Hоw mаny neutrоns аre in а 100 mg sample оf fluorine gas composed entirely of the most common isotope of fluorine?
Which sentence demоnstrаtes the mоst effective use оf sentence vаriety? а. I went to the store. I bought milk. I came home.b. After going to the store to buy milk, I came home.c. I went to the store; bought milk; came home.d. To the store I went, milk I bought, and home I came.
THE ROBOTS’ NEXT VICTIMS During the lаst big wаve оf аutоmatiоn in the 1980s and 1990s, technology produced new jobs and made others obsolete. The demand for rote-labor workers had diminished, while that for workers with computer-based skills had gone up. Laborers who had little additional experience were hit the hardest, and they tended to be black. Who will the biggest victims be in this new age of automation, in which artificial intelligence dominates and even driving is computerized? Americans favor assigning to robots jobs that are dangerous and unhealthy rather than those that require human sensibilities, according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center. Latinos, especially Latino men, are heavily overrepresented in those challenging and often repetitive roles. The top 20 most popular occupations among Latinos are mostly in agriculture, roofing, and construction, involving hard, manual, often dangerous work. Construction, for example, had the most fatal work injuries among the Bureau of Labor Statistics categories. Latinos make up a whopping 63 percent of drywall installers, a dangerous job because of the harmful irritants in drywall dust, while 30 percent are white and 7 percent are African American. Latinos are also overrepresented in repetitive work that requires few digital skills—such as that in hospitality. Automation has already begun in the aforementioned sectors, which have many job openings (in construction, for example, nearly 200,000) that employers can eliminate using robots, which also save the companies money in the long term. And the automation of jobs such as drywall installation and roofing is also appealing because the positions are so dangerous: countless injuries and deaths could be prevented. All this suggests that the current workforce-automation trend is beneficial not only for the economy, but also for the workers in those jobs—provided that they can develop the new, relatively advanced digital skills required to manage the machines or find other decent-wage jobs. However, few Latinos have these opportunities. While the construction sector has many openings, for example, sometimes they are in new areas to which displaced workers can’t travel. This reality isn’t surprising. In an effort to gauge the impact of automation on different racial groups, one study assessed the “automation potential”—a measure that pertains to how many tasks can be automated using today’s technology—for the 20 occupations in which each racial group is most concentrated. Latinos, the researchers found, face the highest automation potential at close to 60 percent, followed by blacks at 50 percent, Asians at almost 40 percent, and whites at roughly 25 percent. Creating more education opportunities that target Latinos could help improve their employment prospects. Entrenched school and housing segregation means that Latinos have far less access than whites to resources that determine their longer-term education and job trajectories, largely by influencing who gets what skills early on, for example, schooling that can lead to a computer science degree at MIT versus schooling that all but limits one to a job in housekeeping. Latinos have the highest high-school dropout rate—at 10 percent—in large part because they tend to pool their resources together to have one household income, said Jaime Dominguez, a political-science and Latino-studies professor at Northwestern University, alluding to the fact that so many Latino families are low-income. “There is an obligation to work.” Automation threatens to exacerbate a pattern in which Latinos are stuck at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder: In depriving them of jobs—and often pushing them into the devastating cycle of long-term unemployment, the trend makes it increasingly difficult for low-income Latinos to enter the middle class. Yet few resources have been dedicated to ameliorating the trend’s impact on this demographic’s workforce. The most recent federal-job training program, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunities Act of 2014, has specific provisions for Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian individuals in recognition of those groups’ unique disadvantages. However, the act does little to explicitly target support for Latinos.
GOING AGAINST THE CURVE Ask peоple whаt’s wrоng in Americаn higher educаtiоn, and you’ll hear about grade inflation. Across 200 colleges and universities, over 40 percent of grades were in the A realm, a percentage that has grown over the past three decades. But the opposite problem worries me even more: grade deflation, when teachers use a forced grading curve: The top 10 percent of students receive A’s, the next 30 percent get B’s, and so on. The forced curve arbitrarily limits the number of students who can excel. If your forced curve allows for only seven A’s, but 10 students have mastered the material, three of them will be unfairly punished. It disincentivizes studying, creating an atmosphere that pits students against one another. At best, it increases competition, and at worst, it sends students the message that the world is a zero-sum game: Your success means my failure. Many people believe that the world is a zero-sum game, but as an organizational psychologist, I’ve found that they’re wrong. The time employees spend helping others contributes as much to their performance evaluations and promotion rates as how well they do their jobs. An analysis of 168 studies of more than 51,000 employees showed that leaders reward people who make the team and the organization more successful. My research studying the careers of “takers,” who aim to come out ahead, and “givers,” who enjoy helping others showed that in the short run, the takers were more successful. But in the long run, the givers consistently achieved better results. Takers believe in a zero-sum world, and they end up creating one where bosses, colleagues and clients don’t trust them. Givers build deeper and broader relationships — people are rooting for them instead of gunning for them. Like most people in business schools, my students were intent on networking, but they focused their efforts outside their classes and regarded their in-class peers as competition. I decided to change that culture. I started experimenting with grading schemes that would encourage community and collaboration, while still maintaining standards and assessing students individually. I began by writing unusually difficult exams. That was enough to motivate students to study hard. And I introduced a rule: No student will ever be hurt by another student’s grade. I promised them that I would never curve downward, only upward. If the highest mark was an 83, I would add 17 points to everyone’s score. Now one student’s excellence didn’t hurt another’s grade. But while that removed a level of competition, it didn’t address the bigger goal, which was to make preparing for my exam a team effort. How could I get students to help one another? I tried another approach. The most difficult section of my final exam was multiple choice. I told the students that they could pick the one question about which they were most unsure, and write down the name of a classmate who might know the answer. If the classmate got it right, they would both earn the points. Essentially, I was trying to build a collaborative culture with a reward system where one person’s success benefited someone else. It was a small offering but it made a big difference. More students started studying together in small groups, then the groups started pooling their knowledge. The results: Their average scores were 2 percent higher than the previous year’s. We’ve long known that one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it. In fact, evidence suggests that this is one of the reasons that firstborns tend to slightly outperform younger siblings on grades and IQ tests: Firstborns benefit from educating their younger siblings. I had been trying to teach this lesson through my research on givers and takers, but it was so much more powerful for them to live it. Creating an atmosphere in which students want to help one another also allowed them to benefit from another of the defining features of personal and professional relationships: transactive memory, which is simply knowing who knows best. In a work team you don’t have to know how to perfect PowerPoint slides if your colleague is an expert. When students take the time to find out who has expertise, they become smarter at learning. And that’s ultimately what we’re trying to teach, isn’t it? The mark of higher education isn’t the knowledge you accumulate in your head. It’s the skills you gain about how to learn.