Saturday, December 17, 2011

Video
http://abclocal.go.com/wtvd/video?id=8466939

Game
http://www.playspent.org/

I played and could not make it to the end of the month with out running out of money

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Blog Posting update as of 12/12/11 - Do not respond

Twizinz - 16
Southrenboy - 15
Candylemons - 5
Blondie10 - 55+
Boots - 55+
BellaDancerella11 - 23
Zebra19 - 55+
Bobbersboy - 15
Kat - 12
Mouse - 3
DaBoss - 12
Chamsiin94 - 11
Redneck - 12
Meow Bark - 10
Superman - 8

above are the numbers I came up with. If you do not agree, count up your post and prove to me that you have more or less.

Singsank

Monday, December 12, 2011

Football's Leap of Faith

By Sean Gregory

Time

Go ahead and "Tebow." You know: crouch on one knee, put your fist to your forehead and close your eyes in prayer as Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow does during NFL games. If you're unfamiliar with Tebowing, the latest meme to mesmerize the nation, a quick search will reveal people Tebowing at the Eiffel Tower, on a wedding dance floor, on the curling ice. Not a fan of praying, or of Jesus, or of getting your pant knee dusty? It doesn't matter. Because if you appreciate football, you need to Tebow just a little. You need to give thanks to Tebow, for he has given NFL fans one of the most captivating tales in years.

"I think it's cool," Tebow tells TIME when asked about the Tebowing craze, unruffled by the notion that some people are mocking his display of faith. "You don't know the heart of people. But I tend to think the best of people and believe they are doing it for the best reasons."

Tebow understands clearly that, for better and for worse, he is known for his strong faith as much as his football skills. Even before going 6-1 as the Broncos' starter after replacing Kyle Orton in October and leading the 7-5 Broncos to a first-place tie atop the AFC West division, Tebow was a symbol of America's intense division over public displays of piety. His constant annunciations of his Evangelical faith, dating to his days as a Heisman Trophy--winning quarterback at the University of Florida--and even to high school, when this son of a pastor was the subject of an ESPN documentary segment called "The Chosen One"--make fellow Christians ecstatic. "Tim Tebow is the figurehead for Christianity in sports ... I believe he is fighting against the devil himself," declares the creator of one of several "Pray for Tim Tebow" Facebook pages. But there are hate pages too, and legions of detractors who see no position for God in the huddle and groan at the notion of an NFL star who's a virgin and never curses. Former Broncos quarterback Jake Plummer recently said he wished Tebow would "just shut up" about religion.

For most of his 2010 rookie year, Tebow waited silently on the sideline, holding a clipboard, not the hopes of Christians, in his hands. Since becoming Denver's starter, however, he has won in ways that even an agnostic might call downright divine. He's engineered four fourth-quarter comebacks in seven games, driving the cult of Tebow to epic heights. Searches on Yahoo! for Tebowing skyrocketed in early December, and NM Incite, a social-media-consulting company, says Tebow has generated far more online buzz over the past month than any other NFL quarterback.

Tebow is a chiseled 6-ft. 3-in. (190.5 cm)quarterback who is built--and sometimes throws--like a linebacker. His off-balance, windup delivery is like the golf swing of a weekend hacker somehow playing on the PGA Tour. The Broncos quickly realized he would not succeed in the typical drop-back scheme. "If we were trying to run a regular offense, he'd be screwed," Denver coach John Fox noted last month. So the Broncos pass with prudence. Tebow is averaging 15 tosses per game over his past four starts--Green Bay Packers star Aaron Rodgers, in contrast, has averaged 36 throws a game over that span--and is running an old-fashioned option-style offense, which favors his mobility. Tebow's 20-yard scoring dash against the New York Jets was the NFL's longest last-minute game-winning touchdown run by a QB.

On Dec. 4 he completed 10 of 15 passes for 202 yards and two touchdowns in a 35-32 win over Minnesota. Still, says former Super Bowl MVP Kurt Warner, "he's just not a great passer right now." Warner, another man of deep faith, labels Tebow's success "a modern-day miracle."

But miracles are by definition rare. According to some stats geeks, Tebow is just lucky. Denver's defense has played better in Tebow's starts. A recent post to a Harvard sports-analytics blog, titled "A Statistical Analysis of the Miracles of Tim Tebow," argues that his raw stats have yielded an unexpected number of wins and notes that young NFL quarterbacks who get off to fast starts tend to regress to the mean as opposing teams decipher their weaknesses. "If Tim Tebow continues to play how he's been playing," says co-author Chris Bruce, an MIT grad and Harvard MBA student, "he's not likely to win as he's been winning."

So the debate rages on. NFL.com linked to Bruce's piece; so did SpiritDaily.com a Catholic news site. Even political pundits are weighing in. "Critics have a problem with who Tebow is as a man," conservative commentator Bill Bennett recently wrote on CNN.com "They are bothered by his faith, character and conviction."

Those hoping Tebow will hush up about Jesus should prepare for a letdown. "People say, 'Why isn't it enough to do it one time?'" says Tebow, who addresses interviewers as "Mr." and "Ms.," stays out of trouble and is raising money to build a hospital in the Philippines, where his family has long done missionary work. "But say I'm getting married. Is it enough for me to tell my wife on the day of our wedding that I love her? Or do I tell her at every opportunity?"

Tebow calls his faith a tonic for Tebowmania itself. "I know who holds tomorrow," he says. "That's what gives me comfort in all situations, from the praise to the haters. Because thank goodness I don't have to live the roller coaster that everybody else lives about my life."

Putting the Social into Science

By Nicholas A. Christakis
Time

Look at the words on this page. No one needed to teach you how to see; evolution has hardwired us for this complex task. Now try to understand them. No child is born able to read; this task is learned from parents and teachers in a social setting. In other words, one of our most essential abilities as humans--reading--is the product of a combination of innate and learned traits.

The distinction between nature and nurture was always a false dichotomy even before it became a clich, yet we still tend to think of biology and culture as warring explanations for human experience. But recent scientific discoveries are putting this mind-set on a collision course with reality. Things we once thought were entirely determined by culture--like our choice of friends or our voting patterns--turn out to have deep evolutionary roots. For example, a recent study I co-authored found that people seek out friends who have the same genetic variants that they do, way beyond physical characteristics. Conversely, we also know that early social experiences, such as education, poverty, malnutrition and child abuse, can modify the expression of a person's genes. We even have evidence that a specific kind of cultural activity--the domestication of cattle over the past 7,000 years--has actually altered our genes to make us more lactose-tolerant.

This synthesis of the natural and social sciences is being spurred not only by biological discoveries but also by technological advances. For example, it is now possible to use the Internet to instantly enlist thousands of subjects in virtual labs and conduct social experiments that were previously impossible. Moreover, we now have access to vast amounts of data since we can inconspicuously track the behaviors, purchases, movements, interactions and thoughts of millions of people in real time via credit cards, cell phones and online social networks.

This new biosocial science not only reshapes our understanding of humanity but also holds promise for public policy and public health. Organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National Institute on Aging (which has funded some of my work) see that some of our most vexing health problems--malaria, for example--cannot be solved by pharmacological and engineering solutions alone. We can develop novel insecticides and special bed nets to prevent mosquito bites and distribute them via clever supply chains to remote villages. Yet if the people there don't change their behavior--and if we can't pair our biological understanding with an understanding of that behavior--then we will continue to fail.

But that's just the start of the potential of biosocial science. Imagine you could reduce devastating market swings by understanding people's biological responses to risk. Or figure out how to control the behavior of dangerous crowds. Or predict the course of an epidemic weeks before it strikes the general public (something we have already done).

The melding of the biological and social sciences can feel threatening. On the political right, people resist because they want to see humans as separate from the natural world and not unmoored from moral or religious absolutes. On the left, they resist because they don't want to believe we have an intrinsic biology that could play a role in human affairs.

For the past 100 years, people have looked to the physical and biological sciences to solve societal problems and have reaped great rewards with discoveries, from nuclear power to plastics to antibiotics. But in the 21st century, it is biosocial science that holds the key to improving human welfare. If we were to see humans as fully part of nature, we might even solve the hardest problem in all of science: the origin of human consciousness itself.

Monday, December 5, 2011

Blood on the Ice

By SEAN GREGORY Monday, Dec. 12, 2011

In Hockey circles, they're known as tough guys, goons, enforcers. They're sluggers on skates. The job description is simple: You touch one of our talented players, our goal scorers, I pummel your face. Underneath the cocky, growling exterior of some hockey fighters, however, is something surprising: fear. Crippling fear. The kind that can keep you up all night before a game, stomach churning, half-wishing that when you do fall asleep, you don't wake up the next day.

Jim Thomson knew the feeling. A former enforcer, he played for six National Hockey League teams from 1986 to '94 and protected, among others, Wayne Gretzky. For Thomson, a steady diet of booze and painkillers helped untangle the late-night knots in his gut. He'd never let on, but whenever Thomson knew he'd have to fight the next day, he was terrified of getting his ass kicked in front of 15,000 fans howling for blood--his blood.

The NHL's enforcers, many of them marginally skilled at best, often become rent-a-fighters who drift from team to team until their usefulness runs out. Thomson says he sustained six documented concussions in his pro career and failed to report dozens of others. He's convinced that these blows to the head, received in dozens of fights, contributed to his anxiety, depression and addiction. Recent scientific research suggests such a connection. After Thomson's playing days ended, his addiction intensified and his depression worsened. At his low point, he curled up in bed, strung out on drugs and alcohol, thinking about taking his own life. "I know what being an enforcer did to me, how it destroyed me," Thomson says.

Thanks to stints in rehab, Thomson was able to bounce back. He now trains hockey players and does some motivational speaking. Others haven't been so lucky. The recent deaths of three enforcers highlighted the potential link between head trauma and mental illness and ignited a debate about whether fighting should have a place in the NHL. In May, the New York Rangers' Derek Boogaard, whose 2010--11 season was cut short by a concussion, died of an accidental overdose of a painkiller and alcohol. Boogaard had a history of substance-abuse problems. On Aug. 15, Rick Rypien, a former Vancouver Canucks player who had just signed with the Winnipeg Jets, killed himself after a decadelong struggle with depression. Two weeks later, Wade Belak, a recently retired defenseman for the Nashville Predators, hanged himself. (Belak's parents have described his death as an accident.)

While of the three, only Rypien's issues with depression were well known, we are aware that mental illness carries a stigma in pro sports and can go hidden. And while only Boogaard had a documented history of concussions, we know that pro athletes often refuse to report concussions, afraid that time off the ice will cost them a job. Belak, Boogaard and Rypien got into over 400 pro-hockey fights combined; accumulated subconcussive blows to the head may lead to addictive behavior and depression.

You can't draw definite conclusions about the root cause of this year's tragedies, but some scientific hints are disturbing. A Boston University research center has diagnosed two former enforcers with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease found in people who have sustained repeated blows to the head. The enforcers were Bob Probert, one of the toughest players of all time, who died in 2010 of heart failure, and Reggie Fleming, who played in the prehelmet days and passed away in 2009 at 73. Fleming, a fierce and fearless player, had suffered from dementia and other CTE symptoms for 30 years. (CTE symptoms include substance abuse and depression and can be diagnosed only postmortem; the Boston University lab is conducting a study on Boogaard's brain.)

After several NFL players were diagnosed with CTE, football took steps to make that game safer. Hockey is trying to do the same. In January, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman noted that concussions are on the rise. If the league wants to reduce head trauma and the risk of its players going through hell, why not scrap a tradition that involves multiple bare-knuckle punches to the head? "The role of the enforcer must go," says Thomson. "What are we waiting for?"

Hockey fighting has passionate defenders, though, even among the ex-enforcer ranks. "The beauty of our game is the diversity," says former enforcer Ryan VandenBussche, who served 70 penalty minutes for each of the 10 goals he scored in nine years in the NHL. "We give the fans what they want." In early October, one of hockey's highest-profile figures, irascible ex-coach and Hockey Night in Canada broadcaster Don Cherry, went so far as to call Thomson and two other enforcers "turncoats," "hypocrites" and "pukes" because Cherry thought they wanted to eliminate fighting. (Two of them didn't; Cherry later apologized.)

Bullies and Blood Sport

Since the dawn of hockey, fighting has been ingrained in the game. Screamed one Toronto Star headline during the NHL's first season, in 1918: "Two NHL Players Under Arrest in Charge of Fighting, Fighting Players Remanded for Sentencing." After the Philadelphia Flyers of the 1970s, known as the Broad Street Bullies, intimidated their way to back-to-back Stanley Cups, teams started an arms race (a fists race, really) to stockpile enforcers. The 1977 film Slap Shot--which starred Paul Newman as a player-coach of a minor-league team that signs a trio of bespectacled goons--glorified hockey as blood sport.

By the early '90s, the NHL began dishing out 10-game suspensions to players who left the bench during a brawl. After a lockout shut down the 2004--05 season, the NHL allowed longer passes and enforced rules against hooking and holding in order to emphasize skill and win back fans. These changes have allowed the game to flow, and with fewer stoppages and less clutch-and-grab defense, players are not as inclined to drop their gloves and square off. Today, according to the NHL, fighting is down more than 50% from its late-1980s peak, to less than a fight every two games.

Not only is fighting less prevalent; its defenders point out that it's far from the main cause of concussions. According to research from St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, fighting causes 8% of all diagnosed NHL concussions. Moreover, fighting proponents insist that throwing punches actually makes the game safer. If the NHL were to ban fighting, the argument goes, concussions could increase: without fear of retribution from enforcers, players might feel freer to take cheap shots. "It's not a gratuitous 'We like fighting,'" says ex-player Brendan Shanahan, now the NHL's chief disciplinarian. Players may be more likely to use their sticks as weapons, for example.

But the NHL is already handing out stiffer penalties for egregious hits to the head while the puck is in play. So why, if fighting were banned, would stick-waving maniacs suddenly emerge? Dr. Robert Cantu, a co-director of the Boston University concussion lab, labels as "horsebleep" the assertion that fighting causes just 8% of hockey concussions, since the research measures only diagnosed concussions. Judging by the enforcers he has examined, he says hockey fighters suffer concussion symptoms "about once every four fights."

And even if we suppose that fighting causes only 8% of concussions, aren't these worth eliminating? Football refs immediately break up brawls. If you fight in a soccer match, your team plays a man short for the rest of the game. Hockey in the Olympics and at the collegiate level in the U.S. survives without fisticuffs. Why can't the NHL? "We evolve with the times," says Thomson. "We once smoked on airplanes, but we stopped doing that when we found out it was killing us. Where do you see more head shots than in a hockey fight? Why don't we start at the top?"

Monday, Dec. 12, 2011 Penn State Of Mind By Sean Gregory with Kayla Webley

In the days following the revelations of the sex scandal at Penn State, the horrific details of a football coach's alleged rape of young boys were difficult to believe. The community's response bordered on incomprehensible: students rioting in defense of Joe Paterno, the revered football giant who lost his job as head coach for failing to do more to stop the abuse; alums at a tailgate party, arguing that Paterno's indifference was no big deal and chanting, "You gotta fight/ For your right/ For JoePa!" to the tune of the Beastie Boys classic; the funeral-home director, escorting a grieving man from the room where he had just identified his deceased mother, saying, "Don't you think there has been a rush to judgment on Joe Paterno?"

"From the outside looking in, you can't understand it," says Andrew Hanselman, a senior majoring in marketing, on the close-knit Penn State culture. "From the inside looking out, you can't explain it."

But as more and more campuses confront the cost of an insular culture, the need to understand--and take action--will only grow. In another college-sports capital, Syracuse University assistant basketball coach Bernie Fine was fired Nov. 27 after being accused of molesting at least three boys during his 36-year career.

In places like Syracuse, N.Y.; State College, Pa.; and Columbus, Ohio, college sports are now too-big-to-fail economies, and this has implications for everything from the safety of students to the mission of the universities. "Some campuses have a misguided perspective," says Brett Sokolow, a managing partner at the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management, "that covering these things up will help them in the long term." But if there is a lesson being learned in State College, it is not just danger that comes in the cover-up; it is the risk you face from what you can't see in the first place.

The Happy Valley Bubble

Penn State sees itself as a place that breeds an intense, familial sense of loyalty. It's partly the university's setting--nestled in Happy Valley, the third safest metropolitan area in the U.S., in a town Psychology Today once called one of the least stressful places to live in America. People tend to show up as students and stay forever, in spirit if not in fact. "Even when you leave State College," says Scott Kretchmar, a professor of exercise and sport science who arrived on campus in 1984, "it's attached to you like an umbilical cord." The Penn State Alumni Association, with more than 165,000 members, is the largest dues-paying alumni group in the world. Most senior athletic-department officials are Penn State grads who have worked at the school for decades.

And why would they leave a place where football is cause for epic celebrations that draw more than 100,000 people on Saturdays to the second largest stadium in the western hemisphere, where players are kings and coaches are gods, and none more so than Paterno, presiding for more than 45 years over a $72.7 million empire, the fifth richest among college programs? Penn State football made a $53.2 million profit last year, second only to the University of Texas' $71.2 million. Paterno earned millions from Penn State; he and his wife donated more than $4 million to the school.

With his philanthropy came great power. According to a recent Wall Street Journal report, Paterno thwarted the efforts of Vicky Triponey, the school's former standards-and-conduct officer, to discipline football players for, among other transgressions, beating up other students. Paterno even threatened to stop fundraising if she was not fired. Triponey resigned in 2007. "It's no secret that Penn State football acted unfettered," says Donald Heller, an education professor at Penn State, "and without institutional control."

Matt Paknis, like Paterno an alumni of Brown University, was a graduate assistant coach for Penn State in the late 1980s. "I always scratched my head about that place," says Paknis, now a leadership-development consultant living in Massachusetts. "You had to fit into the approval system that was out there. There wasn't a lot of challenging, saying, 'What's going on here?'"

Paknis, maybe because of his low status, was never welcomed into the inner circle, he says. "There was this projection outside of Penn State that he was the dean, this nice old guy," he says of Paterno. "That's the furthest thing from the truth. He ruled with an iron fist." In that environment, Paknis believes, Penn State would be loath to look too closely at the accusations swirling around former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, for fear of damaging the brand. But other Penn State veterans strongly dispute that self-protection played a role. "There was never a reluctance for Joe to involve people in deep thinking, to tap into creative minds," says Craig Cirbus, an assistant coach for Paterno from 1984 to '94 who became head coach at the University at Buffalo. "He wanted all different views provided." And Paterno's defenders have argued all along that had he and other coaches and administrators understood the extent of Sandusky's alleged crimes, they would have intervened more aggressively. So what is it they weren't able to see?

The Psychology of Protection

Within a college bubble, say organizational psychologists, the urge to shape your mental picture of the world can be overwhelming. "Culture trumps everything," says Laura Finfer, a psychologist and a principal at a New York City executive consulting firm. Colleges, Finfer has found, can be quite clannish: "Cultures define you, and you become blind to everything in front of your eyes."

Or the way you see things changes. Ray Aldag, a management professor at the University of Wisconsin's School of Business, points to two cognitive tricks: selective perception and subjective perception. Selective perception is our bias toward ignoring information that is at odds with our worldview. Subjective perception explains our tendency to couple uncomfortable information with reaffirming facts in order to make ourselves feel better. For example, Penn Staters decry abuse. But pair that with anger over the indignity of Paterno's dismissal, and Paterno becomes a victim.

Cohesive groups like the Penn State football leadership tend to draw boundaries around themselves. "We apply rules of fair and just behavior to our own groups and people within them," says Michelle Duffy, an organizational-behavior professor at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. "But we morally exclude outsiders. In some ways you are dehumanizing out-group members--in this case, the victims."

That dynamic helps explain the problems that can come from campuses that act like city-states, with law-enforcement systems operating independently of local and federal officials. Many campuses have their own police departments, staffed with sworn officers who have the authority to investigate everything from break-ins to murders. Depending on the transgression and how it is reported, some alleged crimes are dealt with on campus, and some are passed to local prosecutors. The colleges have unusual discretion, although stronger enforcement of federal laws is affording them less latitude. The Clery Act, signed into law in 1990, requires colleges and universities that receive federal funds to disclose the number of criminal offenses recorded on campus. Until recently, however, the Clery Act has lacked teeth.

Less-than-transparent reporting of campus crime is a problem beyond Penn State, especially when athletes are involved. So the Obama Administration has created a team dedicated to strengthening enforcement. In early October, the U.S. Department of Education opened an investigation of Marquette University after two female students accused athletes of sexual misconduct. The university has been accused by a local prosecutor of failing to report the allegation to Milwaukee police as mandated by Wisconsin law. This year, six institutions are facing fines. That's the same number of schools that the Department of Education fined in the first 18 years of the law's existence. Now 49 schools have been investigated, 26 of them in the past three years. Six-figure fines are the new norm. "We're just beginning to break the silence of sexual violence that exists on campuses," says Alison Kiss, the executive director of Security on Campus, a college safety-advocacy group.

The Grand Experiment Revisited

During his 45-plus years as head football coach, Paterno conducted what he termed "the grand experiment": the idea that major-college athletes could contend for national championships while excelling in the classroom. For the most part, it succeeded. Out of this current painful event, Penn State has a chance to try a new grand experiment. The school could drop football for at least a year.

Such a decision would not be unprecedented. In 1939, University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins, scornful of schools that drew too much attention for their sports teams, ditched football. "We Americans are the only people in human history who ever got sport mixed up with higher education," Hutchins wrote in a 1954 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED article explaining his decision and advocating that others follow suit.

Through the Penn State example, schools across the U.S. would be forced to think about rebalancing academics and athletics. Nearly a third of the players on the Texas Tech football team don't graduate. But in the Big 12 conference, Texas Tech is actually the top academic performer. Among 65 schools with major-college-football programs, only three--Northwestern, Boston College and Duke--graduate 90% or more of their football players. According to Duke University economist Charles Clotfelter, salaries for football coaches at 44 major public universities have grown 750%, on an inflation-adjusted basis, since 1985. Salaries for professors at these schools have risen 32%.

Six months ago, Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel resigned under pressure after trying to cover up NCAA violations. It was a chance for Ohio State president Gordon Gee, who once abolished the athletics department at Vanderbilt University to better integrate sports with that school, to reset the terms on his campus. But on Nov. 28, he announced the hiring of Urban Meyer as football coach, with one of the richest contracts in college-sports history--$24 million plus a country-club membership and a private plane for personal use. The campus bubble keeps inflating; is Penn State, or anyone else, going to pop it?

Monday, November 28, 2011

Teacher, Leave Those Kids Alone

Dec. 5th, 2011 issue of Time

By Amanda Ripley

On a wet Wednesday evening in Seoul, six government employees gather at the office to prepare for a late-night patrol. The mission is as simple as it is counterintuitive: to find children who are studying after 10 p.m. And stop them.

In South Korea, it has come to this. To reduce the country's addiction to private, after-hours tutoring academies (called hagwons), the authorities have begun enforcing a curfew — even paying citizens bounties to turn in violators.

The raid starts in a leisurely way. We have tea, and I am offered a rice cracker. Cha Byoung-chul, a midlevel bureaucrat at Seoul's Gangnam district office of education, is the leader of this patrol. I ask him about his recent busts, and he tells me about the night he found 10 teenage boys and girls on a cram-school roof at about 11 p.m. "There was no place to hide," Cha recalls. In the darkness, he tried to reassure the students. "I told them, 'It's the hagwon that's in violation, not you. You can go home.'"

Cha smokes a cigarette in the parking lot. Like any man trying to undo centuries of tradition, he is in no hurry. "We don't leave at 10 p.m. sharp," he explains. "We want to give them 20 minutes or so. That way, there are no excuses." Finally, we pile into a silver Kia Sorento and head into Daechi-dong, one of Seoul's busiest hagwon districts. The streets are thronged with parents picking up their children. The inspectors walk down the sidewalk, staring up at the floors where hagwons are located — above the Dunkin' Donuts and the Kraze Burgers — looking for telltale slivers of light behind drawn shades.

At about 11 p.m., they turn down a small side street, following a tip-off. They enter a shabby building and climb the stairs, stepping over an empty chip bag. On the second floor, the unit's female member knocks on the door. "Hello? Hello!" she calls loudly. A muted voice calls back from within, "Just a minute!" The inspectors glance at one another. "Just a minute" is not the right answer. Cha sends one of his colleagues downstairs to block the elevator. The raid begins.

South Korea's hagwon crackdown is one part of a larger quest to tame the country's culture of educational masochism. At the national and local levels, politicians are changing school testing and university admissions policies to reduce student stress and reward softer qualities like creativity. "One-size-fits-all, government-led uniform curriculums and an education system that is locked only onto the college-entrance examination are not acceptable," President Lee Myung-bak vowed at his inauguration in 2008.

But cramming is deeply embedded in Asia, where top grades — and often nothing else — have long been prized as essential for professional success. Before toothbrushes or printing presses, there were civil service exams that could make or break you. Chinese families have been hiring test-prep tutors since the 7th century. Modern-day South Korea has taken this competition to new extremes. In 2010, 74% of all students engaged in some kind of private after-school instruction, sometimes called shadow education, at an average cost of $2,600 per student for the year. There are more private instructors in South Korea than there are schoolteachers, and the most popular of them make millions of dollars a year from online and in-person classes. When Singapore's Education Minister was asked last year about his nation's reliance on private tutoring, he found one reason for hope: "We're not as bad as the Koreans."

In Seoul, legions of students who fail to get into top universities spend the entire year after high school attending hagwons to improve their scores on university admissions exams. And they must compete even to do this. At the prestigious Daesung Institute, admission is based (diabolically enough) on students' test scores. Only 14% of applicants are accepted. After a year of 14-hour days, about 70% gain entry to one of the nation's top three universities.

From a distance, South Korea's results look enviable. Its students consistently outperform their counterparts in almost every country in reading and math. In the U.S., Barack Obama and his Education Secretary speak glowingly of the enthusiasm South Korean parents have for educating their children, and they lament how far U.S. students are falling behind. Without its education obsession, South Korea could not have transformed into the economic powerhouse that it is today. (Since 1962 the nation's GDP has gone up about 40,000%, making it the world's 13th largest economy.) But the country's leaders worry that unless its rigid, hierarchical system starts to nurture more innovation, economic growth will stall — and fertility rates will continue to decline as families feel the pressure of paying for all that tutoring. "You Americans see a bright side of the Korean system," Education Minister Lee Ju-ho tells me, "but Koreans are not happy with it."

South Koreans are not alone in their discontent. Across Asia, reformers are pushing to make schools more "American" — even as some U.S. reformers render their own schools more "Asian." In China, universities have begun fashioning new entry tests to target students with talents beyond book learning. And Taiwanese officials recently announced that kids will no longer have to take high-stress exams to get into high school. If South Korea, the apogee of extreme education, gets its reforms right, it could be a model for other societies.

The problem is not that South Korean kids aren't learning enough or working hard enough; it's that they aren't working smart. When I visited some schools, I saw classrooms in which a third of the students slept while the teacher continued lecturing, seemingly unfazed. Gift stores sell special pillows that slip over your forearm to make desktop napping more comfortable. This way, goes the backward logic, you can sleep in class — and stay up late studying. By way of comparison, consider Finland, the only European country to routinely perform as well as South Korea on the test for 15-year-olds conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. In Finland, public and private spending combined is less per pupil than in South Korea, and only 13% of Finnish students take remedial after-school lessons.

Koreans have lamented their relative inefficiency for years, and the government has repeatedly tried to humanize the education system — simplifying admissions tests, capping hagwon tuition, even going so far as to ban hagwons altogether during the 1980s, when the country was under a dictatorship. But after each attempt, the hagwons come back stronger. That's because the incentives remain unchanged. South Korean kids gorge themselves on studying for one reason: to get into one of the country's top universities. The slots are too few — and the reward for getting in too great. "Where you attend university haunts you for the rest of your life," says Lee Beom, a former cram-school instructor who now works on reform in the Seoul metropolitan office of education.

But this time, the administration argues, its reforms are targeting not just the symptom of the dysfunction but also the causes. It is working to improve normal public schools by putting teachers and principals through rigorous evaluations — which include opinion surveys by students, parents and peer teachers — and requiring additional training for low-scoring teachers. At the same time, the government hopes to reduce the strain on students. Corporal punishment, an entrenched and formalized ritual in South Korean schools, is now prohibited (although students told me it still happens occasionally). Admissions tests for prestigious, specialized high schools (like foreign-language schools) have been eliminated. Middle schoolers are now judged on the basis of their regular grades and an interview. And 500 admissions officers have been appointed to the country's universities, to judge applicants not only on their test scores and grades but also other abilities.

The Parent Trap
No one defends the status quo in South Korea. "All we do is study, except when we sleep," one high school boy told me, and he was not exaggerating. The typical academic schedule begins at 8 a.m. and ends sometime from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., depending on the ambition of the student. To be sure, some students opt out of this system — those who go to certain vocational high schools, for example. But most cannot transcend the relentless family and peer pressure to study until they drop from fatigue. "It breaks my heart," another teenage boy tells me, "to see my classmates compete against each other instead of helping each other."

Parents remain the real drivers of the education rat race, and they will be the hardest to convert. Han Yoon-hee, an English teacher at Jeong Bal High School in Ilsan, a suburb of Seoul, says parental anxiety is profound. "I suggest to [my students] that they should quit hagwons and focus on school," she says. "But their parents get very nervous when they don't take classes at night. They know other students are taking classes. They have to compete with each other."

Sometimes it's hard to know who is competing with whom — the students or their mothers. In 1964 a school entrance exam contained a question about the ingredients in taffy. But the exam inadvertently included two right answers, only one of which was counted as correct. To protest this unfairness, outraged mothers — not students — began cooking taffy outside government offices using the alternative ingredient. Eventually, the mothers won the resignation of the Vice Education Minister and the superintendent of Seoul, and several dozen students received retroactive admission offers.

Still, the Education Ministry can point to one recent victory in this long fight: spending on private instruction decreased 3.5% in 2010, the first drop since the government began tracking the figure in 2007. Does the decline signal a trend? Well, Koreans still spent 2% of their GDP on tutoring, even with the downtick. Andrew Kim, a very successful instructor at Megastudy, South Korea's largest hagwon, says he earned $4 million last year from online and in-person lectures. He agrees that the system is far from ideal, but so far he has seen no impact from the reforms on his income. "The tougher the measures," he says, "the more resilient hagwons become." In response to the government-imposed curfew, for example, many hagwons have just put more lessons online for students to buy after hours at home.

Other hagwons flout the law, continuing to operate past the curfew — sometimes in disguise. The night of the Daechi-dong raid, the inspectors I am following wait for the door to open. Then they take off their shoes and begin a brisk tour of the place. In a warren of small study rooms with low ceilings and fluorescent lights, about 40 teenagers sit at small, individual carrels. The air is stale. It is a disturbing scene, sort of like a sweatshop for children's brains.

This is technically not a hagwon but an after-hours self-study library — at least in theory. Self-study libraries are allowed to stay open past 10 p.m. But the inspectors suspect this is a camouflaged hagwon. The students are studying from the same work sheets, and there are a handful of adults who appear to be teachers.

One of them denies any wrongdoing. "We are just doing our own work here," she says indignantly. "We don't teach." Cha, the squad leader, shakes his head. "I've allowed your excuses before, but we're getting too many tips about this place," he says. "It's an open secret in this community that you've been operating illegally."

Afterward, the squad makes a few more stops at other self-study libraries. It finds nothing suspicious. At about midnight, Cha lights a cigarette on a corner and chats with his colleagues. Then they head home for the night, having temporarily liberated 40 teenagers out of 4 million.

— with reporting by Stephen Kim / Seoul

Ripley is an Emerson fellow at the New America Foundation

This article originally appeared in the October 3, 2011 issue of TIME Asia.

Stock in Trade: Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work

http://www.sociology.org/featured/stock-in-trade-social-class-and-the-hidden-curriculum-of-work

Did you know that what you get depends on who you are? It is true. Females get different things than males, and the lower classes get different things than the upper classes. No where is this more evident than in the education you get. Working class, professional, or ruling class, it’s not who you know but who your parents are (i.e. their social class) that makes all the difference.

Click on the link to learn more!!

Friday, November 25, 2011

Study Guide - Do Not Repond

I have uploaded the study guide for your test on Friday!! Go to ACGC website, scroll to High School, then to staff, then to staff websites and click. Find me on the page and click on Assignment Calendar. Click on Sociology, then click on Socialization, it is the last file on the page.

Monday, November 21, 2011

Social injustice

If you could get rid of just one social injustice what would it be? and Why?

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Lunch Observation

What kind of things do you think we will observe during 5th-8th lunch? Make some predictions. Remember the predictions need to be observable and measurable.

Social status

As a student at ACGC, is it hard to move from one group to another? We all get labeled, does that label dictate your social status or does you social status determine you label? Once you are labeled can you change your social status identity?

The Near Poor

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hidden-motives/201111/the-near-poor

Monday, November 14, 2011

Social Networks: What Maslow Misses

social-networks-what-maslow-misses-0

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Why Kids Bully: Because They're Popular

By BELINDA LUSCOMBE Tuesday, February 8, 2011

- All Sociology students need to respond to this article!

The text in red below are links to other articles you may want to read before responding

Mean kids, mothers tell their wounded young, behave that way because they have unhappy home lives, or feel inadequate, or don't have enough friends or because they somehow lack empathy. But a new study suggests some mean kids actually behave that way simply because they can.

Contrary to accepted ruffian-scholarship, the more popular a middle- or high-school kid becomes, the more central to the social network of the school, the more aggressive the behavior he or she engages in. At least, that was the case in North Carolina, where students from 19 middle and high schools were studied for 4.5 years by researchers at the University of California-Davis.

Authors Robert Faris and Diane Felmlee interviewed public-school kids seven times over the course of their study, starting when the students were in grades 6, 7 and 8. They asked the students to name their friends and used the data to create friendship maps. They then asked the kids who was unkind to them and whom they picked on, and mapped out the pathways of aggression.

(More on Time.com: The Tricky Politics of Tween Bullying)

What they found was that only one-third of the students engaged in any bullying at all — physical force, taunts or gossip-spreading — but those who were moving up the school popularity chain bullied more as they went higher. Only when kids reached the very top 2% of the school's social hierarchy or fell into the bottom 2% did their behavior change; these kids were the least aggressive.

"Seemingly normal well-adjusted kids can be aggressive," says Faris, whose results are published in the new issue of the American Sociological Review. "We found that status increases aggression."

While the authors are not ruling out psychological or background influences as underlying causes of the bullying, they believe that popularity is at least as important. "It's one of the few times I can recall in social sciences where race and family background seem to make very little difference," says Faris. "Those demographic and socioeconomic factors don't seem to matter as much as where the kids are in the school hierarchy."

(More on Time.com: A Glimmer of Hope in a Bad-News Survey About Bullying)

Faris also found that the more kids cared about popularity, the more aggressive they were. Ironically, that's pointless; hostile behavior did not cause rises in status. "The evidence suggests that overall aggression does not increase status," he says. Then again, it's not whether it works that's important. It's whether the kids believe it works.

Another stereotype the study jabbed at was that males and females bully differently. Boys spread gossip only marginally less often than girls did. And girls were negligibly less physically violent to each other than boys were. Gender-on-gender bullying was more prevalent among girls than boys, but boys were more likely to be hostile toward girls than the other way around.

Gender wasn't entirely a neutral factor, however. If a girl knew a lot of boys, or a boy knew a lot of girls at a school where there wasn't much intermingling of the sexes, those kids' status would go up, presumably because they provided a bridge to contact with potential dates. And, yep, the "gender-bridge" kids, as the study called them, seemed to be more aggressive than others.

If bullying is actually more of a result of hierarchy than of psychology, Faris believes there might be a more effective solution than trying to change the behavior of the bullies. "The majority of kids who witness this, either give it tacit approval or outright encouragement," says Faris. "Those are the ones who give these kids their status. We need to change their minds."

Find this article at:
http://healthland.time.com/2011/02/08/do-popular-kids-bully-more/

How Being Socially Connected May Sap Your Empathy

By MAIA SZALAVITZ Friday, October 28, 2011
socially connected is good for you, both physically and mentally, but in a paradox, it may also make you less empathetic to the plight of others.

Numerous studies have established that having lots of social support is associated with longevity and better psychological health, but past studies have also hinted that there's something about the chemistry of connection that inclines people toward unkindness — particularly toward stigmatized groups like those with disabilities or addictions.

The researchers of the new study wanted to explore this issue further by looking at how people who had a strong sense of social support would behave toward those outside their circle. Specifically, the researchers sought to examine whether feelings of connectedness led to increased tendencies to dehumanize others.

"By 'dehumanization,' we mean the failure to consider another person as having a mind," says lead author Adam Waytz, assistant professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, explaining that the idea of "mind" includes the capacity to feel pain and pleasure, as well as to plan and intend.

In one experiment, the researchers randomly assigned 38 participants to write essays: some were asked to write about a time they felt supported by a loved one; others were instructed to write about a person whom they see in daily life but don't interact with, like someone they see in the hall at school or work.

Afterward, the volunteers were asked to evaluate their perceptions of four different groups: rich people, middle class people, those with drug addictions and disabled people. The evaluations had to do with different aspects of mind that they were asked to attribute to the average group member, such as how capable the person would be of "engaging in a great deal of thought" or "doing things on purpose."

The participants who had written about feeling supported were more likely to dehumanize the addicted and disabled people, lowering their rankings of various aspects of mind by about one point on a 7-point scale.

In another experiment, 59 participants were given photos of people they were told were terrorists responsible for planning the attacks of 9/11. Some of the volunteers looked through the pictures with a friend, while others did so with a stranger who was also participating in the research.

Afterward, when questioned, people who perused the photos with a friend were more likely to support the use of waterboarding and the use of greater levels of electric shock on the suspects. On a 450-volt scale, those who'd been with their friends said that 170.6 volts would be acceptable to use on average, while those working with a stranger were only willing to go up to 136.

"We think there are two reasons," says Waytz. "One is that experience of social connection draws a circle around you that defines who is in and who is out. It very clearly delineates who is 'us versus them' and when it is 'us versus them,' people outside appear to be less human.

"The more interesting reason is that social connection is sort of like eating. When you are hungry, you seek out food. When you are lonely, you seek social connection. When the experience of social connection is elevated, we feel socially 'full' and have less desire to seek out other people and see them in a way that treats them as essentially human."

A similar psychology may affect our everyday interactions. "People talk about being overextended, having too many dinner dates, coffee dates, meetings. They feel depleted," says Waytz. "We think this plays into our findings. Even though you are extremely socially connected, at some point, it comes at the expense of the ability to consider the full humanity of those around you."

While Waytz doesn't suggest people should limit their feelings of genuine connectedness, he does think there are bounds to our ability to be truly present for others. "Empathy is a fixed resource and when we are spending it on those close to us, we simply have less to spend on others whom we feel less close to," he says.

But that doesn't preclude us from rationally recognizing the tendency to dehumanize outsiders, he says, and relying on our moral principles to avoid behaving dishonorably. "I think expanding the circle of empathy has been good for humankind," he says. "But that's only part of the story. Another part is [using moral guidelines] like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights."

Waytz' research also suggests that we might reconsider the way we characterize people with addictions. Although the notion of addiction as brain disease may absolve addicts of some of the blame for their affliction, it also suggests that they are not operating under free will. Since dehumanization itself involves seeing people as having "less mind" and a reduced ability to plan or control behavior, that view may increase the stigma of the condition, not reduce it.

The paradoxes of human nature make these issues much more complicated than they initially seem.

Monday, November 7, 2011

Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sports

This year is the 40th anniversary of Title IX - legislation that was to bring equality to girls & women in the area of athletics at both the high school and college level. Have we come far enough or do we have work to do? In 1977 only about 1 in 10 females participated in athletics, today it is up to 1 in 3. In 1977 about 90% of the head coaches of female athletics team were female, today the numbers are down under 10%. Why have we seen the gains in participation but the dramatic drops in coaching and administration?

Below is an article from the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sports at the University of Minnesota

In July, The Nation magazine devoted a special issue—"Views from Left Field"—to the role and impact of sports in U.S. culture. In the wake of Title IX a significant part of that sport culture now includes females. To illuminate an important issue pertaining to female athletes, TC Director and Professor Mary Jo Kane was invited by editors at The Nation to address how and why sportswomen are covered in mainstream sport media. A central focus of Kane's article was whether a "sex sells" strategy is the most effective way to increase interest in and respect for today's female athletes.

This question is better answered within a broader context of what sport media scholarship has revealed. Over the past four decades, scholars have examined media coverage of women's sports and discovered two patterns of representation. First, female athletes, compared to their male counterparts, are significantly underrepresented in terms of amount of coverage, where they receive only 2-4% of all sports reporting. This lack of media attention ignores the reality of women's overall level of involvement: They represent 40 percent of all sport participants nationwide and approximately half of all those involved in intercollegiate athletics. The second pattern is that athletic females are routinely presented in ways that emphasize their femininity and heterosexuality versus their athletic competence and grace-under-pressure performance.

Trends related to amount and type of coverage have been remarkably resilient and universal. They can be found in print and broadcast journalism, at different levels of athletic involvement (Olympic, college, and professional sports), and regardless of time period with respect to Title IX. In sum, sport media routinely highlight the athletic exploits of males as opposed to the physical—and sexualized—appearance of females.

A major consequence of such media coverage is to maintain women's status as second-class citizens in one of the most powerful social, political, and economic institutions on this planet. One premise of sport media scholarship is that media play a significant role in relegating sportswomen to the sidelines because they systematically underreport and trivialize women's athletic achievements. Scholars have investigated why these particular patterns of representation dominate media coverage—not to mention marketing techniques—surrounding women's sports. A commonly held belief among those who cover and promote women's sports is that the most effective way to generate fan interest is to present sportswomen in ways that reaffirm conventional notions of femininity and heterosexuality. This taken-for-granted assumption explains the desire to portray sportswomen as traditionally feminine rather than as physically powerful. It also explains why, when athletic females appear in ads as product endorsers, they often do so in sexually provocative poses.

In spite of such deep-seated beliefs and practices, there is virtually no research to support the effectiveness of such a "sex sells" approach to the coverage and promotion of women's sports. To fill this void, Kane and colleague Dr. Heather Maxwell conducted a ground-breaking study in which they examined the widely held notion that "sex sells" women's sports. Key findings from this study, Kane's broader critique of how (and why) sportswomen are represented in both image and narrative form, and evidence for what does sell women's sport, can be found in The Nation's special issue. Additionally, a slide show of exemplar images of the six categories of how female athletes are portrayed in sport media—from athletic competence to soft porn—can be viewed on our Web site.

The key takeaway from Kane's research and her primary argument?—Sex sells sex, not women's sports.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Bringing Up Baby in the Digital Age

By age 2, 92% of American children have an online footprint. What does that do to their psyches?

By MARTIN LINDSTROM | @MartinLindstrom | November 4, 2011
Last year, the Internet security firm AVG reported that 92% of American children have an online footprint before the ripe old age of 2 years old. Their digital presence often begins with their first image — a sonogram — being posted online. Each subsequent shot, from birth to birthday party, is shared on social networks. In fact, 7% are born with a pre-established email address, and a further 5% have a social network profile. On the one hand, this means that you are no longer forced to politely page through proud parents’ photo albums. But what does such visibility from such a young age do to both the kids and their parents?

As Peter was showing me around his bedroom, I noticed some small black lines drawn on the back of his bedroom door. They were kind of like the old tallying system — four small vertical lines, crossed by one horizontal. Peter was obviously keeping a record of something. I was curious but not quite prepared for his answer. He patiently explained that each line represented an occasion where he’d been allowed out of the house on his own over the past year. There were only seven lines, and it appeared that the most recent outing was already two months old.

In order to seek answers to this question, I decided to spend at least 48 hours in the homes of 10 different families. First on my list was Peter, a 10-year-old, who lived with his mother, father and younger sister in a small suburb on the outskirts of Charlotte, N.C. These young parents were so delighted with the prospect of their first child, that they had uploaded the image from Peter’s first sonogram on their own website.

Two days later I moved on, joining Michael and his family in Louisville, Ky. The story was somewhat similar but, in this case, the invasion of privacy — and the attendant dangers — had moved indoors. Michael had built a Lego castle in the corner of his bedroom, and he was happy to guide me through the design. As he pointed to the perimeter, he explained, “Here’s the first wall protecting me and my family.” He went on, talking me through the second wall, the third wall and finally the fourth. At the very center of this walled bastion was a small bedroom. “This is where I live,” he casually stated. Cameras, microphones and a few guards were positioned around the room. I was a somewhat taken aback when I noticed there was no inside handles on his door. In other words, he could only leave his room if someone opened the door from the outside. One of his direct contacts with the outside world could possibly be via the email address his parents had set up for him before he was born, or his Facebook account, which is extremely active.

As I dug deeper, I realized that Peter’s parents were not afraid of him running away. Nor were they afraid of him falling outside and hurting himself. Rather, having lost all sense of privacy and sure that every move of Peter’s could be tracked, their primary fear was abduction. And as a result of their concern about the dangers of the outside world, they’d focused on making the world inside their home as entertaining as possible. Peter had free access to his computer and every kind of game — there was a Gameboy, a Wii, an NDS as well as a library full of DVDs. This was not a world exclusive to a boy and his toys; Peter was welcome to have friends over to play as often as he wished.

Over the next month, as I visited home after home, I realized how dramatically different life had become since I was a 10-year-old. I grew up on the suburban streets of Denmark, mingling with all the other neighborhood children. It’s hard to imagine what courage it took for my parents to allow me, as an 8-year-old, to walk to school alone. What were they thinking when I turned 15 and they let me borrow their boat to go ocean sailing with my two best friends?

But in a strange twist to this tale, if my parents had been asked to share images of me that would give shape to something called my digital footprint — pictures of me in the womb or taking my first steps or smiling my first smile — I’m pretty sure they’d have rolled their eyes and thought, “Is this person mad?” Fast-forwarding to 2011, I am pretty certain that parents of today would be equally aghast if their neighbor’s child was allowed to walk to school or sail the seas alone. They would undoubtedly roll their eyes and possibly say to one another, “Are they mad?” But I’m not entirely sure which family would be right.

Singsank's Sociology Blog