When Kyle Asberry was hired two years ago as a library aide at two public elementary schools in the lower-income Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, he faced a sorry state of affairs.

Both of the Los Angeles Unified School District schools-which he won’t name out of fear of reprisal-had shut down their libraries for at least a year owing to staffing shortages resulting from budget cuts. One library was even used as a storage facility for boxes.

‘I tried to do what I could. Once I cleaned the libraries up [and] dusted off the shelves, teachers and kids came in, and were waiting to come in. That was the high point,” he said. ‘They were looking for the books. In both libraries, though, most of the books are old. There are no new titles at all.”

As dire and damaging as it is, Asberry’s situation is among the best-case scenarios in today’s school libraries.
The Future of Book Publishing Comes with a Side of McDonald’s Fries

His positions are funded through a 2011 civil rights settlement with the federal government to promote performance in black and immigrant communities.

Across the country, public school libraries, including those elementary and middle school ones serving kids in […]

No Comments

Four years ago, some of us watched with a mixture of incredulity and horror as elite discussion of economic policy went completely off the rails. Over the course of just a few months, influential people all over the Western world convinced themselves and each other that budget deficits were an existential threat, trumping any and all concern about mass unemployment. The result was a turn to fiscal austerity that deepened and prolonged the economic crisis, inflicting immense suffering.

And now it’s happening again. Suddenly, it seems as if all the serious people are telling each other that despite high unemployment there’s hardly any ‘slack” in labor markets – as evidenced by a supposed surge in wages – and that the Federal Reserve needs to start raising interest rates very soon to head off the danger of inflation.

To be fair, those making the case for monetary tightening are more thoughtful and less overtly political than the archons of austerity who drove the last wrong turn in policy. But the advice they’re giving could be just as destructive.

O.K., where is this coming from?

The starting point for this turn in elite opinion is the assertion that wages, after stagnating for years, have started to […]

No Comments

A new study sponsored by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.

Noting that warnings of “collapse’ are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that ‘the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history.” Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to ‘precipitous collapse – often lasting centuries – have been quite common.”

The research project is based on a new cross-disciplinary “Human And Nature DYnamical’ (HANDY) model, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharri of the US National Science Foundation-supported National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, in association with a team of natural and social scientists. The study based on the HANDY model has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Elsevier journal, Ecological Economics.

It finds that according to the historical record even advanced, complex civilisations are susceptible to collapse, raising questions about the sustainability of modern civilisation:

‘The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact […]

No Comments

The Air Force admitted losing two of its 184 – make that 182 – top-of-the-line F-22 Raptor stealth fighters on Thursday. It was one of the worst days yet in what’s turning out to be a bad year for the pricey, radar-evading jet built by Lockheed Martin.

At 3:30 local time on Thursday an F-22, apparently belonging to the 325th Wing, a training unit based at Tyndall Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle, plunged into the ground in a wooded area inside the base perimeter near Highway 98, sparking a small fire.

The pilot ejected safely. ‘The cause of the crash is still under investigation and additional details will be provided as soon as they become available,” the flying branch said in a statement.

The same day, the Air Force copped to an earlier accident involving the stealth fighter, which costs as much as $678 million per copy (depending on how you crunch the numbers). On May 31, a student pilot on his second solo Raptor flight at Tyndall neglected to power up his jet’s engines fast enough after retracting the landing gear.

‘Without sufficient thrust, the aircraft settled back to the runway, landing on its underside,” the Air Force explained in its […]

No Comments

Introduction

The digital era has brought profound challenges and opportunities to countless institutions and industries, from universities to newspapers to the music industry, in ways both large and small. Institutions that were previously identified with printed material-and its attendant properties of being expensive, scarce, and obscure-are now considering how to take on new roles as purveyors of information, connections, and entertainment, using the latest formats and technologies.

The impact of digital technologies on public libraries is particularly interesting because libraries serve so many people (about half of all Americans ages 16 and older used a public library in some form in the past year, as of September 2013) and correspondingly try to meet a wide variety of needs.1 This is also what makes the task of public libraries-as well as governments, news organizations, religious groups, schools, and any other institution that is trying to reach a wide swath of the American public-so challenging: They are trying to respond to new technologies while maintaining older strategies of knowledge dissemination.

In recent years, public libraries have continued to add new technologies and formats to their holdings, with the goal of providing patrons resources in whatever form they prefer. Many libraries have also expanded into community […]

No Comments