Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

I just finished up a week-long fellowship in Palo Alto (Thank You Stanford!). The university is so beautiful and the weather so ridiculous that you wonder how it can possibly qualify as a school--let alone one of the best schools in the world.

But OK, let’s accept that it is. So one of the things that struck me while I was out there was how cavalier people are with their most valuable asset. Everyone out there rides a bike, which is cool. It is actually a challenge to drive or walk on campus and not collide with a bike. But I was amazed to see that pretty much no one wears a helmet. “Once in a while you’ll see a grad student wearing a helmet,” one professor told me. But the vast majority of the thousands and thousands of bikers whizzing past cars, trucks and other bikes all day long are helmet-less. I know I’m a huge nerd to be thinking about this, but seriously, there is something interesting here.

I ride a bike to work most days. Mostly I love it because it is the fastest way to get around and I can count it as exercise if I get really busy. But I have gotten so used to wearing a helmet that I no longer think it is nerdy. I just don’t think about it at all.

Meanwhile, in Palo Alto, you have about 15,000 people working really hard and paying a lot of money to get a degree. These are people whose main advantage in the world resides in their heads. They are smart and ambitious, it’s fair to say, since Stanford only accepts 8% of the kids who apply.

The university has gone to great lengths to make biking safer (“Meet Sprocket Man, the superman of bicycle safety!” Yes, true story!), but there is a powerful no-helmet culture--even among hardcore geeks (and I saw a lot of them). It’s kind of fascinating, when you think about it. It’s like watching a bunch of aspiring supermodels eat ice cream and fries between posture classes.

Now, some people will argue that helmets don’t make you safer, and there is clearly a dearth of good controlled studies on this (to read more about this, check out this study of what happened after certain countries made helmets mandatory). But it’s also true that the vast majority of people who die in bike accidents are not wearing helmets--and they die from head injuries.

Two months ago, a student named Yichao Wang was hit by a car on Stanford’s campus as he biked home at night. He was thrown 128 feet into an intersection after he failed to yield to a Honda Civic, the police would later conclude. He was not wearing a helmet. He suffered critical brain injuries and spent the next 16 days in a coma. Wang was a Ph.D. student from Singapore who was studying how membranes can absorb pharmaceutical residue during the wastewater treatment process. His family flew in from China and held a vigil at his bedside at Stanford Hospital. He died on Feb. 19.

I just wrote a review of a strange and compelling book that I want to tell you about. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, is by Rebecca Solnit, an author and essayist.

The book chronicles five disasters--the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Halifax explosion of 1917, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, Hurricane Katrina and 9/11. But instead of rehashing the old stories of suffering and redemption, Solnit focuses on the ways many people seemed to thrive in some ways in the midst of all that loss. It is a rarely discussed truth about disasters--they provide a sort of clarity and community that is lacking in normal times. And Solnit makes the point that if we are too become a more resilient society, we need to understand the “joy” of disasters as much as we understand the pain.

I found the book to be thoughtful and smart--right up to the point when Solnit lectures us on the media and the rest of the “elites” who perpetuate disaster myths. I am not one to defend the media coverage of disasters, as is evidenced throughout this blog, but I found her condemnations to be more preachy than productive. We have to understand why reporters mischaracterize disasters if we hope to do better; righteous indignation is satisfying, but it doesn’t get us anywhere at this point.

That said, the book is a provocative exploration of the dark chasm between disasters as we expect them to be and as they are. The review came out today in the Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, and you can download the full review at no charge here here.

I’ve been doing some TV interviews about this week’s TIME cover story on paying kids to learn in school. People keep asking me: “What will happen as a result of these findings?” If we know that paying kids to perform in school can work if it’s done right (and studied carefully), are more schools going to do it?

Well, you’d think so, wouldn’t you? It’s a no brainer--especially since this kind of program costs literally 1/10th of what other reforms with similar results cost. But the truth is, I really don’t know what will happen. We know that DC is continuing its program, as is Dallas, which is fantastic. And New York and Chicago continue to experiment with various kinds of incentives. But we don’t know if this research will translate into policy everywhere. And why don’t we know?

Because not everyone has the courage of Joel Klein, New York City’s Schools Chancellor. Klein let Harvard economist Roland Fryer into his school system three years ago to test what would happen if you paid kids to get good test scores. This is a big deal. It was controversial and no one knew if it would work. Using private funds, Fryer paid more than 8,000 kids some $1.5 million in New York, with Klein’s support.

As it turns out, the New York City model did not work--at least not in any way that’s easy to measure. The kids enjoyed the money, and they weren’t harmed in any way. But their standardized test scores and grades did not go up compared to kids who did not get paid.

But, and this is key: some of the other models (particularly in Dallas) did work. So Klein and the NYC schools took a risk so that the rest of the country could learn. The question is, will they? “You want to look at these things and expand those that are successful and certainly try to figure out why certain things didn’t work,” Klein told me. “What you don’t want to do is to resist all innovation on the theory that some of it might not work.”

In education, big policy decisions almost never get made according to evidence. Then again, there almost never is evidence. Now we have some. I look forward to seeing what happens.

I have a story in today’s TIME Magazine about what happens when you pay kids to work hard in school. I got interested in this because, most of the time, schools operate in the dark--through trial and error, hunches and theories, year after year. The practices and assumptions have never been tested in a rigorous way. So I was intrigued to learn about this latest project of Roland Fryer, a Harvard economist who is dedicated to the radical notion of doing education research using the scientific method.

Fryer thought it would be interesting to see if paying kids cash money could help them perform better in school. So he and his team launched a massive, randomized experiment in Chicago, Dallas, DC and NYC to test the idea. They paid out $6.3 million in largely private money to 18,000 kids. They also tracked control groups whom they did not pay. The program generated a massive amount of buzz, but until now, no one knew if it was working.

Fryer agreed to share his results with me for the story. (His full academic paper, released just after the story came out, is here. Warning: PDF.) Almost as fascinating as the findings is his story of launching the experiment itself. You’d think he was trying to pay kids to lie, cheat and steal--not to learn. A wild tale.

But the best part was hanging out in the classrooms, talking to the kids about the experiment from the inside. They totally get it. They know that many of their teachers don’t approve of them being paid for coming to class; they know that their parents are skeptical; they know it won’t help some kids. And they totally dig it. They. Love. It. They want to earn more. The real problem is, as the story explains, they don’t always know how. 

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An op-ed in today’s New York Times offers a nice reminder that girls are not in fact becoming more violent. They are becoming less so, despite the occasional horror story.

“We have examined every major index of crime on which the authorities rely. None show a recent increase in girls’ violence; in fact, every reliable measure shows that violence by girls has been plummeting for years. Major offenses like murder and robbery by girls are at their lowest levels in four decades. Fights, weapons possession, assaults and violent injuries by and toward girls have been plunging for at least a decade.”

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports, based on reports from more than 10,000 police agencies, is the most reliable source on arrests by sex and age. From 1995 to 2008, according to the F.B.I., girls’ arrest rates for violent offenses fell by 32 percent, including declines of 27 percent for aggravated assault, 43 percent for robbery and 63 percent for murder. Rates of murder by girls are at their lowest levels in at least 40 years.”