Tuesday, December 3, 2013
CONTACT ME AT: manessmorrison2@yahoo.com


News Clips For The Day


US teens lag in global education rankings as Asian countries rise to the top – NBC
By Daniel Arkin, Staff Writer, NBC News

Students in the United States made scant headway on recent global achievement exams and slipped deeper in the international rankings amid fast-growing competition abroad, according to test results released Tuesday.

American teens scored below the international average in math and roughly average in science and reading, compared against dozens of other countries that participated in the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which was administered last fall.

Students in Shanghai — China's largest city with upwards of 20 million people — ranked best in the world, according to the test results. Students in East Asian countries and provinces came out on top, nabbing seven of the top 10 places across all three subjects.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan characterized the flat scores as a "picture of educational stagnation. We must invest in early education, raise academic standards, make college affordable, and do more to recruit and retain top-notch educators," Duncan said.

Roughly half a million students in 65 nations and educational systems representing 80 percent of the global economy took part in the 2012 edition of PISA, which is coordinated by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD.

The numbers are even more sobering when compared among only the 34 OECD countries. The United States ranked 26th in math — trailing nations such as the Slovakia, Portugal and Russia. 

The exam, which has been administered every three years to 15-year-olds, is designed to gauge how students use the material they have learned inside and outside the classroom to solve problems.

U.S. scores on the PISA have stayed relatively flat since testing began in 2000. And meanwhile, students in countries like Ireland and Poland have demonstrated marked improvement — even surpassing U.S. students, according to the results.
"It's hard to get excited about standing still while others around you are improving, so I don't want to be too positive," Jack Buckley, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, told the Associated Press.

Duncan said the results were at "odds with our aspiration to have the best-educated, most competitive work force in the world." The scores are likely to reopen a long-simmering political debate about the state of education in America as economically ascendant nations like China eclipse U.S. students' performance.

American students historically have ranked low on international assessments, owing to a range of social and economic factors — from skyrocketing rates of child poverty to sheer population diversity. Nearly 6,1000 American students participated in this round of testing.

"Socio-economic background has a significant impact on student performance in the United States, with some 15% of the variation in student performance explained by this, similar to the OECD average," according to a PISA summary of U.S. performance. "Although this impact has weakened over time, disadvantaged students show less engagement, drive, motivation and self-beliefs."

Shanghai students also dominated the PISA exam in 2009, according to the AP.
Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the wire service that the educational system in that city is not equitable — and the students tested are progeny of the elite because they are the only ones permitted to attend municipal schools due to restrictions that, among other things, prohibit many migrant children.
"The Shanghai scores frankly to me are difficult to interpret," Loveless told the wire service. "They are almost meaningless."

Buckley told the AP that U.S. officials have not encountered any evidence of a "biased sample" of students administered the exam in Shanghai. He said if the whole country was included, it is unclear what the results would show.

The test is premised on a 1,000-point scale. Here's a sampling of the leading findings:
— In math, the U.S. average score was 481. Average scores ranged from 368 in Peru to 613 in Shanghai. The global average was 494.
— In science, the U.S. average score was 497. Average scores ranged from 373 in Peru to 580 in Shanghai. The global average was 501.
— In reading, the U.S. average score was 498. Average scores ranged from 384 in Peru to 570 in Shanghai. The global average was 496.

Students from all states were tested. For the first time, three states — Massachusetts, Connecticut and Florida — elected to boost participation in PISA to get more state-specific data.

Average scores from Massachusetts rose above the international average in all three subject areas. Connecticut students scored on average near the global average in math and higher than the global average in science and reading. Florida students on average scored below the global average in math and science and near the global average in reading, according to the AP.



One thing stands out from this news report about Shanghai: “that city is not equitable — and the students tested are progeny of the elite because they are the only ones permitted to attend municipal schools due to restrictions that, among other things, prohibit many migrant children.” In the US no child is prohibited from attending school in the public schools unless he becomes a discipline problem, even the children of illegal aliens. The private schools here are of two or three types: they aim at educating students to attend college and score high on the College Board Exam; they are schools based on discipline for students who have proven to be violent; or they are church schools which are set up to teach religiously-oriented lessons to a greater degree than the public schools do. The religious schools may be academically above average if they engineer their courses to be more difficult, and the college prep schools are all above average. These schools are expensive, so that mostly the elite go there, though they may have scholarship programs.

The public schools should not fall behind to the degree that they do, however, but they tend to teach at a less advanced level as the private schools -- they could improve this by upgrading their curriculum. Individual students who need tutoring could be given the extra attention, rather than making the lessons easier in general.

Some people have said that teachers have lower expectations for black and Hispanic students, thus failing to challenge their minds to better performance. Studying harder will improve grades – most students don't perform at the actual top of their intelligence, so teachers should work harder at helping and encouraging those student who under-perform. American parents, also, don't push their children to make good grades as much as Asian parents do. This international test is an achievement test, not an IQ test.

It is also clear that poverty, whatever the race of the student, tends to lower achievement, and the US has never successfully confronted poverty in this country. Many of the people who identify themselves as being conservatives do not believe in anti-poverty programs and early education, and put up a strong political opposition to enabling government to improve these things.

In general, efforts at changing the nature of the populace in the US meet with resistance from the citizenry as well as from the politicians. People tend to think such things are invasions of their privacy and rights. Parents need to be better educated themselves, before it can be expected that their children will be. People who don't see themselves as having a problem seldom can be made to improve themselves.

The US is not, in general, a “high-brow” nation. We are still largely blue-collar, and many students matriculating at colleges across the nation are the very first people from their family to attend college and that isn't just among blacks. We can only continue to try, and upgrade the public school programs to prepare students better for advanced education. It's embarrassing to score low on such a test, because we are in the habit as a nation of considering ourselves to be superior to other nations, since World War II when we became a much more powerful country. Clearly, we need to work harder at our “superiority” and not be too proud to improve.




Two thousand mice dropped on Guam by parachute — to kill snakes
By M. Alex Johnson, Staff Writer, NBC News

They floated down from the sky Sunday — 2,000 mice, wafting on tiny cardboard parachutes over Andersen Air Force Base in the U.S. territory of Guam.
But the rodent commandos didn't know they were on a mission: to help eradicate the brown tree snake, an invasive species that has caused millions of dollars in wildlife and commercial losses since it arrived a few decades ago.

That's because they were dead. And pumped full of painkillers.
The unlikely invasion was the fourth and biggest rodent air assault so far, part of an $8 million U.S. program approved in February to eradicate the snakes and save the exotic native birds that are their snack food.

"Every time there is a technique that is tested and shows promise, we jump on that bandwagon and promote it and help out and facilitate its implementation," Tino Aguon, acting chief of the U.S. Agriculture Department's wildlife resources office for Guam
told NBC station KUAM of Hagatna.

It's not just birds the government is trying to protect. It's also money.
Andersen, like other large industrial complexes on the Western Pacific island, is regularly bedeviled by power failures caused when the snakes wriggle their way into electric substations — an average of 80 a year, costing as much as $4 million in annual repair costs and lost productivity, the Interior Department estimated in 2005.
The U.S. has tried lots of ways to eliminate the snakes, which it says likely arrived in an inadequately inspected cargo shipment sometime in the 1950s.

Snake traps, snake-sniffing dogs and snake-hunting inspectors have all helped control the population, but the snakes have proved especially hardy and now infest the entire island. Guam is home to an estimated 2 million of the reptiles, which in some areas reach a density of 13,000 per square mile — more concentrated than even in the Amazonian rainforests, the government says.

But brown tree snakes have an Achilles' heel: Tylenol.
For some reason, the snakes are almost uniquely sensitive to acetaminophen, the active ingredient in the ubiquitous over-the-counter painkiller. If you can get a tree snake to eat just 80 milligrams, you can kill it. That's only about one-sixth of a standard pill — pigs, dogs and other similarly sized animals would have to eat about 500 of them to get into any trouble.

Brown tree snakes also love mice. It's easy to bait mice with acetaminophen, but how do you then deliver the mice to the snakes? "The process is quite simple," Dan Vice, the Agriculture Department's assistant supervisory wildlife biologist for Guam, told KUAM. 

Helicopters make low-altitude flights over the base's forested areas, dropping their furry bundles on a timed sequence. Each mouse is laced with the deadly microdose of acetaminophen and strung up to two pieces of cardboard and green tissue paper.
"The cardboard is heavier than the tissue paper and opens up in an inverted horseshoe," Vice said. "It then floats down and ultimately hangs up in the forest canopy. Once it's hung in the forest canopy, snakes have an opportunity to consume the bait."

Wildlife workers do have a way to chart how well the mice work. In addition to the acetaminophen and the parachutes, some of the poison pests also come equipped with tiny data-transmitting radios.


Poor little mice! I do hope this kills the snakes, which would be eating birds if not the mice. It's low-tech, but it probably will work. At last it's interesting as a novelty.




US 'deeply concerned' over Chinese moves, says Biden – NBC
By Josh Lederman, The Associated Press

TOKYO — Vice President Joe Biden voiced strong opposition Tuesday to China's new air defense zone above a set of disputed islands, showing a united front with an anxious Japan as tension in the region simmered. 

Standing side by side in Tokyo with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Biden said the U.S. is "deeply concerned" about China's attempt to unilaterally change the status quo in the East China Sea. 

"This action has raised regional tensions and increased the risk of accidents and miscalculation," he said. Biden said the U.S. is coordinating closely with allies Japan, South Korea and others, adding that the U.S. has an interest in lowering tensions in the region. 

"I will be raising these issues with great specificity when I meet with Chinese leadership the day after tomorrow," Biden said. Biden's remarks came as Japan is pressing the U.S. to more actively take Japan's side in an escalating dispute over China's new air defense zone above a set of contested islands in the East China Sea. 
The U.S. and Japan have refused to recognize China's air defense zone above tiny islands that China and Japan both claim. The U.S. and its allies are concerned China's move is part of a broader strategy to assert increasing authority in the region. 

"The prospect for miscalculation and mistake is too high," Biden said of the air defense zone. 

A group of disputed islands, Uotsuri island (top), Minamikojima (bottom) and Kitakojima, known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China is seen in the East China Sea. The islands are the subject of a territorial dispute between Japan and China.
Abe, who met with Biden at the prime minister's residence here Tuesday, said he and Biden confirmed that neither country would tolerate the attempt to change the status quo by force. He invoked Japan's decades-long alliance with the U.S. in pledging the two would work closely to deal with the situation. 

At the same time, Abe appeared to try to smooth over a minor rift that emerged between the U.S. and Japan as Biden headed to the region over whether commercial airlines should comply with China's demand that they file flight plans before flying through the zone.

Japanese leaders were concerned after word came that the U.S. was advising American carriers, in line with existing protocol, to comply with such requests from foreign governments. "We agreed we will not condone any action that could threaten safety of civilian aircraft," Abe said. 

Reluctant to cede any ground, Tokyo has been urging Japanese commercial flights not to notify China before flying through the zone. Word that the U.S. had advised American commercial carriers to comply rankled leaders in Tokyo, who are hoping a united front with the U.S. will increase pressure on Beijing to reverse course. 
But senior Obama administration officials said Tuesday that the U.S. never told American commercial carriers to comply specifically with China's demands. Rather, the Federal Aviation Administration merely reaffirmed existing policy that pilots should comply with such instructions anywhere in the world, said the officials, who weren't authorized to comment by name and demanded anonymity. 

The zone covers more than 600 miles from north to south, above international waters separating China, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. China says all aircraft entering the zone must notify Chinese authorities beforehand or face unspecified defensive measures. 

Although the U.S. has joined Japan and other allies in refusing to recognize the zone, Washington has treaded carefully, wary of creating a new fault line in its relationship with China just as the U.S. is pursuing a new era of economic cooperation with Beijing. 

The show of unity between Biden and Abe will be closely watched by China, as well as other Asian nations worried that the new defense zone may portend further steps by China to assert control in the region. On Monday, China's ambassador to the Philippines claimed China has a sovereign right to establish a similar zone over the South China Sea, where China and the Philippines are locked in another long-running territorial dispute. 

The feud promises to trail Biden throughout his weeklong trip to Asia — a tour intended to affirm Washington's continued interest in upping its presence in the region, in part to counter China's growing influence.


It doesn't look as though China will attack a plane that flies through the zone. Probably they will just scramble a fighter to fly alongside as a show of force. That's what the US does when a plane flies over Washington, DC without permission. There is a certain amount of posturing that goes along with international relations, and there is a longstanding rivalry between Japan and China. Since Japan invaded China during World War II there has been an enmity between them. I don't think there will be a war between them over this territorial dispute, at least not now. I certainly hope not.





Iceland police kill a man for the first time in the nation's history – NBC
By Henry Austin, NBC News contributor

Police in Iceland killed a person for the first time in the nation’s history after they responded to shots fired at officers on Monday. Two officers were fired on after going to an apartment in the country’s capital Reykjavik, police said in a statement. Like most of the country’s police force, they were unarmed as they investigated reports of a “loud bang” at around 3 p.m. local time (10 a.m. ET).  

When a SWAT team arrived the man again fired on the officers, hitting one of them and sending him flying down the stairs, the statement added. It did not reveal the condition of the officer, but said the man then began firing through a window at them.
The team then entered the apartment and shot the man, before rushing him to hospital, the statement said. He was pronounced dead at the scene. Police said they regretted the incident and wished to express sympathy to the man’s family.  

Icelandic website Visir later named the man as Sigrid Oscar Jónasdóttur and his sister Sigridur Jónasdóttir blamed poor health care for the mentally ill for the man’s death. “There are no resources for these people,” she told the site. 
Iceland, with a population of around 320,000, has a low crime rate and gun violence is extremely rare.



Iceland
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Iceland i/ˈaɪslənd/ (Icelandic: Ísland, IPA: [ˈistlant]; Lýðveldið Ísland) is a Nordic island country marking the juncture between the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.[5] The country has a population of 321,857 and a total area of 103,000 km2 (40,000 sq mi), which makes it the most sparsely populated country in Europe.

The interior consists mainly of a plateau characterised by sand and lava fields, mountains and glaciers, while many glacial rivers flow to the sea through the lowlands. Iceland is warmed by the Gulf Stream and has a temperate climate despite a high latitude just outside the Arctic Circle.

From 1262 to 1918, Iceland was part of the Norwegian and later the Danish monarchies. The country became independent in 1918 and a republic was declared in 1944.
Until the 20th century, the Icelanders relied largely on fishing and agriculture, and the country was one of the least developed in the region. Industrialisation of the fisheries and aid through the United States' Marshall Plan following World War II brought prosperity and, by the 1990s, Iceland had developed as one of the wealthiest and most developed nations in the world. In 1994, Iceland became party to the European Economic Area, which supported diversification of the economy into economic and financial services.

Iceland has a free-market economy with relatively low corporate taxes compared to other OECD countries.[9] It maintains a Nordic social welfare system that provides universal health care and tertiary education for its citizens.[10] In 2013, it was ranked as the 13th most-developed country in the world by the United Nations' Human Development Index.[4


Iceland provides universal health care, but according to the website visir there is poor mental health care. This could be due to too few hospitals and psychiatrists or long distances between resources – it shouldn't be due to the cost. Since this is the first time officers have killed a citizen they can't be having very commonplace problems. I would have expected there to be a great deal of depression from Seasonal Affective Disorder due to the location near the North Pole, at least.





Opposition fighters in Syria move 12 nuns from captured village – NBC

The Mar Takla Christian Orthodox monastery in the Syrian town of Maaloula where 12 nuns were reportedly taken by Syrian rebels on Monday.
Opposition fighters in Syria have taken 12 nuns from a predominantly Christian village near Damascus and moved them to a rebel-held town, the mother superior of a Syrian convent said Tuesday.

The statement by the mother superior, Febronia Nabhan of Saidnaya convent, came as Syrian state TV reported that a suicide attacker set off his explosive vest in an unspecified government institution in Damascus, killing four people and wounding 17. Syrian TV gave no further details about the blast.

Blasts in Damascus are not uncommon in the almost three-year-long civil war in Syria. Some have killed scores of people.

Nabhan said Tuesday that the nuns and three other women were taken the day before from another convent, in the predominantly Christian village of Maaloula, and moved to the nearby town of Yabroud. The Vatican ambassador to Syria said it was not clear whether the nuns had been kidnapped or evacuated for their safety.
Nabhan told The Associated Press that the Maaloula convent's mother superior,
Pelagia Sayaf, called her later that day and said they were all "fine and safe."
Syrian rebels captured large parts of Maaloula, 40 miles northeast of the capital, on Monday after three days of fighting.

The state news agency SANA had reported Monday that six nuns, including Sayaf, were trapped in a convent in Maaloula.

In September, rebels seized parts of Maaloula only to be driven out within a few days by government forces.

Maaloula was a major tourist attraction before the conflict began in March 2011. Some of its residents still speak a version of Aramaic, a biblical language believed to have been spoken by Jesus.


The Islamic fighters are protecting other religions, as Islam says they should. It must be terrible to live in a war zone, though. At any time a stray bomb could explode, killing everyone nearby, as with the suicide bombers. This time, though, they are okay apparently. That's good news.



­A Supreme Court Fight For The Rights Of (Frequent) Fliers – NPR
by Nina Totenberg

­Do airline frequent fliers have any legal rights when they get into disputes over their club memberships?
That's the question before the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, when the justices examine whether, and under what circumstances, frequent fliers can sue in these disputes.

Frequent-flier programs — famous for their free trips, upgrades and goodies — are also infamous for what some members view as arbitrary airline behavior.
Take the case of famed concert cellist Lynn Harrell, expelled from the Delta frequent-flier program, as reported on the Colbert Report.

Delta kicked Harrell out because he always travels with his cello and pays for a separate seat for the large and very valuable instrument. Indeed, Harrell travels so much, and internationally, that he got a frequent-flier card for "Cello Harrell."
Delta didn't like that, telling Harrell he was violating the rules. Not only was the cello chucked out of the program, so was the human Harrell. His miles were also confiscated, and he was barred from ever enrolling in any Delta Sky Miles program in the future.

Harrell's situation may have been a laughing matter on Comedy Central, but some other folks who get cross-ways with the airlines view their disputes as matters that should go all the way to the Supreme Court.

Rabbi S. Binyomin Ginsberg, an educational consultant and lecturer, was cut from his frequent-flier program for, according to Northwest Airlines, complaining too often. Complaints over late luggage, lost luggage, long delays on the tarmac and so on.
According to Ginsberg, he never complained to flight attendants, gate personnel or pilots. Instead, he started at the top.

"I did exactly what they asked you to do," Ginsberg said in an interview with NPR. "If you have a negative experience, they want you to give them feedback." And so he did — a lot.

According to Northwest, he called the frequent-flier program 24 times within seven months to register what the airline viewed as complaints. Ginsberg was a very frequent flier, with top Platinum Elite status and approximately 75 flights a year. He says he never asked for anything when registering his complaints. The airline contends he "repeatedly asked for compensation."

Whether asked for or not, the airline tried to soothe the unhappy flier. In 2007, Ginsberg was awarded nearly $2,000 worth of travel vouchers, 78,000 in bonus miles, and $491 in cash for a lost bag.

But then Ginsberg was notified by telephone that his frequent-flier status was being terminated because he had "abused it."

Ginsberg says that the agent told him he was "no longer a member of our frequent-flier program," that his miles had been confiscated, and that he would "never be able to join the program again."

Ginsberg says he thought it was a joke at first. But when he realized it wasn't, he asked for an explanation. "And they said, 'Because you complained too much about our service,' " he says.

When he called the legal department to follow up, he says he was told that under federal law the airline has "total discretion" in such matters.

"I said, 'You know what, you're forcing me to take legal action,' " Ginsberg says, "and she started laughing, literally," telling him, "'You know, you're not the first person who has threatened that, and we don't get scared of that.' "
And so, Ginsberg did what any red-blooded American would do. He sued the airline for himself and others similarly situated, asking for $5 million in damages
­ Nobody outside the airline industry seems to know how many people have had their frequent-flier-club memberships revoked, but on Tuesday, Ginsberg's case will actually be before the Supreme Court. The legal issue is more esoteric than the nitty-gritty of frequent-flier points.

Federal law gives the federal government the power to regulate most disputes over airline routes and services. Therefore, for example, the Supreme Court ruled in 1995 that consumers could not sue American Airlines for retroactively changing its frequent-flier program (like United and Delta did this November).

But the court left open what it called "routine breach-of-contract claims," where customers assert they are trying to make the airlines live up to their agreements.
In Ginsberg's case, the Northwest contract provided that the airline could terminate membership in the frequent-flier program at any time if it believed in its "sole judgment" that a member had abused the program.

Ginsberg contends that he did not abuse the program, and that the airline revoked his membership without valid cause; essentially that the airline, in terminating his lifetime membership, was not acting in good faith within the reasonable expectations of the agreement.

Northwest, however, says Ginsberg's "reasonable expectations" are not reasonable and that he is attempting to make the agreement more expansive than it actually is.
Now the Supreme Court will decide, and frequent fliers everywhere will be watching.


I think making 24 complaints in 7 months could reasonably be construed as harassment or abuse, though Ginsberg said he didn't ask for compensation. I feel sorry for the cellist, however, because he paid the expensive price of a seat for his instrument without complaint. The fact that the airline gave his cello a frequent flyer card is their own fault, if they knew the seat was for a cello. It will be interesting to see what the Supreme Court does on the case. That frequent flier membership was probably assigned by a computer unassisted by a human being.