I attended the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro and wrote of the corruption and violence that had fallen on the poorest in the beautiful city, and the schools and hospitals starved for funds as the government spent grandly on its Olympic Taj Mahal.
Rio’s mayor at the time, Eduardo Paes, wrote a letter complaining of my calumnies and took offense at talk of corruption. Another year passed, and Brazilian prosecutors found Olympic corruption everywhere. An executive from a big construction firm testified that he had given $5 million in bribes to Paes. The former mayor denies those charges.
Watch the video “‘I Was Shocked’: Holocaust Survivor Meets With Teenagers” (above). What does Eva Schloss give as her reason for meeting the teenagers who were shown in a video making Nazi salutes at a party? What does she say she learned? What advice does she give? What hope does she express at the end of the video?
1. Who is Anne Frank? What did she become famous for writing? What message contained in her diary does the article quote? How is Eva Schloss related to Anne Frank?
2. What does Ms. Schloss believe the incident revealed about Holocaust education at Newport Harbor High School?
3. Who is Sean Boulton? How does he explain the students’ actions that were photographed at the party? What statistics seem to back his point about hateful speech having become “normalized”?
4. Who is Paul Nussbaum? Where does he place the blame for incidents like those described in the article? What is his advice for teaching young people about the Holocaust?
5. What happened to Ms. Schloss when she was 16? How does she describe the realization that came next?
Finally, tell us more about what you think:
The article outlines what happened, in addition to the visit from Ms. Schloss, as a result of the incident at the party attended by Newport Harbor High School students: a statement from the mayor of one of the two cities served by the school; students wearing blue in solidarity with the Jewish community; a community meeting featuring students, a rabbi and the spokeswoman for a local Jewish organization; and an upcoming private tour of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, during which students and their parents will meet with a Holocaust survivor and someone whose parents died in the Holocaust.
What do you think is the intended purpose of each of these actions? How well do they meet Mr. Nussbaum’s recommendation that the focus is kept on the personal? Which do you think has the most potential to help students understand what happened during the Holocaust?
Have you learned about the Holocaust? If so, where did you learn about it? Do you think that education is a viable solution for preventing hateful speech, symbols and actions? Why or why not? Do you have additional suggestions for dealing with the issue?
So you’ve been staring deep into a blank document. The cursor is blinking, awaiting your words of wisdom, but you’ve got nothing.
It’s okay, this happens to the best of us. Getting started can be the hardest part of any task – especially when it’s new and unfamiliar territory. But when assignment deadlines are looming, it’s important to find a way to switch yourself on, even if you’re not feeling it.
To help you settle into the study term, we’ve got some handy tips to prepare you (both body and mind) to start researching, writing, and actually relishing the journey. It’s not too late to make a start!
Prep that bod
We know you’ve heard it before, but it’s for good reason – how you feel physically has such a profound effect on your mental performance. Before you settle down to study, we recommend that you:
A) Get some light exercise. It gets the blood pumping and the brain ticking. Try a 15 minute walk, a bit of yoga, or a few household chores. Don’t wear yourself out with high intensity exercise, aim to gently invigorate your system.
B) Have a snack. Don’t launch into study hungry, or too full. Ever feel particularly tired post-lunch? It’s your body directing all your energy into digestion, so keep your meals lighter, and more frequent to compensate.
Pro tip: Have a long-lasting hot drink (caffeine, if you so desire) that will carry you seamlessly from snack time into study time. You may not even notice the transition when you’re sipping on a hot cup of liquid happiness.
Start in the shallow end
University learning materials can be dense – it’s a good thing in the long run, as it will amp up your mental stamina. But in the initial stages of study, the complexity of the material can pose a real hurdle.
Our advice? Begin by doing a Google search for some user-friendly resources, which can help you understand the subject you’re studying at large. Seek out a format that feels effortless to you – perhaps find an overview video of your subject on YouTube, that allows you to sit back, and let the information flow through you. Wikipedia is also great for a topic overview. Any jargon you may not understand usually takes the form of a clickable link, so you can instantly define anything you get stuck on. Beginning with information that is easily understood is a great way to transition into more difficult material.
Get yourself a tad uncomfortable
Putting a bit of pressure on yourself can work wonders for productivity, whether that pressure be physical or mental, conscious or subconscious. For example, try studying in a café – the travel to get there, the money spent on food, and the expectation to free up your table to another customer, will put pressure on you to make the most of your time. Another method is to work in a standing position. If you set out to be productive while standing, the sooner you do so, the sooner you can slump back down into your chair.
Know where you’re heading
When you’re desperate to get started, the tendency is to start writing words to feel productive, then getting caught up polishing those words prematurely. You may later cut out those sections, having wasted long stretches of time.
The best tactic improve your productivity, and lessen your resistance to the task, is to set up a skeleton for your writing or research, which you can flesh out later. That way, you know where you’re going, what questions to ask yourself, and what to spend your time on. Start with a simple framework – an introduction to the topic and a brief history, moving through to the current situation, and ending with future plans and predictions. Modelling your framework on a conventional story arc, with a beginning, middle and end, can really get the ball rolling. You’re free to (and likely to) change your structure later, but a simple linear framework is a good strategy to get you started.
Tackling the unfamiliar is difficult for everyone, but once you push through that initial barrier, you grow. You’re not always going to feel switched on, but when study can’t wait, try some of our techniques to kick yourself into gear.
If you ever need help, don’t hesitate to contact your university tutors, or a friendly OUA student advisor.
From its early days of punch-card machines and calculators, IBM continuously evolves and innovates to develop essential business tools like personal computers, storage media, programming languages, artificial intelligence (AI), and cloud computing.
So, when IBM CEO Ginny Rommetty talks about “what’s next” in tech, the world’s business leaders sit up and listen. Her 2019 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) keynote address paints a vivid picture of how the future of business is changing, and provides powerful examples of leadership that keeps organizations ahead of the curve.
While Rommetty’s keynote covers wide-range of topics, in contains two clear takeaways for aspiring business leaders. First, the MBAs of the future need to be more innovative than ever. They must apply creativity to adapt new technologies to previously-unimagined business opportunities. Second, to succeed in the long term, CEOs need to keep the social impacts of their products and their hiring practices top of mind.
Here are four big, future-focused trends highlighted by Rommetty that tomorrow’s MBAs should think about.
Deep Data: “Big Data” is old news; instead, Rommetty highlights the potential of “deep data” that brings together disparate datasets to generate new analytic insights. For example, IBM is working with its subsidiary The Weather Channel to improve weather forecasting resolution by 200%, in part by utilizing barometer readings from a network of millions of smartphone users that opt-in.
Broad AI: According to Rommetty, even if AI doesn’t replace all jobs, “100 percent of jobs will be different” in the AI era. That’s because the technology is rapidly evolving beyond today’s “narrow” AI (which learns tasks in a single domain) towards “broad AI” that works across many domains.
Blockchain: While the most famous application of blockchain is cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Rommetty and Charles Redfield of Walmart discussed how IBM’s blockchain-enabled Food Trust initiative is helping increase food safety while reducing waste.
Ethics and Inclusivity: Rommetty also emphasized the importance of ethics in the development of technologies like AI, where it’s vital for products to be bias-free as well as “explainable, fair, secure, and with lineage.” She also stressed that companies must ensure that “new collar” (not white- or blue-collar) tech industry opportunities are accessible to people from all walks of life. IBM is pursuing this goal through public-private education partnerships.
Rommetty’s vision of “what’s next” for business leaders is full of exciting new opportunities, but it also pushes the limits of the traditional MBA education. With emerging technologies and new social concerns transforming the means and ends of business, tomorrow’s leaders need to be more innovative, adaptable, and conscientious than ever before.
With its new Global MBA degree, Macquarie University has stepped up to this challenge with education that’s every bit as innovative as today’s business world demands. In place of the usual program structure and course requirements of a traditional MBA, Macquarie has designed the Global MBA curriculum around six future-focused capabilities that cover analytical skills, creative thinking, and the “soft skills” needed by modern business leaders.
Leading: Great CEOs like Rommetty know how to leverage talent as well as technology to transform the way business gets done. Forward-thinking leadership skills are explored by courses like Know Your People, Adapt Your Leadership, and Become a Meaning Maker.
Strategising: In the midst of today’s fast-changing challenges and opportunities, leaders need to adapt and respond quickly. Students learn to develop future-focused workplace strategies with courses like Be Global, Be Sustainable, and Be Disruptive.
Analysing: Data is more central than ever to business success, and the skills needed to analyse information and generate insights are developed through courses like Know Your Numbers and Know Your Customers.
Influencing: Leaders need to be adept at using power and politics to shape the decision-making process and bring about change. Global MBA students hone these crucial “soft skills” with courses like Communicate With Impact and Negotiate and Resolve Conflict.
Adapting: Changes to technology and culture (such as those discussed by Rommetty) are transforming the meaning of work. Courses such as Build Personal Resilience and Become a Global Citizen help students navigate this landscape with confidence and purpose.
Problem Solving: In this capstone Specialisation, Global MBA students apply their problem-solving skills to real-world projects with guidance from Macquarie’s faculty and industry experts.
In addition to the future-focused capabilities curriculum, the Global MBA fits Rommetty’s vision in another, extremely important way: it provides unprecedented access to a world-class MBA. Based in Sydney, Australia, Macquarie University is one of the Asia-Pacific region’s top business schools and is highly-ranked internationally, providing a global perspective and a diverse student body from all over the world. By offering an affordable, online, and highly interactive business degree, the Global MBA is making the Macquarie experience more accessible than ever.
The UK tech sector is growing more than two and half times faster than the overall economy, while in the US more than 190,000 new tech jobs were added in the last year alone. With rising demand for talent to fill these new vacancies we look at just some of the roles that may be available to graduates from the new BSc in Computer Science.
From app developers to drone operators, the tech sector offers unparalleled opportunities for the next generation of technologists.
The first session of the new BSc in Computer Science, launched by the University of London, in partnership with member institution Goldsmiths and online learning platform Coursera, will start in Aprilthis year.
The new degree has been designed to give students not only the fundamentals of computer science but also skills in a number of specialisms that will be in high demand among employers. Industry experts predict that artificial intelligence, machine learning and virtual and augmented reality will be some of the biggest technology trends to take off in the coming years – all of which are specialisms on offer to students choosing the University of London degree.
“Because tech is always advancing – and the technology we use today will be improved again tomorrow – no matter what industry you go into there are endless opportunities.”
Tobias Cieslik, Director at Xult Group, has been working in tech recruitment for more than five years. He said, “Some of the big trends we’re seeing are in augmented and virtual reality, which have become hot topics within the sector. Other areas like autonomous and electric vehicles are developing year on year, while cyber security remains a priority for almost all industries. Because tech is always advancing – and the technology we use today will be improved again tomorrow – no matter what industry you go into there are endless opportunities.”
Sarah Trevelion, Talent Manager at consulting and technology company Techmodal, agrees. She said, “My role allows me to meet some really interesting people who have worked in IT for a number of years but have now moved into subsectors like sales, intellectual property rights and legal advice. Once you have a good grounding in tech there are so many other branches of work you could choose, and the breadth of roles is very exciting.”
“Once you have a good grounding in tech there are so many other branches of work you could choose, and the breadth of roles is very exciting.”
While many companies offer on-the-job training and development opportunities, industry experts agree that a degree in computer science will continue to be rated highly by recruiters.
Sarah Trevelion commented, “At Techmodal a lot of our recruits come in at a junior level and we offer training within the business. For me a good candidate doesn’t just have the basic skills but also has an aptitude for continuous learning. So having a degree not only demonstrates a certain level of ability and exposure, but it also tells me you’re at the right academic level to keep learning.”
“You will be expected to know a lot about a lot. Completing a degree gives you a mindset that’s ready to learn, adapt and deal with challenges.”
Rob O’Brien, Senior Technical Manager (International and Labels) at ITV Studios, knows the importance of a solid academic grounding. He said, “Whatever industry you work in, they are always going to want to use the latest trends and you will be expected to know a lot about a lot. Completing a degree gives you a mindset that’s ready to learn, adapt and deal with challenges.”
For those with a passion for computing, working with the most current tech offers its own rewards, but for others the incentives are more personal.
Phil Peters began his career three years ago and was quickly promoted to Senior Software Engineer at Ordnance Survey. He said, “I love being at the forefront of technology. As an engineer I’m given access to new programmes and new software at least six months before users. But what’s really rewarding is to think that the software and data I’m working on is being used by the police and the ambulance service to be able to find your house faster so they can help you. My work is genuinely benefiting people’s lives.”
Perhaps the most exciting thing about a future career in computer science is that many students beginning their degree now will be doing jobs that haven’t even been created yet. According to McKinsey Global Institute, a third of new jobs created in the US in the past 25 years were roles that did not exist before. From app developers to drone operators and from user experience designers to vloggers, the tech sector offers unparalleled opportunities for the next generation of technologists to create their own career path.
Codecademy’s very own Nick Duckwiler (left) and Ryan Tuck from Warby Parker (right) in our office. (📷: Mitch Boyer)
Last month, Codecademy and Warby Parker came together to work on a special Learn SQL from Scratch Capstone Project. It was during this time when I met Ryan Tuck, a Data Engineer at Warby, who played a major part in this partnership. So when he decided to drop by our office for the final QA round, I had to break out my notebook and ask some questions. Enjoy.
Hey Ryan, let’s start off with a question I’ve had for a while — what is a Data Engineer? (Is it similar to a Data Analyst or a Software Engineer?)
At Warby Parker, data engineers are responsible for creating and maintaining the plumbing required to support the data and reporting needs of the business. We use software engineering practices to automate the work of data cleaning, normalizing, and model building so that data is always ready to be consumed by data analysts in every department.
What languages/frameworks do you use at Warby?
On data engineering, we use Python as our general purpose programming language, as do most of the other teams in our Technology department. When it comes to databases, we use PostgreSQL for the majority of our SQL needs, and are beginning to use Amazon Athena and Google BigQuery for some of our larger datasets. We use Looker as our exclusive business intelligence entry point to all of this data.
What are some of the projects you worked on?
I’ve had the privilege of working with a lot of of smart people in every department at our company to help them solve their varied data needs, from reconciling financial data with the Accounting team to automating and modeling standardized performance metrics for our team of over 200 customer experience advisors.
As part of a team of five supporting the data needs of a rapidly growing company, I’ve tried where possible to focus on helping our analysts solve their own problems. This includes helping people learn Python and commit to our codebase, guiding the creation of data models in SQL, and encouraging people to submit pull requests to add features in Looker, our BI tool.
Seeing dozens of otherwise “non-technical” colleagues opening up PRs on a daily basis, and consequently being part of the democratization of tech that we value at Warby Parker, is probably the most rewarding “project” I’ve been a part of.
One project finished recently during our first annual “Hackweek” is called Pipes, which allows anyone at the company to easily move large amounts of data from wherever to wherever (Looker, Google Sheets, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, etc) on a regular cadence, or manually through a simple one-line chatbot interface. The adoption has been overwhelmingly positive and we’re looking to grow this sort of tooling out even more.
“We use software engineering practices to automate the work of data cleaning, normalizing, and model building so that data is always ready to be consumed by data analysts in every department.”
What got you into the data field?
I’ve always been drawn to analytical fields like math, and became pretty proficient in Excel during some internships in college. Once I had learned to program and learned more about data science and its applications in artificial intelligence, I knew that anything I could do to immerse myself in the world of data would be a step in the right direction.
Three and a half years ago, I landed a job as a junior software engineer at Warby Parker not fully knowing what I was in for, but am so glad I got the opportunity to help build tools to support an interesting and ever-changing data-driven culture here.
Where did you learn SQL and Python?
I had a background in C++, and was exposed to Python through an Intro to Data Science course. When Warby Parker hired me onto the Data team in 2015, I had never written a SQL query in my life, but picked it up quickly and within a few months started up internal SQL training classes, which I still teach on a monthly basis.
What does your tattoo say?
The ultimate cheatsheet.
This is Bayes’ Theorem, which is an equation that describes how to update probabilities given new evidence. Two summers ago I worked on building a tool to help predict weekly fantasy football performance. Some colleagues suggested a Bayesian approach would be appropriate, since there aren’t really enough data points in an NFL season to be able to use statistical approaches that require larger datasets, and I’d want to regularly update my predictions after each player’s latest performance.
I did a deep dive into understanding the (simple) math underlying Bayes’ Theorem and came out of that experience with a whole new worldview, understanding my entire knowledge of the world as a big and intricate probabilistic model that I was continuously updating with every experience I ever have. It was pretty transformative, and I figured that was worth a tattoo.
What is a concept in SQL/Python that’s essential to your work?
Donald Knuth said, “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” I’ve generally found this to be true, and try to live by it in my work. For example, I’ll generally prefer to keep a data model simple by rebuilding it for all time on a daily basis using a single SQL query instead of making a more complicated model that requires iteratively adding to a table, keeping track of state, updated timestamps, when something last ran, etc.
A wise man once said, “Duplicating data makes things go fast,” but databases are already impressively fast to begin with, without implementing anything to improve performance. Ultimately, I almost always approach a problem thinking about optimizing for my time over machine time, for readability over performance, and for introducing as little cognitive overhead as is required by the problem at hand. Only once performance issues or readability issues present themselves will some code be worth a rewrite.
Last question! Since you wrote Warby Parker’s internal SQL training courses, I know there gotta be some inner Curriculum Developer in you. Can you teach a SQL concept in 2 minutes?
Sure! Have you ever written a query that yields some result set and you think, “I’d love to query the stuff I just produced like it was a table?” Enter the WITH clause.
Suppose I have a mega query that gives the transaction summaries:
select
transactions.date as transaction_date,
sum(items.price) as total_cost,
count(*) as number_of_items
from
transactions
inner join
customers
on
customers.id = transactions.customer_id
inner join
transaction_items
on
transactions.id = transaction_items.transaction_id
inner join
items
on
items.id = transaction_items.item_id
Using WITH, I can create a temporary table within my query that I can SELECT from and treat it just like a regular old table.
I will put everything from the previous query in a parentheses and use WITH to give it the name transaction_summaries.
Then I’ll apply the date and customer filtering down below for a more readable query, to separate out all the JOIN logic from the actual WHERE filters that I want to apply on that data.
with transaction_summaries as (
select
transactions.date as transaction_date,
sum(items.price) as total_cost,
count(*) as number_of_items
from
transactions
inner join
customers
on
customers.id = transactions.customer_id
inner join
transaction_items
on
transactions.id = transaction_items.transaction_id
inner join
items
on
items.id = transaction_items.item_id
)
select
*
from
transaction_summaries
where
first_name = 'beyonce'
and
transaction_date > '2018–01–01'
order by
total_cost desc
limit
5
If you’re familiar with subqueries, this does a similar thing but makes the SQL far more readable, even if your query isn’t quite as performant as it would have been. This is essentially an implementation of the mantra “Don’t Repeat Yourself” that’s common in the world of programming.
Incredible. And love the SQL styling! 😍
Huge shout out to Ryan and the whole Warby Parker team for making this partnership happen. Special hat tips for behind-the-scenes support from:
A Day in the Life of a Software Engineer (via Life of Luba)
With Airbnb came a revolution of sorts in the world of vacation travel and culture. We sat down with Luba Yudasina, a YouTuber, an opera singer, and a Software Engineer on the Airbnb’s Homes Platform team, to discuss software engineering and her programming journey—from Codecademy to Airbnb!
Hey Luba, let’s start with the basics! What does a Software Engineer on the Platform team do at Airbnb?
Homes Platform’s mission is to create the building blocks to power all Homes categories. Any project undertaken by our team should be reusable and extensible in some way. This means that as a backend engineer, I have a lot of opportunities to work on impactful technical projects that create systems and services to support Homes, as well as collaborate across teams to come up with the best architectural decisions and designs.
Recently, our team wrote a blog post on classifying Room Types into categories using Machine Learning and computer vision. The room-type classification problem largely resembles the ImageNet classification problem, except our team’s model outcomes are customized room-types.
After a few experiments with various models, the team chose ResNet50 due to its good balance between model performance and computation time. To make it compatible with our use case, we added two extra fully connected layers and a Softmax activation in the end.
Let’s rewind a little bit. Coming from a chemical engineering background in college, how did you make the switch into programming?
I went to the University of Waterloo in Canada—a university with the biggest co-op program in the world. Co-op means that to obtain a bachelor’s degree you must complete a certain number of internships. If you are in Engineering at Waterloo, you must complete 5 internships to graduate.
In my first and second years, I interned at chemical engineering companies and afterwards I couldn’t see myself working in the field full-time. That’s why I’m particularly grateful that I studied at Waterloo: if not for co-op, I probably would not have realized I didn’t want to work in chemical engineering until getting a full-time job after graduation.
I happened to have a lot of friends in Computer Science and Software Engineering right when I realized Chem Eng wasn’t for me. They really encouraged me to try coding, and when I decided to follow their lead I never looked back! My first online programming course was Web Development on Codecademy 🙂
“It’s a really cool time to be a software engineer and even cooler to be a female software engineer, because this is the time when women start to embrace their own unique identities and be ok with not being ‘one of the dudes.'” -Luba Yudasina
When I decided I wanted to learn computer science on my own, my goal was to get an internship in the field because working as a software engineer at a tech company would be the best test to really know if it was for me.
I happened to be in Munich, Germany on academic exchange for a whole year when I was learning how to code, so I hustled as much as I could while being there to get experience to learn quicker and have something to put down on my tech resume.
Almost immediately after arriving in Germany, I got a part time job as a developer at a game publishing company. I had a good friend in Computer Science at my German university: her and I ended up working on an Android app as a side project, etc. When I was ready, I started preparing for technical interviews. I then leveraged my network to refer me to companies and do mock technical interviews with me.
Yelp was really random though—a Yelp recruiter looked at my LinkedIn profile and didn’t even message me, but I messaged them anyway asking about internship opportunities, and that’s how I got my interview there!
Airbnb HQ in San Franciso
What is an essential app/item in your day-to-day?
Code searching! A lot of software engineering is problem solving and a lot of it is understanding other people’s code and the reasoning behind writing it a certain way. Searching through the codebases is almost essential to my day to day. Whenever I build something new or build on top of already existing tech, I need to understand how it works and is written, and code search is vital to this.
At Airbnb we use Google’s Codesearch for these purposes, but developers (myself included) also frequently use their IDEs to search for relevant code. I mostly use RubyMine or IntelliJ (depending on the codebase I’m working with).
In your videos, you’ve mentioned the intersection of gender and technology. Can you speak a bit more about that?
It’s a really cool time to be a software engineer and even cooler to be a female software engineer, because this is the time when women start to embrace their own unique identities and be ok with not being “one of the dudes.”
I think it’s particularly important to redefine the stereotypes, and I hope that with my own example I can show young girls and women interested in the field that you don’t have to give up your feminine side to be a software engineer and still be into fashion, or makeup, or art (I personally sing opera) and have other interests outside of coding and be successful in the field.
Before we wrap up, do you have anything else you would like to say to our learners?
Don’t be discouraged, learn and absorb as much as you can! If you don’t understand a concept or can’t build a project right away, know that with practice, perseverance and concentration you will get there!
Take advantage of such amazing tools as Codecademy that are there for you to take and learn. Learning anything new can be frustrating, but knowing that you can do it, staying curious, asking questions and not losing your motivation is the key to success.
Huge shoutout to Luba for this insightful interview. It’s always incredibly moving to see a Codecademy learner go on to do bigger things. Go subscribe to her YouTube channel, Life of Luba.
And thank you to the whole Homes Platform/Engineering team at Airbnb for the support. Check out their wonderful open source projects on airbnb.io.
People living in most parts of the United States experienced the start of daylight saving time on Sunday morning. What do you think about the ritual of pushing clocks one hour forward, and then, in autumn, moving them back one hour? Have you heard that some places are pushing to abolish daylight saving time? What are your thoughts on that? In “Daylight Saving Is Here. Suppose We Made This Time Change Our Last?,” Kirk Johnson writes:
“I cannot change the rotation of the earth and sun,” said Kansen Chu, a California lawmaker who is sponsoring a bill to keep the state permanently on daylight time — one of at least 31 states that are addressing some aspect of daylight saving and its discontents. “But I am hoping to get more sunlight to the people of California.”
Proponents of setting the clock once and being done with it, like Mr. Chu, a Democrat from the San Jose area, said that shifting back and forth in the spring and fall, if it ever really made sense, no longer does.
California voters agreed last fall, approving a ballot proposition for year-round daylight time by a wide margin.
Lifestyles and patterns of work are different now than they were when daylight saving first became entrenched nationally during and after World War II. Research, Mr. Chu and others said, has shown that human beings just aren’t as flexible about their daily rhythms as they once seemed; accidents, heart attacks and strokes tend to occur in greater numbers around the time shift.
The 1966 law allows states to opt out of daylight saving, and Hawaii and Arizona do so, staying on standard time all year; so does Puerto Rico. But for reasons that historians say remain murky, the law does not allow states to opt in all the way, and choose daylight time year-round. So the California proposal, and a similar bill passed by the Florida Legislature last year, would require an act of Congress to take effect.
Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
— How helpful, if at all, do you think daylight saving time is? To what degree is it worth the hassle of changing clocks, “losing” and later “gaining” an hour of time?
— What is the most important reason that supports your stance on either preserving or abolishing daylight saving?
— What effects do you predict ending daylight saving would have on the economy? What about people’s health? Why do you think that?
— Should there be requirements such as all states in a time zone, or adjacent to one another, reaching consensus about keeping with or breaking from daylight saving time? Or should the decision be made for the whole country?
— What are some reasons people may oppose a federal ruling about the ritual? Why might people support it?
Students 13 and older are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.
In a regularly best-selling way, A.J. Jacobs writes stunt books. Or quest-stunt books, is more like it. Or humorous quest-stunt books is most like it. “The Year of Living Biblically,” for example, described his efforts to abide by the over 700 rules he finds set down — by, well, Whom? — in the Old and New Testaments. In “The Know-It-All,” Jacobs told of his 18-month effort to read the entire “Encyclopaedia Britannica,” using its abecedarian entries as prompts for reflection and anecdotes. Etc.
