text:
/**
 * @file    ImportAssetDialog.hpp
 * @author  Marvin Smith
 * @date    8/6/2017
 */
#ifndef GEO_VIEWER_GUI_IMPORT_ASSET_DIALOG_HPP
#define GEO_VIEWER_GUI_IMPORT_ASSET_DIALOG_HPP

// Qt Libraries
#include <QDialog>
#include <QFileDialog>
#include <QLabel>
#include <QStackedWidget>
#include <QToolButton>
#include <QVBoxLayout>

// C++ Libraries
#include <map>

// Geo-Viewer Libraries
#include <GeoViewer/core/System_Configuration.hpp>

// Project Libraries
#include "ImportAssetEasyWidget.hpp"

/**
 * @class ImportAssetDialog
 */
class ImportAssetDialog : public QDialog
{
    Q_OBJECT

    public:

        /**
         * @brief Constructor
         */
        ImportAssetDialog( System_Configuration::ptr_t sys_config,
                           QWidget*                    parent = nullptr );

    public slots:

        /**
         * @brief Reset Requested
         */
        void Reset_Action();

        /**
         * @brief Import Requested
         */
        void Import_Action();

        /**
         * @brief Cancel Action
         */
        void Cancel_Action();

        /**
         * @brief Set Panel ID
         */
        void Set_Panel_Index( int index );

        /**
         * @brief Show the Easy Import Pane
         */
        void Show_Easy_Import_Pane();

        /**
         * @brief Enable Import Button
         */
        void Enable_Import_Button();

    private:

        /**
         * @brief Initialize Configuration
         */
        void Initialize_Configuration();

        /**
         * @brief Initialize the GUI
         */
        void Initialize_GUI();

        /**
         * @brief Create Title Widget
         */
        void Build_Title_Pane();

        /**
         * @brief Build Easy Import Widget
         */
        void Build_Easy_Import_Pane();

        /**
         * @brief Build Advanced Import Widget
         */
        void Build_Advanced_Import_Pane();

        /**
         * @brief Build Toolbar
         */
        void Build_Toolbar();

        /// Class Name
        std::string m_class_name;

        /// System Configuration
        System_Configuration::ptr_t m_sys_config;

        /// Main Layout
        QVBoxLayout* m_main_layout;

        /// Stack Widget
        QStackedWidget* m_import_viewer_stack;

        /// Easy Import Widget
        ImportAssetEasyWidget* m_easy_import_widget;

        /// Important Buttons
        QToolButton* m_import_button;
        QToolButton* m_cancel_button;
        QToolButton* m_reset_button;

}; // End of ImportAssetDialog Class

#endif

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
How Brexit will leave the fishing industry beached
It is a difficult time for Britain�s small-scale fishermen. Photo: Simon Watkins.
Britain's small-scale fishermen are, without doubt, among the country's 'left behind'. But Brexit will not improve their lot. SIMON WATKINS reports.
A grey September morning on Hastings Beach. Boats are being hauled up the steep pebble slope after their early morning fishing trips. A gentle breeze wafts in from the English Channel. The air is mildly salty, but the language among some of the fishermen is even more so.
"They're a bunch of total f**king wankers!"
The speaker is a fisherman bemoaning the government's perceived betrayal of fishermen in its Brexit planning. The anger is visible all around. A flag fluttering from one of the tall black wooden fishing sheds demands: 'No Fishing Sell Out!' Down on the beach, amid the crates and pallets, is an even more embittered sign.
Addressed directly to Theresa May, it declares: 'Ain't you lucky? We used to hang traitors in this country. Out Means out!'
The town of Hastings voted 54% for Leave, slightly more strongly than the UK overall. But down among the fishermen, there is not a Remainer to be found.
The recent scallop war off the coast of France has pushed fishing back up the Brexit agenda. The scenes of British fishing boats clashing with angry French rivals have stirred Brexiteer hearts. The scallop skirmish itself was unconnected to Brexit and centred on a quite specific and localised row over the scallop season, but some suspect it could be an omen of things to come.
The rules of the EU's Common Fisheries Policy will remain in place for the UK until the end of 2020. But then we will need a new deal.
In July Michael Gove's Department of the Environment Farming and Rural Affairs, issued a White Paper optimistically entitled 'Sustainable Fisheries for Future Generations', intended to outline what shape this deal could take.
Consultation on the White Paper ended this month. It was broadly welcomed by major fishing bodes including the Scottish Fishermen's Federation and the National Federation of Fishermen's Organisations (NFFO). Barrie Deas, chief executive of the NFFO said, enthusiastically: "We think the white paper has got it right on the big ticket issues."
Critics argue it is more a wish-list than a definite plan and offers little real hope to the vast majority of Britain's 12,000 fishermen. One problem is that these fishermen do not however represent a single economic interest.
A handful of companies and individuals operating large trawlers dominate the industry, but the vast majority of the 'workforce' are those who operate smaller scale boats, defined as those under 10 metres in length.
These 4,000 plus smaller boats account for almost 80% of the UK's total fishing fleet. It was, of course, members of this community who famously sailed down the Thames with Nigel Farage during the 2016 referendum campaign to voice their fury at the EU.
The fishermen of Hastings are all small scale operators. Some of their boats may look big to a landlubber, but none are more than 10 metres in length.
That life is difficult for many of these fishermen is beyond doubt. The New Economics Foundations estimates that while profit margins among the biggest trawlers average 19%, for the under 10 metre fishing fleet it is zero.
Former Hastings fishermen Pete White is drinking tea with former fishing colleagues. He believes he was driven out of the trade by the effects of Britain's EU membership and the Common Fisheries Policy. The mistake was made many years ago, he argues, but the attitudes continue to this day. "To the government, fishing is unimportant. They sold us out in 1973," he declares.
The fury of the fishermen ranges over a vast array of perceived and often real injustices, but their ire is focussed on two core issues – the free access to British waters allowed to continental boats, which can fish up the six mile limit, and, of course, the quotas, which limit the quantities of fish that can be caught. For the fishermen the two are closely interlinked.
Adam Williams is in his early 20s and works on one of three boats owned by his family, who have been fishermen for several generations. "The quota is one of the main things," he says. "We only get a tiny amount of the quota. And then we get Belgian trawlers who fish right on the six mile limit. When we come out of the EU the limits can be pushed back. Then the quotas will be shared out better."
Along the beach, Robert Ball and crew have just returned from a fishing sortie and are sorting out their nets. "We see big powerful boats right on the six mile limit. They fish 24 hours a day, they go back Friday and then they're back on Monday morning.
"The government has not got a clue. It's so complicated, I do not understand it. We just want to go to sea and catch fish."
The discontent is far from unreasonable. Britain's small-scale fishermen are quite right that they have had a raw deal for decades. The obvious injustices and are clear in the numbers. In the Channel, French fishermen hold more than 84% of the quota for cod. English fishermen have just 9%.
As for the quota allocated to individual boats, the inequality is just as stark. The small fishing vessels (which we should recall make up 80% of the UK's fleet) are entitled to just 4% of all the UK's fishing quota. The vast bulk is held by larger boats. In some instances the majority of quota for one particular fish stock is held by just one vessel. So on this at least, the Brexiters are right. The small-scale fishermen have been treated appallingly. They are truly part of the 'left behind'.
But are the Brexiteers also right that the troubles of the smaller fishermen are entirely the fault of the EU? And even more critically, is Brexit really the solution?
The tiny quota available to smaller fishing boats and the economic dominance of larger vessels is not the fault of the Common Fisheries Policy or any other EU measure. The decision over how each member state divides its national quota among its fleet is entirely a matter for national governments.
What is more, the British government's recent fishing White Paper makes clear it has no plans for change on this front. "We do not intend to change the method for allocating existing quota," it states.
Chris Williams, senior programme manager at the New Economic Foundation and an expert in marine socio-economics, comments: "The key promise of more quota for small boats was always within the power of the UK government, not Brussels. It still is, and yet this White Paper specifically states that the existing quota ownership will not be challenged."
So the small-scale fishermen may have some grounds to feel betrayed. But this has nothing to do with whether or not Brexit happens or even what type of Brext deal is agreed. It is because the UK government is not changing its own rules for allocating fishing quota to individual vessels.
So if the EU has nothing to do with the quota for each vessel, is it to blame because of the low national quota? Would Brexit and escaping the EU's notorious Common Fisheries Policy allow a significantly bigger total catch for British fishermen, and so lift all boats?
In theory, yes.
It is almost impossible to find anyone who believes the Common Fisheries Policy is a success. Deas, at the NFFO, describes it as "cumbersome". Jeremy Percy, chairman of the Coastal Producers Organisation – which represents small scale operators – calls it "a disaster".
A key failing of the policy, as its stands, is how national quotas are allocated. These are based on historical catches from the 1970s, a system called 'relative stability'. Britain's low quotas in some fish stocks have been blamed on poor record-keeping for British catches in this period, which underestimated how much British fishermen were catching, and on poor negotiating by the then UK government. This is what led to the manifest nonsense of British fishermen getting just 9% of the cod in the Channel.
The government's fisheries White Paper proposes that Britain will take control of its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). This is the water extending to 200 nautical miles beyond our coast. It will control the amount of fish caught in those waters and who is allowed to fish there.
So, in theory, this could increases the fish available for British fishermen. Percy says: "If Brexit means Brexit, and you take the narrow view, then yes there could be more fish for small scale fishermen to catch." But, as Percy himself explains, this theoretical view also needs to take account of the realities of the exit negotiation and the wider trade picture.
In total, British fishermen catch about 700,000 tonnes of fish each year. Some is landed and sold in EU ports. Of the fish landed in the UK, most is also then exported, again mostly to the EU.
The net result is that very roughly half of all fish caught by British fishermen is ultimately sold in the EU. Percy points out that exports are particularly important to the small-scale fishermen. So even if British fishermen are able to catch far more fish, where will they sell them?
The second hard reality, recognised in the White Paper, is that once the UK leaves the EU it will still be bound by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. This requires maritime nations to co-ordinate with neighbours over 'shared fish stocks'. This would apply to the many fish that flagrantly ignore international maritime borders and swim back and forth in the North Sea, Irish Sea and English Channel.
Recognising this reality in its White Paper, the UK government proposes annual negotiations between Britain and the EU, in which national fishing quotas and access to each other's waters would have to be agreed.
The White Paper insists the UK government will keep these negotiations over fishing entirely separate from the rest of the trade negotiations with the EU. Experts point out that this is pure wishful thinking.
"There is no way that is going to happen," says Chris Williams at the NEF. Indeed the EU has already indicated that the rights for its member states' boats to fish in UK waters will be linked to negotiations over Britain's ability to export fish to the EU.
Williams argues that we would have been far better off renegotiating fishing rights while still inside the EU, rather than from the outside, and at the same time as we negotiate everything else.
As it is, neither the EU nor the UK holds all the cards when it comes to fishing. EU fishermen are heavily dependent on their access to the waters around Britain. But British fishermen are also dependent on access to EU waters and, even more so, to the EU export market.
So, as ever, it all comes back to trade negotiations. The outcome is uncertain and, if there is no-deal, unthinkable. But the idea that Britain has the upper hand in fishing, or that British fishermen will emerge clear winners is, at best, highly dubious.
The only obvious potential winners might be the large industrial scale trawlers for whom Brexit could bring bigger catches in those waters out to the 200 mile limit. But these are not the British fishermen wheeled out by Nigel Farage, and they are not the ones who need help.
For the struggling small-scale fishermen, more dependent on exports and already operating on narrow or non-existent profits margins, Brexit offers at least as many risks as it does rewards.
The NEF's Chris Williams is clear. "[Small fishermen] are grossly mistaken if they think Brexit will make things better for them."
Jeremy Percy is even more blunt: "More fish for British fishermen! That was what was offered, along with £350 million a week for the NHS… and all the other lies."
Down on Hastings beach, the fishermen are likely to be angry for some time to come.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Billy from DIY SOS meets his former teacher at North Devon Big Build
Updated: Sunday, July 28, 2019 (11:47)
Billy Byrne of DIY SOS meets his former teacher Frank Antoniazzi after 55 years at the North Devon Big Build for an episode of the show, joined by fellow show regular, plasterer Chris Frediani. Picture: Tony Gussin
A familiar face on the BBC's DIY SOS was stunned when his old gym teacher of 55 years ago turned up at the show's North Devon Big Build.
He did he do? Frank Antoniazzi rates his former pupil and DIY SOS electrician Billy Byrne after meeting him for the first time in 55 years. Picture: Tony Gussin
Much-loved electrician and show joker Billy Byrne was for once lost for words when Frank Antoniazzi from Combe Martin arrived on the High Bickington set where the team is helping Lucy and Jan Collins and their five children.
Two of the couple's triplet daughters have a rare kidney disease meaning they need dialysis in Bristol several days a week and so one of the parents is almost permanently on the motorway - DIY SOS is working to change that.
Despite not having spoken for more than half a century, Mr Antoniazzi and Mr Byrne were soon chatting away about the days when they were teacher and pupil at Howard Secondary Modern School in Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire.
Mr Byrne, aged 69, was at the school from 1960 to 1965 and he said Mr Antoniazzi 'made him a footballer' after putting him in the first year team.
Mr Byrne said: "We had a great football team and we had the likes of Johnny Gillwood playing for us, who was a professional player at Spurs for five years.
"It's just an amazing thing - we have a reunion in October and I am going to get in touch with Frank and invite him down.
"Mr Antoniazzi was just a terrific guy. I am what I am now because of our teachers, we had discipline, we had respect, we had everything."
Mr Antoniazzi said he had seen the DIY SOS article in the Gazette about its nine day North Devon build.
He said: "It's fantastic, it has made my day. I watch it on the TV and thought how am I going to get in touch with Billy. When I saw that article two weeks ago I thought I have to turn up.
"I put Billy in my first year team but I had three other parents saying he shouldn't be in the team, their sons are better than Billy."
The Big Build at High Bickington will end on Thursday, August 1 and Mr Byrne said the community had really come together, with hundreds of trades people and volunteers helping out.
He said: "It's unbelievable, that house is full of such good-natured people getting that family back together.
"It's been a brilliant turn out. The thing about DIY SOS is people come here, no-one is getting paid and they want to do it."
The show is expected to be aired some time next year.
READ MORE: DIY SOS will help Devon family in desperate need .


Lifestyle brand Sophie Allport has recently added a brand new collection of luxury candles to their extensive range of quality homeware gifts. Made in England, the scented candles have been specially developed to combine optimum burn time with the best possible fragrance release. Utilising a high quality, 100% mineral wax the candles are able to achieve a long, clean and even burn for up to 40 hours. A beautiful gift idea, the collection has five fragrance blends: Fig & Ginger, Pomegranate, Cinnamon & Orange, Eucalyptus and Lemongrass. The neutral, white candles are hand-poured into a glass tumbler, embossed with the scent name in Sophie's signature handwriting and matched with a grey gift box.
Featured candles retail at £22.00 each and are available to purchase direct from the Sophie Allport website.


Many people look forward to and enjoy the arrival of fall weather and the ushering in of the holiday season. And to some people, this is actually the perfect time and weather to enjoy a hot tub party in their backyard with family and friends. There are wide ranges of options available on the web and make sure that you consider the specific needs while selecting hot tubs. The most online networks available in Internet lack quality of product and are expensive. So, make sure that you select hot tubs from a high quality network. There is something that's just wonderful about having your own hot tub right in your own yard, always at your disposal. You may not be thinking about the healthy side effects when you are ready to plunge in after a long and difficult day, but you would feel the relief right away. There are great varieties of hot tub spa styles available in market and you can choose the one that suits your budget and personal requirements. Most online networks available in Internet offer the world's best hot tub products for consumers at factory direct pricing that no other competitor in its class can offer you.


Adobe has released a critical security patch (APSB17-32) for Adobe Flash Player. This update addresses a critical type confusion vulnerability that could lead to code execution. Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems are affected. This vulnerability is identified with CVE-2017-11292.
A security researcher from Kaspersky Labs have uncovered this new zero-day remote code execution vulnerability in Adobe Flash, which was being actively exploited in the wild. According to researchers at Kaspersky Labs, the exploit was delivered through a Microsoft Office document and the final payload was the latest version of FinSpy malware. Analysis of the payload by researchers have indicated its link to a group of advanced persistent threat actors, known as BlackOasis. BlackOasis is the same group of attackers which were also responsible for exploiting another zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2017-8759) discovered in September 2017. Also, the final FinSpy payload in the current attack (CVE-2017-11292) shares the same command and control (C&C) server as the payload used with CVE-2017-8759.
This zero-day exploit is delivered through Microsoft Office document attached to a spam email, and embedded within this document is an ActiveX object which contains the Flash exploit. The Flash object contains an ActionScript which is responsible for extracting the exploit using a custom packer. The exploit is a memory corruption vulnerability that exists in the "com.adobe.tvsdk.mediacore.BufferControlParameters" class. If the exploit is successful, it will gain arbitrary read and write operations within the memory, allowing it to execute a shellcode. The shellcode then downloads the final payload (FinSpy).
FinFisher, also known as FinSpy, is surveillance software that has extensive spying capabilities on an infected system. It can secretly conduct live surveillance by turning ON infected system's webcams and microphones, recording everything the victim types on the keyboard, intercepting Skype calls, and exfiltration of files.
Flash Player versions 27.0.0.159 and earlier for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux.
Flash Player version 27.0.0.159 and earlier for Adobe Flash Player for Google Chrome.
Flash Player version 27.0.0.130 and earlier for Adobe Flash Player for Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 10 and Windows 8.x.
All the users of the Adobe Flash Player for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux are advised to update to Flash Player version 27.0.0.170. Flash Player for Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer 11 will be automatically updated to the latest version.
All these updates can be easily remediated through SecPod Saner. Install Saner to detect and remediate these type of threats and stay secure.


text:
Latest Edu-Reads
Beth Hawkins has your must-read of the week with the incredible true story of the Rosenwald schools. Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, partnered with Booker T. Washington to build more than 5,000 schools for black communities across the South. Researchers from the Federal Reserve "concluded that the Rosenwald schools significantly bolstered literacy, earnings and South-to-North migration among rural blacks." Check out the full story here.
"Dallas ISD is in fact retaining its best teachers at rates above the state's and the district's retention rates before the implementation of TEI. Overall, the district has kept 93% of teachers rated "Proficient II" or above. The district has retained 100% of its master-level teachers." That's from an update on how Dallas is doing on retaining its best teachers.
Education Strategy Group has a new resource on how states can boost FAFSA completion rates.
InsideHigherEd reports on a new study finding that many programs at public and nonprofit colleges would also fail the "gainful employment" test.
A new brief by John V. Winters concludes, "Working in a locality where a greater share of the population has a college degree is correlated with higher wages and better employment outcomes even controlling for individuals' own education and other characteristics. Studies based on various natural experiments suggest that this positive relationship is causal." That is, education is not just a benefit to individuals, it also has wider societal benefits.
–Guest post by Chad Aldeman
Posted on Jan 17, 2020 @ 11:46am
After Memphis instituted universal screening for its gifted and talented programs, it saw a dramatic uptick in the number of black and Hispanic students who were identified.
Dana Goldstein's New York Times piece on how textbooks differ across states is well done (and laid out beautifully). History may be written by the victors, but apparently it also has to cater to the whims of state boards of education.
Newark charter schools are producing large gains in reading and math achievement.
Matt Barnum has a helpful rundown of what the research says on what works (and doesn't) to help students complete college.
Mary Wells offers five ways districts need to change to support autonomous schools.
This two-part conversation with Rick Hess about the complex nature of educational reform and philanthropy is worth your time. Here's part one and part two. Mostly, it made me think of all the strange career incentives that are baked into our educational system.
How basketball is changing, in one graph.
Posted on Jan 15, 2020 @ 2:56pm
Has Common Core Failed?
The answer to the question, "has Common Core failed?" depends on what you think the goals of the Common Core movement were. In my mind, here's a short list of what the Common Core movement accomplished:
More rigorous state standards;
More commonality across different sets of state standards; and
A further push on the idea that K-12 schools should prepare students to be "college- and career-ready."
If, however, you held out hope that state standards themselves would lead to higher student achievement, well, you should read Morgan Polikoff and Tom Loveless' columns in this Education Next debate on the long-term impacts of the Common Core.
Taking the opposing view, Mike Petrilli argues that Common Core just hasn't had an effect yet. Ten years into the Common Core era, I'm with Polikoff and Loveless: Improving state standards may have been a worthy policy to pursue, but any downstream effects should be showing up by now. If anything, implementation fidelity is getting worse over time, not better. And, although Petrilli seems to think the opposite, I attribute the Common Core as one of several contributing factors that led to the weaker accountability systems adopted in the wake of the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act.
From my vantage point, the Common Core was a perfectly good idea that got over-extended and over-hyped.
The 13th annual CALDER conference is coming up in February. The agenda is here. It's open to all who can make it in D.C. (plus free breakfast and lunch!), or there's a webinar option for those who prefer to follow along remotely.
EdTrust has an important report looking at what's driving inequities in access to advanced courses. They find that Black and Hispanic students perform well when given opportunities, but a lack of seats, and inequitable distribution in those seats, deny them equal opportunities. The report also comes with a nifty data tool to see how your state is doing.
Rachel Canter talks to Jennifer Schiess on the educational progress in Mississippi.
Mike Antonucci looks at how California school districts, "are approaching financial crisis even as California increased education expenditures by extraordinary amounts — about 50 percent in the last five years."
"One of the most consistent findings in education research" is that Master's degrees don't make people better teachers. And yet we continue to reward teachers for earning Master's degrees. Grace Gedye asks why, and Ben Miller looks at implications for the debt burdens we're placing on teachers. And remember, these same useless Master's degrees are also distorting the teacher "wage gap" data that get tossed around ad nauseam.
Taylor Swaak dives into a new report showing that 41 percent of New York City schools don't represent their neighboring district's student demographics.
A new policy brief by Melanie Rucinski and Joshua Goodman finds, "the lack of diversity in Massachusetts' teacher workforce largely stems from early stages of the teacher development pipeline. Licensure exam takers and passers are substantially less diverse than the college-enrolled population, but among those who pass the exam there are few racial differences in rates of initial teaching employment or retention." Listen to Rucinski talk about the paper on the latest Education Next podcast.
Attainment Versus Achievement
I have a new column up at The 74 celebrating some good news on college attainment:
College attainment rates rose just 1 or 2 percentage points per decade for the first half of the 20th century and only began to pick up in the 1970s. Although the most recent data only go through 2018, the 2010s have already seen a gain of 5.1 percentage points, more than the gains in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. If the 2010s ended anything like the decade began, it will easily be the best decade we've ever seen in terms of college attainment.
The research is divided on whether attainment (aka years of education) or achievement (e.g. test scores) matters more. We just went through a decade with stagnant achievement scores, and ideally we'd see improvements in both, but I argue it's still worth celebrating the attainment gains.
Read it here.
Posted on Jan 9, 2020 @ 10:38am
Conor Williams has a moving tribute to Courtney Everts Mykytyn, the founder of Integrated Schools.
Bellwether's most-read blog posts and reports from 2019.
Matthew Yglesias summarizes new research suggesting that air filters could have an extraordinarily large effect on student achievement.
Louisiana schools chief John White is stepping down in March after eight years in the role. White has a number of accomplishments to be proud of–I'm partial to their highly-rated ESSA plan and their impressive gains in FAFSA completion rates–or Lauren Camera has a rundown of improvements under White's watch:
Louisiana boasted a graduation rate of 81% in 2018, graduating more students than ever before and up from 72% in 2012, the year White was appointed – an increase that translates to about 5,000 students. More students also enrolled in college in 2018 than ever before, with more than 25,000 pursuing a postsecondary education.
Also since 2012, the number of students earning Advanced Placement credits increased by more than 3,800, or 167%, according to state records. And nearly 5,000 more students earned a college-going score of at least 18 on the ACT colleges admissions test.
Even on the National Assessment of Education Progress, an assessment of math and reading among fourth- and eighth-graders in the U.S. that's showed stagnant and sometimes decreased achievement since 2015, the Bayou State has bright spots: Louisiana ranked No. 1 in the nation in 2019 for improvement in eighth grade math, the state's pace of improvement since 2009 in all subjects exceeds national trends and it ranks among the top 10 for improvement over the last decade in all four subject-grade assessments.
Here's an important new working paper on School Improvement Grants (SIG) from Min Sung, Alec Kennedy, and Susanna Loeb. Looking at two entire states (Washington and North Carolina) and two cities (San Francisco and an anonymous "Beachfront County"), they found large gains in reading and math achievement and high school graduation rates. Those gains grew over time, continued after the funding dried up, and were as large or larger for low-income students and students of color.
It's becoming increasingly clear that the narrative that SIG "didn't work" is wrong or at least incomplete. The better question now is not "did SIG work?" but rather "why did it produce results in some places and not others?"
Jill Barshay has a cool story about how John Jay College improved its graduation rates by focusing extra attention on seniors who were otherwise at risk of dropping out.
Now that it's 2020, will people stop using the, "By 2020, 65 percent of all jobs will require postsecondary education" statistic? Note that over time some people have simplified the stat to say, "65 percent will have a college degree," but the original source for the statistic, a 2013 report from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, included any "postsecondary education and training beyond high school." As I noted on Twitter, we actually made it! As of November 2019, 68 percent of all employed civilians had attended at least some college.
If you like your apples sweet, juicy, and crunchy, I recommend trying the new Cosmic Crisp. Background story here.
Posted on Jan 8, 2020 @ 5:48pm
I'm biased, but I enjoyed Greg Richmond's interview with Andy Rotherham. It's short, but there are lots of good nuggets in there, including this one:
My friends who are doctors and nurses, nobody is attacking them for indifference to housing or education policy. Only in education policy is focusing on a single issue as one lever for change considered a problem.
Kate Rabinowitz and Laura Meckler take a look at teacher diversity for The Washington Post. The article also includes interactive graphics that allow you to look up how teacher diversity compares to student diversity in your local school district.
"Instructions to suppress stereotypes often have the opposite effect, and prejudice reduction programs are much more effective when people are already open-minded, altruistic, and concerned about their prejudices to begin with." That's from Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic reviewing the academic literature on implicit bias training.
Katrina Boone on how and why, "Native parents and activists saw school choice as a way to pursue justice and cultural revitalization."
Which states have the best (and worst) teacher retirement plans? I take a look at one simple way to answer that question.
Washington schools chief Chris Reykdal is trying to address disparities in access to college-level coursework by pushing for a bill that would require school districts, colleges, and universities to cover the cost of dual credit for high school students.
Gentrification is a growing problem in all of our urban cities, right? Well, no. Here's Will Stancil correcting the record:
Research has also tended to show that no matter how you measure gentrification in the urban core, it's almost always more common to find neighborhoods afflicted by intensifying poverty. Out of the fifty biggest American regions, forty-four have core cities where the population in poverty has grown faster than the overall population since 2000. The only exceptions are New York City, Los Angeles, D.C., New Orleans, Atlanta, and Providence.
Posted on Jan 6, 2020 @ 12:29pm
Holiday Edu-Reads
This Wall Street Journal story is worth your time. Financial companies buy their way into teachers lounges with offers of free food or other perks, only to sell teachers on expensive, fee-laded 403(b) plans. Meanwhile, state and national teachers unions are willing middlemen who get kickbacks from these deals. Lest you don't trust the Wall Street Journal, here's a similar story from The New York Times and many more horror stories from the nonprofit 403bwise.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is this ProPublica story from New Jersey, where health plans for school employees cover the full cost of out-of-network expenses. The results are what you might expect:
In recent months, teachers across New Jersey have been protesting, even striking, for higher wages and more affordable benefits. Meanwhile, a state analysis shows, the glut of out-of-network payments has consumed hundreds of millions of dollars in the past four years. That's money that experts say could have helped fund the teachers' demands. And New Jersey residents are also pitching in to pay the bills: Homeowners in the towns where the schools are located are chipping in through higher property taxes.
Health care costs can be controlled with more aggressive oversight. Here's a story about a Boston union and how they did it:
It required union members to make a trade-off that many, at first, found unpalatable — giving up access to some of the city's best known, and most expensive, hospitals.
In return, however, workers not only kept their insurance premiums under control, they saved so much money that housekeepers like Rajae Nouira saw their hourly pay increase from $16.98 to $23.60 in five years, a 39% jump.
Evan Coughenour is not Catholic, but he has a growing appreciation for Catholic schools.
Tresha Ward has some tips for principals on how to lead autonomous schools, and how that's different than leading any other school.
Elizabeth Ross and Kelli Lakis look at licensure rules for teachers crossing state lines.
The FAFSA is about to be simplified, here's Evie Blad on what that means for students and Lamar Alexander's favorite prop.
Matt Chingos surveys the landscape on free college proposals and explains why, "A plan that simply pays whatever colleges are charging would bail out states like Vermont at the expense of states like Wyoming — and encourage states to raise tuition to capture more federal money."
EdSource has a deep dive, with a cool map, into community college transfer rates in California. About 40 percent of community college students in California eventually transfer to the state's university systems, but those rates vary widely based on geography.
Nat Malkus is worried about screen time for kids. As a parent, I wish my kids' school would send them home with some homework this holiday season. Or at least extra library books. Instead, all I got was a reminder of my kids' login for online learning platforms so they could spend their break with MORE screen time. No thanks…
Posted on Dec 20, 2019 @ 11:16am
Latest Edu-News
The edTPA is "a high-stakes assessment that's expensive, discriminates against people of color, is vulnerable to cheating, and forces schools to teach to the test." That's Mike Antonucci summarizing this article by Madeline Will about new research on edTPA… Oh, and the edTPA is also not a great predictor of teacher effectiveness. But other than that…
Justin Trinidad interviews Felicia Butts, the Director of Teacher Residencies at Chicago Public Schools, about their bilingual teacher residency program.
When a traditional school district is losing the competition for students to… other traditional school districts. It's weird how the word "charter" doesn't appear in the piece at all!
"whether they're GreatSchools' ratings, state ratings, or anything else, let's make them as accurate and nuanced as possible—but let's also focus on ensuring they are truly useful and accessible to all families." That's David Keeling from EdNavigator about how the families they work with interact with school ratings.
Here's your regular reminder that colleges determine what "college-ready" means.
A new study finds that housing vouchers boosted math and reading scores in New York City.
Billions of dollars are at stake. There will be only one champion. I'm talking, of course, about the FAFSA Fast Break challenge.
After multiple pauses, Congress has finally agreed to kill the "Cadillac Tax" on high-cost health care plans. This was one of the key funding provisions of the original Affordable Care Act. As I noted back in July, the Cadillac Tax was meant to address a particularly bad incentive baked into our tax policies:
I'd rather Americans didn't have our health care benefits tied to our employers at all, but we've created a particularly weird incentive by not taxing employer spending on health care. That creates a system where the people using health care have little reason to help control health care costs. And, in the long run, employers spend more and more on benefits at the expense of salaries and wages. That's bad for efficiency, bad for budgets, and, ultimately, bad for workers.
The Case For Student Growth
I have a new column up at The 74 making the case for why we should measure student growth. It may be easier to judge school quality based on the students who are enrolled there, but that will likely present a misleading view of the school's actual contributions to student learning:
The only way out of this conundrum is for states and districts to take the lead in measuring student growth rates and embedding them in a more prominent way in school rating systems. For example, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education in Washington, D.C., has run the numbers on what its "STAR" accountability system would look like both with and without growth. It concludes:
"…schools at the lower end of the STAR rating distribution tend to benefit from the inclusion of growth metrics, whereas schools at the upper end of the STAR rating distribution would tend to benefit from the exclusion of growth metrics."
That is, the D.C. school ratings would have the same problems as the real estate agents on Long Island and the reformers in Newark if they didn't include student growth. The D.C. example is a reminder that if we don't measure student growth, we'll have the wrong definition of school quality. Worse, we'll favor student populations that are already doing well, while harshly judging schools that actually help students learn the most.
Posted on Dec 17, 2019 @ 2:43pm
Statements on Eduwonk are the views of the authors alone and should not be considered those of Bellwether Education Partners or of any others within the organization. Bellwether maintains an internal culture that cultivates and respects diverse points of view and does not take organizational positions on education issues.
About Eduwonk & Bellwether
About Eduwonk
About Bellwether Education Partners
About Andrew Rotherham
Ahead of the Heard
Follow Eduwonk
Get Eduwonk by Email
Tweets by @arotherham
Search Eduwonk.com
Reviews of Eduwonk.com
Smart List: 60 People Shaping the Future of K-12 Education
"Least influential of education's most influential information sources."
-- Education Week Research Center
"full of very lively short items and is always on top of the news...He gets extra points for skewering my high school rating system"
-- Jay Mathews, The Washington Post
"a daily dose of information from the education policy world, blended with a shot of attitude and a dash of humor"
-- Education Week
"unexpectedly entertaining"..."tackle[s] a potentially mindfogging subject with cutting clarity... they're reading those mushy, brain-numbing education stories so you don't have to!"
-- Mickey Kaus
"a very smart blog... this is the site to read"
-- Ryan Lizza
"everyone who's anyone reads Eduwonk"
-- Richard Colvin
"designed to cut through the fog and direct specialists and non-specialists alike to the center of the liveliest and most politically relevant debates on the future of our schools"
-- The New Dem Daily
"peppered with smart and witty comments on the education news of the day"
-- Education Gadfly
"don't hate Eduwonk cuz it's so good"
-- Alexander Russo, This Week In Education
"the morning's first stop for education bomb-throwers everywhere"
-- Mike Antonucci, Intercepts
"…the big dog on the ed policy blog-ck…"
-- Michele McLaughlin
"I check Eduwonk several times a day, especially since I cut back on caffeine"
-- Joe Williams
"...one of the few bloggers who isn't completely nuts"
-- Mike Petrilli, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
"I have just three 'go to' websites: The Texas Legislature, Texas Longhorn sports, and Eduwonk"
-- Sandy Kress
"penetrating analysis in a lively style on a wide range of issues"
-- Walt Gardner
"Fabulous"
-- Education Week's Alyson Klein
"thugs"
-- Susan Ohanian
EduReading
Read Andy's columns at U.S. News & World Report
Slidedeck: The State of the Charter Sector
By Ashley LiBetti,
Phillip Burgoyne-Allen,
Brandon Lewis,
Kirsten Schmitz
Nuance in the Noise: The Complex Reality of Teacher Shortages
By Kaitlin Pennington McVey,
Justin Trinidad
Eight Cities
By Jason Weeby,
Lynne Graziano,
Tanya Paperny,
Sara Mead
By Hailly T.N. Korman,
Slidedeck: Overview of the History and Status of Teachers' Unions
Kelly Robson,
Kaitlin Pennington,
Juliet Squire
Copyright © 2020 Bellwether Education Partners. All rights reserved.


text:
Iraq War Veteran Spreads Knowledge of Martial Arts
A Life member of a VFW Post in Texas taught the skill to fellow vets while deployed
Re-introducing a Vietnam War veteran to martial arts set the course of one future veteran's life and spurred his desire to help others.
Clay Worley, who discovered the ancient art form in his youth, served in the Army from 1997-98 with the 1st Infantry Division and 1st Armored Division in Bosnia and from 2003-04 with the 82nd Airborne Division and 1st Cavalry Division in Iraq. The interaction with the Vietnam vet gave Worley a new perspective and motivation.
"To be on the floor with this Vietnam vet, as he was telling me a little bit about his story — and those guys tend to be kind of close hold in terms of their experience — they don't go around boasting about it, I just thought to myself, 'I don't know what he faced, but I am awed that I'm even teaching him anything because he ought to be teaching me,'" recalled Worley, a Life member of VFW Post 8587 in Georgetown, Texas.
Clay Worley (left), a VFW member and martial arts instructor, leads a class through a cool-down period after his session at the Universal Martial Arts Hall of Fame weekend in August 2019 at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel in Houston. Photo by Kari Williams.
Worley, an 80 percent disabled combat veteran, started his own martial arts business, Dekimasu Karate Studio, at 18 years old. It has since grown into an alliance with five schools. He also owns a business consulting company called Fit Fighters Club of Central Texas. He taught martial arts to Marine Corps reservists during field exercises in the early 1990s.
While deployed to Bosnia and Iraq, Worley taught martial arts and said his sessions attracted people from all ranks and job fields — cooks and refuelers to pilots and paratroopers.
"We're all bammin' and jammin' and nobody's being formal with each other," Worley said. "Nobody was being disrespectful, but the social barriers and the occupational barriers just went away."
In the mid-1990s, after earning his commission as a lieutenant, Worley instructed "platoon-level" classes during physical fitness training. From 2001-03, while a member of the Texas National Guard, he instituted hand-to-hand combat training.
The sport, he said, is his passion and he wants to make sure it is "always affordable and accessible" to those interested in pursuing it.
"I want to share the knowledge," Worley said. "I don't want anybody to think that they got to crawl up some mountain in far east Asia and only after 30 years can they scratch the surface on what it's all about."
In addition to his work while on active duty, Worley has spent more than 10 years hosting fundraising seminars for veterans and their families, and teaching veterans individually and in group settings.
A 'Unique Approach'
Working with veterans takes a "unique approach" that includes collaboration, patience and encouragement, according to Worley.
"You have to watch, listen and help each veteran find their own personal victory," he said. "You can't push and pull and drag a bunch of veterans across the floor when they're coming from different age levels, skill levels and fitness levels. You can't take the one-size fits all approach. It just doesn't work."
He also conducts a "needs evaluation" with vets to determine their goals.
"Especially in that first lesson, I'm watching and I'm listening," Worley said. "I'm not talking nearly as much. I'm giving them something to do according to their interest level."
Worley currently has 200 clients worldwide, and one instructor in his alliance runs a veterans program in Washington state.
Kathrin Sumpter, who is not a veteran, has worked with vets since 2007. She has been involved in martial arts for 28 years, and met Worley in 2008.
Sumpter incorporates Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) into her approach. EMDR is a form of psychotherapy that uses eye movements to help manage symptoms of diagnoses such as PTSD.
She said martial arts movements require "left-brain, right-brain switching," such as performing five punches with one arm, then switching to the other. That "volley," she said, creates an isolation of the movements.
"I've seen the effects of this dynamic exercise," Sumpter said. "[In these] very controlled, combative techniques, you can channel the combat into a logical … with purpose exercise, but it's combative."
Delivering a 'Good Experience'
Worley said he has seen veterans leave sessions feeling better about themselves.
"You get smiles. You get looks of relief," Worley said. "And you know without them having to say, 'Thank you,' that you delivered a good experience for them."
Sumpter said she tailors her programs based on the individual needs of her participants.
One Vietnam War veteran, she said, came to class "in the throes of a panic attack." She helped him through the sessions by using a partner drill called the Hubud, which involves "three-count, hand-to-hand tactical and tactile" movements using elbows and forearms.
"I saw this guy go from bouncing off the walls, his shoulders dropped, the tightness in his voice left him right before my eyes," Sumpter said, adding that he became a "grounded person."
Vietnam War veteran and fellow martial artist Steven Jimerfield began his martial arts training in 1966, prior to his deployment. He served with the Coast Guard from 1967-68 on the USCGC Gresham and 1968-69 and 1970 on the USCGC Taney as a boatswain's mate 1st class.
While never officially diagnosed, Jimerfield said fellow vets have told him he shows signs of PTSD. He said he has felt guilt over not seeing "the action a lot of guys did" in Vietnam, but also believes symptoms stem from his experiences in his law enforcement career.
Jimerfield worked in Coast Guard Intelligence as a criminal investigator and later for the Alaska Department of Public Safety. He retired after 30 years with the Alaska State Troopers, the last seven spent overseeing one-on-one control tactics training.
As the years go by, he said, he has noticed symptoms more frequently.
"When I was coming out of my last knee surgery, I had a flashback," Jimerfield said. "When I was coming out of anesthesia, I had a nurse who has worked with veterans, and she held my hand and she talked to me and told me I was home. I was OK. I was safe. It was really touching."
Jimerfield, who has been practicing martial arts for 50 years, said when he teaches classes and helps others, he is "pushing" his PTSD symptoms in a different direction.
"I believe that takes your focus off and away, so we bury a lot of that, I think," Jimerfield said. "I have put [up] a barrier, and I just don't think about it, so it's not there."
As a one-on-one tactics control instructor, Jimerfield said, he does not have a lot of veterans attending his class. However, his personal interest in martial arts has helped him connect with fellow Vietnam-era comrades.
"I have a friend who's a professor at Idaho State who's a Vietnam veteran," Jimerfield said. "We met through the martial arts and, amazingly, we served around the same time. He was an F-14 pilot at the siege of Khe Sanh as a forward observer."
The two discovered that they are the same age and were in country at the same time.
"It's kind of funny because we fold our money exactly the same," Jimerfield said. "All of our little habits are the same. We just became great friends in training."
Sumpter said the work Worley has done for his fellow veterans like Jimerfield is inspiring. She reaches out to him when her students face PTSD symptoms. Worley can "speak a language" she cannot, Sumpter said.
"I've gotten a lot of good advice from Clay," she said. "You've got to know where these guys are at, where they're coming from. So I've been able to change my approach and maybe reach people that I couldn't reach before."
Worley has met fellow veterans like Jimerfield and connected with people like Sumter to further the mission from a "bug that was planted" in his teen years.
"That planted a seed in my mind and my spirit that grew into this gigantic tree," Worley said. "And I've never lost it."
This article is featured in the January 2020 issue of VFW magazine.


text:
George Orwell, a Man for Our Time
Thomas Banks Christopher Akehurst Gerald J. Russello
Thomas Banks: Orwell and the Life to Come
George Orwell was an atheist for nearly all his life. If the account of his school years which he supplied in his long essay "Such, Such Were the Joys" is to be relied on, he had ceased to believe in God by the time he was fourteen years old, and had conceived a strong distaste both for the doctrines of Christianity and for its Founder:
I hated Jesus and the Hebrew patriarchs. If I had sympathetic feelings towards any character in the Old Testament, it was towards such people as Cain, Jezebel, Haman, Agag, Sisera: in the New Testament my friends, if any, were Ananias, Caiaphas, Judas and Pontius Pilate. But the whole business of religion seemed to be strewn with psychological impossibilities.
As the boy grew into the man, his views on Christ and the characters of sacred history do not appear to have changed very much, though his early esteem for such oddly chosen heroes as Haman and Judas appears to have left him. But to the religion of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer in which he had been raised Orwell never returned. His guiding allegiances were to the revolutionary working classes, to the socialist movement, and the liberal tradition of free speech. All of these loyalties, as he understood them, were bound to turn him into an enemy of organised Christianity in general and of the Catholic Church in particular. For Catholic intellectuals he rarely had a good word, even if he might on occasion recognise the literary talents of a Chesterton or a Hopkins, or the plainspoken honesty of a Frank Sheed. As for the Catholic culture of his time, to him it principally meant General Franco, mental stagnation, authoritarian politics and repression generally.
These essays appear in October's Quadrant.
Contempt for the sacred he carried about like a loaded weapon, and was willing to use it against even fairly innocuous targets. In a letter to a female friend in 1932, he describes an experience at an Anglican parish in a poor neighbourhood where he was temporarily lodging:
My sole friend is the curate—High Anglican but not a creeping Jesus and a very good fellow. Of course it means that I have to go to church, which is an arduous job here, as the service is so popish that I don't know my way about it … I have promised to paint one of the church idols (a quite skittish looking [Blessed Virgin], half life-size, and I shall try to make her look as much like one of the illustrations in La Vie Parisienne as possible) …
La Vie Parisienne, for those not familiar with the name, was an erotic men's magazine in the early twentieth century. To quote this much is to demonstrate that Orwell was not, like certain other sceptics, a man burdened with any lingering fondness for the religion he had cast off as an adolescent.
The lessons of war gave his odium more fuel on which to feed. Orwell served as an infantryman with a Loyalist unit in the Spanish Civil War, in which the cause of the Church was closely bound up with that of Orwell's Nationalist enemies. The cause of literature nearly suffered an irreplaceable loss on May 20, 1937, when the future author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four was shot through the neck by an enemy sniper. Orwell recovered and returned to England with no kinder feelings towards the political Right than those he had carried with him to Catalonia. His encounter with the Catholic Church in the flesh had, if anything, left him even more hard-bitten in his anticlericalism. He wrote approvingly at this time of the burning of Spanish churches in communist-controlled areas, mentioning with regret that Barcelona's Sagrada Familia was spared during the violence. He treated with scepticism accounts of murdered nuns (stories now known to be horribly true), and, being left hors de combat, continued his war with the Nationalists and their sympathisers with his pen.
One notes in his journalism from the end of the 1930s and the early 1940s with what vigilance he kept accounts of allies and enemies. He was not by nature a bitter man, but he made a point always to know which side of politics a fellow writer was on, and party affiliations certainly factored in his judgments of books and their authors. His professed belief in literary objectivity was not a hypocritical sham, but its application in his own practice had its limits. He was saved from turning into a narrow and tiresome ideologue by his generous instincts and quintessentially English sense of fair play, yet he never let sleep his awareness of who is For us and who is Against.
The political was not everything to him. The doctrinaire Marxist and every other crank who lives to overthrow the established customs of mankind were, equally with the Jesuit and the reactionary, objects of his personal disgust. The civilised decencies of private life he never ceased to value, as the reader discovers in Orwell's homely reflections on the English pub, the English rose garden and the domestic fireplace. These and other of this life's unbought graces had in him a devout appreciator. Still, a writer less interested in the world above this world would be far to seek.
For this reason it is of interest that Orwell considered the declining belief in the supernatural to be a matter worthy of his concern. He refers to the growing disbelief in the life to come in several passages of his collected works, and never lets himself slip into the facile secularist attitude that this is unambiguously a good thing, the result of growing freedom of mind, public education and all the rest of it. Rather, the collapse of the former Christian confidence in the resurrection and the final judgment was, as Orwell concluded, one of the reasons why his generation had seen the rise of the dictators of Left and Right, secret police and concentration camps. The following passage may be taken to summarise his unease:
Western civilization, unlike some oriental civilizations, was founded partly on the belief in individual immortality … The western conception of good and evil is very difficult to separate from it. There is little doubt that the modern cult of power worship is bound up with the modern man's feeling that life here and now is the only life there is. If death ends everything, it becomes much harder to believe that you can be in the right even if you are defeated. Statesmen, nations, theories, causes are judged almost inevitably by the test of material success. Supposing that one can separate the two phenomena, I would say that the decay of the belief in personal immortality has been as important as the rise of machine civilization.
Elsewhere he puts the matter even more bluntly: "The major problem of our time is the decay of belief in personal immortality."
Orwell thought the study of theology a ludicrous preoccupation, but in these passages he seizes upon the root of much modern perplexity. Absent the assurance that there awaits every one of us a resurrection, whether for good or evil, all the great questions of personal conduct become immensely more obscure. When three of the Four Last Things have been analysed out of existence, exactly what moral weight attaches to the one that remains? The grave, if it is the final abode of St Peter and Nero equally, would seem to be a strong argument that the earthly life of the first is not a significantly better model to live by than that of the second. The unconscious dust of the two may even now be mixed together, neither punished nor rewarded. If the dogma of the life to come is indeed a cheat, anyone who discards it in favour of the gospel of Epicurus acts wisely; moreover, with the blessing of St Paul: "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable."
Orwell was not given to making lazy intellectual compromises. He hated the easy Epicureanism that the modern Western world sold in his day and still sells on its every billboard and pop-up ad in ours. Seldom as he found himself in agreement with Chesterton, who had seen America, he would undoubtedly have concurred with the opinion that the great Catholic man of letters offered after a visit to Times Square: "How beautiful it would be for someone who could not read." The modern world, so much of which is a skilfully organised means of causing us to forget that we have souls, as well as minds and bodies, presented few attractions that Orwell, any more than his putative enemy Chesterton, found remotely worthy of applause. He never fooled himself into thinking that the conquest of happiness is no more than a question of establishing widespread equality in education, employment, and access to material goods. He knew that men have other needs:
Most Socialists are content to point out that once Socialism has been established we shall be happier in a material sense, and to assume that all problems lapse when one's belly is full. But the truth is the opposite: when one's belly is empty, one's only problem is an empty belly. It is when we have got away from drudgery and exploitation that we shall really start wondering about man's destiny and the reason for his existence.
Orwell has been dead for seventy years now. The problem of empty bellies is still with us, even if it is not so common in our time as it was in his. For this we do well to be thankful. But it would take an invincible optimism to examine the lives that we live now and conclude that the soul of the West is at all better nourished than was the case when Orwell, a lifetime since, found it famished.
Thomas Banks is a teacher of Latin and literature and a poet who lives in North Carolina. His writing has appeared in First Things, Crisis Magazine and the New English Review. He and his wife offer instruction in ancient and modern literature at The House of Humane Letters (houseofhumaneletters.com).
Christopher Akehurst: Big Sibling is Watching You
Who would you suppose at first sight this verbal snapshot represents?
A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture … seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.
They really get themselves into a state, don't they, the social media mob, crouched over their keyboards, some in unsavoury shared houses, others in the more desirable residences enjoyed by Green Guardian-subscribing Friends of the ABC and suchlike, clacking out in transports of rancour the digital screeching that passes for reasoned comment in the obscenity-laden echo chamber of online "debate". But of course the words above are not of our time, as readers may already have recognised. They are from George Orwell's description of the daily "Two Minutes Hate" in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Orwell did not foresee the internet but he did foresee the rages that engulf the worldwide mob in our own era. He foresaw the attack on free speech. He also foresaw the kind of lies we have invented to accommodate, for instance, fantasists in the field of sexual identity. What is the difference between insisting that "I am a woman" when biology says you're a man, and believing "two plus two equals five", as Orwell's robotic Party members do when instructed by the omnipotent Big Brother?
When, many years ago, I first read Nineteen Eighty-Four (the title year is set thirty-five years after the date of writing) it struck me as a horrifying excursion into the impossible, more like science fiction than a realisable portrayal of our social future. I have just read it again and far from a fanciful foretelling it flashes like a warning light on red. Much of what it describes is already happening around us.
Stalin and Hitler—and let us never forget that Hitler was not, as portrayed by the modern Left, an extreme right-winger but a socialist—showed us (and Orwell) the barbaric excesses that tyrannies are capable of. But surely, or so I concluded on first reading the book, the kind of vicious intolerance of dissent that kept their—and later Mao Zedong's—despotic regimes in power could never take hold in our liberal democratic Western society. That was why we had fought the Second World War—to protect democracy—and later the Cold War, to keep the "evil empire" at bay. Our shared Judeo-Christian-Westminster set of values united us, as did our determination to defend our freedom.
Who could have predicted that the gravest threat to our freedom would come not from without but from within? Orwell did. The England he describes—though it could be anywhere in the West—is the product of internal revolution. We got that too.
It wasn't 1984 but 1968 that fractured our outward unity and released the torrents of hatred of those shared values. The most visible haters were not the supposedly downtrodden working class but students from the prosperous middle class, beneficiaries all of those same values, orchestrated into action by the anti-capitalist effusions of, chiefly, weaselly old Marxist Herbert Marcuse, a refugee from Hitler nestling in tenured privilege in the world's most capitalistic country. Marcuse persuaded a pampered generation that our values were all wrong and that our society was oppressive, greedy and rotten. And so we were plunged back a century into an age of perennial riots and cries for revolution with which we still live.
Feminists were the first of the new revolutionaries to try and force us down Orwell's path. They were the first to impose on us, in the form of "inclusive language", a version of Orwell's truncated concept-eliminating Newspeak. Any words with "man" in them had to go, so that we finished up with absurdities like person Friday, which had only made sense in Defoe's formulation, or in having meetings presided over by something you sit on. I haven't checked but I imagine "Big Brother" is now banned as well. Has he become Big Sibling?
Newspeak is a direct parallel with the contemporary Left's politically correct language. The essence both in the book and now is to prevent free speech by suppressing words that convey what today's linguistic censors call "inappropriate" ideas. Language, instead of being a glorious means of expressing our thoughts and imagination, of communicating to everyone, as Matthew Arnold put it, "the best of what has been thought and said", is to the contemporary leftist an instrument of manipulation. Eliminate the words for concepts you don't approve of, and you limit what people can say and think, or as one of Orwell's characters remarks, "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words."
How many words have been forcibly removed from our vocabulary simply because some politicised offence-garnering identity group has decided it objects to them? In the same way that in Nineteen Eighty-Four the liquidation of inconvenient citizens ("traitors") is arbitrary and sudden, so it is with today's linguistic liquidations. Aboriginal, I read the other day, is all at once taboo; colonial, applied to beer, was last June's hate-word. Long gone are lady, considered by feminists a term of patriarchal oppression, and Christian name, allegedly out of place in a multicultural society. Black gets objected to for imaginary "racist" associations in usages such as "it was a black day" because fanatics don't understand that the metaphor derives not from the skin colour, which is never true black anyway, but from primitive fear of absence of light. By the same token, if Greens had a little more imagination they might want to do away with "green with envy" (which of course is usually entirely apposite) while the majority of us could affect to be offended by "whited sepulchre".
If words, then books. In Nineteen Eighty-Four all books from earlier eras when people were free to think have been hunted out and destroyed and such classics as are allowed to remain have been rewritten into unrecognisability. Our contemporary bibliophobes with their schemes for "decolonising" libraries are right on board with that, even if book-burnings are still rare—probably because many young people of today's protesting sort have trouble reading, as educational surveys repeatedly show, and prefer to destroy visible objects even they can understand, such as statues.
Mobs do not reason, or else, in their anger at, say, slavery, they would protest against present-day slavers—Muslims in North Africa, Asian sweatshop owners—not real or imagined past ones. They don't reason because they exemplify Orwell's Newspeak verb bellyfeel in irrationally accepting—bellyfeeling—an assertion, the fundamental one of our time being the leftist notion that Western history as a catalogue of oppression and exploitation has been wholly destructive of the planet, its people and environment. And of course they mindlessly chant slogans of numbing meaninglessness as though repetition were a substitute for content. As Orwell's Julia, an outwardly keen Party member, advised, "Always yell with the crowd."
Winston Smith, the principal character in Nineteen Eighty-Four, discovers to his cost that opposition to the imposed orthodoxy leads to a terrible end. Similarly if not yet quite as brutally, anyone in public life who dares to question today's orthodoxies faces loss of job, income and reputation, irrespective of what the prevailing orthodoxy is, since as in the novel they change from time to time. In Nineteen Eighty-Four the change is one of military alliances, with the two other powers in the world alternating from enemy of Airstrip One, as England has been banally renamed, to friend and back again (the Nazi-Soviet pact was the inspiration for this), each variation requiring instant unquestioning loyalty or hatred from Party members. In our time the changes depend on which identity group is in the current ascendant. We've had gays and lesbians demanding marriage and feminists reviling marriage as domestic slavery. We've had Aborigines demanding "constitutional recognition" and Aborigines who don't want to be part of the nation at all. The "trans" lobby seems set now for a good long run, as do the anti-whitists with their desperate hand-me-down emulation of another country's locally specific racial politics—which now includes the importation from America, by people who in everything else are viscerally anti-American, of alien terminology to describe our Aborigines—"people of colour" and "first nations".
There are other parallels today with Ninety-Eighty-Four. In the novel there are various hate figures put through the motions of spurious public trials and exposed to vilification and revulsion. We had Cardinal Pell. There is a constant war to keep people afraid. We have a pandemic, and apparently the prospect of more, with all the opportunities for regulating people's lives that they offer to the dictatorially inclined. We live under constant surveillance, which Orwell foresaw too, with the telescreen in every home and public place. The telescreen ensured, too, a ubiquitous stultifying uniformity of thought. We can experience that by stepping onto a university campus, or turning on the ABC, or reading the pronouncements of our awful Human Rights Commission.
Above all, no humour. There is not a wisp in the book. How could there be when the Left, portrayed in Nineteen Eighty-Four in the fullness of its triumph over all that is decent and worthwhile, and in our own day obsessed by its dreary paranoia over sex and race, has no sense of humour at all? This is especially manifest at state-sponsored, hence leftism-infused, "comedy" festivals.
In twenty-first-century Australia Nineteen Eighty-Four is still—just—in the realm of dystopian fantasy. But the spirit of Big Sibling presides over every civic, cultural, educational and even sporting institution we have. If we can't liquidate him, we're finished.
Christopher Akehurst, a regular contributor, lives in Melbourne. His article "The Continued Decline of the Suburban Church" appeared in the July-August issue.
Gerald J. Russell: Orwell Knew
There is a parlour game conservatives in America sometimes like to play among themselves. The game tries to predict whose dystopia the country (sometimes expanded to include the Anglosphere, or the whole "West") is most likely to experience. Until the end of the Cold War, the answer was obvious: that of George Orwell. His visions in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four terrified conservatives (and not just them, of course), who saw the rise of communism as the most serious threat to Western civilisation. The barnyard Lenin and Stalin, Big Brother, Newspeak and the rest became Orwell's metaphors for a totalitarian world government opposed to democracy and the free market. Terms such as doublethink and memory hole entered the lexicon in part because they reflected very real fears at the time.
After the Cold War ended, however, Orwell was somewhat eclipsed by the different dystopia of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Instead of a dour communist state, Huxley wrote of a rich, decadent technopolis, whose denizens are deformed through eugenics and whose populace is rendered almost insensate and anaemic by drugs and other pleasures. That vision seemed more suited to the world dominated by a global capitalism rising towards the end of history that promised to convert us into consumers rather than citizens, for our own good. The global elite, sometimes referred to as the "Davoisie" in reference to their gatherings in Davos, Switzerland, would run the world for us. That vision of course had its own casualties, not least the millions of those lost in the great shuffle of global markets, who have turned instead to narcotics, pornography, gambling, video games and other distractions helpfully provided by corporations or government, who are then left to their dissolution.
The brave new world of Huxley's imagination seems strikingly sophisticated and intellectual when compared to that portrayed in the third possible alternative future sometimes raised along with the other two, the 2006 film Idiocracy. In that movie, which has become something of a cult classic, the population has grown stupid and lazy, with people barely able to function independently while they are ruled by incompetent corporate masters who cannot even understand the system they have inherited but cannot maintain.
Of course, the distinction between the Orwellian and Huxleyan dystopias was always a bit overstated. Huxley's world is in its way as totalitarian as Orwell's Oceania, and the proles are also drugged with screens and narcotics. As Ryan Barilleaux has written, a dystopia is not simply a bad political situation, or a civilisation in decline, though these may be present. Rather:
dystopia is necessarily and specifically the consequence of utopianism (the pursuit of utopia in this world, as opposed to the great tradition of utopian speculation). It reflects someone's program of social and political perfection.
And dystopias have common characteristics, such as abuse of technology, social regimentation and inevitable totalitarianism to implement technology and that social regimentation for dystopian ends. Thus Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale is closer to portraying a real dystopia than Trump is in bringing one about; Trump just doesn't have a vision of perfection to actualise, however much his opponents would wish such a vision upon him.
In particular, the time seems right for an Orwell revival. He was a man of the Left, and despite (perhaps because of) the current populist wave in parts of the West, the Left has responded with enormous cultural, political and financial power to assert their views in ways that would have won the admiration of Big Brother. Indeed, like the fights in the 1930s among various factions of the Left (which as Richard Bradford recounts, cost Orwell access to some support by those who thought he was not hewing to the party line), today's progressives seem as intent on destroying the older liberalism of the post-war generation as they are with their putative opponents on the Right, in an echo of totalitarian politics from Russia to Cambodia. Social media platforms routinely manipulate search results to exclude opinions with which they disagree, sometimes in ways that are not obvious. Corporations fall over themselves to announce their allegiance to current orthodoxies, and the past becomes reduced to a binary history of Us versus Them. Moreover, the "Us" and "Them" change as power politics dictates, so everyone is in a constant state of unease about saying or doing the wrong thing, or even referring to someone else who has done or said something contrary to current orthodoxy. As Orwell himself puts it in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the dominance of totalitarian ideology creates an "eternal present" where the Party is always right.
Richard Bradford's Orwell: A Man of Our Time (published this year by Bloomsbury) is largely a straightforward, solid account of Orwell's life and work. Bradford, author of biographies of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, among others, presents the outlines of Orwell's professional, personal and intellectual life. But the point of the biography is not to rehash that ground. Instead, it is to bring Orwell into our time. In particular Bradford thinks Orwell is a "man of our time" because many of the things Orwell saw in the 1930s and 1940s have come or are coming to pass:
antisemitism—especially on the extreme left; the toleration by the free world of authoritarian regimes, now because we need them economically; dim-witted materialism; populist politics; brainless nationalism; doublethink as a motor for political discourse—that is, outright lying; the resurgence of seemingly endemic xenophobia; and, of course, Brexit.
Orwell still speaks with authority. We read Orwell because it is evident from even a brief familiarity with his biography that he was largely a man of principle; his experience in Burma, his life of poverty until Animal Farm, his volunteering to fight in the Spanish Civil War despite poor health, and then volunteering for service on the eve of the Second World War even though he was too old, his tramping about in London, Paris and the English coal mines to experience the lives of the poor and "down and out". These lend an unmistakable authenticity to his writing, so even when we disagree with Orwell, we know he is writing from a place of deep belief opposed to oppression and injustice.
Bradford is clear, most of the time, about the fact that the "present-day distortion and manipulation of fact" are occurring on all parts of the political spectrum. However, he seems to indicate that the Tories are perhaps a little worse. Indeed, he does more than indicate: his comparison of Nigel Farage with the Nazi Oswald Mosley is explicit. And his easy conflation of nationalism and xenophobia ultimately fails to convince because they need not go together. Indeed, Bradford condemns the call centres and other low-wage jobs that have robbed the working classes of much of their opportunities for advancement, and tries to blame both on Brexit voters. But one message from Brexit, as it was with the presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016, is that voters were in part rejecting the free-market globalism that Bradford also seems to oppose.
Moreover, much of the populism currently regnant in the United Kingdom and America does not have a dystopian program of the kind Orwell would recognise. Trump is not (as Bradford recognises) Big Brother, and the Tories are not the Party. The ideological threat in our current age comes more directly from the Left and not the Right. In America, recent efforts to tear down statues and other monuments, making no distinction between those, for example, who supported slavery and those who opposed it, are just one example of the "eternal present" being imposed across society. Other examples include changing dictionary definitions, removing objectionable movies from streaming services, and other actions meant to depict the past (or what some perceive as the past) to be "bad" and the present, "good". The electronic surveillance anticipated by Orwell's telescreens is here, and it is run by techno-futurists from Silicon Valley who have little sympathy for reactionary or conservative causes. Though there is no Big Brother on the Left, they have a more clearly developed program and they even have a disembodied version of Oceania's fictitious enemy, Emmanuel Goldstein; in this case it is "patriarchal oppression" or similar words that serve the same purpose: demonising enemies and rendering civilised disagreement very difficult.
Bradford does recognise that the Orwellian temptation also exists on the Left. He defends the late Sir Roger Scruton from the false attacks on him that led to his removal from an architectural advisory post, and recounts the efforts to whitewash communism in the 1930s and 1940s. But more important, he grasps Orwell's insight about the role of non-ideologues in a world under siege from totalitarian impulses. In the West, liberals are happy to see progressives charge against those whom they also oppose, never thinking that the revolution will turn on them as well. They think they can have their own private space in which to indulge their freedom while the mob parades outside and attacks their common enemies. But that is a false hope; the ideology Orwell describes is all-consuming, and the liberal fallacy "is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside". Bradford notes:
Orwell's anger against the apparent alliance between complacency, indifference, and self-absorption bred out of liberal democracy; such citizens took for granted their entitlements so long as there seemed no danger that they'd be taken away.
That is, until the mob stops looking for the reactionaries and comes for you. Ask Winston Smith what happens next.
Gerald J. Russello is the editor of the University Bookman (https://kirkcenter.org/bookman), a quarterly published since 1960 by the Russell Kirk Center in Mecosta, Michigan
11 thoughts on "George Orwell, a Man for Our Time"
Elizabeth Beare says:
Socialism is very nasty, as he found out, the hard way, and proceeded to tell others.
This man could write.
He knew how important it was to be able to put down words, evoke emotions, show processes and engage his readers in reflection on what he had written and how it might apply to their lives and thinking.
Certainly, a man for these times too, where a lot is written with blinkers on.
RB says:
I understood it to be a warning, instead of its a "how too manual".
1984, originally a hard satire, has become a manual.
Facebook and Twitter are become the Ministry of Truth, deliberately censoring wholesale facts that their policy people (HR) find very unappealing, dangerous. The Biden Jr emails are a flashpoint here. Orwell well understood the political power in controlling information.
Ian MacDougall says:
Elizabeth:
Monopoly socialism, as in Stalin's Russia and Mao's China, yes. But modern liberal-democratic capitalism includes a measure of socialism: we do not have privatised roads and public highways, nor privatised air, nor privatised sunlight. An attempt was made not so long ago to privatise a fair bit of Sydney's water supply, as in:
https://www.afr.com/politics/arthur-sinodinos-and-the-surreal-world-of-australian-water-20140322-ixbyv
But fortunately for Sydneysiders and the rest of the nation, it got terminated, with ICAC involvement. Information had got out of control.
pgang says:
Wouldn't we be better off with a Solzhenitsyn revival? He was infinitely more credible than Orwell. George was merely an observer and admirer of the left, whereas Alexander was its product.
Solzhenitsyn knew how to write a story. Orwell? Good luck struggling through his dreariness.
Haven't read that one Ian. I have his compendium on Kindle but decided that life was too short to work my way through it after slogging through a couple of the more popular ones. If I can work up the courage I'll attempt your suggestion in future.
Peter OBrien says:
16th October 2020 at 10:06 am
Orwell described the destination, not the journey. We are now living in 1974 – or possibly later, this trajectory probably being exponential.
A new word appeared before me this week, one that combines fun, wordplay, sexual deviation, hair fetish, Germanic poke-fun and political retribution. Would Orwell have liked it?
"Bidensniffen".
Tricone says:
It always seemed to me that Orwell named his villain "O'Brien" (sorry Peter) as a swipe at Catholics, or more specifically, the fashion among some 1930s & 40s English Catholic-convert intellectuals he knew of romanticising Catholicism, and Irish Catholics in particular.
A long spell working in remote mines in WA in the 70s, where the mine shop had a good selection of Orwell's work, including complete collection of essays and short pieces , gave me plenty of time to read and absorb his work.
Counsel says:
As to a Solzenhitsyn revival, Orwell and Solzhenitsyn had different insights. Orwell's were greater.
Orwell's "who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past" is as clear an enunciation of the power of mass communication as has ever been made.
We see it in populations worldwide embracing the actions of government with respect to the Coronavirus. People are advised by all sources that a disaster is about to befall them and, unaware of any alternative perspective, thank their governments for avoiding it.
Solzenhitsyn's insight was that the Soviet Government did not control the past. The populace did not believe the government's lies. However, that dishonesty was obvious to everybody except Western intellectuals.
Facebook and Twitter have shown by their suppression of the Biden stories that in large measure they now consider it as part of their role to control the present and, frighteningly, the future.
bearops says:
When revisiting this great article it occurred to me that if "Big Brother" were to be corrected to the feminist newspeak term "Big Sibling" the party faithful would be forced to chant "BS…BS…BS.."
Julia Gillard's Tall Story
The Coming Age of De-Globalisation
Martin Hutchinson
The Other Side of Dick Cheney
Kieran Morris


Khaleesi and Viserion share the same bolts and climb the face mostly to the right of the bolts with fun face climbing with some small holds. There is toprope 5.9 to the right. Follow a short crack system to the face, left of the wider crack.
It is the last bolted line on the wall.


text:
Q: Is it possible to find cluster centroids in kernel K means? Suppose ${x_1, \ldots, x_N}$ are the data points and we have to find $K$ clusters using Kernel K Means.
Let the kernel be $Ker$ (not to confuse with $K$ number of clusters)
Let $\phi$ be the implicit mapping induced by this kernel.
Now if $\phi$ were finite dimensional, there was no problem. However, assume $phi$ to be infinite dimensional, such has induced by RBF kernel
Now, everywhere I have read about kernel K means, it only says that we can do kernel K Means using
$||\phi(x_i) - \phi(x_j)||^2 = Ker(x_i, x_i) + Ker(x_j, x_j) - 2Ker(x_i, x_j) \;\; \ldots(1)$
I get this, but it is not so simple for my brain and nobody gives an explicit algorithm for kernel K means which leaves me with following doubts:

*

*In what space do we initialise the K centroids? In the original space, or the space induced by $\phi$? I am guessing, we initialise in the original space only because we can't even comprehend the data points in space induced by $\phi$
Suppose we initialise randomly these $K$ centroids $\mu_1, \ldots \mu_K$ in the original space only. (Please correct me if I assuming wrong)

*After initialisation, we have to assign every data point to one of the clusters. Suppose we want to assign $x_n$ to a cluster, this can be easily done using (1) to compute
$\mu_k$ = $\text{arg min}_j\; ||\phi(x_n) - \phi(\mu_j)||^2$

*After assigning clusters, how do I calculate the new centroids? Obviously I can't take mean in the space induced by $\phi$ as it is infinite dimensional, so what do I do now?
What is the work around this problem? I am assuming there is someway that we don't have to store the centroids at all. But I can't think of how to achieve this.
I have read Finding the cluster centers in kernel k-means clustering
However, the community wiki answer doesn't explains where $(1)$ comes from.

A: Kernel k-means is equivalent to regular k-means operating in the feature space induced by the kernel. Therefore, the centroids live in feature space which, as you mentioned, may be infinite dimensional. When formulating a learning algorithm using the kernel trick, we never need to touch feature space directly. All operations in feature space are performed implicitly using the kernel function. So, we never deal directly with the centroids in kernel k-means. Instead, we work with the cluster assignments, as I'll explain below.
K-means in feature space
Lloyd's algorithm is the standard method for (approximately) solving the k-means problem. Here's a generalization that works directly in feature space. Let $X = \{x_1, \dots, x_n\}$ be the data points and $\phi(\cdot)$ be a function that maps a point from input space into feature space.

*

*Initialize $K$ clusters $C_1, \dots, C_K$, where each cluster $C_j$ is a set containing $n_j$ points, and each point is a member of exactly one cluster.

Repeat until convergence (no change in cluster membership):

*For each cluster $C_j$, the centroid (in feature space) is:
$$\mu_j = \frac{1}{n_j} \sum_{x \in C_j} \phi(x) \tag{1}$$

*For each point $x_i$, find the index $a_i$ of the cluster whose centroid is nearest (in feature space).
$$a_i = \arg \min_j \ \|\phi(x_i) - \mu_j\|^2 \tag{2}$$
$$= \arg \min_j \
\langle \phi(x_i), \phi(x_i) \rangle
+ \langle \mu_j, \mu_j \rangle
- 2 \langle \phi(x_i), \mu_j \rangle \tag{3}$$
$$= \arg \min_j \
\langle \mu_j, \mu_j \rangle
- 2 \langle \phi(x_i), \mu_j \rangle \tag{4}$$

*Update clusters. Each point becomes a member of the cluster with the nearest centroid:

$$C_j = \{x_i \mid a_i = j\}$$
Note: $\langle \cdot, \cdot \rangle$ denotes the inner product. Equation $(3)$ follows from the relationship between the norm and inner product. The first term $\langle \phi(x_i), \phi(x_i) \rangle$ doesn't depend on the cluster so we can drop it, giving equation $(4)$.
Using the kernel trick
Suppose we a have kernel function $k(\cdot, \cdot)$ that computes inner products in feature space. So $k(x, x') = \langle \phi(x), \phi(x') \rangle$. We can replace inner products in the algorithm above with kernel function evaluations, thereby operating implicitly in feature space. This is called the kernel trick.
First, combine steps 2 and 3 by substituting the definition of centroids in equation $(1)$ into the nearest centroid search in equation $(4)$:
$$\arg \min_j \
\left \langle
  \frac{1}{n_j} \sum_{x \in C_j} \phi(x),
  \frac{1}{n_j} \sum_{x' \in C_j} \phi(x')
\right \rangle
- 2 \left \langle
  \phi(x_i),
  \frac{1}{n_j} \sum_{x \in C_j} \phi(x)
\right \rangle \tag{5}$$
Since the inner product is bilinear, we can rewrite this as:
$$\arg \min_j \
\frac{1}{n_j^2} \sum_{x \in C_j} \sum_{x' \in C_j}
\langle \phi(x), \phi(x') \rangle
- \frac{2}{n_j} \sum_{x \in C_j} \langle \phi(x_i), \phi(x) \rangle
\tag{6}$$
Replace inner products with kernel function evaluations:
$$\arg \min_j \
\frac{1}{n_j^2} \sum_{x \in C_j} \sum_{x' \in C_j} k(x, x')
- \frac{2}{n_j} \sum_{x \in C_j} k(x_i, x)
\tag{7}$$
For each point $x_i$, this says how to find the cluster with the nearest centroid, without explicitly computing the centroids in feature space. It can be substituted in for steps 2 and 3 in the algorithm above.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Stewart Creek is a stunning gorge inaccessible by road or trail. Depart from Silky Oaks helipad for a private champagne breakfast atop a rainforest waterfall. Fly over the Daintree Rainforest with stunning views out to the Coral Sea. Upon arrival, your helicopter will land on top of the waterfall, and here you will enjoy a gourmet breakfast, along with champagne. Enjoy swimming in the freshwater pools, hiking in the rainforest, or just relaxing and taking in the stunning view before being flown back to Silky Oaks Lodge.


text:
Atlanta Black Star
Backstreet Boys Are Getting Their Own Tell-All Documentary
Posted byBy Kim Burnell	| February 11, 2013 CommentsComments (0)
Backstreet's back, alright! Following in the footsteps of Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Beyonce Knowles, One Direction, and many others, the Backstreet Boys are getting their own full length feature film.
This tell-all documentary will follow the five original band members, covering everything from their humble child star beginnings to their quest for a comeback. A statement from the BSB said, "The fact that we are masters of our own destiny, a new album in the works and our 20th anniversary — it all adds up to being the right time to share our story" – yea, that and the fact that everyone else is doing it.
The recently hired director, Stephen Kijack, promised it wouldn't be a "3-D Boy Band puff piece," (Hmm, is that a jab at One Direction's new documentary 1D in 3D?) but instead it would focus on the ups and downs of one of the most famous boy bands in history. Apparently the group still has a major following in Japan, Latin America, Germany, U.K., the U.S, Canada, China, India, Spain and Mexico, according to The Hollywood Reporter. This worldwide fan base is prompting the group to set out on a world tour.
At the threat of being forgotten with the rising fame of One Direction and The Wanted, the Backstreet Boys are pulling out all the stops to prove they've still got it. Personally I think they have nothing to worry about. One Direction and The Wanted don't hold a candle to the original 90's boy bands, including Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync. Justin Timberlake's smashing solo success means there is zero chance for an 'N Sync reunion, so I guess we'll have to be content with some vintage Backstreet Boys instead. The BSB documentary is set to hit theaters this fall.
Couple Opens New Jersey's First Black-Owned Drive-In Movie Theater to Celebrate Black Culture
CommentsComments (0)
Kobe Bryant Eight-Part Documentary 'Mamba Out' Begins Airing July 5
'There's This Narrative Pushed By the Media…': YouTube Vlogger on His Role In Apple TV's New Film 'Dads' and the 'Magic' of Black Fatherhood
Atlanta Black Star is a narrative company. We publish narratives intentionally and specifically to enlighten and transform the world.
Sign up to receive The Atlanta Black Star Newsletter in your inbox.
Contribute to Atlanta Black Star today and help us share our narratives.
Enter Contribution Amount
Make Contributions Recurring
Number of Installments?
Never End 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12


Do You Need A Family Law or Probate Law Attorney?
When you want to divorce your spouse or file for custody of your child, count on J. Anukem & Associates LLC to guide you through the family law process.
We've been providing personalized legal services to residents of Maryland and Washington, D.C. for years.
Schedule an appointment with a family law attorney at J. Anukem & Associates as soon as possible by calling 301-500-0462.
We'll tell you what to expect in your legal matter and answer all of your questions. Get a free consultation from J. Anukem & Associates in Greenbelt, MD now. We also have a law office in Washington, D.C. and Bethesda, MD.
If you need a family law attorney, probate law attorney or other legal professional to protect your interests in or out of court, turn J. Anukem & Associates.
We know how confusing and frustrating the legal process can be. We work hard to make sure you're comfortable with every step we take.
Tell us about your personal injury, business law, estate planning or family law needs right away. Make an appointment with J. Anukem & Associates. We have an office in Greenbelt, MD, one in Bethesda, MD and one in Washington, D.C.
Copyright © 2019 J. Anukem & Associates LLC, all rights reserved.