The reversal is laid out in a report published on March 5th by the OECD, a Paris-based rich-country think-tank. Boys’ dominance just about endures in maths: at age 15 they are, on average, the equivalent of three months’ schooling ahead of girls. In science the results are fairly even. But in reading, where girls have been ahead for some time, a gulf has appeared. In all 64 countries and economies in the study, girls outperform boys. The average gap is equivalent to an extra year of schooling.
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To see why boys and girls fare so differently in the classroom, first look at what they do outside it. The average 15-year-old girl devotes five-and-a-half hours a week to homework, an hour more than the average boy, who spends more time playing video games and trawling the internet. Three-quarters of girls read for pleasure, compared with little more than half of boys. Reading rates are falling everywhere as screens draw eyes from pages, but boys are giving up faster. The OECD found that, among boys who do as much homework as the average girl, the gender gap in reading fell by nearly a quarter.
Beijing's Toxic Sky →
Environmental disasters like this are increasing pressure on China's central government.
In Beijing, awareness of the dangers of the polluted sky is now on the rise, thanks to growing data. China will "declare war on pollution," Premier Li Keqiang told parliament in an opening address in 2014. A tougher environmental law took effect on January 1, while a new environment minister took charge on Friday...
The TSA's FAST Personality Screening Program Violates the Fourth Amendment →
I'm not sure how quickly we're approaching a reality where anyone could know anything about anyone else if they just buy the right app, but, conceptually, it seems possible within our lifetimes. And our legal system still hasn't caught up to addressing privacy implications of 30-year-old technology like email...
...FAST scans, however, exceed the scope of the administrative search exception. Under this exception, the courts would employ a balancing test, weighing the governmental need for the search versus the invasion of personal privacy of the search, to determine whether FAST scans violate the Fourth Amendment. Although the government has an acute interest in protecting the nation's air transportation system against terrorism, FAST is not narrowly tailored to that interest because it cannot detect the presence or absence of weapons but instead detects merely a person's frame of mind. Further, the system is capable of detecting an enormous amount of the scannee's highly sensitive personal medical information, ranging from detection of arrhythmias and cardiovascular disease, to asthma and respiratory failures, physiological abnormalities, psychiatric conditions, or even a woman's stage in her ovulation cycle...
Chris Jenks on the Petraeus Plea →
Among other reasons to hate the two-tiered justice system on full display in Petraeus's case:
Appreciated your comments on Petraeus. One additional factor which resonates with me and I think most military folks is that Petraeus was a general court martial convening authority for a decade or more. He decided what cases were referred to a court-martial. He decided on the terms of plea deals. He decided what post trial clemency should or should not be given. He has sent people to jail and ended careers for far less than what he did.
Also absent from the discussion was how apparently the Army was not interested in recalling him to active duty and taking action against him for misconduct that occurred while on active duty. Instead, he will continue to receive 4 star general retired pay, literally the most [money] anyone in the US military could potentially receive.
Email Privacy, Overseas Jurisdiction, and the 114th Congress →
This is stunning. We've had to wait this long to address privacy issues around email? The world is changing, faster than ever! And Congress *needs* to step up the pace.
Two years ago, I wrote about a bipartisan effort (in which I was and still am participating) to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. That effort, sadly, went nowhere.
I am, however, happy to report that progress is being made to revive that effort in the 114th Congress. This year two separate but related bills are being considered in the House and Senate that bear on these issues.
One, the Leahy-Lee bill (Yoder-Polis in the House) addresses email privacy. The current structure of ECPA, which was adopted in 1986, stems from a time when nobody could imagine that anyone would ever store lots of data (like emails) for long periods of time — the expense was too great. So ECPA adopted an odd rule that communications stored for longer than 180 days would be accessible by law enforcement through a subpoena rather than by a warrant. This had the result of making long-term stored email less well protected than, say, diaries or letters or your telephone communications. Who knew that Gmail was in the future?...
Americans Aren’t Saving Enough for Retirement, but One Change Could Help →
Here is something every non-rich American family should know: The odds are that you will run out of money in retirement.
On average, a typical working family in the anteroom of retirement — headed by somebody 55 to 64 years old — has only about $104,000 in retirement savings, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances.
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The standard prescription is that Americans should put more money aside in investments. The recommendation, however, glosses over a critical driver of unpreparedness: Wall Street is bleeding savers dry.
“Everybody’s big focus is that we have to save more,” said John C. Bogle, founder and former chief executive of Vanguard, the investment management colossus. “A greater part of the problem is the failure of investors to earn their fair share of market returns.”
Not to mention the several recessions (including the recent Great Financial Crisis) that wiped out the average US citizen's savings because of fraudulent investments sold to them by the big banks (often through small, local banks).
Here's a primer on net neutrality from What's Tech →
On this week's episode of What's Tech? Verge Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel explains net neutrality. The recent historic vote by the FCC in favor of net neutrality will have a decisive impact on the future of the internet. But when did the pursuit of net neutrality begin? And what exactly is it?
Fewer Women Run Big Companies Than Men Named John →
Among chief executives of S.&P. 1500 firms, for each woman, there are four men named John, Robert, William or James. We’re calling this ratio the Glass Ceiling Index, and an index value above one means that Jims, Bobs, Jacks and Bills — combined — outnumber the total number of women, including every women’s name, from Abby to Zara...
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The Glass Ceiling Index is a fun but quite imperfect way of measuring the permeability of the glass ceiling. (Especially because in a few decades, the millennial Jacobs, Tylers and Zacharys will outnumber baby boomer Bills and Bobs.) But it does point to an important truth — that in many important decision-making areas of American life, women remain vastly outnumbered.