Links - 8th November 2019 (2)

Charter schools have positive effects on traditional public schools located near them, at least in New York City - "Charter opponents have long claimed that charter schools siphon resources away from the traditional public school system. The ideological motivation for this line of reasoning is clear when touted by teachers unions and their friends: i.e., calling charters parasitic unless they conform to traditional school practices, including mandatory unionization, makes that bias obvious... Recent research from Temple University professor Sarah Cordes sheds needed light on this question. Cordes examined the impact of charter schools in close proximity to, or even co-located with, traditional public schools (TPS) in New York City over a fourteen-year time span... Exposure to charter schools significantly increased student performance at nearby traditional public schools. The effects increased with proximity to the closest charter school; students at traditional publics schools co-located with charters experienced the greatest positive impacts. Small impacts were observed for schools close to charters but began dissipating when a half mile or more away. Students at traditional public schools also experienced reductions in grade retention when co-located with or close to a charter, as well as small positive effects on their attendance. As for the impact on student subgroups, the most positive impacts of charter exposure (for students in nearby traditional public schools) occurred for poor students and those eligible for special education services. There was no significant impact for public schools that co-located with another public school: In other words, it was the shared space with a charter that made the difference. The study also examined possible school-level reasons for positive charter effects, using parent and teacher survey data. Several plausible explanations emerged. Traditional public schools co-located or nearest to charters experienced improved student and parent engagement, higher expectations for students, and improved perceptions of safety and school cleanliness—any or all of which could have translated to improved student performance. It’s also possible that those public schools’ increased per-pupil expenditures (PPE) of two to nine percent—resulting from student attrition (more dollars spread over fewer students)—helped have a positive impact... the study confirms that charter schools can have a positive competitive effect on nearby public schools. This confirms previous research showing that not only charters, but other forms of choice like vouchers, can impact traditional public schools for the good"

Does reading fiction make us better people? - "Dutch researchers arranged for students to read either newspaper articles about riots in Greece and liberation day in the Netherlands or the first chapter from Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago’s novel Blindness. In this story, a man is waiting in his car at traffic lights when he suddenly goes blind. His passengers bring him home and a passer-by promises to drive his car home for him, but instead he steals it. When students read the story, not only did their empathy levels rise immediately afterwards, but provided they had felt emotionally transported by the story, a week later they scored even higher on empathy than they did right after reading. Of course, you could argue that fiction isn’t alone in this. We can empathise with people we see in news stories too, and hopefully we often do. But fiction has at least three advantages. We have access to the character’s interior world in a way we normally do not with journalism, and we are more likely to willingly suspend disbelief without questioning the veracity of what people are saying. Finally, novels allow us to do something that is hard to do in our own lives, which is to view a character’s life over many years."

Google’s struggle with bipartisan employee dissent is a problem that’s only getting worse - Vox - "a former Google engineer, Kevin Cernekee, accused Google of firing him for expressing his conservative political beliefs at work and claimed the company fosters a culture of politically biased bullying... Googlers used to be able to ask management unplanned, ad-hoc questions at these meetings, but now they have to submit questions in advance that can get voted up or down.Only the questions that receive the most upvotes get asked, and some employees have told Recode they think this voting system is unfair because controversial questions are easily downvoted. One employee said that the top 10 questions are usually about noncontroversial product or business initiatives, and that more critical questions often don’t make it to the top despite being important concerns.
Questions a small minority think are critical get downvoted. Evidence a minority are trying to impose themselves on everyone else

Google Puts Curbs on Political Debate by Employees - WSJ - "Google issued new guidelines limiting employee discussion of politics and other topics not related to work, in a major shift for a company that has long prided itself on open debate and a freewheeling internal culture. The Alphabet Inc. unit said in a public memo on Friday that staffers should avoid spending time hotly debating matters unrelated to their jobs and refrain from name-calling, among other discouraged behavior. Google also said it would appoint employees to moderate the company’s famously raucous internal message boards, rather than allowing volunteers to do so—in effect acknowledging that the discussions have spiraled out of control... The company’s internal message boards host thousands of discussion groups, on topics ranging from social issues to sports, and employees can spend hours a day sparring in them. In recent years, though, the level of debate at times has driven a wedge between staffers with opposing views as well as between management and an increasingly activist workforce... Chief Legal Officer Kent Walker has threatened to fire workers poking around inside the company for information on contentious topics like Google’s cloud-computing relationship with the U.S. Defense Department, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month.In its memo on Friday, the company reiterated that confidential information discussed internally should be kept private... many employees were drawn to the company in part by its policies, including commitments to “do no evil” and “bring your whole self to work.” ... “While sharing information and ideas with colleagues helps build community, disrupting the workday to have a raging debate over politics or the latest news story does not,” the guidelines say. “Our primary responsibility is to do the work we’ve each been hired to do, not to spend working time on debates about non-work topics.”... The updated guidelines are Google’s latest attempt to dial back the company’s freewheeling discourse. Last year it warned employees that it would discipline anyone who discriminates or attacks colleagues or engages in discussions that are “disruptive to a productive work environment.” In those guidelines, Google also advised employees to avoid name-calling, including making blanket statements about groups or categories of people... “Cultures of political correctness ironically can become unsafe places to work,” he said. “People need to be able to discuss what’s going on in the world. Communities are where you do that and the community where people spend most of their waking time is at the office.”"
This is probably too little, too late to control the SJWs

Why public sector outsourcing is less efficient than Soviet central planning - "The logic of outsourcing is that market-based production is better than public production because the governance of private organisations is more transparent, flexible, efficiency focused and disciplined by owners. But this idea is problematic on two fronts. In the first place the presumption of market superiority is an artefact of public choice theory; it’s not rooted in historical assessment of which regime, public or private, has better produced public goods. In the second, this logic is dependent on ‘first-best-world’ economic theorising: it assumes an efficient market for simple goods, or for goods that can be somehow simplified. Hence for outsourcing to work those archetypal conditions have to exist. While they typically can exist for simple goods and services (the NHS doesn’t grow its own food), the outsourcing markets for complex goods and services characteristically fulfil none of the necessary conditions... What contract theory tells us is that the more complex the service or good, the longer the duration of the contract and the greater the contingencies or uncertainties that the supplier might face, the less the outsourced tasks are amenable to codification and hence to robust contracts that can adequately protect the buyer.Such ‘incomplete’ contracts create unanticipated and destined to be high costs for the management and supervision of the ‘non–contractible’ elements relating to service delivery. Frequent contractual failures require repeated (and given a poor bargaining position) expensive renegotiation. Complexity, shifting needs and interdependency are conditions endemic within public service goods and services. The economics of Soviet central planning tells us that the resulting asymmetries in information and leverage between state and producer are just the start of bargaining games that the state cannot win. Given public funding the state remains both the only partner in the market relationship however numerous the ‘end users’ or rhetorical ‘customers’ may be, but also the continuous bearer of the contractual obligations and financial, legal and political liabilities and costs of a failed supplier: a position unique to the state. The following market failures are rife in public service markets: high barriers to entry leave public service markets dominated by monopoly or oligopoly firms which render the provider relatively immune from the self–correcting mechanisms of market competition; uncertainty and complexities in contractual requirements create huge information asymmetries between buyer and seller; relationship–specific investments encourage the producer to exploit the loss of bargaining power entailed by sunk costs (i.e. ‘hold-up’ problems); and finally, negative spillovers, that is to say, damaging external effects not reflected in the original price of the transaction are particularly problematic given systemic interdependencies, for example between NHS and social care systems... As Accounting Professor Adam Lever and Gil Plimmer’s coverage at the Financial Times have shown, large public service industry (PSI) firms are a particularly striking example of ‘financialised’ corporations: they are not the productive innovators of the neoclassical imaginary... Given the objective difficulty of establishing accurate pricing under incomplete contracting, only the most reckless firms with least regard for service quality and those most determined to deploy later strategies of ‘hold up’ will rationally underbid for contracts with no guarantee they can stay within the initial margins. The collapsed Carillion was just such a repeat ‘winner’"
So much for "the private sector is always superior"

'The Guarded Gate' Review: Elites and Their Eugenics Projects - "The early 20th Century saw many popular movements—some misguided—that claimed to be improving society. In the U.S. there was—in addition to eugenics—Prohibition, the conservation movement, the women’s rights movement, the early civil rights movement, the birth control movement and other projects created by “do-gooders” and reformers. Although it may seem incredible to modern readers, many of these do-gooders were enthusiastic proponents of eugenics. We have to let go of the notion that only stone-faced Nazis and their sympathizers were serious about eugenics in the 1920s and 1930s. With a few exceptions (like Harry H. Laughlin, whose proposed eugenic sterilization laws were a model for Nazi Germany and who received an honorary degree from a German university in 1936 for his work on behalf of the “science of racial cleansing”—see pages 370-71 of Okrent), most American proponents of eugenics were patriotic and public-spirited citizens like Theodore Roosevelt—which is not particularly reassuring. What, if anything, sets eugenics apart from other coercive social projects like Prohibition in the early 20th Century? The answer is that eugenics was unique among those popular movements because support for it was bi-partisan and nearly-unanimous in American society as a whole—it was mostly treated as obviously beneficial and not a hot-button topic... Immigration restriction united Democrats and Republicans in Congress after WWI—the restrictive Johnson-Reed (Immigration) Act of 1924 passed almost unanimously in the House and the Senate and was signed by President Calvin Coolidge (R). Persons as different as eccentric sexologist Henry Havelock Ellis and liberal Baptist pastor Harry Emerson Fosdick were anti-immigration and/or pro-eugenics. Coercive eugenic sterilization was approved by a nearly unanimous (8-1) Supreme Court in the case of Buck vs. Bell in 1927. The eugenics movement brought together elite academics like geneticists, sociologists, biostatisticians and psychologists, plus the occasional animal or plant breeder, inventor, entrepreneur and philanthropist. As Okrent says (p.172), “The eugenics bandwagon had room for everybody.”... It’s tempting to view the KKK as low-brow racism and eugenics as high-brow racism. But the KKK’s obsession with American blacks wasn’t shared by most eugenicists, and immigration from Africa wasn’t an issue in most public discussion... [Carl] Brigham could further argue that European immigration had accounted for two million newcomers who were ‘below the average negro,’ thus managing in one sentence to deprecate millions of Americans, both newly-arrived and long established”... it was class prejudice—rather than racism in the conventional sense—that explains much of the motivation of the eugenics project in the U.S... less than a century ago, some of the most important and prestigious scientific institutions in the U.S.—the National Research Council, the U.S. Public Health Service and the Carnegie Institute of Washington—were deeply involved in supporting eugenic research"

What's the difference between AdBlock and Adblock Plus (ABP)? : AdBlock Help - "Despite having similar names, AdBlock (https://getadblock.com) and Adblock Plus (ABP) (https://adblockplus.org) are unrelated products developed by different companies. They work the same way, with some differences... Long, long ago, somebody (not us) created a Firefox add-on called Adblock. Later on, another team created a different Firefox add-on and adopted the name Adblock Plus (ABP).When Google Chrome came along, the Adblock Plus team wasn't interested in supporting the new browser. Michael Gundlach created an ad blocking extension he called, naturally enough, AdBlock for Chrome. It went on to become the most popular Chrome extension. Then the Adblock Plus team decided to support Chrome after all. Over time, both AdBlock and ABP added support for additional browsers and platforms. And that's why the two most popular ad blockers have such similar names. Aren't you glad you asked?"

San Francisco supervisors: NRA is a 'domestic terrorist organization' - "The San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a resolution Tuesday that declares the National Rifle Association a "domestic terrorist organization."... The designation of domestic terrorist organization is justified because the NRA's opposition to gun control is "standing in the way of saving lives”... The resolution passed unanimously"
Apparently a terrorist is anyone you don't like whom you accuse of harming people

REMINDER: Lib blue-checks have no issue using the #DeportMelania hashtag - "Since we’re being told that the “Send her back!” chant directed at Rep. Ilhan Omar at last night’s MAGA rally was beyond the pale, we do wonder where all the outrage is when lib blue-checks call on Melania Trump to be deported"