Sam Han | Eportfolio

Second, these individuals did not simply have an individual problem. They had a family problem. This is a hard thing to say and I am of course aware that this, too, is a generalisation. But many of these people are from families that are profoundly dysfunctional, operating on completely different terms from the rest of society, middle class or poor.

Most of them are shaping up that way by the time they are in primary school or even in nursery. They then grow up in circumstances where their role models are drug dealers, pimps, people with knives and guns, people who will exploit them and abuse them but with whom they feel a belonging. Hence the gang culture that is so destructive.

This is a phenomenon of the late 20th century. You find it in virtually every developed nation. Breaking it down isn’t about general policy or traditional programmes of investment or treatment. The last government should take real pride in the reductions in inequality, the improvement in many inner-city schools and the big fall in overall crime. But none of these reaches this special group.

By the end of my time as prime minister, I concluded that the solution was specific and quite different from conventional policy. We had to be prepared to intervene literally family by family and at an early stage, even before any criminality had occurred. And we had to reform the laws around criminal justice, including on antisocial behaviour, organised crime and the treatment of persistent offenders. We had to treat the gangs in a completely different way to have any hope of success. The agenda that came out of this was conceived in my last years of office, but it had to be attempted against a constant backdrop of opposition, left and right, on civil liberty grounds and on the basis we were “stigmatising” young people. After I’d left, the agenda lost momentum. But the papers and the work are all there.

This is former British Prime Minster Tony Blair’s opinion piece that has been getting a lot of circulation today. I fear we may be witnessing a trend toward the Moynihanian cultural politics of family, which has so permeated American domestic policy discussions.

At the 7:00 mark of this video, Mike Huckabee, the former governor and current Bible-toting dinosaur apologist, picked up a bass and joined the band Nada under Tim Pawlenty’s tent. While standing in front of a crowd of Republican voters, at a family-friendly carnival that kids were dragged to, Mike Huckabee and Nada covered Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues”—the classic country song that includes the line, “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.”

Mike Huckabee pays no mind to the unbelievably casual gun violence that Cash drawls. He bobs his head, driving along the bassline, no stop, no pause, no extended Bill O’Reilly harangue.

Johnny Cash was a drinker and a drug user, with several misdemeanors under his belt. One of his car crashes started a large-scale forest fire and he was subsequently sued by the federal government. (He was unapologetic.) He cheated on his wife. He sang about guns, he sang about violence. (He also sang about love, about loss, about faith.) Johnny Cash performed at the White House, numerous times, without a problem.

It’s amazing how selectively Fox News and its followers pick their battles. They can drum up war in foreign lands, they can excuse deaths of other skin colors. They can sign up everyone for the NRA and chain themselves to the Second Amendment fences. They can sing Johnny Cash and Ted Nugent, play Call of Duty 4. But as soon as a black man talks about holding a gun, then it’s something scary, something entirely different.

Jeff gets it right.

The problem is that the tacit control and sense of the common good based upon personal relationships upon which social order finally depends has started to break down in British inner cities, which are often fragmented into different racio-religious and cultural ghettoes. (Though it is notable that the Muslim communities behaved particularly well during the recent troubles.)

In the face of this breakdown normal policing cannot substitute – and unfortunately only a police-state could, an option with which too many British middle-class people seem all too comfortable.

The long-term solution, therefore, must have to do with re-creating ethos and self-respect – this also being the key to local economic renewal. For the time being, the rioters, however bad their actions – and actually because they have been so bad – must be seen as the victims of a wider national malaise as well as responsible actors who momentarily took some very wrong decisions.

A response to the happenings in England by theologian John Milbank. He’s a major intellectual resource of Phillip Blond, a favorite of PM David Cameron and chief architect of Red Toryism. This response, however, pleasantly surprised me, especially with regard to taking to task the liberal-left demand for more policing.

“So Karl Marx, it seems, was partly right in arguing that globalization, financial intermediation run amok, and redistribution of income and wealth from labor to capital could lead capitalism to self-destruct (though his view that socialism would be better has proved wrong). Firms are cutting jobs because there is not enough final demand. But cutting jobs reduces labor income, increases inequality, and reduces final demand.

…

To enable market-oriented economies to operate as they should and can, we need to return to the right balance between markets and provision of public goods. That means moving away from both the Anglo-Saxon model of laissez-faire and voodoo economics and the continental European model of deficit-driven welfare states. Both are broken.”

To repeat something that I always do, we must rethink the linkage of markets and capitalism. As Braudel and DeLanda after him have consistently maintained, capitalism as it exists today may be largely anti-market.

Current Exhibition

Portraiture Now: Asian American Portraits of Encounter
August 12, 2011 through October 14, 2012.

Visit the website

This installation of Portraiture Now will feature seven artists, each of whom will show several works.

The National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program are collaborating on an exhibition that will be the Smithsonian’s first major showcase of contemporary Asian American portraiture. Through the groundbreaking work of seven talented artists from across the country and around the world, the exhibition offers provocative renditions of the Asian American experience. Their portraits of encounter offer representations against and beyond the stereotypes that have long obscured the complexity of being Asian in America.

The artists featured are CYJO, New York; Hye Yeon Nam, Atlanta and New York; Shizu Saldamando, Los Angeles; Roger Shimomura, Lawrence, KS; Satomi Shirai, New York; Tam Tran, Memphis, TN; and Zhang Chun Hong, Lawrence, KS.

Lead support for the exhibition, publication, and related programs is provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation and the Rebecca Houser Westcott Fund for “Portraiture Now.”

Additional support is provided by Andrew S. Ree and the Joh Foundation.

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Friend of mine recently put me on to one of the projects that will be part of this exhibit. Also just saw a BBC segment on it.

The project in particular that I was hipped to is called KYOPO. http://www.kyopoproject.com/project.html

Sociologist Alain Touraine on scapegoating immigrants in Europe.

SINGAPORE (AFP) – Apple’s iPad and other tablet computers are replacing traditional note pads in some Asian schools and making the lives of thousands of students a whole lot easier.

Soon pupils could be reading on their tablets about a quaint old communication device called “paper”, especially in Asia’s advanced economies where many schools are racing towards a paperless classroom.

The slim glass slabs slip easily into a bag and can store thousands of textbooks, making a fat school bag full of heavy books, pens and notepads a thing of the past.

“I like the iPad because it is portable and we do not have to carry so many bags and files around,” said 13-year-old Nicole Ong, who now makes notes on her iPad during class at Nanyang Girls’ High School in Singapore.

A sample group of more than 120 students and 16 teachers at the school have been given iPads, at a cost of over $100,000. By 2013, every student in the school will have one.

The number of software applications — or apps — that can be used for educational purposes on tablet computers is set to explode.

It’s a brand new business that even media mogul Rupert Murdoch has identified as an area of huge potential growth.

Murdoch said his News Corp group is to push into the education technology market in a speech to the e-G8 conference of Internet entrepreneurs and European policymakers in Paris last month.

He described education as the “last holdout from the digital revolution” and outlined a vision for personalised learning with lessons delivered by the world?s best teachers to thousands of students via the Internet.

“Today?s classroom looks almost exactly the same as it did in the Victorian age,” Murdoch added.

But many Asian schools are already way ahead of the game.

“No longer is language learning solely based on the teacher commenting on students’ works — classmates can feedback on one another,” said Seah Hui Yong, curriculum dean of Nanyang.

Rene Yeo, head of the information technology department at Tampines Secondary School, also in Singapore, teaches science with his iPad. His students learn factorisation by simply moving the numbers around on the screen.

They also read about animal cells and the human brain structure by clicking on the various parts. And tablet computers make the double helix structure of a human DNA practically come to life before a student’s eyes.

There are apps to learn English and maths, pupils can do cause and effect analysis on iBrainstorm, prepare for oral exams and speeches with AudioNote and even strum the guitar for a music lesson on GarageBand.

The rise of classroom technology will mirror its rise throughout society, says Sam Han, a US-based expert on the role of technology in education.

Han, instructional technology fellow at the Macaulay Honors College, City University of New York, said he expects some Asian countries to leapfrog the West.

“While the Internet was birthed in the US, Singapore and South Korea (for example) boast far greater broadband Internet access penetration and infrastructure than the US,” he said.

Japan’s communications ministry has given tablets to more than 3,000 under-12 pupils at 10 elementary schools and even fitted classrooms with interactive electronic blackboards under the so-called “future school” pilot project.

In South Korea, where schools have WiFi zones, the education ministry has been testing ‘digital textbooks’ in some schools since 2007. In 2012, the ministry says it will decide whether to supply tablets to schools nationwide.

Singapore has a hugely competitive education system known for its high level of science and mathematics instruction. The education ministry provides a grant for schools to buy this kind of equipment, as well as software and services.

Many schools already have WiFi, making it easy for students to connect to the Internet.

But some teachers acknowledged there are students who get distracted by playing games or surfing Facebook and other social media sites like Twitter.

Education psychologist Qiu Lin cautioned against schools getting carried away and promoting the blind use of technological devices, and neglecting the real goals of education.

“The trend of integrating technology into education will definitely increase,” said the assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University, which is separate from the high school.

“But after one month when the novelty of iPads wears down, a good curriculum and teaching materials that can increase deep thinking and problem solving in students need to be in place.”

Not quite the “expert” on instructional technology as the article says but nevertheless feel good about the fact that I wasn’t quoted as saying something completely wrong or stupid.

It’s really embarrassing to say but the current printing of my new book has quite a few errors. Routledge has promised that subsequent printings will be corrected but I did want readers who purchased the current one to know that I’m aware of them.

There’s one in particular that I wish weren’t there. It is at the end of chapter 2 (p. 51). Please make believe that it says this as opposed to what is really printed:

Taking from the ethic of “hacking” in the open-source movement, Web 2.0 has, in some ways, broadened what was only available to a specialized community of hackers—to partake in the development to the software and see their participation directly result in changes, upturning the traditional dichotomy of “producer” and “user,” and, in turn, uprooting the inherent power relations between the two. –End of chapter–

There are others but that one is the one that really gets to me. Thanks in advance for reading.

Totally curious about this film.