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The question, “If I were President I’d…” implies that if you swap out one leader, put in another, then all will be well with America — as though our leaders are the cause of all ailments.

That must be why we’ve created a tradition of rampant attacks on our politicians. Are they too conservative for you? Too liberal? Too religious? Too atheist? Too gay? Too anti-gay? Too rich? Too dumb? Too smart? Too ethnic? Too philanderous? Curious behavior, given that we elect 88% of Congress every two years.

A second tradition-in-progress is the expectation that everyone else in our culturally pluralistic land should hold exactly your own outlook, on all issues.

When you’re scientifically literate, the world looks different to you. It’s a particular way of questioning what you see and hear. When empowered by this state of mind, objective realities matter. These are the truths of the world that exist outside of whatever your belief system tells you.

One objective reality is that our government doesn’t work, not because we have dysfunctional politicians, but because we have dysfunctional voters. As a scientist and educator, my goal, then, is not to become President and lead a dysfunctional electorate, but to enlighten the electorate so they might choose the right leaders in the first place.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Astrophysicist, Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, and host of NOVAScienceNOW

When young, circus elephants are attached by heavy chains to large stakes driven deep into the ground. They pull and yank, but the chain is too strong, the stake too rooted. One day they give up, having learned that they cannot pull free, and from that day forward they can be "chained" with a slender rope. When this enormous animal feels any resistance, though it has the strength to pull the whole circus tent over, it stops trying. Because it believes it cannot.

"You will never amount to anything. You cannot sing. You are not smart enough. You are a loser. You should have more realistic goals. You are the reason our marriage broke up. Without you kids I would have had a chance. You are worthless." This opera is being sung in homes all over America right now, the stakes driven into the ground, the heavy chains attached, the children reaching the point they believe they cannot pull free. And at that point, they cannot.

Unless and until something changes their view, unless they grasp the striking fact that they are tied with a thread, that the chain is an illusion, that they were fooled, and ultimately, that whoever so fooled them was wrong about them and that they were wrong about themselves -- unless all this happens, these children are not likely to show society their positive attributes as adults.

The specter of fascist resurgence may not be far beneath the peaceful veneer of any nation. Even the most ostensibly free and open societies are not immune to fascism's lure -- including places like Palo Alto. What came to be known as the "Third Wave" began at Cubberly High School in Palo Alto as a game without any direct reference to Nazi Germany, says Ron Jones, who had just begun his first teaching job in the 1966-1967 academic year.

When a social studies student asked about the German public's responsibility for the rise of the Third Reich, Jones decided to try and simulate what happened in Germany by having his students "follow instructions" for a day. But one day turned into five, and what happened by the end of the school week spawned several documentaries, studies and related social experiments illuminating a dark side of human nature -- and a major weakness in public education.

Babies can understand many of the words that adults are saying. Scientists at the University of California show that babies process words they hear with the same brain structures as adults, and in the same amount of time. Moreover, the researchers found that babies were not merely processing the words as sounds, but were capable of grasping their meaning.

"Babies are using the same brain mechanisms as adults to access the meaning of words from what is thought to be a mental database of meanings, a database which is continually being updated right into adulthood," said the study's first author, Katherine Travis, of the Department of Neurosciences and the Multimodal Imaging Laboratory at UC San Diego.

Click here to download:

Illustrated-Guide-to-PhD.pdf (23 KB)

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Click here to download:

Illustrated-Guide-to-PhD.pdf (23 KB)

http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

We live at a time that might be appropriately called the age of the disappearing intellectual. In a media scape and public sphere that view criticism, dialog and thoughtfulness as a liability, anti-intellectuals abound, providing commentaries that are nativist, racist, reactionary and morally repugnant. But the premium put on ignorance and the disdain for critical intellectuals is not monopolized by the dominant media, it appears to have become one of the few criteria left for largely wealthy individuals to qualify for public office.

Underlying this drift toward the disappearing critical intellectual and the erasure of substantive critique is a regime of economic Darwinism in which a culture of ignorance serves to both depoliticize the larger public while simultaneously producing individual and collective subjects necessary and willing to participate in their own oppression. The cheerful robot is not simply an opprobrium for ignorance, it is a metaphor for the systemic construction in American society of a new mode of depoliticized and thoughtless form of agency.

Democracy places civic demands upon its citizens. It may be the case that everyday life is increasingly organized around market principles; but confusing a market-determined society with democracy hollows out the legacy of higher education, whose deepest roots are moral, not commercial. This is a particularly important insight in a society where the free circulation of ideas are not only being replaced by ideas managed by the dominant media, but where critical ideas are increasingly viewed or dismissed as banal, if not reactionary.

http://www.truth-out.org/the-disappearing-intellectual-age-economic-darwinism61287?print

The books in your house matter more to your children than your education or income. A study recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility found that just having books around the house (the more, the better) is correlated with how many years of schooling a child will complete.

The study found that growing up in a household with 500 or more books is "as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father." Children with 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of school than children in homes without any books.

There is something in possessing a book that's significantly different from borrowing it, especially for a child. You can write your name in it and keep it always. It transforms you into the kind of person who owns books, a member of the club, as well as part of a family that has them around the house. You're no longer just a visitor to the realm of the written word: You've got a passport.

http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2010/06/02/summer_book_giveaway/

A teacher at a high school in Queens caught 12-year-old Alexa Gonzalez doodling on her desk with a lime green magic marker. Instead of just erasing it, the school called police and the girl was walked out in handcuffs. A day later, the principal of a public school on Staten Island nearly suspended 9-year-old Patrick Timoney for playing with an action figure who had a 2-inch gun.

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/education/2010/02/06/2010-02-06_grade_for_common_sense_f_.html