I wear my skin only as thin as I have to, armor myself only as much as seems absolutely necessary. I try to live naked in the world, unashamed even under attack, unafraid even though I know how much there is to fear.

But for math the ACCUPLACER says “you cannot go to college until you learn multiplication tables” – period. It is no wonder that many 19-year olds walk out and say “f*ck that!” and give up on college. They found their way to college, found their way through getting financial aid, got registered, arranged transportation, found the cafeteria, and yet, they are told that “college is not for them” by a f*cking computer program. And a computer program for which there is no negotiation – the advisors will never override the program – the student simply needs to go home and spend the rest of their life as an unskilled worker working for low wages.

This seems so unfair. I wish pundits would get more pissed about this as “fair access” / “social justice”.

Me, too. It’s lonely out here. And following on the heels of this:

I suggest a simple fix in the short-term and then some deeper analysis to fine-tune things.

His argument is specific to local conditions, but worth reading nonetheless.

Bonus link: Bob Moses (who is a one of my personal heros) and The Algebra Project.

1. The language used around data portability is confused and incoherent. Look at phrases describing data portability: take back, pull out, portable, removable, get out. Do those mean data portability meaning the ability of the user to access and copy? Or data portability meaning the ability of the user to remove–delete or make inaccessible on the original system–and transfer to another service. Data portability is itself an ambiguous term. Which of those meanings does it have for you?
2. Privacy advocates tend to believe what users say rather than what they do. I heard people argue this point at great length, at one point interpreting an experiment by danah boyd comparing perceived versus actual privacy settings for users–users think they’re much more private than they really are, boyd says–as showing users care more about privacy because they say they care more. I’ll look up her paper.
3. Many privacy issues will resolve (and have resolved) as social and cultural change destigmatize nonstandard behavior. We’ve seen this happen drastically in the aftermath of the sixties. Gay people are out of the closet all over the country. No one looks askance at a child born outside of wedlock. Just think what other changes have come, and what behavior no longer needs to be kept private. Those social changes solved many privacy issues by eliminating them.

“Anyone can microtarget advertisements to individuals,” said Norman Davidson, chief privacy officer of FaceFacts, “but our new FaceFacts API (FFAPI) allows microtargeting of groups. Not just as individuals, but by inferring their social relations and serving ads targeting the needs uppermost on their minds at that time. Let’s show some examples.

“Here we see a couple shopping for an engagement ring,” Davidson said. “First, facial recognition lets us ID both of them. Now we drill down, and there are their names and ages–that’s his real age, by the way, not what’s on his driver’s license. Back up and over to the biometric readings. Note his pupil dilation. That’s good for an extra three to ten percent markup at the jeweler’s. We get a taste of that.

“Now, look closely at this one. You’ll see one gentleman in the foreground and another in the background. The man in the background has been arrested three times for assault and robbery. We’re going to suggest pepper spray to the man in the foreground and, as he passes and the man in the background approaches, a nice set of handcuffs.”

So it’s never a surprise when Friedman misses the implication of his own writing. Here he argues for his own exclusivist form of educational reform (via an exclusivist immigration policy, but let that pass for now), and comes up with these two remarkable bits:

My favorite chat, though, was with Amanda Alonzo, a 30-year-old biology teacher at Lynbrook High School in San Jose, Calif. She had taught two of the finalists. When I asked her the secret, she said it was the resources provided by her school, extremely “supportive parents” and a grant from Intel that let her spend part of each day inspiring and preparing students to enter this contest.

We’ll get back to that in a moment. Now, what lesson does Friedman draw from his night out?

Gotta say, it was the most inspiring evening I’ve had in D.C. in 20 years. It left me thinking, “If we can just get a few things right — immigration, education standards, bandwidth, fiscal policy — maybe we’ll be O.K.”

Now, did you hear that teacher say anything about education standards? No. She talked about “supportive parents” (which, for Friedman, ties into his exclusivist immigration stance), resources, and funding. Where in Friedman’s article is increasing the resources for the schools? Where does he suggest increasing their funding? Nowhere.

But that is exactly the part of schooling that can be controlled. The government can’t provide a kid with supportive parents. It can fund that kid’s schools.

Perhaps if Friedman could understand the vast sea of underserved students in underfunded schools throughout the nation as internal immigrants he’d consider giving them what they need.

Or not. After all, they’re poor.

ECONOMIC QUESTIONS SHOULD NEVER HAVE POLITICAL ANSWERS

which is itself a political answer to an economic question.

But where Bloch differed from other Marxists was in his insistence that it was not possible to simply dismiss religion as “the sigh of the oppressed creature in a hostile world” without recognising that the sigh contained the pre-illumination of a different and better world.

and

The resurrection of God presents a challenge to those such as Dawkins and Hitchens because they continue to perceive religion as an opiate which is handed out by states and their tame priests and mullahs in order to keep people quiet, rather than as a home-grown product consumed by people in order to dull the pain not only of global economic disadvantage but also of a deep, yet unidentifiable sense of loss.

Bloch’s Atheism in Christianity has been waiting its turn on my shelf for some time now. I think it just got bumped up in line.

(via CAUTE)