A study published in the journal Educational Psychology found that students who had cellphones or laptops present while a lesson was being taught scored five percent, or half a letter grade, lower on exams than students who didn’t use electronics… The study also found that students in the device-permitting classroom who were not using devices also scored lower. The researchers attributed this to distraction from the devices around them.

Adorable mech engineers!
They tend to be naughty, the dears…
They act like a luv
And get grants from the gov
But then all the funds disappear.

Today’s walk was the
new SW Waterfront:
AKA The Wharf.

Today’s walk was through the
National Zoo, where sprays of
cool water helped – a little.

And as FGM becomes more common in the United States, our doctors too will start specializing in the many complications of the slashing off of six year olds’ genitals. The Somali doctor quoted in my headline has of course a steady stream of bleeding mutilated children to specialize in, since 98% of the little girls in that country get hacked, mostly by local village butchers. I’m sure we’ll have our share of local butchers here in the ol’ US of A too; but some of our castrators will maybe have nursing degrees or whatever.

Meanwhile, the latest child FGM death in Somalia seems to have attracted sufficient global attention to rouse the government (“government”) to say that it will pursue the case in the courts, blah blah. I’m sure we’ll all forget the clinical details long before whoever is trying to run Somalia remembers that it was after all just a girl and really who gives a shit. There’s a war on.

One of the doctors who tried to save Deeqa after the botched procedure told CNN she suffered the most extreme form of FGM he had ever seen.

“Her whole female genital tract had been removed, the labia and the clitoris had been cut off, it’s type 4 FGM.

“She was brought in two days after they cut her, she was already infected with tetanus,” Dr. Abdirahman Omar Hassan said.

If they’d been able to save her, Deeqa could have lived out her full life span: Buried under a body veil at eleven years old, married to some random old guy at twelve, finished off at thirteen in an honor killing.

Students there know and respect athletic traditions. Even off-season, in the dead of summer, they gather to remind the world what has for so long made the school famous.

We can only wonder what they have in store for us once the season begins in late August. The excitement is building! Pity Aaron Hernandez can’t be there.

A commenter at Deadspin gets to the heart of what matters in the University of Pennsylvania bribery story.

The University of Miami continues to this day to proudly take … well, dirty hardly does as an adjective for Esformes money, does it?

Two sights yesterday, on a walk
before tea at the Henley Park Hotel.

A sculpture on a side
door to the Henley Park.

Massed sky on Mass Ave.

**********************

Our tea table, Henley Park.

… and 1 800 GOT JUNK?…’

UD just heard this, as she turned on her radio at 5:30 AM, and she thought: “Not sure about that sequence…”

… to tell us what you really think.

“I am a UT graduate, and my offices have helped many students, professors and even sports teams in many ways over the years,” [Rep. John J.] Duncan wrote in [his] newsletter. “I have nothing personally against any coach and hope the new UT coach does well. But I am disgusted by [its coach] buyouts. We just finished paying one former coach $100,000 a month, not to coach, and now we’ll be paying over $8 million to the latest ex-coach.”

If you like what the haredim have done to Israel, you’ll love the latest piece of education legislation out of New York.

A yeshiva advocacy group had sued to stop New York State from implementing the so-called “Felder amendment,” an 11th hour deal to appease a state senator who was holding up the budget…

Critics are focusing their ire at Brooklyn state senator Simcha Felder, who threw the state budget negotiations into chaos and held up passage until he got an amendment to lower the bar on the amount of secular education required for yeshiva students.

… Young Advocates For Fair Education [has] has waged an intense battle to make sure that yeshivas give their students instruction in English, math and other state-mandated subjects.

It’s that old “mandate” again, ain’t it? We’ve got mandates; Israel’s got mandates. But how can they be mandates when the ultraorthodox aren’t mandated to mandate them?

The vast majority of my friends in chasidic yeshiva … still have never even heard the words algebra, atom, or biology… I have heard of no graduates from my chasidic school who have enrolled in college. In fact, the vast majority of chasidic yeshiva graduates do not even obtain a high school diploma…

********************

And think of the goodies civil society gets in return: Permanent profound welfare dependency. Large numbers of unemployables. A significant minority that thinks the laws of liberal democracies don’t apply to them. Indeed, that barely recognizes the state except as a source of funds.

Your tax dollars at work.

… Her campaign against the mandatory hijab started accidentally. In 2014, Alinejad posted a picture of herself on Facebook with the wind blowing through her hair in London… She received comments from women in Iran telling her how envious they were of her freedom. In response, Alinejad posted still more images of herself to Facebook, similarly unveiled. The difference was that these snapshots had been stealthily captured years earlier, inside Iran, hiking with friends or driving her car. In her posts, Alinejad called for other women to take similar pictures.

She was soon deluged with images, and a campaign was born. Alinejad called it My Stealthy Freedom. Today, My Stealthy Freedom’s Facebook page has more than a million followers, and Alinejad’s personal Instagram account boasts similar numbers. Posts have been accompanied by a changing array of hashtags, the most popular of which has been #WhiteWednesdays, which began last year as a call for women to send pictures or videos of themselves holding up or waving a white veil in public on that day of the week. These days, the videos flood in constantly.

The father of a 10-year-old girl who died after undergoing female genital mutilation (FGM) in Somalia has defended the practice.

Dahir Nur’s daughter died of blood loss on 17 July, two days after being taken to a traditional circumciser.

But he told Voice of America (VOA) “people in the area are content” with FGM even considering the dangers, adding it is the country’s “culture”.

According to Unicef, 98% of girls and women in Somalia have undergone FGM.

Dr Abdirahman Omar Hassan, director of Hanano hospital in the city of Dhusamareb, told VoA he had never seen “anyone who was mutilated like that in my life.”

[Nur’s daughter] had [also] caught tetanus, most likely from the unsterilised equipment used during the original procedure.