Danny Crichton

This article was originally written for the Stanford Review's Fiat Lux blog

The faculty committee charged with considering ROTC's return to Stanford has recently requested comments from the university community. The response has been a little underwhelming: less than 20 emails and 6 phone calls according to an article by the Stanford Daily. The contact information has been published fairly widely, both in the Daily and in the Stanford Review, as well as here on Fiat Lux.

Interestingly, it was noted that the majority of responses have been positive toward ROTC, a possible surprise given the recent spate of negative editorials condemning its return. It seems that students are quite apathetic about the issue - from both sides of the debate.

This low turnout is disconcerting. History professor David Kennedy kicked off this introspection on ROTC with a speech to the faculty senate in which he noted strong concern over the growing divide between civilians and the military. Since our military is accountable to civilian political leaders, a division can increase tensions and unrest regarding military actions. One only has to look to last year's debate over Afghanistan policy to see the stirrings of this divide in action.

That cultural divide may or may not be wide throughout most of America, but it most definitely is at elite schools. There are just very few people at Stanford who appear interested in joining the military, as the numbers above suggest. The absence of ROTC is partly to blame, as there may be students who are unaware of the benefits of military service. But I am willing to venture here and say that those students are relatively few and countable on a hand or two.

The issue, in my analysis, is already one of culture. The qualities that Stanford inculcates

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my experience in learning computer science over the last decade. In that same vein, this article was just published by the Chronicle of Higher Education by Kevin Carey, who discusses what a small background in CS did for him.

Discussing his work in analyzing school finance data, he writes:

So I sat down, mostly as an intellectual exercise, to rewrite the formula from first principles. The result yielded a satisfyingly direct SAS procedure. Almost as an afterthought, I showed it to a friend who worked for the state legislature. To my surprise, she reacted with enthusiasm, and a few months later the new financing formula became law. Good public policy and good code, it turned out, go hand in hand. The law has reaccumulated some extraneous procedures in the decade since. But my basic ideas are still there, directing billions of dollars to schoolchildren using language recorded in, as state laws are officially named, the Indiana Code.

This is why I believe that some level of logic and programming is a prerequisite for far more careers than is generally acknowledged. There's a reason that Columbia recently started a joint-degree program in journalism and computer science. The ability to write your own codes allows you to create your own tools - and that is truly powerful.

Republicans have taken the House in a land-slide victory, swinging the most seats in decades and giving them a fairly healthy majority. They were less successful in the Senate, picking up seven seats (with Alaska) but made up for it with a strong showing in many gubernatorial races.

Those are the basic facts, but it the analysis of the results is a little less clear. Below, I join on the commentating bandwagon by providing my reflections on these results.

Reflection #1: Redistricting Doesn't Matter

One of the common themes of analysis that I have seen about these elections was redistricting - the decennial redrawing of congressional maps based on the U.S. census. Common wisdom has it that Republicans are in a position to lock in their majority for a decade or more by controlling more governor's mansions than Democrats. I believe that such wisdom is incorrect.

Redistricting does not happen in a vacuum. Even with minorities, Democrats do not lack a voice in the process, and they are going to scream if Republicans begin to systematically gerrymander on a wide scale. Given the current cynicism of the American voter, there is only so far that a partisan legislature can push the map before the controversy alone makes the advantage of the map moot. Moreover, both sides can even join forces to gerrymander together (hence why California has gone through elections without a single seat changing hands).

Does redistricting matter a little? Sure, there are always close seats that can take advantage of a few more neighborhoods to make the numbers safer. And given how close many districts are, redistricting may make the cost of running higher. But that hardly cements a single party for a decade.

Post-Analysis #2: Talent Matters

So what does matter? Talent. The

How will our generation adapt to the decline of America? That will be the question of our country, and indeed, of the world as we progress through the twenty-first century. On both an economic and political level, America has lost the ability to think with vision and with force. Perhaps it was hubris, but this country used to be the destination for success. Today, that success is altogether fleeting.

In economic terms, we will grapple with higher unemployment, greater income inequality, more contingent labor, lower living standards and ultimately less fulfilling careers. The source of these problems are numerous. The lack of quality public education for a large part of the population is my top culprit. Our economy has become more technical over time, yet we cannot increase the number of scientists and engineers coming from our schools (or for that matter, change a culture that ridicules the math and science abilities of its youth). Other sources of problems include a declining civil infrastructure and an aging population.

If our problems were exclusively economic, America's future would be secure. This is the country that leads in economic reinvention and entrepreneurship. No, the other problem is one of politics.

The level of dysfunction in American government is simply breathtaking, and it will only get worse with new trends like the rise of corporate campaign contributions in the wake of the Citizens United case. Public trust has reached such an abysmal low that no politician - I repeat, no politician - can possibly govern effectively in the face of the factional politics that divide us. What politician can ask for the sacrifices needed if no one believes them?

What will America look like in two decades? Take a look at today's New York Times, where Martin Fackler discusses the two decade

In an article in the NYTimes, Nicholas D. Kristof discusses the changing experience of Oman over the past few decades. Once fundamentalist, the country has modernized at a breathtaking pace, and today is one of the most open and tolerant societies in the Arab world. Two years ago, I wrote a paper on this very topic for a class at Stanford (the paper also happens to be the first research paper I wrote in college, so apologies in advanced for some less-than-lucid writing).

The theory of deliberative democracy remains very controversial, since the Western tradition generally focuses on rule of law as a critical element of any democratic society. While it remains to be seen if Oman will continue to modernize under future sultans, its gains today should be lauded and encouraged throughout the Middle East.

Polarization has reached a feverish pitch in American politics. It seems that every fringe group knows how to massage its media message to great effect - just witness the firestorm over the recent Burn a Quran Day idea initiated by Florida pastor Terry Jones. The media, once controlled by the hands of elite gatekeepers, has now been democratized, and every person has a voice.

At the same time, there are growing concerns that students lack the ability to critically analyze and judge sources for quality and bias - in short, to evaluate the information they read (for some discussion, check out the Project Information Literacy group at the University of Washington on key skills for the digital age). This raises enormous problems when coupled with the lack of editorial judgment displayed by the new media. As I have written about before, people can find websites to match any political point of view, making it difficult to find common ground.

It is here that I feel that high school newspapers offer tremendous positive skills, and why I believe that increasing funding for them is crucial if America is not only to weather these massive changes in the media landscape but also to increase the written communication skills of our workforce.

My story may shed some light on this value. I applied to join the newspaper staff in eighth grade, under recommendation from my English teacher. The decision was not easy, since my high school uses block scheduling and newspaper was considered a full-block class (which means that a quarter of my schedule would be used up). I chose newspaper over orchestra because it sounded interesting, and I liked to write.

I would stay with newspaper throughout high school (with a one year sabbatical of sorts my junior year). I rose from staff

This has certainly been China Week for both the domestic and international press. On the domestic side, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was grilled by the House Ways and Means Committee about China's currency exchange rates, in which the yuan is essentially pegged to the U.S. dollar. That panel is voting on legislation that would punish Chinese goods with tariffs ("countervailing duties", as described in this AFP article). Such a tariff would almost certainly result in some sort of trade war, the severity of which would likely be determined by the capability of Obama's diplomats and trade representatives. While the bill may not come to a vote given Congress' schedule before the midterms, few politicians will waste the opportunity to get behind such a populist initiative.

China was even more in the news on the international front. The week was filled with stories surrounding the Japanese arrest and continued detention of Zhan Qixiong, the captain of a Chinese fishing boat which collided with a Japanese patrol vessel near the disputed Senkaku Islands (Diaoyu Islands in Chinese). The immediate crisis abated on Friday when prosecutors released the captain, indicating that Japan was ready to concede on the basic issue (while also vowing not to apologize to the Chinese).

More ominously, China threatened (then apparently backtracked) to block the export of rare earth metal to Japan. Despite their name, these metals are exceedingly common on Earth, but few places produce them in any quantity besides China. These metals are crucial for modern technology, ranging from cell phones to the Toyota Prius, and ultimately Japan is dependent on these Chinese-sourced metals for much of its economy.

The other story of note is that the People's Liberation Army and the U.S. Army are prepared to reopen bilateral

This series of blog posts explores the experiences in my background that led to an admission to Stanford. Inspired by Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, I began thinking about how my own circumstances and chance encounters shaped who I am today. This is the first of five parts.

Developing competence in computer programming and software design is a process of exploration as well as trial and error. It takes time to learn common programming idioms (for example, to test whether an integer is even - take the variable mod 2 and check if it equals 0).

In one chapter of Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell discusses the background of the current computer titans such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Both were placed in environments that allowed them to explore technology at an early age (high school and college). For instance, Steve Jobs lived near Bill Packard of Hewlett-Packard fame, and would ask him questions about his work. Gladwell argues that their future success is a function of this early exploration along with serendipity that the computer revolution was timed just right for their ages.

On my first reading, I thought about how nice it would be to have such opportunities, forgetting the many opportunities that I had to develop my computer abilities along the way.

The first computer I actively explored was in kindergarten - a Macintosh Performa. The computer was used mostly for game playing (X-Wing, Titanic), but it began to solidify my understanding of basic user interface components of the computer like folders and hard disks (back then, I only had 300MB, and I had to constantly switch which programs were installed in order to play what I wanted).

However, the first critical milestone took place in second through fourth grade when I began to use my elementary school's