into a construction material?” Jennifer Edmunson, lead geologist for the project at Marshall Space Flight Center, told the Times.

“We need to start this development now if we’re going to realize habitats on the moon by the 2040 time frame,” she added.

As for what will go inside the lunar dwellings, NASA is working on that, too. The agency is partnering with several private companies and universities to develop prototypes for space furniture and interior design elements, including fixtures and tiles.

Beam me up, Scotty!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The long-awaited Triangle Fire Memorial to the victims and legacy of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire will be dedicated today at 11:30 am at the site of the historic fire in New York City. Rising nine stories high, the Memorial is being installed on the very building that housed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place in Greenwich Village.

The Triangle Fire Memorial tells the story of the fire in the languages spoken by the victims: English, Yiddish and Italian. It will also be one of the only memorials in America dedicated to workers.

A giant steel ribbon with the names of the 146 workers who died in the disaster, predominantly women and girls, has been installed running horizontally from one corner of the building. Underneath it, a reflective panel shows the stenciled names as well as quotes from people who were there, describing the mayhem.\

In the coming weeks, a vertical steel column will be added to the corner to span almost the entire height of the building, a reference to how high up the victims were stuck.

It’s the story of desperate immigrant women, mostly Jewish and Italian, who were trapped by a door that was locked because there were no workplace safety rules that said it couldn’t be. Some jumped to their deaths from the windows to avoid the flames.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“What they will see is a memorial that tries to build into the object itself the history of the fire, a history of working women, a history of Italians and Jews, a history of tragedy, but then also a history of change,” said Mary Anne Trasciatti, a Hofstra University professor and president of the coalition.

The victims were close to the end of their working day on March 25, 1911, when a fire started on the eighth floor of the clothing factory, which took up the top floors of a building now owned by New York University.

Frantic workers tried to get out as the flames spread to the ninth and 10th floors, some scrambling to get into an elevator, others heading for the roof. But others who tried to get past a door to escape found it locked, trapping them inside. At a trial of the factory’s owners afterward, some said the door had been kept locked on purpose, over theft concerns.

Firefighters responded quickly. But their ladders were too short to get to the topmost floors.

Horrified witnesses in the crowd watched as workers leapt from the windows. Among those bystanders was the late Frances Perkins, already an anti-poverty advocate trying to change workplace conditions, and who became even more dedicated after what she saw that day.

“It really started her in her push for ‘we have to treat workers better,’” said Ileen DeVault, professor of labor history at Cornell University.

Some of her words recollecting the day are part of the memorial, running along the reflective panel. “Every one of them was killed, everybody who jumped was killed.”

Perkins would be part of a state commission that put a series of safety rules in place in New York that were emulated elsewhere, and later became an integral part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s cabinet as his secretary of labor. She pushed for policies like minimum wage, workers compensation, and old age pensions.

One of the names on the memorial will be that of Rosie Weiner, who died in the blaze, but whose sister and fellow factory worker, Katie Weiner, made it out alive.

Later, Weiner would recount how she grabbed an elevator cable to make her escape. Today, her great-niece, Suzanne Pred Bass, is on the board of the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition.

Growing up, Bass knew her great-aunt had lived through the fire, but it wasn’t until years later that she heard about Rosie.

Bass’ mother remembered accompanying her mother as a small child to the pier where the victims’ bodies were taken after the fire.

“She never forgot that, she was 4 years old and I can only imagine how how scary and awful,” Bass said.

Memorial designers Richard Joon Yoo and Uri Wegman wanted to find a way for modern-day people to connect with the fire and its legacy, they said. The public was invited a few years ago to contribute pieces of fabric that were joined together in a 300-foot (91-meter) “Collective Ribbon.” That ribbon’s design was then etched onto the memorial steel that rises up toward the top of the building.

It was important to make that connection between past and present because issues of labor, workplace protections, and how workers are treated are still far from settled in the country and the world, Yoo and Wegman said.

Long overdue!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Eleven years after an annular solar eclipse crossed the western United States on May 20, 2012, another annular eclipse will race across the USA from Oregon at 9:13 a.m. PDT to Texas at 12:03 p.m. CDT on Saturday, October 14, 2023. The path of the annular eclipse next visits Central America and South America, and ends shortly after at sunset in the Atlantic Ocean.

Information on this event  can be found at a website that has complete information, graphics, and a video on its timing and trajectory.  

Enjoy!

Tony

Claudia Goldin

Dear Commons Community,

The 2023 Nobel economics prize was awarded yesterday to Claudia Goldin, a professor at Harvard University, for advancing the understanding of women’s labor market outcomes.

Goldin is the third woman to win the prize, which was announced by Hans Ellegren, secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in Stockholm.

“Understanding women’s role in the labor market is important for society. Thanks to Claudia Goldin’s groundbreaking research, we now know much more about the underlying factors and which barriers may need to be addressed in the future,” said Jakob Svensson, chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences.

Goldin, 77, “was surprised and very, very glad,” Ellegren said of Goldin’s reaction to receiving the award.

“Claudia Golden’s discoveries have vast societal implications,” said Randi Hjalmarsson, a member of the prize committee. “By finally understanding the problem and calling it by the right name, we will be able to pave a better out forward.”

Her book, The Race between Education and Technology written with Lawrence Katz was a must read for anyone interested in the topic when it was published in 2008. It occupies a prominent place on my bookshelf.

Congratulations!

Tony

Katalin Karikó

Dear Commons Community,

Last week, Katalin Karikó was announced the winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, alongside her colleague Drew Weissman. The two had worked together at the University of Pennsylvania on messenger-RNA research that paved the way for Covid-19 vaccines. But Karikó was not always embraced by her scientific community, and in the days since the prize was announced, national news headlines and social-media commentaries have seized on her story. After years of unsuccessful attempts to obtain grant funding, Penn demoted her and cut her pay in the late 1990s. Years later, she was told she was “not of faculty quality” and kicked out of her lab space. And a paper she and Weissman published in 2005 was initially desk-rejected by Nature, which considered it an “incremental contribution.” (The paper appeared in Immunity instead.)

It was that paper that, 15 years later, became a blueprint for the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines that saved millions of lives around the world. Karikó and Weissman’s work “fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system” and enabled vaccines for the virus to be created and distributed inside of a year, the Nobel Prize committee wrote.

Karikó, who is originally from Hungary, has described the challenges she faced as a scientist in media interviews through the years and in her memoir, Breaking Through: My Life in Science, being released next week. But her story drew exponentially more attention after last week’s announcement. It especially struck a nerve with scientists and academics on social media, who seized upon Karikó’s recounting, in an interview on the Nobel website, of being “kicked out from Penn” and “forced to retire.” It felt like fitting karmic payback that the ambitious scientist who’d never managed to land a high-profile grant and was shut out by a high-profile academic institution was now a Nobel laureate.

Read more of her story at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

As soon as the federal pandemic relief started arriving at America’s schools, so did the relentless calls.

Tech companies by the dozens wanted a chance to prove their software was what schools needed. Best of all, they often added, it wouldn’t take a dime from district budgets: Schools could use their new federal money.

They did, and at a tremendous scale.

An Associated Press analysis of public records found many of the largest school systems spent tens of millions of dollars in pandemic money on software and services from tech companies, including licenses for apps, games and tutoring websites.

Schools, however, have little or no evidence the programs helped students. Some of the new software was rarely used.

The full scope of spending is unknown because the aid came with few reporting requirements. Congress gave schools a record $190 billion but didn’t require them to publicly report individual purchases.

The AP asked the nation’s 30 largest school districts for contracts funded by federal pandemic aid. About half provided records illuminating an array of software and technology, collectively called “edtech.” Others didn’t respond or demanded fees for producing the records totaling thousands of dollars.

Clark County schools in the Las Vegas area, for one, signed contracts worth at least $70 million over two years with 12 education technology consultants and companies. They include Achieve3000 (for a suite of learning apps), Age of Learning (for math and reading acceleration), Paper (for virtual tutoring) and Renaissance Learning (for learning apps Freckle and MyON).

The pandemic sparked a boom for tech companies as schools went online. Revenue skyrocketed and investors poured billions into startups.

At the same time, new marketing technology made it easier for companies to get school officials’ attention, said Chris Ryan, who left a career in edtech to help districts use technology effectively. Equipped with automated sales tools, marketers bombarded teachers and school leaders with calls, emails and targeted ads.

“It’s probably predatory, but at the same time, schools were looking for solutions, so the doors were open,” Ryan said.

At the school offices in rural Nekoosa, Wisconsin, the calls and emails made their way to business manager Lynn Knight.

“I understand that they have a job to do, but when money is available, it’s like a vampire smelling blood,” she said. “It’s unbelievable how many calls we got.”

The spending fed an industry in which research and evidence are scarce.

“That money went to a wide variety of products and services, but it was not distributed on the basis of merit or equity or evidence,” said Bart Epstein, founder and former CEO of EdTech Evidence Exchange, a nonprofit that helps schools make the most of their technology. “It was distributed almost entirely on the strength of marketing, branding and relationships.”

Many schools bought software to communicate with parents and teach students remotely. But some of the biggest contracts went to companies that promised to help kids catch up on learning.

Clark County schools spent more than $7 million on Achieve3000 apps. Some were widely used, such as literacy app Smarty Ants for young students.

Others were not. Less than half of elementary school students used Freckle, a math app that cost the district $2 million. When they did use it, sessions averaged less than five minutes.

The district declined an interview request.

Some Las Vegas parents say software shouldn’t be a priority in a district with issues including aging buildings and more than 1,100 teacher vacancies.

“What’s the point of having all this software in place when you don’t even have a teacher to teach the class? It doesn’t make sense,” said Lorena Rojas, who has two teens in the district.

Education technology accounts for a relatively small piece of pandemic spending. Tech contracts released by Clark County amount to about 6% of its $1.2 billion in federal relief money. But nearly all schools spent some money on technology.

As districts spend the last of their pandemic aid, there is no consensus on how well the investments paid off.

The company Edmentum says Clark County students who used one of its programs did better on standardized tests. But a study of a ThinkCERCA literacy program found it had no impact on scores.

A team of international researchers reported in September that edtech has generally failed to live up to its potential. With little regulation, companies have few incentives to prove their products work, according to the researchers at Harvard and universities in Norway and Germany.

The federal government has done little to intervene.

The Education Department urges schools to use technology with a proven track record and offers a rating system to assess a product’s evidence. The lowest tier is a relatively easy target: Companies must “demonstrate a rationale” for the product, with plans to study its effectiveness. Yet studies find the vast majority of popular products fail to hit even that mark.

“There has never been anything close to a proper accounting of what has been spent on or how it was deployed,” Epstein said. “You can call it mismanagement, you can call it a lack of oversight, you can call it a crisis. There was a lot of it.”

Epstein has called for more federal regulation.

“Some companies sold hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars in products that they could see were barely ever being used,” the nonprofit CEO said.

In Louisville, Kentucky, education technology contracts totaled more than $30 million. The Jefferson County district signed contracts with online tutoring companies Paper and FEV for a combined $7.7 million. Millions more went to companies such as Edmentum and ThinkCERCA for software to supplement classroom teaching.

Jefferson County declined an interview request, saying most of the contracts were approved by officials who have left. Asked for records evaluating the use and effectiveness of the purchases, the district said it had none.

The district said it is using this year as “a fresh start.”

“We will be compiling baseline data and the new academic leadership team will be analyzing it to determine the impact these programs are having on student learning,” a district statement said.

In Maryland’s Prince George’s County, curriculum director Kia McDaniel spent hours sifting through pitches. Her team tried to focus on software backed by independent research, but for many products that doesn’t exist.

Often, she said, “we really did depend on the results that the sales team or the research team said that the product could deliver.”

Students made gains using some apps, but others didn’t catch on. The district paid $1.4 million for learning support from IXL Learning, but few students used it. Another contract for online tutoring also failed to generate student interest.

The district plans to pull back contracts that didn’t work and expand those that did.

Even before the pandemic, there was evidence that schools struggled to manage technology. A 2019 study by education technology company Glimpse K 12 found, on average, schools let 67% of their educational software licenses go unused.

Ryan, the former edtech marketer, said that at the end of the day, no technology can guarantee results.

“It’s like the Wild West, figuring this out,” he said. “And if you take a huge step back, what really works is direct instruction with a kid.”

Those of us who have been promoting the need for research on education technology know this story well.  While many ed tech companies promote their software honestly, others do not.  In 1994 and again in 2012, I wrote about the “predatory” nature of some in the ed tech industry.  Unfortunately, it continues.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

As of this morning, there were more than 1,100 casualties as a result of the Hamas’ attack and Israel’s retaliation –  700+ in Israel, 400+ in Gaza and 123,000 Gazans displaced.

Hamas’ attack on Israel comes at a time when the country faces historic domestic political division, growing violence in the West Bank and high-stakes negotiations among Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

After its members killed 200 Israelis and kidnapped dozens more, Hamas claimed it was taking revenge for a series of recent actions by Israel at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque and in the West Bank. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government has been conducting an escalating crackdown against what it says are rising Palestinian terror attacks for more than a year.

Former U.S. intelligence and military officers said they believed the timing of the Hamas attack was primarily aimed at disrupting negotiations between Israel and Saudi Arabia as Riyadh appeared on the verge of a historic step to normalize relations with Israel. As reported by NBC News and Reuters.

Iran is seeking “to put pressure on their implacable foe Israel” with this attack, said retired Navy Adm. James Stavridis, a former commander of NATO.

In an interview with NBC News‘ Lester Holt last month, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said, “We are against any bilateral relations between our regional countries and the Zionist regime,” a reference to Israel. Raisi added, “We believe that the Zionist regime is intending to normalize this bilateral relations with the regional countries to create security for itself in the region.”

In recent weeks, diplomats from the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia have told NBC News that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Joe Biden have all expressed support for an agreement that would result in Saudi Arabia recognizing Israel diplomatically.

Diplomats say that if Saudi Arabia agreed to recognize Israel it would lead other Arab states to do so. A series of such agreement would end decades of hostility between Israel and its neighbors dating back to 1948.

All three sides, though, have complex conditions for such an agreement. Breaking with past Saudi rulers, bin Salman has signaled that he is willing to recognize Israel, given the vast economic benefits it would provide to Saudi Arabia. Before the Hamas attack, there were reports that Saudi Arabia had told the White House it would agree to increase its oil production to help cement a deal, something the Biden White House has sought for two years.

But the Saudis want the U.S. to help them develop a civilian nuclear program, something opposed by hard-right members of Netanyahu’s coalition and by members of the U.S. Senate, which would have to approve any such deal.

Separately, Biden told Netanyahu when they met in New York last month that any agreement would have to include land for the Palestinians so that they could establish a viable state, something Netanyahu’s settlement extensions in the West Bank would prevent. Last week, a bipartisan group of Senators raised the same concerns in a letter to the White House.

The West Bank, meanwhile, remains the scene of rising attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians. Israeli settlers have violently attacked Palestinians at least 700 times in 2023 — the highest number on record, according to the U.N.’s humanitarian agency (OCHA).

Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir praised the expansion of the settlements, calling for more. Netanyahu’s far-right government responded with plans to build 5,000 new Israeli settlements. Israeli settlements built on Palestinian land are illegal according to international law, and have been condemned by the U.S. government.

As the talks with the Saudis, Israelis and Americans progressed, Palestinian disappointment rose. “There is a palpable frustration among the Palestinians at seeing the Saudis and Israelis moving closer,” said Stavridis.

Netanyahu has also stoked domestic division among Israelis as he has pushed a judicial reform that would weaken Israel’s Supreme Court, a move that sparked mass protest across the country.

The first portion of reform passed in March after The Knesset, the Israeli parliament, enacted a law that protected a prime minister from being removed from power. It stipulated that the prime minister could be ousted only for health or mental health reasons, and only the leader and their office could make that decision.

The judicial reform came after Netanyahu  forced multiple elections in recent years as the prime minister struggled to remain in power. Critics denounced the court reforms by noting that it would weaken the democratic checks of power within Israel, some even noting that it was tailor-made to keep Netanyahu in leadership after he faced allegations of corruption.

A second part of the reforms passed in July would prevent the court from declaring government decisions unreasonable. A poll from Israel’s Channel 13 that month found 56% of Israelis feared the judicial reform would spark a civil war.

Starvidis, the former admiral, said that Hamas and its patrons viewed the deep political divisions in Israel as a potential opportunity to strike. There is a sense among Israel’s adversaries that it “has never been more divided, never been weaker, never been more torn apart, he said.

Nadav Eyal, as Israeli author and senior columnist with the Yediot Ahronot newspaper, predicted in an interview that the attack would transform the country further. “This event was a national trauma. It’s like 9/11 but frankly bigger,” he said. “We have dozens of people who are abducted — civilians.”

Eyal said that, no matter the country’s divisions, Israel would respond militarily. “This really forces Israel to react with the utmost force,” he added. “There is a consensus with the Israeli public and the political sphere that this changes everything in the region and for Israelis.”

Every indication is that this will be a long, bloody conflict!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Here is reporting from The Hill on the mess the Republicans are in trying to elect a new speaker.

Already in uncharted territory, House Republicans are navigating even more surprise waves as they race to select a replacement for former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) next week.

The normally internal, relationship-based process is getting a swath of outside attention — a reality that is not sitting well with many in the House GOP.

Plans for a televised Fox News forum with the candidates were quickly scrapped after backlash.

And former President Trump has weighed in with a preferred pick, after showing openness to being a Speaker candidate himself and sources saying he considered showing up at the Capitol for the Republican nominating contest.

It has the potential to be the most competitive race for a party’s top spot that the House seen in decades — a dynamic that members must grapple with on a severely condensed timeline, with a looming shutdown deadline exerting pressure to quickly elect a Speaker that can restore normal business of the House.

One of the few other times the House faced a mid-session Speaker change was in 2015, when around a month passed between Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) announcing his resignation and the House GOP’s internal nominating contest. Now, members have just more than a week between McCarthy’s ouster and their internal nominating contest set for Wednesday.

“What we’re seeing is a very accelerated process,” said Matthew Green, professor of politics at Catholic University and coauthor of “Choosing the Leader: Leadership Elections in the U.S. House of Representatives.”

“It’s like, super speed,” he continued.

Two powerhouses in the GOP conference — House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) — are jockeying for the top spot in the chamber, reaching out to different coalitions within the party to secure support for the gavel. Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), the chairman of the Republican Study Committee, is also mulling a run for Speaker.

All three contenders bring a different flair to the table.

Scalise is a leadership veteran, having served in the highest echelons of the House since 2014; Jordan is the founding chairman of the influential conservative House Freedom Caucus and holds the gavel for the powerful House Judiciary Committee; and Hern, a newcomer relative to the other two, leads the largest GOP group in the chamber.

“I will say I’m impressed with the number of endorsements these candidates have gotten so quickly,” Green said of Scalise and Jordan. “I call them both serious competitors. The problem, though, is that if you have leadership ambitions, you really kind of have to start like years in advance.”

The competitiveness of — and widespread interest in — the race was on full display Thursday morning, when news broke that Fox News would hold a televised forum with the three contenders. Such an event would be highly unusual, given that leadership elections are normally hashed out hidden from the public eye.

But those plans quickly fell apart as some lawmakers spoke out against the idea. Rep. Carlos A. Gimenez (R-Fla.) called the event “unproductive.”

A Jordan spokesman said that he would prefer the candidates speak to the GOP conference before the televised event, CNN first reported.

Hern then wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that he “will not be participating in the televised debate.” Scalise followed suit, and plans for the forum were scrapped within hours of them having been unveiled.

But the idea of the unconventional event — and its subsequent domino-effect fall — epitomizes the atypical nature of this month’s Speaker’s race, which has gained outsized attention on the national stage after McCarthy’s stunning, and unprecedented, fall from the top spot.

The peculiar essence of the race does not end there.

Trump’s shadow has added to the chaos surrounding the Speaker saga, with the former president being endorsed for the job, floating a potential visit to the Capitol, offering himself up to be the interim GOP leader, and, eventually, throwing his support behind Jordan — all within a matter of days.

It is very unusual for a former president to get involved in a closely contested Speaker contest.

“Usually they don’t want to get involved, because heaven forbid they pick a losing candidate — now they’ve just burned a bridge with the winner,” Green said. But, he added: “You know, Donald Trump does what he does.”

Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) announced Tuesday night — shortly after McCarthy’s ouster — that he would nominate Trump to be the next Speaker, with Reps. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) also backing the former president.

House rules do not require the Speaker to be a member of the chamber, but the possibility of a Trump Speakership was largely panned as unrealistic and far-fetched — especially as the former president, who is facing four indictments and a civil lawsuit in New York, barrels ahead with a comeback bid for the White House.

Despite those ongoing engagements, news broke Thursday afternoon that Trump was considering making a trip to the Capitol on Tuesday, when the GOP conference is scheduled to huddle for a candidate forum amid the Speaker race. Later in the day, Trump offered himself up for the top House job, albeit on a short-term basis.

“They have asked me if I would take it for a short period of time for the party, until they come to a conclusion — I’m not doing it because I want to — I will do it if necessary, should they not be able to make their decision,” Trump told Fox News Digital.

But just hours later, Trump changed course, throwing his support behind Jordan for Speaker and urging his allies on Capitol Hill to do the same. The announcement came shortly after Nehls beat him to the announcement, writing on X that he had talked to Trump, and that the former president was endorsing Jordan.

“He will be a GREAT Speaker of the House, & has my Complete & Total Endorsement!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Conservative outside groups, including Heritage Action and the Club for Growth, have also released public statements about what they are looking for in a Speaker.

“Even in high-profile races like this, outsiders don’t usually have as much influence as they’d like to think they do,” Green said. “Lawmakers are thinking about their own careers, and the person who can help them the most is usually the leader who’s being elected.”

“Now, having said that — for very, very close races, sometimes it can make a difference,” Green said.

Tony