09/02/2015 archive

Both my boys went back to school this week, and both were met with assignments with some demands for information about their summer. For the first time ever, they don’t want to share that. Their grandmother died. No, it wasn’t the only thing that happened, but it dominated. The aftermath made for a slow, muted summer, and also made for the fist time I didn’t have one picture to send back to school of Dan doing any summer activity at all. My bad.

Dan will say it, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t want to write about it, maybe he would, but I’m not going to make him. He spent his free time this summer mostly on art and the computer. I have to say that I wasn’t happy with everything he drew, some of it was dark, but he was processing the first death he’s ever experienced, and we talked, he’s okay. He does miss my mom. I hope they just let him say his summer was fine and let it go.

For Baboo it’s worse, I think. He’s expected to write something for several different classes, and he’s trying to do that without mentioning the big event. It’s easy enough to write about the books he’s read for summer, he always reads more than enough and there’s plenty to recap, but his summer? Oh, there’s slim pickings there. Stoogefest, visiting Aunt Sissy, and….? Not a helluva lot more.

We didn’t spend our entire summer draped in crepe, wailing and crying, we just took things slow. We did stand out front and watch the fireworks, but like everything all summer, it was the first time without Mom, and we all felt it. I have a hard time writing about it, why would I want them to have to do it?

Aside from that, some things are theirs. Some things are personal. Their grief, their feelings, and this year–how they spent their summer.

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Katrina vanden Huevel: Memo to Fed: Don’t Raise Interest Rates

The Fed needs to stop worrying about stemming inflation that doesn’t exist and keep the focus on the jobs we need.

 The Federal Reserve governors really want to raise interest rates. For months, they’ve signaled that they are likely to start gradually raising them this fall. Interest rates have been near zero since the “Great Recession.” Unemployment is down. The economy is setting new records for consecutive months of growth. Raising rates would declare that we’re back to normal.

There’s only one problem: The economy may be recovering, as the White House and many economists tell us, but most Americans aren’t. If the Fed raises interest rates, it will slow an economy that is already growing too slowly and cost jobs in an economy that already produces too few jobs. That will, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz warned in a news conference outside of the Fed’s annual retreat in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, add to our already extreme inequality.

 So why raise rates? The Federal Reserve has a mandate-the so-called dual mandate-to sustain maximum employment at stable prices. The Fed has made 2 percent inflation its arbitrary target (a little inflation is needed to guard against slipping into deflation-declining prices that lead the way to recession or worse). But every measure of inflation is below that target. So why even think about raising rates?

Hannah McKinnon: Mixed Messages: President Obama’s Alaskan Climate Trip

On Monday, President Obama and Secretary Kerry are going to Alaska. Their main goal (as we talked about here) is to see the front lines of climate change first hand.

Yet at the same time, in the same region, Royal Dutch Shell is now powering ahead with its newly approved summer 2015 drilling season, thanks to the Obama Administration’s greenlighting of their last remaining permit application about two weeks ago.

The tragic irony should be lost on no one. What message is the President sending? Is the melting Arctic an alarm bell for urgent climate action or a welcome mat for Big Oil?

Anyone who suggests it can be both can’t avoid being labelled a hypocrite.

You are responsible for this material.  It will be on the test.

Told you.

The new SATs everyone’s kids will be preparing for next spring

Rachel Nuwer, Scientific American

Tuesday, Sep 1, 2015 04:30 AM EST

“Fortune favors the prepared mind,” as Louis Pasteur once said. So as school revs up this month, so do SAT prep classes. Students might be surprised, however, at the amount of time dedicated to visual literacy skills. The increased focus on graphics is designed to prepare an estimated 1.6 million college-bound pupils for the first redesign of the standardized college admissions test in more than a decade. Along with other updates, test takers of the March 2016 exam will encounter graphics not only in the math section as in past years but also in the reading and writing and language portions. Students will be asked to interpret information presented in tables, charts and graphs and to correct text so it accurately describes data found in accompanying figures.

Mounting evidence indicates that such literacy is a key skill for success in college, careers and daily life in general. In an increasingly data-rich world, graphics now pop up routinely in formats ranging from political campaign literature to household bills. “Being a literate consumer of that information is valuable regardless of your career,” says Jim Patterson, an executive director at the College Board, the nonprofit corporation that owns and publishes the SAT.

Education experts agree that students in many developed nations, including the U.S., lack experience with visual data. “Apart from basic x- and y- axis graphs, educators [around the world] don’t sufficiently teach students how to represent information graphically,” says Emmanuel Manalo, a professor of education psychology at Kyoto University in Japan. The SAT’s new focus most likely will nudge educators to shift their lesson plans accordingly. Students, in other words, won’t be the only ones with bubble charts or scatter plots on the mind this fall-teachers will, too.

The intellectual work required to interpret a graph taxes our brain more than the effort involved in reading the same information presented as text, according to a new study by Manalo and two researchers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.

So why do we do info-graphics again?  Oh, that’s right.  It makes it easier to lie and obfuscate.

As TPP Grinds To A Halt, Asian Countries Start Focusing On Rival Trade Agreement RCE

by Glyn Moody, Tech Dirt

Tue, Sep 1st 2015 3:28am

Techdirt has written dozens of stories about the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP). That’s largely because it seemed to be coming to a conclusion, after many years of negotiations, and so it was important to capture the last-minute twists and turns — and the dirty deals — as they happened. But as we reported a few weeks ago, that final breakthrough and completion never happened. Instead, we had the “Maui meltdown”, when a whole bunch of old and new problems raised their heads, with the result that TPP may have missed a key deadline that means it won’t be happening soon, if ever. That may have seemed an extravagant claim, but it is a sentiment that is gradually beginning to spread among commentators in Asia.

…

Techdirt introduced the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) back in June, pointing out that it could end up even worse than TPP. But while TPP is at a standstill, RCEP seems to be moving forwards

…

The biggest difference between TPP and RCEP is that China is part of the latter, but not of the former, while for the US, it’s the other way around. China therefore has a big incentive to make RCEP happen quickly, and seems to be grasping the opportunity opened up by TPP’s latest problems.

…

RCEP has a big advantage in that it is not trying to define an ambitious set of new trading rules, as TPP is, but instead is merely attempting to harmonize existing trade agreements among RCEP’s 16 nations, which also include another major economy absent from TPP — India.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History

Japan signs surrender, officially ending World War II; Union forces occupy Atlanta during the Civil War; A great fire ravages medieval London; Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh dies; Wreckage of the Titanic found.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom.

Bob Dylan

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History

Japan signs surrender, officially ending World War II; Union forces occupy Atlanta during the Civil War; A great fire ravages medieval London; Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh dies; Wreckage of the Titanic found.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom.

Bob Dylan

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History

Japan signs surrender, officially ending World War II; Union forces occupy Atlanta during the Civil War; A great fire ravages medieval London; Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh dies; Wreckage of the Titanic found.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom.

Bob Dylan

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour a cup of your favorite morning beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

September 2 is the 245th day of the year (246th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 120 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1969, America’s first automatic teller machine (ATM) makes its public debut, dispensing cash to customers at Chemical Bank in Rockville Center, New York. ATMs went on to revolutionize the banking industry, eliminating the need to visit a bank to conduct basic financial transactions. By the 1980s, these money machines had become widely popular and handled many of the functions previously performed by human tellers, such as check deposits and money transfers between accounts. Today, ATMs are as indispensable to most people as cell phones and e-mail.

Several inventors worked on early versions of a cash-dispensing machine, but Don Wetzel, an executive at Docutel, a Dallas company that developed automated baggage-handling equipment, is generally credited as coming up with the idea for the modern ATM. Wetzel reportedly conceived of the concept while waiting on line at a bank. The ATM that debuted in New York in 1969 was only able to give out cash, but in 1971, an ATM that could handle multiple functions, including providing customers’ account balances, was introduced.

ATMs eventually expanded beyond the confines of banks and today can be found everywhere from gas stations to convenience stores to cruise ships. There is even an ATM at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Non-banks lease the machines (so-called “off premise” ATMs) or own them outright.