Amanda Ripley : Blog

Whaddya Know? Americans Not Terrorized After All

posted by Amanda Ripley in News

January 11, 2010 at 5:04 PM | 0 comments

For the past couple weeks, I’ve been wondering: Is this all just manufactured hysteria? Are Americans as freaked out by the failed bomb plot as much as the people on their TV screens?

CNN has a new poll out today that suggests regular people are not the ones with the problem (full results in a PDF here). Americans, it seems, don’t scare nearly as easily as their leaders and their reporters.

* Percent of Americans who say they are very or somewhat worried that they or someone in their family will become a victim of a terrorist attack:

--Three months ago: 36%
--Now: 34%

*Percent of Americans who say terrorists will always find a way to launch major attacks, no matter what the US government does:

--60% (same as during Bush administration)

*Percent of Americans who approve of how Obama responded to the incident:

--57%

So it seems Dick Cheney is wrong again:

“President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war.”

And so is Maureen Dowd.

“[Obama is] so sure of himself and his actions that he fails to see that he misses the moment to be president — to be the strong father who protects the home from invaders, who reassures and instructs the public at traumatic moments.”

Thanks, Big Daddy. But you can put away the baseball bat. We’re just fine here.

The Delusion of the Moment: Passenger Screening Technology

posted by Amanda Ripley in Homeland Security

January 7, 2010 at 3:23 PM | 3 comments

OK, as I sit here waiting for Pres. Obama to speak (again!) on the attempted airplane bombing, I find myself perplexed by a very basic question. Perhaps I am missing something. But the indictment of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab alleges that he carried a device containing PETN and TATP, among other ingredients, onto Flight 253 in Amsterdam.

The indictment doesn’t say how much explosive material he was allegedly carrying, but news reports consistently cite 80 grams of PETN--which is just under 3 oz. (Not clear how much TATP he is charged with having carried.) In any case, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has ordered 150 backscatter scanners, full-body imaging machines, to help prevent another similar attempt. Over the next 12 months, TSA plans to order another 300 such scanners.

But wait... All passengers are allowed to bring 3 oz bottles of liquid onto the plane in their carry-on baggage--where it would not be noticed by a whole-body scanner, which scans the body, not the bag. And it would not be noticed at all period because it is legal.

Now, granted, it might be easier to have a bomb already assembled (more or less) and attached to one’s person. But it’s hard to know without knowing more about this device. It’s possible that a terrorist could just put these explosives in their plastic baggy and breeze through the scanner. And, in any case, these much-discussed whole-body scanners may not even notice this kind of device if it is in one’s underwear and not in the carry-on bag.

I dwell on these tedious details to make a point: This whole shared delusion about the need for more and more invasive screening is very curious. Bruce Schneier described the strangeness today in his CNN essay, “Stop the Panic on Air Security”:

We’re doing these things even though security worked. The security checkpoints, even at their pre-9/11 levels, forced whoever made the bomb to construct a much worse bomb than he would have otherwise. Instead of using a timer or a plunger or another reliable detonation mechanism, as would any commercial user of PETN, he had to resort to an ad hoc homebrew—and a much more inefficient one, involving a syringe, and 20 minutes in the lavatory, and we don’t know exactly what else—that didn’t explode....

We’re doing these things even though airplane terrorism is incredibly rare, the risk is no greater today than it was in previous decades, the taxi to the airport is still more dangerous than the flight, and ten times as many Americans are killed by lightning as by terrorists.

Now back to waiting for Obama and more rhetoric about zero tolerance for something 100% guaranteed to happen again.... Is it too early for a drink?

What Does a Great Teacher Look Like? Watch and Learn

posted by Amanda Ripley in News

January 6, 2010 at 6:00 AM | 18 comments

OK, I make my living off words. But there are some things that words can never really capture. To accompany my story on What Makes a Great Teacher, the Atlantic has posted three videos of highly effective teachers, courtesy of Teach For America. These are teachers who are moving low-income American kids forward at breakneck speeds--something many of us have quietly concluded can’t be done.

Each of the three teachers has a different style, but they all are good at the six things that Teach for America has found make all the difference in the classroom. The story explains what those six things are. But the video brings it all to life.

My personal favorite is Justin Meli of Texas, above. I love this video, man. I mean, I made my husband watch this video late on a Friday night when I had no business making him think about education reform. But I just couldn’t help it. Check it out.

What Makes a Teacher Great?

posted by Amanda Ripley in News

January 5, 2010 at 11:19 AM | 8 comments

I occasionally take a break from writing about risk and human behavior to write about education--a kind of slow-motion disaster. This fall, I spent months obsessing over an old puzzle, using very cool new tools. The question was, What makes some teachers truly exceptional--and others, well, unremarkable? The story, which appears in this month’s Atlantic magazine, is my attempt to solve the mystery.

I had a lot of help. I got access to a treasure trove of data from Teach for America, which has been studying this mystery longer and more rigorously than any other outfit. Then I spent days sitting in classrooms in DC public schools--classrooms that ran like powerhouses and classrooms where time just oozed by, with nothing much happening. I am grateful to all the teachers, principals and students who so graciously allowed me to observe and who talked to me about the realities of their classrooms.

Eventually, I learned that the way to spot a great teacher is not to watch the teacher. The secret is to watch the kids. In great classrooms, the students were in a hurry, and not just some of them. Their eyes tracked the teacher as he or she moved across the room. When the kids got an answer right, they whisper-shouted, “Yes!” and pumped their fists.

In other classrooms in the very same school, I saw the very same students stare off into space. They took extraordinary amounts of time to staple their homework or sharpen their pencils. They danced silent steps in their sneakers on the linoleum floors under their desks. They smiled at me and waved. When I sneezed, they offered me tissues. They were the same kids, but the adult standing in front of them was not.

This all matters because, as Kevin Huffman put it in a Washington Post column the other day:

[T]oo often when we look at the sorry state of public education (on the most recent international benchmark exam conducted by the Program for International Student Assessment, U.S. high schoolers ranked 25th out of 30 industrialized nations in math and 24th in science) we believe the results are driven by factors beyond our control, such as funding and families. This leads to lethargy, which leads to inaction, which perpetuates a broken system that contributes to our economic decline.

By now, the research is clear: the one factor that matters most in a child’s education is the child’s teacher. As kids, we knew this. There were great teachers--the kind who made you believe anything was possible. But we always chalked it up to some kind of magical power that few teachers could be expected to possess. Turns out we were wrong.

Finally, we can identify extraordinary teachers—with data, not hearsay—and investigate what they are doing differently. We can even make more of them. The question is, Will we?

5 Myths of Homeland Security

posted by Amanda Ripley in Homeland Security

January 4, 2010 at 5:32 PM | 0 comments

In the Washington Post, Stephen Flynn has a nice round-up of the nation’s Top 5 shared delusions on homeland security. Flynn has spent the past several years tirelessly pointing out the great irony of 9/11: The only people who prevented a terrorist attack that day were regular people. The passengers on Flight 93 likely saved the lives of some of the very same DC politicians and pundits who have, for the past 8 years, utterly ignored the contribution that regular people make to homeland security.

Meanwhile, the Best Comment Award for Flynn’s piece goes to ExportLaw:

“My ancestors who fought the Brits at Kings Mountain and Cowpens didn’t fight for a government capable of protecting them - that’s what the British Crown offered. They fought for a government that was respectful of them and their rights such that they could and would protect their government.”

Nice.

Time to Set Aside Childish Things

posted by Amanda Ripley in Homeland Security

January 4, 2010 at 11:49 AM | 5 comments

In case you missed it, David Brooks had a cogent critique of the homeland-security hysteria in the NY Times the other day:

In a mature nation, President Obama could go on TV and say, “Listen, we’re doing the best we can, but some terrorists are bound to get through.” But this is apparently a country that must be spoken to in childish ways.

It does seem that we have become a nation of pansies when it comes to terrorism. It’s curious because we don’t expect the same paternalism when it comes to protecting us from other threats--guns, say, or automobiles. But when it comes to airplanes and violent Islamic extremists, there is apparently no limit to the indignities we will suffer.

Case in point: Fred Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard, on FOX on Dec. 29, 2009:

“I agree with Senator Dianne Feinstein [who] said the other day that, look, if you’re going to err in the war on terrorism, err on the side of overreacting rather than under-reacting. The Bush administration’s policy was to overreact. It seems like the Obama policy is to under-react.”

It takes my breath away, it really does.

Terrorists depend upon overreaction to be effective. They can never match their first-world enemies in weaponry or budget, so they target small, psychologically resonant targets to achieve outsized impact. They did it again on Christmas day over Detroit. What Mr. Barnes seems to have forgotten is that they did not succeed. Or did they?

Double Standard? Bush v. Obama

posted by Amanda Ripley in Homeland Security

December 30, 2009 at 5:19 PM | 4 comments

Josh Gerstein at Politico has a nice side-by-side comparing Bush’s reaction to the shoe bomber in 2001 to the Obama’s reaction this week. It’s an interesting notion, since both Richard Reid and Abdulmutallab, the suspect in this latest case, were said to have used PETN, a powerful explosive (more on PETN below). So what happened after that Dec. 22, 2001 bombing attempt (foiled by flight attendants and passengers) on an American Airlines flight from Paris?

[I]t was six days before President George W. Bush, then on vacation, made any public remarks about the so-called shoe bomber, Richard Reid, and there were virtually no complaints from the press or any opposition Democrats that his response was sluggish or inadequate…

...Bush was at Camp David when Reid used similar plastic explosives to try to blow up his Paris-to-Miami flight, which diverted to Boston after the incident.

Like the Obama White House, the Bush White House told reporters the president had been briefed on the incident and was following it closely....Bush did not address reporters about the Reid episode until December 28, after he had traveled from Camp David to his ranch in Texas.

To be fair, that was just three months after 9/11. Americans had not yet forgotten that terrorists were interested in attacking the country, and the bar for major news (and outrage) on the subject was lower. But still, an intriguing comparison.

Oh, yeah: To see what PETN looks like when it blows up, check out this CNN video. Pretty much comports with what the passengers I interviewed from NWA Flight 253 said he saw on the suspect’s lap… A loud pop, smoke--and, a minute or so later, flames rising above the suspect’s head.