Links for 2009-11-11

"My rural area friends have commented on this same trend. Most kids don't do anything unsupervised in cities and spend all of their time indoors. School is making this worse. Kids are being given ever more homework at younger grades, seat work is now taking place in kindergarten, etc. Contrast this with my rural area friends and relative whose kids play outside a lot, understand how things work, aren't afraid of dirt, and, forgive me for saying this, are a fairly skinny lot. They're also fairly independent (i.e. not like my son, who, left to his own devices would eat nothing but cereal). The city-dweller parents think the rural parents are neglectful, but I tend to think of them as "free-range"."

"Journalism likes to sell itself as a form of detective work. That's certainly the depiction of Woodward and Bernstein in "All The President's Men," and it's the industry's favored depiction of itself. But on the day-to-day level, great journalists are great at making, and keeping, knowledgeable friends."

The Romans knew how to deal with obstruction in the legislative branch.

"I knew that enrollments were way up -- and they are -- and I knew that the biggest gains were among lower-income students, particularly men of color. What I didn't know was the degree to which we're also expanding our reach on the upper end of the income scale. If you were to plot our enrollment gains this year with 'class' as the x-axis -- okay, I'm a big nerd -- you'd get something close to a u-curve. The big gains have been in students who otherwise wouldn't have gone to college, and among students who otherwise would have gone to more expensive places. Facility in class largely correlates with parental income, so we're getting more students on both extremes of the ability scale."

"The number of international first-time students at American graduate schools is flat this year, following four consecutive years of growth, according to a study being released today by the Council of Graduate Schools. At the same time, enrollments of American students are up 6 percent in a year.

For both groups, the numbers do not seem to reflect any single trend but rather a combination of circumstances.

For instance, among the graduate schools in the survey, some are seeing larger increases in American students, but others are seeing decreases. For the 166 reporting increases, the average was 11 percent. For the 79 reporting decreases, the average decline was 7 percent. Generally, doctoral institutions reported larger increases than master's-oriented institutions."