Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Coming to a Campus Near You: College Hookups Gone Digital

April 25, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
hookups

When you think of Internet hookup sites, you might imagine an older crowd too busy for dating; college students, with opportunities for interaction everywhere from the classroom to the local pub, are not likely the first demographic that comes to mind. Co-eds, however, aren’t willing to be left out of the action as the recent proliferation of college hookup sites attests. Titillated at the prospect of “no strings attached” sexual encounters, students across the country are increasingly joining college hookup networks, the majority of which are modeled after the original site, ... Read More

Background Music Reduces Playground Bullying

April 24, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
bullying-soccer

Can music soothe the savage sixth grader? Perhaps, according to a first-of-its-kind study from Israel, which finds that gentle melodies may help deter schoolyard bullying. “If the findings of this pilot study are replicated and can be generalized," researchers Naomi Ziv and Einat Dolev write in the journal Children and Schools, "they point to a very simple, inexpensive method of reducing aggressive behavior.” The three-week experiment featured 56 students—32 boys and 24 girls—at a local elementary school in the north of Israel. All were either 11 or 12 years old. For the ... Read More

Affirmative Action’s Road Doesn’t Pass Through Perfection

April 15, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
supreme-court-building

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to issue an opinion soon on the first affirmative action case it has heard since mumbling (or not) its way through a decision on the Grutter v. Bollinger case a decade ago. The justices heard arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin last October. The plaintiff, a spurned white applicant to UTA, argued that including race, even tangentially, in its admission process was a violation of the 14th Amendment. Were a court majority to agree, it would essentially overturn Grutter, which had allowed race to be included in a basket of admissions standards ... Read More

Why Chess Should Be Required in U.S. Schools

April 15, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
chess-shutterstock

Rook to B8. Checkmate. There's nothing quite like the feeling of defeating a worthy opponent in a game of chess: the ultimate battle of the wits. Of course, it's not a feeling I have very often, since I'm not very good at chess. On the other hand, my father is officially an "expert" and my friend is a "master." In other words, they are both very, very good. To give an idea of how good, if I was to play 100 games with each of them, I would win precisely zero. Worldwide, chess is still a popular game, but it is treated with particular seriousness in Eastern Europe. For instance, the ... Read More

Spelling Bee Now Requiring Finalists to Be Super-Genius Word Cyborgs

April 9, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
spelling-bee

We're talking about the Spelling Bee, so I have to tell you my story. It's a rule. Anyway, I won the school spelling bee in fifth grade. My final opponent—a fourth-grade girl—misspelled "hippopotamus," which I then spelled correctly. Then, I spelled "scheme" with the right six letters in the right order and won.  The girls in my class were mad that I beat their friend, and they told me I only won because we had "scheme" as a spelling word a few weeks before. I showed them ... by spelling one word correctly at the county spelling bee and coming in 18th place because my last name is sort of ... Read More

Help Others to Help Yourself: High School Students Benefit From Volunteer Work

April 5, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
volunteer-teens

Let’s perform a little parental thought experiment. Your daughter (or son) is in her senior year of high school, headed for the exit, when she’s told she must perform 30 hours of community service before graduation. How does the scene play out? A bit of drama, perhaps some eye rolling and door slamming. After you threaten to revoke her car privileges, she signs up to volunteer at the local elementary school. Once a week, she spends an hour reading to youngsters, helping out with homework, leading playground games, and organizing arts and crafts. In the end, she survives. Maybe she even has ... Read More

One Area Where Head Start Lives Up to Its Name

February 1, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment

Head Start is the kind of program that seems like it’s just gotta work. Founded in the opening months of the War on Poverty in 1965, the federal program  works with  disadvantaged kids age 3 to 5 (and their families) to provide extra schooling, health care, and nutrition, all in hopes of better preparing them for grade school and beyond. Under both political parties Head Start has thrived and expanded, most recently when President George W. Bush reauthorized the program. But as the program approaches its 50th birthday, whether, or how well, Head Start works remains a surprisingly lively ... Read More

Spoofing Peer Review: Sock Puppets Publish or Perish

December 14, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Academic research is the lifeblood of Pacific Standard, and without getting too high and mighty, its rigor is really important to us. So imagine the distress we feel seeing that the system for handling the peer-review process at Elsevier, one of the globe’s major academic publishers – they call themselves “the world’s leading provider of science and health information”—has had fake reviews inserted. As explained at the journals which retracted the papers with spoofed reviews: A referee’s report on which the editorial decision was made was found to be falsified. The ... Read More

The Public Pension Story You Weren’t Reading About (Until Recently)

December 13, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

There’s a lot of talk about the sorry state of pensions in America, both the increasing lack of defined-benefit plans and the predicaments of local governments that have made pension promises more generous than they can afford. But according to the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force on K–12 Education and fellow (and former federal edu-crat)  Williamson M. Evers, the most undercovered important story on public education was … pensions. Teachers’ pensions, to be exact. As the task force explains: Public education faces its own fiscal cliff as baby boomers retire from the ... Read More

The Smart Money Getting Smarter

October 25, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Venture capitalists have plunked $15 million into Udacity, the free online university that Kevin Charles Redmon told us about in May. (And our John Gravois noted the influx of angels investing in higher education technology companies in August.) The firms of Andreesen Horowitz and Charles River Ventures and entrepreneur Steven Blank led this round of financing. Udacity says with this money it’s raised $21.1 million so far this year. The new money will be used “to further build out interactive course architecture, including adding new environments for programming and scaling course and ... Read More