1 More massacres in
Iraq and Syria (BBC) Islamic
State (IS) militants have been accused of massacring hundreds of people in
areas under their control in northern Iraq and eastern Syria. At least 80 members of the Yazidi religious minority are
believed to have been killed with women and children abducted in a village in
Iraq. IS is also accused of killing 700 tribesmen opposing them in Syria's Deir
Ezzor province, over a two-week period. The violence has displaced an estimated
1.2 million people in Iraq alone.
US aircraft are
providing air support for Kurdish forces in northern Iraq to drive back the
militants and retake the strategic Mosul dam. US Central Command said it
carried out nine air strikes on Saturday, hitting targets near Irbil and the
dam. The UK, Germany and other countries are delivering humanitarian aid for
refugees in the north.
IS first emerged in
Syria, fighting President Bashar al-Assad during the ongoing civil war there,
but it has since overrun parts of northern Iraq, making its capital in the city
of Mosul. Pursuing an extreme form of Sunni Islam, it has persecuted
non-Muslims and Shia Muslims, whom it regards as heretics.
2
Fear of a tech bubble ( Charles Arthur in The Guardian) What constitutes a technology bubble? If it's gigantic
valuations, you don't have to look far. When venture capital company Andreessen
Horowtiz put $85m last week into online publisher Buzzfeed in exchange for 10% of its equity,
that implied BuzzFeed was worth $850m, more than the 137-year-old Washington Post.
Five-year-old Uber raised a little over $1.2bn from venture capitalist for
about 5% of its equity, to give it that $17bn valuation.
And if Snapchat, the
vanishing-picture service, could turn down a $3bn offer from Facebook in November 2013 (according to the Wall Street Journal) and was
in talks last month with China’s Alibaba over
funding that could value it at $10bn, isn't that evidence of a bubble?
But are the foundations solid enough to stop sky-high
valuations crashing down? The latest debate over whether we're in a "tech
bubble" has been raging in Silicon Valley and beyond since at least late
2010, when venture capitalist John Doerr suggested
we were entering a "third wave" of innovation, focused on smartphones
and social networking. To the suggestion that valuations were – even then –
"overheated", Doerr replied: "I prefer to think of these bubbles
as booms. I think booms are good. Booms lead to overinvestment, to full
employment. Booms lead to lots of innovation."
"In some ways, the sharing economy is a throwback to
the pre-industrial age, when village communities had to share resources to
survive," says John Hawksworth, PwC's chief economist. "They built up
trust through repeated interactions with people they had known all their lives.”
3 Teaching is not a business (David L
Kirp in The New York Times) Today’s education
reformers believe that schools are broken and that business can supply the
remedy. Some place their faith in the idea of competition. Others embrace
disruptive innovation, mainly through online learning. Both camps share the
belief that the solution resides in the impersonal, whether it’s the invisible
hand of the market or the transformative power of technology.
Neither strategy has
lived up to its hype, and with good reason. It’s impossible to improve
education by doing an end run around inherently complicated and messy human
relationships. Marketplace mantras dominate policy discussions. High-stakes
reading and math tests are treated as the single metric of success, the
counterpart to the business bottom line. Teachers whose students do poorly on
those tests get pink slips, while those whose students excel receive merit pay,
much as businesses pay bonuses to their star performers and fire the laggards. This
approach might sound plausible in a think tank, but in practice it has been a
flop.
Firing teachers,
rather than giving them the coaching they need, undermines morale. In some
cases it may well discourage undergraduates from pursuing careers in teaching,
and with a looming teacher shortage as baby boomers retire, that’s a recipe for
disaster. Merit pay invites rivalries among teachers, when what’s needed is
collaboration. Closing schools treats everyone there as guilty of causing low
test scores, ignoring the difficult lives of the children in these schools —
“no excuses,” say the reformers, as if poverty were an excuse.
While these reformers
talk a lot about markets and competition, the essence of a good education —
bringing together talented teachers, engaged students and a challenging
curriculum — goes undiscussed. Business does have something to teach educators,
but it’s neither the saving power of competition nor flashy ideas like
disruptive innovation. Instead, what works are time-tested strategies..
While technology can
be put to good use by talented teachers, they, and not the futurists, must take
the lead. The process of teaching and learning is an intimate act that neither
computers nor markets can hope to replicate. Small wonder, then, that the
business model hasn’t worked in reforming the schools — there is simply no
substitute for the personal element.
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