Class Issues
drorzel | November 6, 2007This is somewhat belated, as it's no longer active, but I had a bunch of other things to do last week, and never got around to posting about Blog My Wage:
HOPE asked Houston City Council member Peter Brown to spend a week living on the wage of a city worker. Council Member Brown took the challenge and lived -- and blogged -- on the wage of city employee Belinda Rodriguez, who has just $23.03 a day to buy food, gas and clothing for herself and her three children.
Better late than never, though. It's a brief but fascinating look at what being poor is like. I've been fortunate enough in my life…
drorzel | October 30, 2007In today's New York Times Natalie Angier has a nice story about increased interest in physics:
Many people wring their hands over the state of science education and point to the appalling performance of America's students in international science and math competitions. Yet some of the direst noises about our nation's scientific prospects may be premature. Far from rejecting challenging science courses, students seem to be embracing them.
This year, for example, the American Institute of Physics said that the percentage of high school students taking physics courses was at an all-time high,…
drorzel | October 15, 2007In the spirit of the newly clarified regulations governing the Academic Competitiveness Grant and National Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent (SMART) Grant Programs administered by the Department of Education, I am pleased to announce the Uncertain Principles Physics Scholarship Program. Under this program, I pledge to personally pay the full tuition for any student who is:
From a low-income family, or a historically disadvantaged group,
Enrolled as a full-time student at an accredited four-year college or university, and
Taking courses toward a degree in physics or related…
drorzel | June 26, 2007Yesterday's Danah Boyd article has produced a lot of responses around the Internet, with plenty of blogger types turning out to be social butterflies with accounts on both Facebook and MySpace. So much for social science, I guess.
There was an interesting collision of articles in my RSS feed this morning, though, with Travis Hime offering an aesthetic comparison:
The second point in favor of Facebook is the fact that it doesn't make my eyes bleed when I read it. The visual layout is clean and simple, in direct contrast to the garish hideousness of MySpace, even before users take the…
drorzel | June 25, 2007Via Bora, a very interesting essay by Danah Boyd about class divisions in social networking sites:
Over the last six months, i've noticed an increasing number of press articles about how high school teens are leaving MySpace for Facebook. That's only partially true. There is indeed a change taking place, but it's not a shift so much as a fragmentation. Until recently, American teenagers were flocking to MySpace. The picture is now being blurred. Some teens are flocking to MySpace. And some teens are flocking to Facebook. Which go where gets kinda sticky, because it seems to primarily have to…
drorzel | December 19, 2006Over at Inside Higher Ed, Edward Palm gets all Swiftian:
The Department of Defense finds itself desperately short of troops with which to sustain what promises to be a long and increasingly unpopular, inconclusive war in Iraq. The Department of Education finds itself suddenly alarmed by the relatively low percentage of Americans pursuing postsecondary education compared to the rate of participation in other countries. American colleges and universities find themselves bucking the current demographic trend such that some of them are lowering standards as they compete for fewer and fewer…
drorzel | December 3, 2006I don't normally do blog carnival announcements. I'm not really organized enough to remember the deadlines, and most of the carnivals out there don't interest me all that much.
The first edition of a new one has just been posted, though, and it's definitely worth publicizing: "Help Us Help Ourselves" (or "HUHO," if you like acronyms). Lauren explains some of the rationale:
I don't need an economist to tell me what it's like to be poor, I don't have to read about it in a book that is more suited for a grad student than for me in my free time between jobs. I'm not stupid, I don't live in a…
drorzel | December 1, 2006The Times last weekend had a big article on the "achievement gap" in education, where poor and minority students are found to lag behind upper- and middle-class white students in many subjects. The author looks at a number of innovative shools that are producing good results with students from the at-risk groups, and considers a number of factors that might cause the gap.
If you're a regular blog reader, you've probably already run across this, as it's been commented on locally by Jonah, Dave, and Jake, and on the wider Internet by a cast of thousands (see, for example, Matt Yglesias). It's…
drorzel | September 25, 2006We get the Sunday New York Times delivered every week (which accounts for the higher-than-usual number of stories from the Times that I link on Sundays...), and I read most of it, but I usually run out of steam before I get to the Magazine, unless the cover story really grabs me. This week was one of those times, with their profile of Michael Oher. I'm bothered by this particular story, in a way that's a little hard to explain, so I'm going to babble about it here a bit, and see where that leads.
On the surface, it's a really heartwarming story. Michael Oher is a poor black kid from the slums…
drorzel | July 23, 2006Today's New York Times has an article on the loss of the middle class in major cities:
The Brookings study, which defined moderate-income families as those with incomes between 80 and 120 percent of the median for each area, found that the percentage of middle-income neighborhoods in the 100 largest metropolitan areas had dropped to 41 percent from 58 percent between 1970 and 2000. Only 23 percent of central city neighborhoods in 12 large metropolitan areas were middle income, down from 45 percent in 1970.
Of course, my immediate reaction was that this is old news, coming as it does several…