Did Ivanka Trump Marry an Affirmative Action Baby?
Posted on October 26, 2009
By Joe Miller | Comments
It’s not the kind of affirmative action that enrages many Americans. But Jared Kushner’s family made millions in donations to Harvard and NYU before he enrolled, according to The Boston Globe and his Wikipedia profile, even though his grades and standardized test scores were in the toilet. But alas, don’t hate the playa, hate the game.
Disney: Baby Einstein Has Zero Gravity
Posted on October 24, 2009
By Joe Miller | Comments
Directly on the heels of Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman’s child-rearing book, “Nutureshock” being released last month, Disney announced Friday it will refund $15.99 for up to four “Baby Einstein” DVDs per household purchased between June 5, 2004, and Sept. 5, 2009. The Baby Einstein series may not only fail to make kids smarter, but may also dumb them down, according to a Pediatrics journal report concluding that baby videos, like “Baby Einstein,” led infants who watched them to have smaller vocabularies compared to the kids who didn’t. The American Academy of pediatrics has recommended that children under 2 be exposed to no television time at all.
The whole thing about exposing children to rinky-dink arrangements of classical music to improve their intelligence is also out the window. In Einstein Never Used Flashcards, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, PH.D., and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, PH.D. cite the 1993 University of Wisconsin research study that led to the intensity about exposing kids to classical music (kids who listened to the Mozart Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, K448 scored higher on a spatial reasoning test). But THAT study was refuted by Nature, Psychological Science, and Harvard University, which collectively concluded that the effect of classical music on spatial ability was short-lived AND had nothing to do with overall intelligence/academic performance.
I don’t know about you, but I’m going to go out and find my 6-month-old a set of good old-fashioned blocks.
The Neuroscience of Fraud
Posted on October 22, 2009
By Joe Miller | Comments
New York Magazine discusses the conflict between Ayn Rand’s childhood in Bolshevik Russia and her unforgiving views about the eminence of indiscriminate capitalism. Newsweek points to new research from UC Davis identifying the area of the brain (the anterior cingulate cortex) responsible for justifying our conflicting beliefs. And a Goldman executive defends income inequality as something to be “tolerated to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all.”
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
OMG! It’s the “Fall of the Republic!”
Posted on October 21, 2009
By Joe Miller | Comments
I suppose Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, Roger B. Taney, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Bernie Madoff, and the Dallas Cowboys had absolultely nothing to do with it.
New Double Identity, Same Double Standards
Posted on July 26, 2009
By Joe Miller | Comments
"Late Autumn Ivy" by Robert Swier on Flickr
Helene Cooper at the New York Times writes that Sotomayor’s, Obama’s and Gates’ ivy league education gives them a dual personality–half elite, and half based on their racial identity. Glenn C. Loury writes that, in the case of Obama, this may have manifested itself in the form his having a stronger response to alleged injustices against elite black men, such as Gates, where Obama said that the arressting officer, Crowley, acted “stupidly” and invited the two men to the White House for a beer, compared to his intangible response to injustices against inner city black men, like Sean Bell, which was simply that the “most important thing for people who are concerned about that shooting is to figure out how do we come together and assure those kinds of tragedies don’t happen again.”
Loury makes the case that there is a far more visible, tangible response to elites rather than to issues that have very real effects on poor and uneducated black and Hispanic communities, such as disproportionately high incarceration rates.
Educational Equality and the President’s Cabinet
Posted on May 15, 2009
By Joe Miller | Comments
Why is it that the Obama administration has spent so much energy trying to prevent lobbyists from overrunning government, but spends little time on the fact that most (more than 50%) of the Cabinet is made up of ivy leaguers?
The President is someone who genuinely cares about equal opportunity. He is aware of class-based problems in education, like persistent achievement gaps, that have kept most Americans out of so-called “top” schools–he wasn’t always the best student. But what the administration has not done such a good job of is appointing a cabinet that truly reflects the educational diversity of the nation. And since educational diversity correlates with overall diversity–the entering classes at these schools are still very far from mirroring the population-at-large–this is an important omission.
Without casting aspersions upon the individuals who are currently serving on the cabinet, or even ivy leaguers, generally–wasn’t it ivy league elites who were at the helms of our financial institutions and government agencies when the entire American way of life all but collapsed? Why is it that the mere fact of being able to say that one went to a particular school is still essentially a license to run wild in Washington?
The American people also have a responsibility to question presidential appointments. We rejected lobbyists who were wreaking havoc on public policy–the President responded with a cocktail of rules that govern the way lobbyists are able to influence government. We should be making a similar inquiry into other institutions that wield so much power but which really have only been dubiously effective at doing what is best for the majority of the American people.
If the President is serious about hiring equality in the federal government, he should work with state and local university systems, especially those in rural and urban areas, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions, and Native American Serving Institutions, to identify quality public servants from all walks of life. But that is not what is reflected on the current cabinet.
Cabinet members and schools are listed below. Traditional ivy league schools are listed in bold. There are several other schools listed below that are not in the ivy league but which are well ensconced in the hegemony . But rather than getting into the business of what U.S. News and World Report does, which is to identify which schools it thinks those are, I leave that to you.
Joe Biden, Vice President: University of Delaware and Syracuse
Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State: Wellesley, Yale
Tim Geithner: Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins
Robert Gates: College of William and Mary, Indiana University, Georgetown (has lectured at Harvard and Yale)
Eric Holder: Columbia
Ken Salazar: Colorado, University of Michigan
Tom Vilsac: Hamilton College, Albany Law School
Gary Locke: Boston and Yale
Hilda Solis: Cal Tech, Pomona, University of Southern California
Kathleen Sebelius: Trinity of Washington, University of Kansas
Shaun Donovan: Harvard
Ray LaHood: Bradley University
Steven Chu: Rochester, UC Berkeley
Arne Duncan: Harvard
Eric Shinseki: National War College, United States Army Command and General Staff College, Duke, United States Military Academy (on Advisory Board of the Center of Leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.)
Janet Napolitano: Santa Clara, University of Virginia
“Cabinet Level” Posts
Christina Romer: William & Mary, MIT, UC Berkeley (Assistant Professor at Princeton)
Lisa Jackson: Princeton, Tulane
Peter Orszag: London School of Economics, Princeton
Ron Kirk: University of Texas at Austin, Austin College
Susan Rice: Oxford, Stanford
Rahm Emanuel: Northwestern, Sarah Lawrence
U.S. Media Companies Should Employ More Asian Talent, Before Seeking Expansion into Asia
Posted on May 4, 2009
By Joe Miller | Comments
It’s not news that large U.S. media companies have a deplorable record when it comes to hiring and promoting people of color. While Asians have made some strides in television dramas, there is a persistent dearth of Asians working in television news and in high level management posts.
Still, as the New York Times reported, these media companies are ramping up efforts to export their product into Asia, even though it comes nowhere near to representing the demographics of the U.S. population, much less that of the rest of the world.
In some cases, news reports on large media networks have been unapologetically xenophobic. Take CNN’s Jack Cafferty for example, who went so far as to call the Chinese (as a proxy for Asians, generally) “the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last fifty years.”
Jack Cafferty and others continue to rail against the Chinese for producing inferior products and exporting them to the U.S. However, the standard is much lower when it comes American media companies exporting their racism.
Asian media executives should continue to deny American media companies access to their markets, until American television progamming, especially its news programming, begins to sound more inclusive and less like the same endangered American species that gave us backlash conservatism and who, for one reason or another, have never quite been able to evolve out of the cul de sac.
Radiohead to Testify Against RIAA in File-Sharing Case
Posted on April 4, 2009
By Joe Miller | Comments
Something we need to see more of–actual artists standing up for themselves against RIAA’s disingenuous claims that it cares about artists more than it cares about deep-pocketed record labels. According to Radiohead’s legal team at Harvard Law School led by Charles Nesson, the band will testify against RIAA in RIAA’s lawsuit against Joel Tenenbaum–the Boston University student who was a teenager at the time of his alleged copyright infringements. More here.
So What if Facebook Fails?
Posted on April 2, 2009
By Joe Miller | Comments
Facebook is in the unique position of being able to change the entire online ecosystem–if it hasn’t done so already. The five-year-old company expects to register its 200 millionth user this week, making it equivalent in size to the sixth-largest country. But despite its massive growth, Facebook is still lagging in profits. While the number of Facebook users surpassed the number of Newscorp’s MySpace last June, MySpace earned an estimated $606 million in revenues in 2008, compared to Facebook’s comparatively paltry revenue target of $300 million. So why hasn’t Facebook been profitable? And, from a public interest standpoint, does it really matter?
Edmund Lee over at Slate reported that Facebook is unlikely to succeed unless it changes its ways. MySpace’s model has always been advertising-focused. Facebook’s model has always been focused on building its user base. Previous attempts by Facebook to change the ways in which it relates to users have caused users to rebel by creating groups–within Facebook–that protest Facebook’s new Terms of Service, say. Users have essentially taken control of the company, making it very difficult for Facebook to figure out ways to make money. Lee suggests that Facebook is landlocked–it either needs to figure out a way to wrest control away from users, without pissing them off, or it needs to focus on traditional revenue models, such as the one used by MySpace, the very non-existence of which is Facebook’s primary competitive advantage.
But the social value of Facebook cannot be denied. The NY Times reports that Facebook has facilitated communication between a woman who wishes to locate relatives who were displaced by the Holocaust, and between a local teacher and the Prime Minister of Denmark. Lee’s analysis focuses almost entirely on the impending doom of Facebook from a profit-making perspective. But as the growth of National Public Radio has illustrated (the average daily audience size of NPR’s “Morning Edition,” which stands at around 7.6 million, is 60% larger than ABC’s “Good Morning America”), the potential for member-supported, public-interest oriented media outlets is clear.
Further, the users who are most likely to make large online donations to nonprofit causes are the fastest growing Facebook demographic. The number of Facebook users over age 35 doubled over the 60 days preceding March 25th, 2009. 3/4ths of Facebook’s users are older, wealthier Americans over age 25. A recent Mashable survey illustrates the power that social media companies wield in attracting donations. According to the Mashable survey, 20% of web-savvy survey respondents, between the ages of 30 and 49, gave donations of $5,000 or more–41% gave $1,000 or more. 47% of survey respondents age 50 and older gave more than $5,000 to social causes via the internet.
The philanthropic potential of Facebook cannot be overstated. Rupert Murdhoch’s other brands, such as Fox News, helped lead us into an unjust war and to enforce a decade of virulent backlash conservatism, culminating in February with a Jim Crow era cartoon, in the New York Post, depicting a chimpanzee–what social value can we expect from MySpace? Facebook’s future is bright–let’s keep them honest.
Univision Fights to Survive
Posted on March 30, 2009
By Joe Miller | Comments
Univision reported a 7.8% drop in ad revenue for the fourth quarter today, bringing the company’s net 4Q08 loss to $1.99 billion. The company has been mired in declining ad revenues, lawsuits, and longstanding debt obligations.
While automobile advertising at Univision fell 41%, revenues from retail advertisers were up 3%, with telecom and fast food advertising each increasing their ad spending on Univision by 8%. Univision CFO Andrew Hobson acknowleged a difficult first quarter and expects sharp declines in retail and further declines in automotive ad spending throughout the rest of the year.
The company is still tied up in litigation with the Mexican media behemoth Group Televisa, despite a $610.8 million settlement in January stemming from a lawsuit in which Group Televisa alleged that Univision underpaid programming royalties tied to advertising revenues. The two companies face a second round of litigation over which company owns the rights to distribute digital content which didn’t exist when the long term programming contract was signed in the 1990s.
Univision’s long-term debt obligations stand at more than $10 billion.
More here.
