LOVE ANGELES

Artsy Loft

Source: Yahoo -  "The apartment's a loft attached to the offices of Snarkitecture, the cool-kid architecture firm where Arsham is a partner, and it's basically just a room that serves two functions: sleeping and dressing. But oh, what a room it is.

The walls look like great big, pixelated screens that fade from gray to white as you approach the ceiling. On closer inspection, the pixels are actually ping-pong balls — a whopping 25,000 of 'em. We half expect someone to come out and call a Powerball winner.

The rest of the place is a study in simplicity. Arsham's got a bed with some built-in shelves and a dresser, where he keeps a few clothes. To enter the loft, he climbs a ladder through the office's employee bathroom.

The apartment — which Snarkitecture designed — was built in two months for less than $100 a square foot. That's about $50 cheaper than your average loft. Impressive. Then again, by the looks of it, all they really had to do was shop at the local sporting goods store."

NY LOVE LA!

This photo was taken by a friend in NYC and posted on the Love Angeles Facebook page.

Building a Better Teacher

Source: NY Times - "On a Winter day five years ago, Doug Lemov realized he had a problem. After a successful career as a teacher, a principal and a charter-school founder, he was working as a consultant, hired by troubled schools eager — desperate, in some cases — for Lemov to tell them what to do to get better. There was no shortage of prescriptions at the time for how to cure the poor performance that plagued so many American schools. Proponents of No Child Left Behind saw standardized testing as a solution. President Bush also championed a billion-dollar program to encourage schools to adopt reading curriculums with an emphasis on phonics. Others argued for smaller classes or more parental involvement or more state financing.

Lemov himself pushed for data-driven programs that would diagnose individual students’ strengths and weaknesses. But as he went from school to school that winter, he was getting the sinking feeling that there was something deeper he wasn’t reaching. On that particular day, he made a depressing visit to a school in Syracuse, N.Y., that was like so many he’d seen before: “a dispiriting exercise in good people failing,” as he described it to me recently. Sometimes Lemov could diagnose problems as soon as he walked in the door. But not here. Student test scores had dipped so low that administrators worried the state might close down the school. But the teachers seemed to care about their students. They sat down with them on the floor to read and picked activities that should have engaged them. The classes were small. The school had rigorous academic standards and state-of-the-art curriculums and used a software program to analyze test results for each student, pinpointing which skills she still needed to work on.

But when it came to actual teaching, the daily task of getting students to learn, the school floundered. Students disobeyed teachers’ instructions, and class discussions veered away from the lesson plans. In one class Lemov observed, the teacher spent several minutes debating a student about why he didn’t have a pencil. Another divided her students into two groups to practice multiplication together, only to watch them turn to the more interesting work of chatting. A single quiet student soldiered on with the problems. As Lemov drove from Syracuse back to his home in Albany, he tried to figure out what he could do to help. He knew how to advise schools to adopt a better curriculum or raise standards or develop better communication channels between teachers and principals. But he realized that he had no clue how to advise schools about their main event: how to teach.

Around the country, education researchers were beginning to address similar questions. The testing mandates in No Child Left Behind had generated a sea of data, and researchers were now able to parse student achievement in ways they never had before. A new generation of economists devised statistical methods to measure the “value added” to a student’s performance by almost every factor imaginable: class size versus per-pupil funding versus curriculum. When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school’s control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to. Some teachers could regularly lift their students’ test scores above the average for children of the same race, class and ability level. Others’ students left with below-average results year after year. William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge. Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, found that while the top 5 percent of teachers were able to impart a year and a half’s worth of learning to students in one school year, as judged by standardized tests, the weakest 5 percent advanced their students only half a year of material each year.

This record encouraged a belief in some people that good teaching must be purely instinctive, a kind of magic performed by born superstars. As Jane Hannaway, the director of the Education Policy Center at the Urban Institute and a former teacher, put it to me, successful teaching depends in part on a certain inimitable “voodoo.” You either have it or you don’t. “I think that there is an innate drive or innate ability for teaching,” Sylvia Gist, the dean of the college of education at Chicago State University, said when I visited her campus last year..." Continue reading at NY Times.

NY Cab Driver Returns $21,000 to Visitor

Source: Yahoo – A New York City cab driver is being praised for returning over $21,000 lost by a visitor from Italy.

Felicia Lettieri, who's 72, left her purse in a Manhattan taxi on Christmas Eve. It contained traveling money for her and six relatives.

Police told them not to get their hopes up about finding it.

The cabbie drove about 50 miles, to a Long Island address he'd found in the purse. No one was home, so he left his phone number, and later returned with the money.

Lettieri's daughter, Maria Rosaria Falonga, told Newsday from Pompei, Italy that the cabbie also left a note.

He told her: "Don't worry, Felicia. ... I'll keep it safe."

The driver, Mukul Asaduzzaman, could not be reached for comment.

He refused a reward.

Announcing…(drumroll)…Win-a-Trip 2010!

Source: By NICHOLAS KRISTOF of NY Times - As I wrote in my Sunday column, I’m delighted to announce my 2010 Win-a-Trip contest. I’ll take a university student with me on a reporting trip to Africa, giving the student a chance to blog for nytimes.com and to file videos to The Times and Youtube.

Just to conjure the right frame of mind, here’s how Michael Kinsley envisioned the trip in one of his columns in The Washington Post a few years ago:

It’s the middle of the night. We’re in a small tent pitched on the rocky slope of a mountain trail: me, Nick, our trusty guide, three prostitutes we’ve rescued from a life of sex slavery and four local businessmen unjustly accused of insider trading on the village’s primitive, hand-pumped stock exchange. Outside, the jackals are yelping. Inside, nature is calling. Urgently. Am I man enough to face the jackals, or masochist enough to wait until morning? Answer: Whatever. I’m tough. I can handle either of these. But ultimately, the jackals are less terrifying than the thought of one more minute listening to Nick’s tales of all the real adventures he’s been on that make this one seem like a game of patty-cake. I flee the tent, am devoured by the jackals and Kristof gets a column out of it.

Yes, that sounds about right.

The contest is open to students at American universities – either undergraduates or graduate students – who are 18 years old or over. I know I’ll get indignant letters from other people, but right now I’m confining it to students. Please consult the full rules, which explain more about eligibility.

You can apply either with an essay of up to 700 words, or a video of up to three minutes, or both. Send the essay to winatrip@nytimes.com. Post the video on my Youtube channel, www.youtube.com/NicholasKristof, next to my own video invitation for applications. In either case, explain why I should pick you.

So what kind of a person am I looking for? The truth is, I’m not entirely sure – except that I want someone with excellent communication skills, who can blog and vlog (video blog) in ways that will capture the interest of other students. If you’ve done blogging, vlogging or journalism, be sure to mention that. Ditto for anything else that makes you special or will make your voice more memorable.

The first winner I chose, a journalism student named Casey Parks, interested me because she had never been outside the U.S. and had grown up poor, in the deep South. I wondered how she would compare Mississippi poverty to African poverty, and I thought that she would bring a useful perspective that I lack. The second student winner, Leana Wen, was a medical student, and I thought it would be interesting to see her take on health care in a country like Congo. For the second trip, I picked a teacher as well, Will Okun, and I chose him partly because he was a superb, funny writer and partly because he was a talented still photographer. For the third trip, I picked Paul Bowers, because he was a thoughtful and sizzling writer with superb recommendations — both his essay and his video grabbed me. So…there you have it…more madness than method, and that will probably be true of this year’s selection as well.

The Center for Global Development will sift through the applications, written and video, and help narrow them down to a group of finalists. Then I’ll work with my assistant, Natasha Yefimov, in picking a winner. We may want more information or references from some people (confirmation, for example, that you don’t snore).

The application deadline is a minute before midnight, Eastern Time, on Monday, Jan 18. I hope to choose the winner by February and then travel in April, May or June. I expect the trip will last 10 days or so and will include a Times videographer to help with the videos. To some extent, I can try to work with the winner’s schedule, and my hunch is that likewise professors will be accommodating, but if you know that you simply can’t take ten days off in the late spring, then it would be best not to apply.

So read the rules and perhaps look at the fruits of the previous trips. You can do that by clicking the links above or going to the Times home page and searching for “Casey Parks” or “Leana Wen” or “Paul Bowers.” Their blog posts and videos will come up.

Since I can only choose one winner, I strongly encourage you to think about how you might make your own trip if you’re not selected. The possibilities are vast, but here are a few alternatives. Two of the best development organizations based in the developing world are the Self-Employed Women’s Association of India and BRAC in Bangladesh, and both accept some volunteers. Or if you have an interest in health, there’s the Edna Adan Maternity Hospital in Somaliland, Africa, a remarkable institution. Or teach English to brothel children in Calcutta at an anti-trafficking organization called New Light, run by Urmi Basu, another of my heroes. There’s also an organization in Cambridge, Mass., called World Teach that can connect you to possibilities to teach English abroad, from Namibia to Micronesia.

Or just poke around a bit on the Internet, and you’ll find many, many other possibilities. If you’ve had an interesting volunteer experience abroad, post a comment about it, or if you work for an NGO in the developing world and could use a volunteer, please note that below with your contacts so that students can reach out to you.

And if you graduate this summer and haven’t arranged anything, just try to wheedle some money from your parents and buy a one-way ticket to Bombay/Dakar/Shanghai/La Paz. I spoke to someone recently who more-or-less did that after my first Win-a-Trip (he flew to Bangkok) and had the time of his life, a truly transformative experience. So just do it….

And may the best applicant win!!