NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS PUNK IS DEAD

Researchers from Aston University have found that the use of swear words in Britain have declined by more than a quarter since the 1990s

Peer-Reviewed Publication

ASTON UNIVERSITY

Researchers from Aston University have found that the use of swear words in Britain have declined by more than a quarter since the 1990s. Dr Robbie Love, based in the College of Business and Social Sciences, looked at how swearing changed in casual British English conversation between 1994 and 2014.

As part of the study, which is published in Text & Talk: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse & Communication Studies, Dr Love  used two large bodies of transcriptions to analyse the use of language, including: The Spoken British National Corpus gathered in 1994 and the same corpus from 2014. Both texts include over 15 million words, although it was found that swear words accounted for less than 1 per cent.

In total, the amount of swearing was found to have  fallen by 27.6 per cent, from 1,822 words per million in 1994 to 1,320 words per million in 2014.The research findings also suggest that the word 'f***' has been overtaken 'b***dy' as the most popular curse word in the UK.

In the study, Dr Love compared the use of 16 of the nation's most common swear words, including p***, c*** and s**g, from the 1990s to the 2010s.

He also found that trends in the type of swear words used have changed over the last few decades , with 'b****y' being the most common curse word in the 1990s and 'f***' taking precedent in the 2010s.

The analysis suggests that this is largely down to a big decline in the use of 'b****y',while 'f***' has remained relatively steady over the years.  It was also found to be the second most commonly used swear word in 1994, followed by s**t, p***, b****r and c**p.

Other key findings of the study included:

• Over a twenty year period  b****r had fallen from the fifth most common curse to the ninth, while b*****d dropped from seventh to 10th.
• The big climbers include  s**t, from third to second, a**e, from eighth to sixth and d***, from tenth to seventh.
• T**t also rose from the 16th most common swear word in the 1990s to 13th by the 2010s.

Dr Love then analysed demographics and discovered that, although swearing is more common in men than women, the difference between the genders has decreased notably from 2.33 times more frequent in men in 1994 to 1.68 times in 2014.

Another change concerned how much people swear as they age. In both data sets, swearing is most common among people in their 20s, and then declines with age.However, the decline was less steep in the 2010s, suggesting that people continue swearing later in life more than they did in the 1990s.

Dr Robbie Love, lecturer in English at Aston University, said:

“This research reinforces the view that swearing plays a part in our conversational repertoire, performs useful functions in everyday life and is an everyday part of conversation for many people. 

“Despite this, it is relatively under-researched precisely because it is considered to be taboo.

“Swearing performs many social functions including conveying abuse and humour, expressing emotion, creating social bonds, and constructing identity.

“The strong social conditioning around swear words makes them more psychologically arousing and more memorable than other words, and something different happens in the brain when saying them compared to euphemistic equivalents, such as saying "f***" compared to ‘the f-word’.” 

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DOI

10.1515/text-2020-0051 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Swearing in informal spoken English: 1990s–2010s

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

15-Aug-2021

ANOTHER REASON MERIT PAY SUCKS

Merit-based employment practices contribute to gender pay gap, study says

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN, NEWS BUREAU

 

IMAGE: MERITOCRATIC EMPLOYMENT PRACTICES SUCH AS PERFORMANCE BONUSES OFTEN FAIL TO REDUCE GENDER-BASED PAY INEQUALITY AND MAY ACTUALLY EXACERBATE IT BY ALLOWING THE STATUS QUO TO REMAIN INTACT AT FIRMS, SAYS NEW RESEARCH CO-WRITTEN BY EUNMI MUN, A PROFESSOR OF LABOR AND EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS AT ILLINOIS. view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO BY SCHOOL OF LABOR AND EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Rather than reducing gender-based pay inequality by limiting managers’ reliance on factors such as gender bias and favoritism, a shift to performance bonuses and other meritocratic employment practices may actually widen the gap by preserving the status quo, according to research co-written by a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign expert who studies labor market institutions.

In a longitudinal study of almost 400,000 employees from nearly 400 Japanese firms over 12 years, the gender gap in bonus pay was found to be greater in workplaces with a merit-based system than in workplaces without it, said Eunmi Mun, a professor of labor and employment relations at Illinois.

“We’re all very familiar with the idea of merit pay at work, that workers get paid based on individual performance and not on other nonperformance-related factors,” she said. “But our paper shows that the opposite can be true, that merit-based pay can actually increase inequality. The findings are, in a sense, counterintuitive to the premise of a merit- or performance-based pay system.”

Mun and co-author Naomi Kodama of Meiji Gakuin University in Japan attempted to overcome the limitations of previous research on merit pay by analyzing data that spanned many organizations and provided historical compensation information about the employees who work there.

“One of the reasons why we don’t know that much about the impact of wage inequality is because data are pretty scarce,” she said. “It’s really hard to collect the kind of wage census data that reflects a shift to merit-based pay and the employee’s wage history. We need to have both levels of information to trace the changes in the impact and perform this massive-scale analysis.

“As part of a broader employment trend to increase productivity and fair treatment by adopting liberal-market practices, Japanese firms also changed from a seniority-based to a merit-based reward system. So in that sense, Japan was a good test case – one that wouldn’t have been possible in the U.S.”

Using the data from Japan, the researchers tested the impact of merit-based systems on three types of compensation: base wage, bonus pay and annual earnings. Findings from the analysis show that the gender bonus gap was higher at companies with merit-based systems, but there was no significant increase in the gender gap in total annual earnings, which includes all types of monetary compensation.

“The more pronounced effect of the merit-based system on bonuses can be attributed to bonus compensation being more directly tied to individual merit and performance than base pay,” Mun said.

Overall, the findings suggest greater variation in the impact of merit-based reward systems on the gender pay gap than previously thought, with differing impacts on compensation types and different employee groups, the researchers said.

“Given the high level of gender inequality produced under the traditional employment system, many expected that the reforms pushing meritocracy would help decrease workplace gender inequality,” Mun said. “But we didn’t find strong evidence of an increase in the meritocratic distribution of rewards between men and women. Rather, we find that in most cases, rewards were distributed in a more, not less, biased way in workplaces that adopted a new merit-based reward system.

“What the reforms seem to have achieved is the preservation of the status quo – that is, a very large gender pay gap instead of the intended goal of increasing productivity by rewarding individual merit and performance.”

The research contributes to understanding gender inequality in times of shifting employment relations and the strong cultural belief in meritocracy across various aspects of society, including education and employment, Mun said.

“Japan is a country whose work culture still has a pretty strong seniority payment system in place and is known for lifetime employment for employees – they get a job when they’re fresh out of college and stay with the same company for a long time, often until they retire,” Mun said. “So it really helps us see what kind of changes that employees experienced during its transition from seniority-based pay to merit pay.”

The meritocracy paradox observed in Japan likely exists in other countries, particularly in countries with a long history of implementing merit-based systems, Mun said.

“Even as it’s become one of the dominant ideologies of our era, there are plenty of warning signs about meritocracy,” she said. “Our study shows that the promises of meritocracy may be illusory and that a healthy skepticism of policies driven by meritocracy is warranted.”

The paper was published in the journal Social Forces.

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JOURNAL

Social Forces

DOI

10.1093/sf/soab083 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Meritocracy at work?: Merit-based reward systems and gender wage inequality

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

16-Jul-2021

The five most impressive geological structures in the solar system

August 23, 2021 

When we talk about amazing geological features, we often limit ourselves to those on Earth. But as a geologist, I think that’s crazy – there are so many structures on other worlds that can excite and inspire, and that can put processes on our own planet into perspective.

Here, in no particular order, are the five geological structures in the solar system (excluding Earth) that most impress me.

The grandest canyon

I left out the solar system’s biggest volcano, Olympus Mons on Mars, so I could include that planet’s most spectacular canyon, Valles Marineris. Being 3,000km long, hundreds of kilometres wide and up to eight kilometres deep, this is best seem from space. If you were lucky enough to stand on one rim, the opposite rim would be way beyond the horizon.

Valles Marineris seen in a colour-coded topographic view as if from 5,000 km above the surface (left), and imaged by the High Resolution Stereo Camera on Esa’s Mars Express (right). Google Earth and NASA/USGS/ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

It was probably initiated by fracturing when an adjacent volcanic region (called Tharsis) began to bulge upwards, but was widened and deepened by a series of catastrophic floods that climaxed more than 3 billion years ago.

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Read more: Plate tectonics: new findings fill out the 50-year-old theory that explains Earth's landmasses

Venus’ fold mountains

We are going to learn a lot more about Venus in the 2030s when two Nasa missions and one from Esa (European Space Agency) arrive. Venus is nearly the same size, mass and density as the Earth, causing geologists to puzzle over why it lacks Earth-style plate tectonics and why (or indeed whether) it has comparatively little active volcanism. How does the planet get its heat out?

Fold mountains in Ovda Regio, Venus. The insert is a similar view of part of the Applachians in central Pennsylvania. NASA/JPL

I find it reassuring that at least some aspects of Venus’ geology look familiar. For example, the northern margin of the highlands named Ovda Regio looks strikingly similar, apart from the lack of rivers cutting through the eroded, fold-like pattern, to “fold mountains” on Earth such as the Appalachians, which are the result of a collision between continents.
Blasted Mercury

I’m cheating a little with my next example, because it is both one of the solar system’s largest impact basins and an explosive volcano within it. Mercury’s 1,550km diameter Caloris basin was formed by a major asteroid impact about 3.5 billion years ago, and soon after that its floor was flooded by lavas.

Some time later, a series of explosive eruptions blasted kilometres-deep holes through the solidified lavas near the edge of the basin where the lava cap was thinnest. These sprayed volcanic ash particles out over a range of tens of kilometres. One such deposit, named Agwo Facula, surrounds the explosive vent that I have chosen as my example.
Right: most of Mercury’s Caloris basin, its floor covered by dull, orange lava. Brighter orange patches are remnants of explosive eruptions. Lower left: close-up inside the red box of an explosive volcanic deposit. Upper left: details of the vent interior. NASA/JHUAPL/CIW

Explosive eruptions are driven by the force of expanding gas, and are a surprising find on Mercury, whose proximity to the Sun was previously expected to have starved it of such volatile substances – the heat would have made them boil off. Scientists suspect that there were in fact several explosive eruptions, possibly spaced over a prolonged timescale. This means that gas-forming volatile materials (whose composition will remain uncertain until Esa’s BepiColombo mission starts work in 2026) were repeatedly available in Mercury’s magmas.
The tallest cliff?

In soil or vegetation-rich regions on Earth, cliffs offer the largest exposures of clean rock. Although dangerous to approach, they reveal an uninterrupted cross-section of rock and can be great for fossil hunting. Because geologists love them so much, I give you the seven kilometres-high Verona Rupes. This is a feature on Uranus’s small moon Miranda that is often described as “the tallest cliff in the solar system”, including on a recent Nasa website. This even goes so far as to remark that if you were careless enough to take a tumble off the top, it would take you 12 minutes to fall to the bottom.
Verona Rupes, about 50km long and several km high, but not actually so cliff-like as it appears as seen by Voyager 2 during its 1986 flyby. NASA/JPL

Read more: Mysterious red spots on Mercury get names – but what are they?

This is nonsense, because Verona Rupes is nowhere near vertical. The only images we have of it are from Voyager 2, captured during its 1986 fly by of Uranus. It is undeniably impressive, being almost certainly a geological fault where one block of Miranda’s icy crust (the outermost “shell” of the planet) has moved downwards against the adjacent block.

However, the obliqueness of the view is deceptive, making it impossible to be sure of the face’s steepness – it probably slopes at less than 45 degrees. If you stumbled at the top, I doubt you’d even slide to the bottom. The face appears to be very smooth in the best, but rather low resolution image that we have, but at Miranda’s -170°C daytime temperature, water-ice has a high friction and is not slippery at all.
Titan’s drowned coastline

For my final example I could happily have chosen virtually anywhere on Pluto, but instead I have opted for a hauntingly Earth-like coastline on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Here, a large depression in Titan’s water-ice “bedrock” hosts a sea of liquid methane named Ligeia Mare.

Valleys carved by methane rivers draining into the sea have evidently become flooded as the sea level rose. This complexly indented coastline reminds me strongly of Oman’s Musandam peninsula, on the south side of the Straits of Hormuz. There, the local crust has been warped downwards because of the ongoing collision between Arabian and the Asian mainlands. Has something similar happened on Titan? We don’t know yet, but the way that the coastal geomorphology changes around Ligeia Mare suggests to me that its drowned valleys are more than a straightforward result of rising liquid levels.

Left: Part of Titan’s Ligeia Mare, showing a coastline with valleys drowned by a sea of liquid methane. Right: The Musandam peninsula, Arabia, where coastal valleys are similarly drowned, but by a saltwater sea. NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/Cornell and Expedition 63, International Space Station (ISS)

Read more: Titan: first global map uncovers secrets of a potentially habitable moon of Saturn

Rock and liquid water on Earth, frigid water-ice and liquid methane on Titan - it makes little difference. Their mutual interactions are the same, and so we see geology repeating itself on different worlds.

Author

David Rothery
Professor of Planetary Geosciences, The Open University

Disclosure statement
David Rothery is Professor of Planetary Geosciences at the Open University. He is co-leader of the European Space Agency's Mercury Surface and Composition Working Group, and a Co-Investigator on MIXS (Mercury Imaging X-ray Spectrometer) that is now on its way to Mercury on board the European Space Agency's Mercury orbiter BepiColombo. He has received funding from the UK Space Agency and the Science & Technology Facilities Council for work related to Mercury and BepiColombo, and from the European Commission under its Horizon 2020 programme for work on planetary geological mapping (776276 Planmap). He is author of Planet Mercury - from Pale Pink Dot to Dynamic World (Springer, 2015), Moons: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Planets: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2010). He is Educator on the Open University's free learning Badged Open Course (BOC) on Moons and its equivalent FutureLearn Moons MOOC, and chair of the Open University's level 2 course on Planetary Science and the Search for Life.
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China crackdown on tutoring sector leads to protests

The crackdown exacerbated financial problems for these firms, leading to more protests in any month since January 2019.

By Bloomberg NewsBloomberg

23 Aug 2021

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on the tutoring industry aims to help create a more harmonious society by leveling the education playing field for children across the country, but it’s having the opposite effect early on.

There have been eight protests involving workers in the nation’s education sector so far in August, the most in monthly data compiled by labor watchdog China Labour Bulletin going back to January 2019. There were another two incidents in late July in the days after the overhaul was announced.

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One of the protests involved a company in Shanghai that helps students prepare to study overseas whose management fled without paying its employees. Similar episodes were seen in cities such as Beijing, Changsha and Nanjing. The crackdown exacerbated the financial problems many schools were facing because of the pandemic, said Aidan Chau, a researcher at the Hong Kong-based organization.

“Before, companies were still hoping that they could continue, but after July, some school managers just decided to close down and run away,” he said. “We expect that there will be more cases coming once actual policies really materialize.”

China unveiled a broad revamp of its $100 billion education tech sector, banning companies that teach the school curriculum from making profits, raising capital or listing. The move came as youngsters complained about excessive demands of tutoring, and parents worried about high fees and their children falling behind if they didn’t take extra classes.

Chau said the protests so far involved smaller firms because larger ones had better policies and paid employees amounts that met or sometimes exceeded legal requirements.

He called on the official All-China Federation of Trade Unions to help the educators get their pay and resolve other issues. “If the official union does nothing, then when the workers decide to take action themselves,” the Communist Party or the union won’t have an excuse, he said.

The federation of unions, a state-approved umbrella organization, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The labor watchdog’s data is based on keyword searches of Chinese social media platforms, including the Twitter-like Sina Weibo and Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s WeChat messaging app so it provides only a glimpse of the labor protest situation in the nation.

The Collapse of China’s Online Tutoring Industry Is Taking American Educators Down With It

By Emily Tate     Aug 16, 2021

The sky was still pitch-black when Anna Whitehead rose from bed to begin teaching for the day. It’s a routine she has grown accustomed to over the past two years—waking up around 4:40 a.m. and logging on, bleary-eyed, to teach English to a cadre of children in China.

Except this time, on Aug. 5, the routine was interrupted.

Whitehead, who on top of being an online English-language tutor works full-time as a high school teacher in a traditional classroom in Alabama, had received a frantic text from the mother of one of her Chinese students overnight. GoGoKid, the online tutoring platform that Whitehead contracts with to supplement her family’s income and help make ends meet, was shutting down immediately.

She checked her email, hoping the mother had misunderstood, and found a message from the company confirming its demise. “Dear teachers,” the email began. “This letter is to inform you that as of Aug 5th 2021, GOGOKID will suspend the curriculum offered to all Chinese students. This decision is in light of the recent educational policy revisions in China. All classes starting on Aug 5th will be cancelled from the system.”
“It was the worst possible outcome ... It just felt like the rug was yanked out from under us.”

The language—“suspend the curriculum”—was a bit vague, but the message was crystal clear: It was over.

Whitehead, who’d had 25-minute classes lined up back-to-back throughout the morning, watched in horror as each one disappeared from her schedule.

“It was the worst possible outcome,” she said in an interview the day after the email came through. “I could’ve at least given them an awesome lesson and told them goodbye. It just felt like the rug was yanked out from under us.”

For many of the thousands of Americans who tutor through GoGoKid, the news was shocking but not entirely surprising. They were bracing for some degree of changes, following China’s recent crackdown on tutoring. But even if the company was forced to shutter, few tutors expected it to happen this soon—or this abruptly.

“We had heard, about a month ago, that there were some sweeping regulations coming to China, so I had an idea something would change,” said Sharisse Quinones Robinson, an online English-language tutor for GoGoKid who lives in DeLand, Fla. “But I didn’t know it would be this severe, and I didn’t know we’d get zero notice.”

GoGoKid, an education product under Beijing-based company ByteDance (which also owns TikTok), collapsed overnight. Other companies in the space are slowly crumbling. Days before the GoGoKid email went out, rival service Magic Ears told teachers that it, too, would wind down its services over the next six to 12 months. Competitors such as QKids, Landi English and others have followed suit, saying that they would allow teachers to tutor until Chinese families’ pre-paid class packages run out. And recently, tutoring behemoth VIPKid sent out a notice to its foreign teachers saying that while it planned to continue to operate as a tutoring company in other countries, its business in China had only “several months” left.

“I had an idea something would change. But I didn’t know it would be this severe, and I didn’t know we’d get zero notice.”

Boom — and Bust

Quinones Robinson wasn’t wrong about a major shakeup to China’s online tutoring market. But she, like many others, underestimated its extent. In late July, the country rolled out new regulations that severely limit for-profit tutoring services and bar foreign investment in private education companies. It comes after years of enormous growth for China’s tutoring sector, including the emergence and expansion of a number of platforms that connect young children in China with native English speakers overseas for live, one-on-one language lessons.

By 2019, VIPKid, a major player in the online English-tutoring market, claimed to contract with nearly 100,000 American and Canadian tutors who served a combined 600,000 children in China. (VIPKid declined to share current numbers.) Qkids, meanwhile, claims on its website that it connects “over 1 million international young learners” with educators. The exact reach of these companies—this industry—is not clear, but their collective footprint is massive, global and estimated to be worth billions of dollars.

The arrangement worked well for both parties. Some Americans had finagled it into a full-time job, but more often, the platforms drew teachers who didn’t make enough money in the classroom alone to cover the bills. Many viewed tutoring as a flexible, fortuitous “side hustle,” a work-from-home slice of the gig economy. In China, wealthy and middle-class parents saw private English tutoring—especially led by native English speakers—as a way to get ahead, a canny edge on other students against whom their own children would some day have to compete.

While Chinese families have been forking over the equivalent of tens of thousands of U.S. dollars to support their children’s private educations after regular school hours—often at night, before bedtime—American tutors have been raking in up to $22 an hour by waking at the crack of dawn to squeeze in a few lessons before their own families wake up and the typical workday begins.

The official reason for the crackdown is that the financial pressure on Chinese families and academic pressure on Chinese children has become untenable. The high-stakes culture around education in China—and the subsequent costs associated with it—has become so fraught that many parents say they can’t justify having another child, which the Chinese government now encourages. It would simply break them financially. Recognizing this strain—and the declining birth rate it has perhaps led to—the Chinese government decided to act.

One unofficial reason for the new regulations, however, could be that companies like GoGoKid and VIPKid have provided Americans with unfettered access to young, impressionable Chinese children. As tensions between the United States and China escalate, many observers speculate that the Chinese government wanted to curtail Western influence on its youngest minds.

Americans who tutor for VIPKid and GoGoKid believe it’s a combination of those reasons. They have certainly seen first-hand the high expectations set for children in China.

“I have one student who said, on a Saturday, ‘I have 13 hours worth of class today,’” Whitehead recalled. “I said, ‘Wow,’ and she said, ‘Oh, it’s not so bad. I have a friend who has 17 hours.’”

Quinones Robinson used to teach a 5-year-old whose lesson began at 8:30 p.m. local time, and she said it was difficult to watch.

“He was exhausted. He was falling asleep,” Quinones Robinson said. “These kids are worked so hard. … Part of me thinks this will be good for them.”
“Do you really want a country that’s your adversary teaching your children? We have contact with these kids every day.”

Joe Madrid, an American tutor for GoGoKid who now lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand, said he’s taught kids who describe staying up doing their homework till midnight or 1 a.m. and going to training centers on weekends. The pressure and the burden on families are real, he said. But he thinks the new regulations have more insidious motivations as well.

“Do you really want a country that’s your adversary teaching your children?” Madrid asked, incredulous. “We have contact with these kids every day. … It seems like a strange thing to me.”

A One-Two Punch

Whitehead, the tutor based in Houston County, Alabama, has been a classroom teacher in the U.S. for eight years. Her husband is also a teacher. Their combined income from working in brick-and-mortar schools was not enough to cover basic needs. “Out of desperation,” Whitehead signed up to be an online English-language tutor a couple of years ago. It would end up being one of the most meaningful decisions and experiences of her life, she said.

Her monthly take-home pay from her full-time teaching position is about $2,500 to $2,800. She was bringing in another $1,500 to $1,800 a month by teaching 20-25 hours a week on GoGoKid and said that money is “absolutely essential” to her family’s livelihood.

“There are a lot of teachers who do this to make their ‘mad money,’ if you will,” Whitehead explained. “I do it for Christmas gifts, for paying credit card bills, for paying normal bills. It doesn’t just pad my income. It helps me stand up straight with my income.”

Anna Whitehead, a high school teacher in Alabama and former online tutor with GoGoKid, poses with a puppet she used during English-language lessons with children in China. (Screenshot from Zoom)

The timing stings. Whitehead and her husband recently bought a new house. “There has been debt incurred because of that, so it’s a tremendous financial blow,” she said.

For Quinones Robinson, online tutoring allowed her to leave an office job that she’d begun to resent and spend more time at home with her children. In 2018, when she got started with VIPKid and GoGoKid, she was a single mom who taught a few sessions in the mornings before work. In no time, though, she was making as much money tutoring as she was from her office salary and decided to hand in her resignation. For three years now, she said, she has been working 25 hours a week from home, in her pajamas, instead of 40 hours a week in business attire at an office: “It’s been awesome.”

Quinones Robinson was making $2,400 to $2,600 a month before GoGoKid’s “Dear teachers” email came through earlier this month and turned her world upside down. She and her husband also bought a new home back in December. “We have to pause for a moment,” she said about her family’s finances and lifestyle. “But I’ll figure this out, whether it’s through Instacart shopping or something else.”

“It’s a tremendous financial blow.”

Whitehead is confident she will find the money elsewhere, too—she mentioned interviewing for other jobs, selling “aggressively” on Teachers Pay Teachers and donating plasma. The harder blow, she said, is being cut off from the children that she has come to know and, by her account, love. When the pandemic began, many families shipped her face masks to make sure she was protecting herself. Some have sent her letters in the mail and gifts on her birthday.

“This is the first day in two years I haven’t gotten up to see them,” Whitehead said on Aug. 6, through tears. “It’s extremely emotional. … I have had the honor of being in their homes, seeing their families, meeting their pets, and hearing about injuries and favorite toys. It’s so different from the American education setting.”

Whitehead is connected to some of her students’ families on WeChat, separate from the GoGoKid platform. But others are “completely gone,” she said. She doesn’t know their real names. They live thousands of miles away. “They’re just gone. That’s the hardest part.”

One student, a girl called Tongtong, is among those that Whitehead feels she’s lost forever. On a video call for this story, she held up a drawing that Tongtong had made for her and then rattled off personal details about the girl: She wanted to be a lawyer. She has a pet bird. Her grandmother has a garden. She gets up every morning before 6 to read.

“I know these kids’ hopes. I know their dreams. I know their frustrations,” Whitehead said. “A million miles away, it’s so familiar.”

Forced Underground

Within hours of GoGoKid’s announcement to shut down, parents in China and tutors in America began scrambling to find one another. Parents in China set up virtual private networks to log onto Facebook, which is typically blocked in the country, and join private groups of GoGoKid teachers, searching for their child’s tutors by sharing screenshots from the app and listing usernames. Tutors, in turn, downloaded WeChat and listed themselves under the names they go by on GoGoKid (Quinones Robinson, for example, is “Teacher Edith”).

Everyone, it seemed, was frantic and desperate to be reunited after their GoGoKid accounts suddenly went dark.

One parent in China who found her way into a private Facebook group of GoGoKid teachers responded to questions via Facebook messenger, saying, “It is hard for me to accept the abrupt ending like this. I do believe many other parents should feel the same.”

The parent, who asked that her name be withheld since she is not supposed to be seeking out foreign educators, said that teachers and parents had formed WeChat groups and started Google Docs to share contact information. On Aug. 6, she said that some people had found who they were looking for.

“It is kind of like searching for your friends after the war,” she said. “Maybe I will never find them, since there are more than 10,000 teachers on GoGoKid. You cannot say how big [a] deal it is during your whole life. But the feeling of loss and being deprived would always be there.”

On Aug. 8, she followed up to say she had found her son’s teachers. “Wonders happened,” she wrote.

“Sometimes I feel guilty contributing to this constant education. But the thing is, these parents are going to find a way.”

Parents and tutors who were shut out of GoGoKid have wasted no time trying to recreate the arrangement on their own. Some of the parents of Whitehead’s students have found her and have asked her to continue teaching their children, through private lessons. She’s not sure exactly what that would look like, but imagines it could take place over Zoom and involve a lot of screen-sharing.

“It’s not just my families,” Whitehead said. “It’s all over. They’re desperate.”

Quinones Robinson had one parent contact her already. The child’s mom messaged her and said, “I found you!” And Madrid, the tutor who lives in Thailand, has already taught a private lesson to a student whose parent he was able to reconnect with on WeChat.

“The mother is not happy this happened, but she has more control now over what her child learns,” Madrid explained. “Now, we work together. I show her the lessons, she says, ‘This is what I want.’ It’s more collaborative.”

The same Americans who worry kids in China are being pushed too hard to excel are now helping parents set up an underground tutoring market. But many say that the continuation of private education services is inevitable, so why bow out now?

“Sometimes I feel guilty contributing to this constant education,” Whitehead said. “But the thing is, these parents are going to find a way. The way the society is set up, their future depends on what their children do.”

The Fate of the Others

GoGoKid may be gone, but other tutoring companies hope to hang on—some for mere months, and others for good.

In a recent email to teachers, Magic Ears leadership laid out a sobering future for the company.

“To be clear, the growth of the online ESL [English as a Second Language] industry is no longer being encouraged and it will not be permitted to expand,” the email said. “The new regulations set in place will restrict activity for all ESL companies based in China, it will shrink the industry and eventually it will be dissolved entirely. All companies, including Magic Ears, have downsized. We are now running on only a quarter of the staff that was initially supporting our students and teachers.”

The email goes on to say that the Chinese government will allow tutoring companies to honor their contractual obligations to parents who have already purchased bulk class packages. Some parents had purchased “many months or even a year of classes in advance.” The company expects to offer its final lessons in about a year’s time.

VIPKid emailed teachers on Aug. 7 with its own update.

“First and foremost, let us be clear that we are confident that VIPKid’s business will remain operational,” the email said.

Like Magic Ears, VIPKid will let parents in China who have purchased class packages finish out the lessons they have already paid for. “VIPKid teachers can still count on work for several months with students in China,” the notice reads.

After those classes have been taught, VIPKid’s service in China—at least as it currently exists, pairing North American tutors with Chinese children—will come to an end. But the company’s “long-term vision” involves expanding tutoring services into other countries, subjects and age groups. In the past year, VIPKid has been piloting a partnership with BookNook to provide reading services to students in the U.S. and is developing another service for adult learners across the globe.

“We expect these teaching opportunities to grow in the coming months,” VIPKid told teachers in the email. “It is our intention to minimize the impact to teachers.”

A spokesperson for VIPKid declined to share specific details around how much longer its one-on-one tutoring service in China may run, but said that as of Aug. 7, families in China can no longer purchase new classes with foreign educators.

Many tutors who have ongoing contracts with VIPKid are not optimistic that the company can pull off the international expansion. Chatter in private Facebook groups tends to be fatalistic.

The day after GoGoKid shuttered, Quinones Robinson woke up early and taught a child through VIPKid’s platform for the first time in a long time. She plans to tutor on VIPKid for as long as she can get bookings. But, expecting that VIPKid will fold soon, just like the others, she said she’d be building out her own private tutoring business in the meantime.



Emily Tate (@ByEmilyTate) is a senior reporter at EdSurge covering early childhood and K-12 education. Reach her at emily [at] edsurge [dot] com.

DUH, OH!
Ex-NASA Scientist Warns Earth Will Be Too Hot For Humans in a Billion Years



A user asked about the size of the asteroid to make the Earth’s orbit bigger.

In his paper, David Holz has proposed a plan to save the Blue Planet from destruction.

LAST UPDATED:AUGUST 23, 2021, 
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A former scientist of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has claimed that Earth will burn up unless humans steal energy from Jupiter’s orbit. David Holz, a PhD, has also proposed a plan to avoid the destruction of the Blue Planet in 1 billion years. According to him, scientists should use giant asteroids to make the Earth’s orbit bigger so that we “steal" energy from Jupiter’s orbit. The physicist and entrepreneur has further claimed that it will expand the distance of Earth from the Sun and will also help in preserving the planet and human species for “at least" 5 billion more years.

Holz said that this is his “out-of-this-world idea” and it needs a good deal of improvements in various space-related technologies first.

Recently, Holz shared on Twitter the screenshots from a new academic paper. It is published by NASA, University of California, and University of Michigan professors. The paper is titled, “Astronomical engineering: a strategy for modifying planetary orbits".

He said around one billion years from now, the Sun will be too hot and the temperature of Earth will increase, making it too vulnerable for humans to survive at its current distance.

Holz, in his tweet, suggested that energy from Jupiter must be stolen to gradually expand Earth’s orbit and the process must be repeated every 6000 years. According to him, it will prevent the Earth from getting close to the Sun again and burning up.

A user asked about the size of the asteroid to make the Earth’s orbit bigger. He suggested that its size should be 130km by 130km by 130km. Holz agreed with him.

He also responded to one more question about the asteroid.

Earlier in February 2020, he proposed nation-sized solar panels to float high above the atmosphere to block the Sun’s rays to adjust the earth’s temperature manually.

Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed. Keep them on the hook

Climate-conscious individual choices are good – but not nearly enough to save the planet. More than personal virtue, we need collective action

Temperatures have reached record heights in southern Italy, which has been badly hit by wildfires. Climate scientists say there is little doubt that climate change is driving extreme weather events. Photograph: Salvatore Cavalli/AP

Rebecca Solnit
Mon 23 Aug 2021 

Personal virtue is an eternally seductive goal in progressive movements, and the climate movement is no exception. People pop up all the time to boast of their domestic arrangements or chastise others for what they eat or how they get around. The very short counterargument is that individual acts of thrift and abstinence won’t get us the huge distance we need to go in this decade. We need to exit the age of fossil fuels, reinvent our energy landscape, rethink how we do almost everything. We need collective action at every scale from local to global – and the good people already at work on all those levels need help in getting a city to commit to clean power or a state to stop fracking or a nation to end fossil-fuel subsidies. The revolution won’t happen by people staying home and being good.

But the oil companies would like you to think that’s how it works. It turns out that the concept of the “carbon footprint”, that popular measure of personal impact, was the brainchild of an advertising firm working for BP. As Mark Kaufman wrote this summer:

British Petroleum, the second largest non-state owned oil company in the world, with 18,700 gas and service stations worldwide, hired the public relations professionals Ogilvy & Mather to promote the slant that climate change is not the fault of an oil giant, but that of individuals. It’s here that British Petroleum, or BP, first promoted and soon successfully popularized the term “carbon footprint” in the early aughts. The company unveiled its “carbon footprint calculator” in 2004 so one could assess how their normal daily life – going to work, buying food, and (gasp) traveling – is largely responsible for heating the globe.

The main reason to defeat the fossil fuel corporations is that their product is destroying the planet, but their insidious propaganda, from spreading climate-change denial to pushing this climate footprint business, makes this goal even more worthwhile.

Carbon footprints caught on, and I routinely see people on social media zooming in on individual consumption habits when climate chaos is under discussion. Bill McKibben made the case against them in 2008:


Say you have a certain amount of time and money with which to make change – call it x, since that is what we mathematicians call things. The trick is to increase that x by multiplication, not addition. The trick is to take that 5 percent of people who really care and make them count for far more than 5 percent. And the trick to that is democracy.

That is, private individual actions don’t increase at a rate sufficient to affect the problem in a timely fashion; collective action seeking changes in policy and law can.

Too, the goal of personal virtue is merely not to be part of the problem. It’s not good enough for a bystander to say “I personally am not murdering this person” when someone is being stabbed to death before them (and those of us in the global north have countless ties to systems that are murdering the climate, so we are not exactly bystanders). The goal for those of us with any kind of resources of time, rights and a voice, must be being part of the solution, pushing for system change. To stop the murder.

Underlying this is a conflict in how we imagine ourselves, as consumers or as citizens. Consumers define themselves by what they buy, own, watch – or don’t. Citizens see themselves as part of civil society, as actors in the political system (and by citizen I don’t mean people who hold citizenship status, but those who participate, as noncitizens often do quite powerfully). Too, even personal virtue is made more or less possible by the systems that surround us. If you have solar panels on your roof, it’s because there’s a market and manufacturers for solar and installers and maybe an arrangement with your power company to compensate you for energy you’re putting into the grid.

In my own case, some of what I could tout as personal virtue is only possible because of collective action. I have 100% clean electricity at home because people organized to make that option and the solar and wind power behind it available. I do some of my errands by bicycle because the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition worked for decades to put bicycle paths across the city and otherwise make it safer to get about on two wheels. I can take public transit because there is public transit. Across the Bay, the city of Berkeley led the way in making all-electric houses the standard for the future; more than fifty California cities and counties have followed suit. Paired with the clean electricity California has committed to, this mandate matters. Having an all-electric house or driving an electric car fueled by renewables won’t be a virtuous choice in the future; it’ll just be the norm.

But individual and collective action don’t have to be pitted against each other. Individual choices do add up (they just don’t, in McKibben’s terms, multiply). That vegan options are available at a lot of fast-food chains is because enough consumers have created a profitable market for them. We do influence others through our visible choices. Ideas spread, values spread, habits spread; we are social animals and both good and bad behaviors are contagious. (For the bad, just look at the contagiousness of specious anti-vaccination arguments.)

Vegetarian and vegan diets (and low-meat or no-red-meat diets) have become far more common, creating markets for new products and different menus. But they have not made the beef industry go away or reformed its devastating climate impact. Climate chaos demands we recognize how everything is connected. Seeing yourself as a citizen means seeing yourself as connected to social and political systems. As citizens we must go after the climate footprint of the fossil-fuel corporations, the beef industry, the power companies, the transportation system, plastics, and so much more.


Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Men Explain Things to Me and The Mother of All Questions. Her most recent book is Recollections of My Nonexistence

KENNEY WASTED OUR $$$ ON IT

U.S. report finds multiple problems with Keystone pipeline

Mon, August 23, 2021

FILE PHOTO: A supply depot servicing the Keystone XL crude oil pipeline lies idle in Oyen

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. government watchdog found multiple problems with the construction, manufacture and design of the Keystone pipeline, validating President Joe Biden's decision to revoke the permit for a Keystone XL extension, leaders of several House Democratic committees said on Monday.

The lawmakers requested the Government Accountability Office report in November 2019 after more than 11,000 barrels of oil leaked from the pipeline system in two releases in less than two years.

"GAO found that preventable construction issues contributed to the current Keystone pipeline’s spills more frequently than the industry-wide trends," they said in a statement.


Keystone's four largest spills were "caused by issues related to the original design, manufacturing of the pipe, or construction of the pipeline," the GAO report said.

Biden canceled Keystone XL's permit on his first day in office on Jan. 20, dealing a death blow to a project that would have carried 830,000 barrels per day of heavy oil sands crude from Alberta to Nebraska. [L1N2JX1D8]

"TC Energy’s record among its peers is one of the worst in terms of volume of oil spilled per mile transported," a statement from the lawmakers said. The lawmakers included Representative Frank Pallone, energy and commerce committee chair.

TC Energy Corp officially canceled the $9 billion Keystone XL in June. It filed a notice of intent in July to begin a legacy North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) claim and is seeking more than $15 billion in damages from the U.S. government.

The company did not immediately respond on Monday to a request for comment.

Pipeline opponents want to slow the movement of Canadian oil to the United States. But pipeline supporters say it will be shipped anyway and that oil sent by rail has caused numerous fiery accidents.

Biden "was clearly right to question this operator’s ability to construct a safe and resilient pipeline, and we support his decision to put Americans’ health and environment above industry interests,” the U.S. representatives said.

(Reporting by Doina Chiacu and Timothy Gardner; Editing by Barbara Lewis and Dan Grebler)

GAO report finds multiple problems with Keystone pipeline

ReutersStaff
Published Monday, August 23, 2021


In this Dec. 18, 2020 photo, pipes to be used for the Keystone XL pipeline are stored in a field near Dorchester, Neb. (Chris Machian /Omaha World-Herald via AP)

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. government watchdog found multiple problems with the construction, manufacture and design of the Keystone XL pipeline, validating President Joe Biden's decision to revoke its permit, leaders of several House Democratic committees said on Monday.

The committee leaders requested the Government Accountability Office report in November 2019 after more than 11,000 barrels crude oil leaked from the pipeline in two releases in less than two years.

"In its thorough review of the pipeline’s history and construction, GAO found that preventable construction issues contributed to the current Keystone pipeline’s spills more frequently than the industry-wide trends," they said in a statement.


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Keystone's four largest spills were "caused by issues related to the original design, manufacturing of the pipe, or construction of the pipeline," the GAO report said.

Biden canceled Keystone XL's permit on his first day in office on Jan. 20, dealing a death blow to a long-gestating project that would have carried 830,000 barrels per day of heavy oil sands crude from Alberta to Nebraska.

"TC Energy’s record among its peers is one of the worst in terms of volume of oil spilled per mile transported," a statement from the lawmakers said.

They included Representatives Peter DeFazio, transportation committee chairman, Frank Pallone, energy and commerce committee chair, Donald Payne, chair of a subcommittee on railroads and pipelines and Bobby Rush, chair of a subcommittee on energy. the lawmakers said.

"President Biden was clearly right to question this operator’s ability to construct a safe and resilient pipeline, and we support his decision to put Americans’ health and environment above industry interests,” they said.

(Reporting by Doina Chiacu; editing by Barbara Lewis)

Democrats argue new report on Keystone pipelines bolsters Biden cancellation

BY RACHEL FRAZIN - 08/23/21 

© Getty Images

A group of House Democrats is arguing that a new report on spills from the Keystone Pipeline System boosts President Biden’s case for canceling the Keystone XL, which would’ve formed part of the network.

Reps. Frank Pallone Jr. (N.J.), Peter DeFazio (Ore.), Bobby Rush (Ill.), and Donald Payne Jr. (N.J.) said in a joint statement that the new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report “validates President Biden’s decision to revoke the permit to build the Keystone XL pipeline.”

“In its thorough review of the pipeline’s history and construction, GAO found that preventable construction issues contributed to the current Keystone pipeline’s spills more frequently than the industry-wide trends,” said the Democratic lawmakers, who chair the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and subcommittees on energy and railroads, pipelines and hazardous materials, respectively.

“In fact, GAO found that, while corrosion was the industry’s leading cause of such accidents on crude oil pipelines, half of Keystone’s accidents were caused by material failure of the pipe or weld," they added. “President Biden was clearly right to question this operator’s ability to construct a safe and resilient pipeline, and we support his decision to put Americans’ health and environment above industry interests.”

The report determined that since 2010, Keystone’s accident history is similar to that of other pipelines, but that its record has worsened in recent years. It particularly cited two more recent spills — one in 2017 and another in 2019 — that accounted for about 93 percent of the total barrels of oil released from the vessel network over the course of a decade.

How Keystone’s operator TC Energy fared compared to its peers varied based on the time period and metrics used in the report.

Using a government measure of the number of accidents impacting people and the environment per total miles of pipeline, the GAO said TC Energy was “consistently” better than the national average, though “less so” in recent years.

Over the five-year period of 2016 to 2020, TC was around average, ranking 43rd out of 80 operators when measuring from the fewest accidents to the most.

In terms of volume of oil spilled per barrel-mile of transport, TC was better than average over the past decade, worse than average of the past five years and better than average for the past three years.

The report said that Keystone’s accidents were more likely to be caused by construction issues, approximately half of those impacting people or the environment, compared to 12 percent industrywide.

In a letter accompanying the report, TC Executive Vice President Leslie Kass said that safety is a “core value” for the company. Kass also said that it had taken additional measures to improve safety, including a new tool that allows it to detect imperfections more easily.

The Keystone Pipeline System stretches across nearly 3,000 miles and delivers crude oil around North America.

The Keystone XL Pipeline, which became a flashpoint in the environmental debate surrounding pipelines, would’ve added an additional route from Canada to Nebraska.

Biden nixed a permit that would’ve allowed the new pipeline to cross the U.S.-Canada border, ultimately leading to its downfall.

The move was polarizing, leading to cheers from many environmentalists but significant pushback from Republicans.