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Dana Goldstein of the NYT looks at the big problem in education today- the failure to teach reading and writing skills to students in American schools. Goldstein cites two alarming statistics. About 40% of students who took the ACT writing exam in the high school class of 2016 lack the reading and writing skills to pass a college level composition class in English. 8th and 12th grade classes in the U.S. have 75% of the students lacking writing skills proficiency, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Of the 1204 comments to this article in the NYT, many of the 17 selected by NYT say the problem is that students lack reading skills. Other problems shown here are the handicaps created by technology, yes technology. Mobile phone use is common and this is done quickly with the least attention to write good sentences, little attention to punctuation, spelling or grammar. Half or incomplete sentences are easier to type on mobile, so a new generation grows up thinking that this is normal. As a result a whole generation of kids have not learned to read or write well, constructing sentences with limited vocabulary. Steve Jobs and Apple may say that iPads and iPhones, smartphones and other tech devices have advanced reading with the beautiful display technology screens, but this is not what is really happening. Google may say that its search helps people access good reading materials, and this too is not what is really happening.  Equally alarming is that there is no clear agreement on how to tackle this problem. The No Child Left Behind 2002 law set a program emphasizing reading and use of multiple choice questions to test reading skills. This was followed by the Common Core standards now implemented in schools for 6 years that shift the focus to writing. Yet the results are still the same, showing little progress. Goodman cites as examples of disagreement, the Writing Revolution project which focusses on grammar and other writing skills, and the Long Island Writing Project that focusses on students finding their own voice by freewriting. A student in the freewriting class which encourages finding your own voice, expresses her frustration by saying she doesn't hear a voice- what voice, she asks.  One of the problems is that teachers themselves lack writing skills. A look at 2400 teacher preparation programs shows little attention paid to teaching writing. The head of the Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University's Teachers College, says Common Core failed in implementation of massive teacher training, which is required to address the problem. As a result remediation programs are needed badly in colleges to fix literacy skills, when better teaching would have prevented the problem in the first place. Little understood or debated is that every generation has to learn about the country's democratic institutions, every generation has to make its own effort to gain civic literacy- it is not something that can be taken for granted or handed down from one generation to the next. Without reading and learning about how these institutions function, young people lack the skills for participating in our democracy and in the global economy. ...

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A draw how you feel, sketch how you feel on electronic pad, offered to readers by The Times, on the first anniversary of the lockdown in Britain. On the verge of a third lockdown, readers look for ways to restore their mental health,

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Senators in the US Congress, Rubio and Schumer, have asked the US government to look into Apple's plans to work with Chinese semiconductor company YMTC. As a result the Commerce Department has placed export restrictions on YMTC. This NYT report looks at the two decade long rise of China and of Apple after Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and shifted manufacturing to China. When Jobs returned to Apple he found major quality issues at Apple's manufacturing facilities, a demoralized workforce, and financial losses, with CEO Michael Spindler running the company into the ground. Jobs had to start with afresh model for Apple and decided to shift manufacturing to China under the engineering leadership of Tim Cook. Alabama native Cook went to Auburn University for his engineering degree and Duke for his business degree. Cook joined Jobs in 1998 at Apple and for ten years till 2007 the two cut costs, shifted to contract manufacturers and rebuilt Apple with new products, iPod, iPad and the iphone. By not manufacturing Apple avoided quality control issues, and the costs of maintaining inventory. It was Tim Cook who ran operations worldwide, and he gradually built up the manufacturing relationships in China with Foxconn, which makes most of Apple's products in sprawling Chinese factories that employ 20 years later about 3 million Chinese workers. Foxconn was chosen by Apple in 2000 to manufacture the Apple Mac laptop. Before that it was a parts supplier to Apple. Increasingly Apple relied on Foxconn to make its new products including the iPhone. Both companies growth relied on the manufacturing of Foxconn to the point where Apple was dependent on Foxconn and had intertwined its operations with Foxconn in China. Today the whole relationship is being called into question after two decades in which American workers suffered the effects of the outshoring of manufacturing jobs. It should be noted that though Mr. Trump raised the issue of manufacturing exclusively in China with Apple, the Trump administration did little to change the practices of the company that pioneered this type of massive manufacturing role for China. That surrendered the entire supply chain to foreign suppliers in the interest of cutting costs and maintaining huge profit margins, with which it financed an array of new products and reached $1 trillion in sales from $10 billion, hundredfold increase over 2 decades. American workers and families for the first time in American history got very little from this Cook-Jobs project. American infrastructure in communities that would have been supported by American factories including the services and infrastructure in communities financed through local taxes, a practice throughout the Industrial Revolution in the US, was sharply disrupted over 2 decades. It caused a rupture in social relations and increased inequality in the US, and defunded infrastructure that comes with manufacturing.  It is the task of the Biden administration to now correct what Mr. Trump simply talked about but never induced or required Apple to do- lead the resurgence of American manufacturing, and make its major investments in the US, invest in its workers and families, invest in America. ...

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Apple and protests over working conditions at factories of suppliers like Foxconn which make the iPads and iPhones. Issues related to Apple's large profit margins and the low wages paid to workers at supplier factories in China and other countries.

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Steve Jobs of Apple never intended the iPhone to be used as an ubiquitous device that is there all the time with user attention riveted to it. A computer scientist, Prof. Cal Newport of Georgetown University, says the vision of the iPhone presented by Steve Jobs at the Mosconi Center in 2007 was very different from what it has become today. It was an iPod that could make calls, help you listen to music, not a device on which you had to constantly check emails, constantly be on the alert for messages, use for getting instant breaking news you didn't need all the time. At the time in 2007 the App store did not exist and Jobs by design did not focus on apps believing that whatever apps there would be would be better designed to be aesthetically good by Apple engineers. It was an iPod that made calls, a engineer on the team that developed the iPhone at that time tells Newport. Jobs vision was of an iPhone that did a few activities well- helping people listen to music , get directions, make calls. What he did not want to do was to change the rhythm of people's lives. Newport calls it a shame that this vision got somehow diverted and disrupted by what happened afterwards. We have become so used to the constant companion model that we forget its novelty, only a little over 10 years ago none of this existed. As a computer scientist writing about the influence of technology on culture Newport says it is important to remember the magnitude of this unintended shift, to know that Jobs got it right the first time and that it would be better for many of us to return to the minimalist vision for the phone that Jobs espoused. ...

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The failure of Nintendo's new handheld 3DS video game device to win market acceptance. Sales dropped to 710,000 in the last 3 months from 3.6 million the prior quarter. Nintendo has now made a big price cut from $250 to $170. The entire videogame industy is going through a transformation where a closed platform like Nintendo's is facing obsolescence. Today any device with a screen and an internet connection can work for videogaming. Companies such as Zynga have Facebook games such as "Farmville" and "Cityville." Mobile and social games are $1 or $5 and often free when they have advertising within the games. They can be readily acccessed instantly by downloading, Contrast that with Nintendo games for 3DS which can sell for $30 to $40. Nintendo has sold over 87 million Wiis and 147 million DS devices. But the sales are dropping precipitiously. Wii sales dropped to 1.56 million in the most recent quarter compared to 3.04 million in the prior year, and DS sales fell to 1.44 million from 3.15 million, according to Nintendo. As a whole game sales in retail stores including hardware and software are declining down to $995 million in June 2011 from $1.111 billion for the same month prior year, according to NPD Group. Microsoft continues to see an increase in its Xbox gaming business- with a 30% increase in sales to $1.49 billion for the last quarter for the division with the Xbox business. One reason is that this is a group of hard core gaming customers who prefer shooting and sports games including the use of a camera device called Kinect where body movements are used by players. In that manner this business is insulated from the overall trend where game developers are shifting to new technologies and developemnts such as Facebook and iPhone. Electronic Arts is focussing on the fast growth for popular games on the iPad....

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If you love soccer or football you should see this interview by Frank Lampard of 2024 Ballon d'Or winner, Spanish player Rodri Fernandez. Rodri plays for Manchester City. The interesting thing about this Premier League You Tube video of Oct 29, 2024 is that British player Frank Lampard, and now coach, is he shows Rodri moments in each game on an iPad and asks him how he does it- the moves he makes as a midfielder on the field, including the picture in his head about the field in those moments.

Lampard does an excellent job showing Rodri at his best, the skills, the instinct, the preparation and the hard work, the discipline, and the extraordinary humility of Spanish footballers.

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Nokia's new phones which allow music to be downloaded wirelessly compete with the Apple iPod. The new phones can download songs wirelessly which the iPod cannot, but have a limited range and music selection compared to the iPod. Nokia hopes o enhance its margins with the higher priced phones. It is also giving Nokia an opportunity to take the lead in innovation.