News – Page 163 – Quixotic Pedagogue

The Fight Against Online Bullying

The Atlantic’s Emily Bazelon took a look into the effort by organizations as diverse as Facebook and the hacker collective Anonymous to battle online harassment and bullying, an experience that over 800,000 people under the age of eighteen experienced last year.

One of the things she learned was that Facebook spends as little time as possible reviewing the complaints:

To demonstrate how the harassment team members do their jobs, Willner introduced me to an affable young guy named Nick Sullivan, who had on his desk a sword-carrying Grim Reaper figurine. Sullivan opened the program that he uses for sorting and resolving reports, which is known as the Common Review Tool (a precursor to the tool had a better name: the Wall of Shame).

Sullivan cycled through the complaints with striking speed, deciding with very little deliberation which posts and pictures came down, which stayed up, and what other action, if any, to take. I asked him whether he would ever spend, say, 10 minutes on a particularly vexing report, and Willner raised his eyebrows. “We optimize for half a second,” he said. “Your average decision time is a second or two, so 30 seconds would be a really long time.”

February 27, 2013/by dpogreba

Are Charter Schools Gaming the System to Get the Best Students?

Daily Wisdom

A Reuters investigation of charter schools finds that many use elaborate strategies to ensure that they get the best students in their schools:

Thousands of charter schools don’t provide subsidized lunches, putting them out of reach for families in poverty. Hundreds mandate that parents spend hours doing “volunteer” work for the school or risk losing their child’s seat. In one extreme example the Cambridge Lakes Charter School in Pingree Grove, Illinois, mandates that each student’s family invest in the company that built the school – a practice the state said it would investigate after inquiries from Reuters.

And from New Hampshire to California, charter schools large and small, honored and obscure, have developed complex application processes that can make it tough for students who struggle with disability, limited English skills, academic deficits or chaotic family lives to even get into the lottery.

The impact may be profound for public schools in the same area:

Charter-school advocates say the shift in resources is warranted because charters often excel where traditional schools have failed, posting stellar test scores even in impoverished neighborhoods with little history of academic success.

But a growing number of education experts – including some staunch fans of charter schools – see that narrative as flawed. They point to application barriers at some charter schools and high expulsion rates at others as evidence that the charter sector as a whole may be skimming the most motivated, disciplined students and leaving the hardest-to-reach behind.

That, in turn, can drive down test scores and enrollment at traditional public schools. In Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Chicago and other cities, officials have cited just such trends as justification for closing scores of neighborhood schools to make way for still more charters.

February 26, 2013/by dpogreba

Dolphins Identify Each Other by Name

Daily Wisdom

NPR is reporting that a recent study shows that dolphins have the ability to call each other by name, making them the first animals researchers have proven do so:

Science continues to show that what we think makes us human may not be so unique: New research finds that bottlenose dolphins call the “names of loved ones when they become separated,” Discovery News reports.

Wired reports that researchers analyzed recordings made by the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program, which captured pairs of dolphins and held them in separate nets.

“During the captures, the dolphins can’t see each other, but can hear each other and continue to communicate,” Wired writes. “In their analysis, King and Janik showed that some of the communications are copies of captured compatriots’ signature whistles — and, crucially, that the dolphins most likely to make these were mothers and calves or closely allied males.”

February 25, 2013/by dpogreba

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