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Pro-European protests centered around Kiev’s
Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square),
dubbed Euromaidan, have gripped Ukraine since November 21, when
the government
announced it would put a planned “association agreement” with
the European Union on hold.  After three weeks of protests,
punctuated by clashes with police and failed attempts to disperse
demonstrators that have only emboldened them, the Ukrainian
government says it’s ready to sign the association agreement with
the EU, but first it wants a promise of $27.5 billion
in financial assistance. That’s a more specific iteration of
the initial Ukrainian demand Europe compensate
it for perceived short-term economic losses that came with the
decision to scuttle the agreement in November. The Ukrainian
government considered the IMF’s loan conditions too harsh, and

blamed them too for the collapse of the agreement with the EU.
In the crisis of weeks of protest, the Ukrainian government found
an opportunity to try to use them to get a better deal from the
EU.

Ukraine’s November decision to suspend talks with Europe, the
Washington Post
reported then, had also been influenced by pressure from Russia
for Ukraine to join its own Customs Union (with Belarus and
Kazakhstan), and by European demands that the Ukrainian government
release former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko. She was targeted
for prosecution after Viktor Yanukovych was elected president
in 2010, and Tymoshenko was eventually charged and convicted for
abuse of office related to a gas deal with Russia. Currently in
prison, Tymoshenko was one of the leaders of the last mass protests
in the Ukraine, the so-called “Orange Revolution” in 2004 that
contributed to Yanukovych’s eventual loss in that year’s
presidential election. Yanukovych had in fact won the original
run-off, but those results were annulled by the Supreme Court for
being fraudulent. A  Moscow
Times write up compared the current protests and the
Orange Revolution, noting the similar West vs. East contours of
both, but also that while the Ukrainian government is in a stronger
position than it was in 2004, that the path toward integration with
Europe might already be irreversible.

For their part, EU leaders stress stronger relations with the
Ukraine don’t have to come at the expense of cooperation with
Russia. Russia’s tightening of border controls and trade
restrictions in response to the Ukraine’s work on an agreement with
the EU, unfortunately, indicate Russia is not interested in what
the EU describes as a “win-win” (as the taking down of trade
barriers
always is!). Unfortunately with trade deals between
governments, taking down trade barriers is rarely all it is, hence
the
scramble by the EU to find financial aid for Ukraine if it
signs a deal in part to cover for expected trade losses from
Russia.

A U.S.
military official has said that the military is expecting to begin
transporting Burundian troops to the Central African Republic
today. The troops are to take part in an African Union-led
intervention supported by the French which aims to stop sectarian
violence in the former French colony.

From
CNN:

(CNN) — The U.S. military expects on Thursday to begin
flying Burundi forces into the Central African Republic to help
stop the violence in that war-torn country, according to a U.S.
military official.

The United States has two C-17 aircraft in Uganda that will pick
up the forces in Burundi and unload them in Bangui, the capital.
The official emphasized the U.S. planes will remain on the ground
in Bangui for a very short period due to the violence there.

The official also said the United States believes its planes and
crews will be safe, because French forces control the airport
there. The airlift of Burundi forces is expected to last about a
week. Discussions about what additional assistance the United State
may provide continue.

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December 14 is the anniversary
of the
horrendous Newtown shooting, but despite the best
efforts of opportunistic politicians, Americans show little
sympathy for proposals to tighten restrictions on guns. In fact,
firearms don’t even appear on their list of concerns when asked
what worries them by Reason-Rupe
pollsters, although big government and politicians do.
And when asked directly about tightening gun laws, people say that
would have no impact on criminals’ access to guns—a logical
position to take, since nothing that’s been proposed so far would
have prevented Newtown shooter Adam Lanza from doing what he
did.

Americans worry about a lot of things in an age of sluggish
economic “recovery” and government incompetence put on display like
an object lesson in stupid policy, poorly enacted. Asked an
open-ended question about the “biggest problem facing the country
today,” people volunteered jobs/wages, worries about Congress, and
social disunity, and nervousness over big government and the Obama
administration. Two percent each even said that immigration and
Republicans under the bed keep them awake at night. Any
volunteeered concerns about guns in their neighbors’ closets came
in at too low a level to be recorded.

Which is not shocking at a time when homicides committed with
firearms have been on a
long-term downward trend, despite all-too-terrible incidents
like Newtown.

Maybe that’s because people understand that restrictive laws
aren’t the answer to every horrible headline.
Sixty-three percent of poll respondents told us that tighter
gun restrictions aren’t going to stand between criminals and access
to firearms. They certainly wouldn’t have stopped Lanza, who used
guns purchased by his mother, a squeaky clean citizen who bought
her guns legally after
passing background checks. And in case there are any questions
about the past year’s most popular gun to hate, Greg Ridgeway, the
Deputy Director of the National Institute of Justice, says that
bans on “assault weapon” and “high-capacity magazines” are
totally pointless. Add in the fact that 80 percent of criminals
get their guns from “family, friends, a street buy, or an illegal
source” according to the Bureau of Justice
Statistics, and it’s clear that Americans display more wisdom
than the average politican.

It’s not just the pool of folks answering Reason-Rupe’s
questions, either. An
AP poll also conducted as the Newtown anniversary approaches
found declining support for tightened gun restrictions, with half
of respondents flat-out saying “laws limiting gun ownership
infringe on the public’s right to bear arms.”

What might have helped prevent the Newtown shooting? A plurality
(27 percent) favors better “mental
health services,” which has evolved into something of a default
policy go-to in recent months for people looking for solutions.
Mental health services might or might not help, depending on what
people mean by “better” (pre-emptive
detention for folks with the blues?). And while Adam Lanza had
known mental health problems,
nobody saw any warning signs to indicate he was about to go off
the deep end.

Still, people do want to “do something,” which might explain why
Americans tell Reason-Rupe they’re even willing to attempt the
objectively unwise (arm TSA agents so they have something to wave
around while they’re groping you) and the overtly impossible (ban
the 3D printing of guns). Anybody concerned that air travel is too
popular might find giving TSA agents the arms to back their attitudes is an
excellent way to trim the number of trips. And 3D printing of
firearms was
explicitly designed to be beyond the reach of goverment
officials.

The Newtown shooting was a horrible crime. It was also a
thankfully rare incident in an era of declining gun-related
homicides, despite the headlines. One year later, Americans seem to
understand that, and to largely reject authoritarian, knee-jerk
responses.

In the aftermath of the deadly Metro-North
train wreck in New York, there was ample fuel for outrage. The
anger was directed at the driver for apparently taking a turn way
too fast—and at the federal government for not mandating technology
to make that impossible. It may seem criminal that the nation’s
railroads haven’t already adopted the technology, but Steve Chapman
says the case for this option is surprisingly weak.

View this article.

We’re getting a better sense of
the outcomes of massive open online courses (MOOCs) and the
apparent poor completion rates came as a surprise and a downer to
some proponents. From The
New York Times:

A study of a million users of massive open online courses, known
as MOOCs, released this month by the University of Pennsylvania
Graduate School of Education found that, on average, only about
half of those who registered for a course ever viewed a lecture,
and only about 4 percent completed the courses.

Much of the hope — and hype — surrounding MOOCs has focused on
the promise of courses for students in poor countries with little
access to higher education. But a separate survey from the
University of Pennsylvania released last month found that about 80
percent of those taking the university’s MOOCs had already earned a
degree of some kind.

And perhaps the most publicized MOOC experiment, at San Jose
State University, has turned into a flop. It was a partnership
announced with great fanfare at a January news conference featuring
Gov. Jerry Brown of California, a strong backer of online
education. San Jose State and Udacity, a Silicon Valley company
co-founded by a Stanford artificial-intelligence professor,
Sebastian Thrun, would work together to offer three low-cost online
introductory courses for college credit.

Mr. Thrun, who had been unhappy with the low completion rates in
free MOOCs, hoped to increase them by hiring online mentors to help
students stick with the classes. And the university, in the heart
of Silicon Valley, hoped to show its leadership in online learning,
and to reach more students.

But the pilot classes, of about 100 people each, failed. Despite
access to the Udacity mentors, the online students last spring —
including many from a charter high school in Oakland — did worse
than those who took the classes on campus. In the algebra class,
fewer than a quarter of the students — and only 12 percent of the
high school students — earned a passing grade.

MOOCs are going to need a bit of work, but was that really a
surprise? Thrun himself noted in his
blog: “There remains so much more that needs to be improved.
The summer pilot was the second iteration of a new approach. To all
those people who declared our experiment a failure, you have to
understand how innovation works. Few ideas work on the first try.
Iteration is key to innovation. We are seeing significant
improvement in learning outcomes and student engagement. And we
know from our data that there is much more to be done.”

Thrun also noted what supporters or “traditional” college
education proponents tend to downplay: Four-year colleges have
tighter barriers to entry and therefore are going to have better
graduation rates. Having open online courses is going to obviously
lead to people coming and going due to the circumstances of their
own lives. Arguably, this is a feature, not a bug. Community
colleges have less of a barrier to participation than four-year
institutions and have a higher dropout rate. This is a well-known,
completely non-mysterious phenomenon, and it wouldn’t be a problem
were it not for the significant amounts of tax dollars shoveled
their way.

At the New America Foundation, Education Policy Director Kevin
Carey
argues that if you factor in a college’s rejections, the
non-completion numbers are not so different. How much difference is
there (at a statistical level) between signing up for an online
course and never actually starting it versus applying to a college
and being rejected?

Carey looked at one particular MOOC class from the University of
Pennsylvania and calculated that 60 percent of the people who never
completed the course barely ever even started. A quarter of them
never even logged in. They didn’t fail to complete. They failed to
even start.

Then he looked at Penn’s enrollment figures. Only 13 percent of
students who applied to Penn last year were accepted in the first
place. Combined with the number of students who didn’t enroll or
drop out, he found:

[A]bout seven percent of all students who “signed up” for the
University of Pennsylvania by submitting an application end up
graduating four years later, which is almost precisely the same as
the percentage of Active Users who completed a MOOC in the study
held up as evidence that MOOCs don’t work very well.

Before complaining about the completion rate of online courses,
traditional college advocates should keep in mind all those folks
they’ve turned away.