Monthly Archives: May 2013

“America’s Top Colleges Has Rich Kid Problem” By Jordan Weissmann

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In case you ever wondered just how much wealthy students dominate America’s top colleges, here’s a nice illustration from a new report by the Century Foundation. At the most selective schools in the country,* 70 percent of students come from the wealthiest quarter of U.S. families. Just 14 percent come from the poorest half. And while these statistics date back to 2006, I think it’s safe to say they haven’t changed greatly in the last few years.

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If you think higher education should be a ladder for upward mobility, then you should regard these numbers as a disgrace. As we’ve written before at The Atlantic, elite colleges do a consistently poor job recruiting the intelligent but low-income high school students who could benefit most from a top-notch education. Part of their problem, as Josh Freedman explained for us recently, is that it’s expensive. Low-income undergrads need financial aid, and many institutions either don’t have the resources, or would simply prefer to deploy them elsewhere. Others have the money and are willing to use it, but aren’t sufficiently aggressive about reaching out to a population of students who often don’t realize they have the academic skills to attend a great school or that aid would cover most of their expenses. Click link for full article

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/05/americas-top-colleges-have-a-rich-kid-problem/276195/

Posted by F. Sheikh

‘We Share 98.5 % Genes With Chimpanzees- What makes us human?By A C Grayling

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According to genetics, there is not much that makes us human; depending on how you count, we share 98.5 per cent of our genes with chimpanzees. Perhaps this is not such a significant matter, given that we also share about 60 per cent of our genes with tomatoes. As this shows, human beings are fully part of nature, and the elements that make us make not just the rest of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, but the rocks beneath our feet and the stars in the sky above us.

So what does make us human? It is not that we live in social groups: ants, antelopes and sparrows do the same. It is not that we have nuanced emotional lives: so do dogs and baboons. It is not even that we have language, for other things – including trees, as it happens – have communication systems, too, and it might be that some of those systems are quite complex, as appears to be the case with dolphins, for example.

But in the human case the system of communication – language – is particularly complex and flexible, with great expressive power, and this makes possible the phenomenon of culture. If I were to pick one thing that separates humanity from the rest of the living world, culture is it.

There are two senses to the word “culture”. It is used by anthropologists to talk about the traditions, practices and beliefs of a society in general. But it is also used to mean the art, literature and intellectual life of a society – and it is this that most spectacularly differentiates human beings from all other animals. Click link for full article

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2013/05/culture-what-separates-us-rest-living-world

Posted By F. Sheikh

‘Islam Is Not A Monolith’ By Mohsin Hamid

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There are more than a billion Muslims in the world, each with an individual view of life. So why are they viewed as a unified group, asks Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

n 2007, six years after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, I was travelling through Europe and North America. I had just published a novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and as I travelled I was struck by the large number of interviewers and of audience members at Q&As who spoke of Islam as a monolithic thing, as if Islam referred to a self-contained and clearly defined world, a sort of Microsoft Windows, obviously different from, and considerably incompatible with, the Apple OS X-like operating system of “the west”.

I recall one reading in Germany in particular. Again and again, people posed queries relating to how “we Europeans” see things, in contrast to how “you Muslims” do. Eventually I was so exasperated that I pulled my British passport out of my jacket and started waving it around my head. “While it’s true the UK hasn’t yet joined the euro zone,” I said, ” I hope we can all agree the country is in fact in Europe.”

Six years on, a film inspired by the novel is in the process of appearing on screens around the world, and I am pleased to report that those sorts of questions are a little rarer now than they were in 2007. This represents progress. But it is modest progress, for the sense of Islam as a monolith lingers, in places both expected and unexpected.

Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia partakes of racist characteristics. Most Muslims do not “choose” Islam in the way that they choose to become doctors or lawyers, nor even in the way that they choose to become fans of Coldplay or Radiohead. Most Muslims, like people of any faith, are born into their religion. They then evolve their own relationship with it, their own, individual, view of life, their own micro-religion, so to speak.

Islamophobia can be found proudly raising its head in militaristic American think tanks, xenophobic European political parties, and even in atheistic discourse, where somehow “Islam” can be characterized as “more bad” than religion generally, in the way one might say that a mugger is bad, but a black mugger is worse, because black people are held to be more innately violent.

Click Link to read full article;

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2013/may/19/mohsin-hamid-islam-not-monolith

Posted By F. Sheikh

 

Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories

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By MAGGIE KOERTH-BAKER

As Richard Hofstadter wrote in his seminal 1965 book, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” conspiracy theories, especially those involving meddlesome foreigners, are a favorite pastime in this nation. Americans have always had the sneaking suspicion that somebody was out to get us — be it Freemasons, Catholics or communists. But in recent years, it seems as if every tragedy comes with a round of yarn-spinning, as the Web fills with stories about “false flag” attacks and “crisis actors” — not mere theorizing but arguments for the existence of a completely alternate version of reality.

While psychologists can’t know exactly what goes on inside our heads, they have, through surveys and laboratory studies, come up with a set of traits that correlate well with conspiracy belief. In 2010, Swami and a co-author summarized this research in The Psychologist, a scientific journal. They found, perhaps surprisingly, that believers are more likely to be cynical about the world in general and politics in particular. Conspiracy theories also seem to be more compelling to those with low self-worth, especially with regard to their sense of agency in the world at large. Conspiracy theories appear to be a way of reacting to uncertainty and powerlessness.

In 2006, the political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler identified a phenomenon called the “backfire effect.” They showed that efforts to debunk inaccurate political information can leave people more convinced that false information is true than they would have been otherwise. Nyhan isn’t sure why this happens, but it appears to be more prevalent when the bad information helps bolster a favored worldview or ideology.

In that way, Swami says, the Internet and other media have helped perpetuate paranoia. Not only does more exposure to these alternative narratives help engender belief in conspiracies, he says, but the Internet’s tendency toward tribalism helps reinforce misguided beliefs. Click Link for full article;

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/magazine/why-rational-people-buy-into-conspiracy-theories.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2&

Posted By F. Sheikh