Mark Landler in The Times of India
President Barack Obama believes that Saudi Arabia, one of America's most important allies in the Middle East, needs to learn how to "share" the region with its arch enemy, Iran, and that both countries are guilty of fuelling proxy wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
In a series of interviews with the magazine Atlantic published on Thursday, Obama said a number of US allies in the Persian Gulf — as well as in Europe — were "free riders," eager to drag the United States into grinding sectarian conflicts that sometimes had little to do with US interests. He showed little sympathy for the Saudis, who have been threatened by the nuclear deal Obama reached with Iran.
The Saudis, Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg, the magazine's national correspondent, "need to find an effective way to share the neighbourhood and institute some sort of cold peace". Reflexively backing them against Iran, the president said, "would mean that we have to start coming in and using our military power to settle scores. And that would be in the interest neither of the United States nor of the Middle East."
Obama's frustration with much of the Arab world is not new, but rarely has he been so blunt about it. He placed his comments in the context of his broader struggle to extract the United States from the bloody morass of the Middle East so that the nation can focus on more promising, faster-growing parts of the world, like Asia and Latin America.
"If we're not talking to them," he said, referring to young people in those places, "because the only thing we're doing is figuring out how to destroy or cordon off or control the malicious, nihilistic, violent parts of humanity, then we're missing the boat."
Obama also said his support of the Nato military intervention in Libya had been a "mistake," driven in part by his erroneous belief that Britain and France would bear more of the burden of the operation. He defended his refusal not to enforce his own red line against Syria's president, Bashar Assad, even though Vice-President Joe Biden argued internally, the magazine reported, that "big nations don't bluff."
The president disputed criticism that he should have done more to resist the aggression of President Vladimir Putin of Russia in Ukraine. As a neighbour of Russia, Obama said, Ukraine was always going to matter more to Putin than to the United States. This meant that in any military confrontation between Moscow and the West, Russia was going to maintain "escalatory dominance" over its former satellite state.
"The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-Nato country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do," he said. "This is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for."
Obama, who has spoken regularly to Goldberg about Israel and Iran, granted him extraordinary access. The portrait that emerges from the interviews is of a president openly contemptuous of Washington's foreign-policy establishment, which he said was obsessed with preserving presidential credibility, even at the cost of blundering into ill-advised military adventures.
"There's a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow," Obama said. "And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses." This consensus, the president continued, can lead to bad decisions. "In the midst of an international challenge like Syria," he said, "you are judged harshly if you don't follow the playbook, even if there are good reasons."
Although Obama's tone was introspective, he engaged in little second-guessing. He dismissed the argument that his failure to enforce the red line in Syria, or his broader reticence about using military force, had emboldened Russia. Putin, he noted, invaded Georgia in 2008 during the presidency of George W Bush, even though the United States had more than 100,000 troops deployed in Iraq.
Similarly, the president pushed back on the suggestion that he had not been firm enough in challenging China's aggression in the South China Sea, where it is building military installations on reefs and islands, some of which are claimed by the Philippines and other neighbours.
"I've been very explicit in saying that we have more to fear from a weakened, threatened China than a successful, rising China," Obama said.
The president refused to box himself in as a foreign-policy thinker.
"I suppose you could call me a realist in believing we can't, at any given moment, relieve all the world's misery," he said.
But he went on to describe himself as an internationalist and an idealist. Above all, Obama appeared weary of the constant demands and expectations placed on the United States.
"Free riders aggravate me," he said.
He put France and Britain in that category, at least as far as the Libya operation was concerned. Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, he said, became distracted by other issues, while President Nicolas Sarkozy of France "wanted to trumpet the flights he was taking in the air campaign, despite the fact that we had wiped out all the air defences."
Only on the threat posed by the Islamic State did Obama express some misgivings. He likened the extremist group to the Joker in "The Dark Knight," the 2008 Batman movie. The Middle East, Obama said, was like Gotham, a corrupt metropolis controlled by a cartel of thugs.
"Then the Joker comes in and lights the whole city on fire," Obama said. "ISIL is the Joker," he added, using an acronym for the Islamic State.
Still, Obama acknowledged that immediately after the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, he did not adequately reassure Americans that he understood the threat, and was confronting it.
"Every president has his strengths and weaknesses," he said. "And there is no doubt that there are times where I have not been attentive enough to feelings and emotions and politics in communicating what we're doing and how we're doing it."
Thursday, 10 March 2016
Our fixation with maths doesn’t add up
Simon Jenkins in The Guardian
Who will win the Varkey Foundation’s million-dollar “best teacher” prize this week in Dubai? Hot favourite is Britain’s star maths teacher,Colin Hegarty, whose videos are followed by a million viewers worldwide. Hegarty has been hailed as the great hope for British maths.
Like much of the public realm, British maths is “in crisis”. The country is languishing alongside America way down every league table. Evidence of this was cited in a new poll from YouGov, measuring the public’s knowledge of maths, science and English. In maths, roughly a third of those surveyed had no idea how to calculate a mode, a median, a “line of best fit” or the area of a circle.
I seriously doubt this poll, since it implies that two-thirds did know the answers. All on whom I tested it failed, including myself. Nor could they see the point. With one voice they replied: “That’s the sort of thing you learned at school.” So what is the point? It merely ensures that many pupils, like the bright child of a friend of mine with maths blindness, have their schooling undermined by the government’s fixation with maths.
Colin Hegarty has been shortlisted for the $1m Varkey Foundation teacher prize. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian
There is nothing, except religion, as conservative as a school curriculum. It is drenched in archaic prejudice and vested interest. When the medieval church banned geography as an offence against the Bible, what had been the queen of the sciences never recovered. Instead Latin dominated the “grammar” curriculum into the 20th century, to the expense of all science. Today maths is the new Latin.
Science at least improved. In 1988 Thatcher hailed a “dash for science” to halt the decline in young people opting for science subjects. It failed completely. Then in 2006 a radical new GCSE syllabus dragged school science away from test tubes and Bunsen burners towards everyday life, to pollution, global warming, additives, health and diet. Since then the reactionaries have turned to maths as the talisman of educational success. It is in maths that we must beat the Chinese, the Singaporeans and the Finns. Pisa league tables of “top nations” are pored over. Maths teachers are paid more, have their loans written off, are entered for global prizes. No one dares mention the calculator.
Any league table that has China at the top, Britain at 26th and America at 36th tells me something more important than merely who is good at maths. If the US and Britain – among the most vigorous economies and most successful at science – are so bad at maths, it suggests their young people are applying themselves to something more useful. Chinese students are rushing to British and US universities to join them.
No one would argue that pupils should not be able to add, subtract and multiply. But I studied higher maths, from calculus to number theory, and have forgotten the lot. All the maths I have needed comes from John Allen Paulos’s timeless manual, Innumeracy. It is mostly how to understand proportion and risk, and tell when a statistician is trying to con you.
I agree with the great mathematician GH Hardy, who accepted that higher maths was without practical application. It was rather a matter of intellectual stimulus and beauty. A new book by Michael Harris, Mathematics Without Apologies, goes to the extremes of this stimulus, to the categorical ladder, incompleteness theory and the Black-Scholes equation, used to assess financial derivatives. It ends in the “inconsistency nightmare”, that nought might possibly equal one.
We accept the need for maths in advanced physics and in computing algorithms, much as we accept Greek for archaeology and Anglo-Saxon for early literature. The “mathematics of finance” school at Columbia University is lavishly sponsored by Wall Street firms, for good reason. But that does not mean every primary pupil must spend hours, indeed years, trying to learn equations and πr2, which they soon forget through disuse. Maths is for specialists, so why instil arithmophobia in the rest?
Charge the maths lobby with the uselessness of its subject and the answer is a mix of chauvinism and vacuity. Maths must be taught if we are to beat the Chinese (at maths). Or it falls back on primitivism, that maths “trains the mind”. So does learning the Qur’an and reciting Latin verbs.
Meanwhile, the curriculum systematically denies pupils what might be of real use to them and society. There is no “need” for more mathematicians. The nation needs, and therefore pays most for, more executives, accountants, salesmen, designers and creative thinkers.
At the very least, today’s pupils should go into the world with a knowledge of their history and geography, their environment, the working of their bodies, the upbringing of children, law, money, the economy and civil rights.
This is in addition to self-confidence, emotional intelligence and the culture of the English imagination. All are crowded out by a political obsession with maths.
The reason is depressingly clear. Maths is merely an easy subject to measure, nationally and internationally. It thus facilitates the bureaucratic craving for targetry and control. The prominence of maths in the curriculum is education’s version of Orwell’s imaginary boot, “stamping on your face … forever”.
------ Reply from a Maths teacher
Tim Gowers in The Guardian
A county council gathers data about where road accidents take place, identifies an accident blackspot, places a speed camera there, and notices that the frequency of accidents decreases. Moreover, this is not a one-off: many other councils have observed similar reductions. Does this show that speed cameras improve road safety?
The answer isn’t as straightforward as one might imagine – and the way to understand this is through mathematics. Unfortunately, the way the subject is taught often leaves people with a narrow and misleading view of what maths is. No wonder Simon Jenkins attacked the subject in Thursday’s Guardian.
Mathematics should be a tool for increasing one’s thinking power but for many children it is just a set of rather pointless rules for manipulating symbols. The problem becomes clear if one asks children a question such as the following: a number 35 bus pulls up at a bus stop and eight passengers get on; what is the age of the bus driver? A large percentage of children, their minds numbed by years of symbol manipulation, will give the answer 43. This is a tragedy: rather than being trained to think, these children have been trained to do the opposite.
To return to the speed cameras, the evidence initially seems conclusive. However, the correct answer is neither a clear yes nor a clear no, but rather that more research is needed. Consider what would happen if the locations of accidents were completely random. Then, just by chance, some places would have noticeably more accidents than others while the data was being collected and these places would be identified as blackspots. But since they would not in fact be more dangerous than anywhere else, the later accident rates at these “blackspots” would tend to decrease to more like the average, whether one installed speed cameras or planted apple trees. This phenomenon is known as regression to the mean. Further investigation is needed to determine whether speed cameras make a difference over and above the difference one would have expected anyway. (It turns out that they do.)
Regression to the mean is one of several statistical phenomena that are counterintuitive until you understand them. But once you do, you become better at making decisions. This is important for individuals – whether we like it or not, we all have to take major decisions based on statistical evidence – and it is even more important for people in positions of authority, whose decisions affect other people.
It is therefore good for the health of a country if its population has high standards of mathematical literacy: without it, people are swayed by incorrect arguments, make bad decisions and are happy to vote for politicians who make bad decisions on their behalf.
So how might mathematics education be different? The way it is often taught, children are asked to take a huge leap of faith: that the symbol manipulation that seems pointless now will one day be useful to them. But this is true for only a small minority of children, who enjoy the symbol manipulation for its own sake and later find themselves drawn towards Stem subjects, where it is indeed very useful. The rest know perfectly well that they will never reach this promised land. What can be done for them?
An indication is given by the speed-camera example. It shows that regression to the mean is an important mathematical phenomenon that can be explained without the need for any calculation or symbol manipulation. Why not use examples like this to bring statistics alive? That way we could explain the point of means and standard deviations rather than just asking people to calculate them.
Of course, some proficiency in calculation and symbol manipulation is important – and it improves one’s conceptual understanding – but it should not be all that is taught. We could also ask children open-ended questions, such as whether it is more dangerous to travel by car or by aeroplane. A question like is not explicitly mathematical, so it is less likely to trigger the brain’s off switch. And if it doesn’t, the ensuing discussion will convey why we should care about multiplication, division, averages and probabilities, what we can say about them when we do not have exact numbers handed to us on a plate, and how to frame mathematical questions to help make decisions that are of practical interest.
I am not suggesting that all maths should be introduced this way. But until our mathematics classes encourage people to think, rather than merely play games with marks on paper, the Simon Jenkinses of this world will continue to confuse mathematics with mindless symbol manipulation, attacking the subject itself when their real target should be today’s curriculum.
Who will win the Varkey Foundation’s million-dollar “best teacher” prize this week in Dubai? Hot favourite is Britain’s star maths teacher,Colin Hegarty, whose videos are followed by a million viewers worldwide. Hegarty has been hailed as the great hope for British maths.
Like much of the public realm, British maths is “in crisis”. The country is languishing alongside America way down every league table. Evidence of this was cited in a new poll from YouGov, measuring the public’s knowledge of maths, science and English. In maths, roughly a third of those surveyed had no idea how to calculate a mode, a median, a “line of best fit” or the area of a circle.
I seriously doubt this poll, since it implies that two-thirds did know the answers. All on whom I tested it failed, including myself. Nor could they see the point. With one voice they replied: “That’s the sort of thing you learned at school.” So what is the point? It merely ensures that many pupils, like the bright child of a friend of mine with maths blindness, have their schooling undermined by the government’s fixation with maths.
Colin Hegarty has been shortlisted for the $1m Varkey Foundation teacher prize. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian
There is nothing, except religion, as conservative as a school curriculum. It is drenched in archaic prejudice and vested interest. When the medieval church banned geography as an offence against the Bible, what had been the queen of the sciences never recovered. Instead Latin dominated the “grammar” curriculum into the 20th century, to the expense of all science. Today maths is the new Latin.
Science at least improved. In 1988 Thatcher hailed a “dash for science” to halt the decline in young people opting for science subjects. It failed completely. Then in 2006 a radical new GCSE syllabus dragged school science away from test tubes and Bunsen burners towards everyday life, to pollution, global warming, additives, health and diet. Since then the reactionaries have turned to maths as the talisman of educational success. It is in maths that we must beat the Chinese, the Singaporeans and the Finns. Pisa league tables of “top nations” are pored over. Maths teachers are paid more, have their loans written off, are entered for global prizes. No one dares mention the calculator.
Any league table that has China at the top, Britain at 26th and America at 36th tells me something more important than merely who is good at maths. If the US and Britain – among the most vigorous economies and most successful at science – are so bad at maths, it suggests their young people are applying themselves to something more useful. Chinese students are rushing to British and US universities to join them.
No one would argue that pupils should not be able to add, subtract and multiply. But I studied higher maths, from calculus to number theory, and have forgotten the lot. All the maths I have needed comes from John Allen Paulos’s timeless manual, Innumeracy. It is mostly how to understand proportion and risk, and tell when a statistician is trying to con you.
I agree with the great mathematician GH Hardy, who accepted that higher maths was without practical application. It was rather a matter of intellectual stimulus and beauty. A new book by Michael Harris, Mathematics Without Apologies, goes to the extremes of this stimulus, to the categorical ladder, incompleteness theory and the Black-Scholes equation, used to assess financial derivatives. It ends in the “inconsistency nightmare”, that nought might possibly equal one.
We accept the need for maths in advanced physics and in computing algorithms, much as we accept Greek for archaeology and Anglo-Saxon for early literature. The “mathematics of finance” school at Columbia University is lavishly sponsored by Wall Street firms, for good reason. But that does not mean every primary pupil must spend hours, indeed years, trying to learn equations and πr2, which they soon forget through disuse. Maths is for specialists, so why instil arithmophobia in the rest?
Charge the maths lobby with the uselessness of its subject and the answer is a mix of chauvinism and vacuity. Maths must be taught if we are to beat the Chinese (at maths). Or it falls back on primitivism, that maths “trains the mind”. So does learning the Qur’an and reciting Latin verbs.
Meanwhile, the curriculum systematically denies pupils what might be of real use to them and society. There is no “need” for more mathematicians. The nation needs, and therefore pays most for, more executives, accountants, salesmen, designers and creative thinkers.
At the very least, today’s pupils should go into the world with a knowledge of their history and geography, their environment, the working of their bodies, the upbringing of children, law, money, the economy and civil rights.
This is in addition to self-confidence, emotional intelligence and the culture of the English imagination. All are crowded out by a political obsession with maths.
The reason is depressingly clear. Maths is merely an easy subject to measure, nationally and internationally. It thus facilitates the bureaucratic craving for targetry and control. The prominence of maths in the curriculum is education’s version of Orwell’s imaginary boot, “stamping on your face … forever”.
------ Reply from a Maths teacher
Maths isn’t the problem - the way it’s taught is
Tim Gowers in The Guardian
A county council gathers data about where road accidents take place, identifies an accident blackspot, places a speed camera there, and notices that the frequency of accidents decreases. Moreover, this is not a one-off: many other councils have observed similar reductions. Does this show that speed cameras improve road safety?
The answer isn’t as straightforward as one might imagine – and the way to understand this is through mathematics. Unfortunately, the way the subject is taught often leaves people with a narrow and misleading view of what maths is. No wonder Simon Jenkins attacked the subject in Thursday’s Guardian.
Mathematics should be a tool for increasing one’s thinking power but for many children it is just a set of rather pointless rules for manipulating symbols. The problem becomes clear if one asks children a question such as the following: a number 35 bus pulls up at a bus stop and eight passengers get on; what is the age of the bus driver? A large percentage of children, their minds numbed by years of symbol manipulation, will give the answer 43. This is a tragedy: rather than being trained to think, these children have been trained to do the opposite.
To return to the speed cameras, the evidence initially seems conclusive. However, the correct answer is neither a clear yes nor a clear no, but rather that more research is needed. Consider what would happen if the locations of accidents were completely random. Then, just by chance, some places would have noticeably more accidents than others while the data was being collected and these places would be identified as blackspots. But since they would not in fact be more dangerous than anywhere else, the later accident rates at these “blackspots” would tend to decrease to more like the average, whether one installed speed cameras or planted apple trees. This phenomenon is known as regression to the mean. Further investigation is needed to determine whether speed cameras make a difference over and above the difference one would have expected anyway. (It turns out that they do.)
Regression to the mean is one of several statistical phenomena that are counterintuitive until you understand them. But once you do, you become better at making decisions. This is important for individuals – whether we like it or not, we all have to take major decisions based on statistical evidence – and it is even more important for people in positions of authority, whose decisions affect other people.
It is therefore good for the health of a country if its population has high standards of mathematical literacy: without it, people are swayed by incorrect arguments, make bad decisions and are happy to vote for politicians who make bad decisions on their behalf.
So how might mathematics education be different? The way it is often taught, children are asked to take a huge leap of faith: that the symbol manipulation that seems pointless now will one day be useful to them. But this is true for only a small minority of children, who enjoy the symbol manipulation for its own sake and later find themselves drawn towards Stem subjects, where it is indeed very useful. The rest know perfectly well that they will never reach this promised land. What can be done for them?
An indication is given by the speed-camera example. It shows that regression to the mean is an important mathematical phenomenon that can be explained without the need for any calculation or symbol manipulation. Why not use examples like this to bring statistics alive? That way we could explain the point of means and standard deviations rather than just asking people to calculate them.
Of course, some proficiency in calculation and symbol manipulation is important – and it improves one’s conceptual understanding – but it should not be all that is taught. We could also ask children open-ended questions, such as whether it is more dangerous to travel by car or by aeroplane. A question like is not explicitly mathematical, so it is less likely to trigger the brain’s off switch. And if it doesn’t, the ensuing discussion will convey why we should care about multiplication, division, averages and probabilities, what we can say about them when we do not have exact numbers handed to us on a plate, and how to frame mathematical questions to help make decisions that are of practical interest.
I am not suggesting that all maths should be introduced this way. But until our mathematics classes encourage people to think, rather than merely play games with marks on paper, the Simon Jenkinses of this world will continue to confuse mathematics with mindless symbol manipulation, attacking the subject itself when their real target should be today’s curriculum.
The stupid, avoidable mistakes that make good employees leave
Travis Bradbury in Quartz
More than half the people who leave their jobs do so because of their relationship with their boss. Smart companies make certain that their managers know how to balance being professional with being human. These are the bosses who celebrate their employees’ successes, empathize with those going through hard times, and challenge them, even when it hurts. Bosses who fail to really care will always have high turnover rates. It’s impossible to work for someone for eight-plus hours a day when they aren’t personally involved and don’t care about anything other than your output.
It’s tough to hold on to good employees, but it shouldn’t be. Most of the mistakes that companies make are easily avoided. When you do make mistakes, your best employees are the first to go, because they have the most options.
If you can’t keep your best employees engaged, you can’t keep your best employees. While this should be common sense, it isn’t common enough. A survey by CEB found that one-third of star employees feel disengaged from their employer and are already looking for a new job.
When you lose good employees, they don’t disengage all at once. Instead, their interest in their jobs slowly dissipates. Michael Kibler, who has spent much of his career studying this phenomenon, refers to it as brownout. Like dying stars, star employees slowly lose their fire for their jobs.
“Brownout is different from burnout because workers afflicted by it are not in obvious crisis,” Kibler said. “They seem to be performing fine: putting in massive hours, grinding out work while contributing to teams, and saying all the right things in meetings. However, they are operating in a silent state of continual overwhelm, and the predictable consequence is disengagement.”
In order to prevent brownout and to retain top talent, companies and managers must understand what they’re doing that contributes to this slow fade. The following practices are the worst offenders, and they must be abolished if you’re going to hang on to good employees.
They make a lot of stupid rules.
Companies need to have rules—that’s a given—but they don’t have to be shortsighted and lazy attempts at creating order. Whether it’s an overzealous attendance policy or taking employees’ frequent flier miles, even a couple of unnecessary rules can drive people crazy. When good employees feel like big brother is watching, they’ll find someplace else to work.
They treat everyone equally.
While this tactic works with school children, the workplace ought to function differently. Treating everyone equally shows your top performers that no matter how high they perform (and, typically, top performers are work horses), they will be treated the same as the bozo who does nothing more than punch the clock.
They tolerate poor performance.
It’s said that in jazz bands, the band is only as good as the worst player; no matter how great some members may be, everyone hears the worst player. The same goes for a company. When you permit weak links to exist without consequence, they drag everyone else down, especially your top performers.
It’s said that in jazz bands, the band is only as good as the worst player; no matter how great some members may be, everyone hears the worst player. The same goes for a company. When you permit weak links to exist without consequence, they drag everyone else down, especially your top performers.
They don’t recognize accomplishments.
It’s easy to underestimate the power of a pat on the back, especially with top performers who are intrinsically motivated. Everyone likes kudos, none more so than those who work hard and give their all. Rewarding individual accomplishments shows that you’re paying attention. Managers need to communicate with their people to find out what makes them feel good (for some, it’s a raise; for others, it’s public recognition) and then to reward them for a job well done. With top performers, this will happen often if you’re doing it right.
It’s easy to underestimate the power of a pat on the back, especially with top performers who are intrinsically motivated. Everyone likes kudos, none more so than those who work hard and give their all. Rewarding individual accomplishments shows that you’re paying attention. Managers need to communicate with their people to find out what makes them feel good (for some, it’s a raise; for others, it’s public recognition) and then to reward them for a job well done. With top performers, this will happen often if you’re doing it right.
They don’t care about people.
They don’t show people the big picture.
It may seem efficient to simply send employees assignments and move on, but leaving out the big picture is a deal breaker for star performers. Star performers shoulder heavier loads because they genuinely care about their work, so their work must have a purpose. When they don’t know what that is, they feel alienated and aimless. When they aren’t given a purpose, they find one elsewhere.
They don’t let people pursue their passions.
Google mandates that employees spend at least 20% of their time doing “what they believe will benefit Google most.” While these passion projects make major contributions to marquis Google products, such as Gmail and AdSense, their biggest impact is in creating highly engaged Googlers. Talented employees are passionate. Providing opportunities for them to pursue their passions improves their productivity and job satisfaction, but many managers want people to work within a little box. These managers fear that productivity will decline if they let people expand their focus and pursue their passions. This fear is unfounded. Studies have shown that people who are able to pursue their passions at work experience flow, a euphoric state of mind that is five times more productive than the norm.
They don’t make things fun.
If people aren’t having fun at work, then you’re doing it wrong. People don’t give their all if they aren’t having fun, and fun is a major protector against brownout. The best companies to work for know the importance of letting employees loosen up a little. Google, for example, does just about everything it can to make work fun—free meals, bowling allies, and fitness classes, to name a few. The idea is simple: if work is fun, you’ll not only perform better, but you’ll stick around for longer hours and an even longer career.
Bringing It All Together
Managers tend to blame their turnover problems on everything under the sun while ignoring the crux of the matter: people don’t leave jobs; they leave managers.
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