As of this writing, only one district is offering in-person only education; all the other districts are offering modified/hybrid models. Of course, these plans may be altered as COVID-19 surges continue; this feature will be regularly updated as districts change their respective approaches to dealing with this pandemic.
National Security Reports – July 2020 Update
Russia (Intelligence and Security Committee of [UK] Parliament); The EU and Russia: Locked into confrontation (EU Think Tank); The American Way of Irregular Warfare (RAND); and Hoping for the Best, Preparing for the Worst: American Nuclear Deterrence on the Korean Peninsula (Asia Society, video).
Intelligence Organizations: CENTER FOR 21ST CENTURY SECURITY AND INTELLIGENCE (Brookings); Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA); AFCEA Intelligence; Intelligence and National Security Alliance; and RAND Intelligence Policy Center.
Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2020; Russian Armed Forces: Military Modernization and Reforms; Emerging Military Technologies: Background and Issues for Congress; Iraq: Issues in the 116th Congress; Cuba: U.S. Policy Overview; North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons and Missile Programs; Tracking China’s Global Economic Activities: Data Challenges and Issues for Congress; Police Use of Force: Overview and Considerations for Congress; Comparing Police Reform Bills: the Justice in Policing Act and the JUSTICE Act; and Latin America and the Caribbean: U.S. Policy Overview (all CRS).
Historic Accounts of Epidemics
This collection from Harvard – Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics – contains hundreds of items spanning the 15th to the early 20th centuries. You will find here works dealing with yellow fever, small pox, plague, and other diseases that have beset mankind.
Heads of Big Tech Firms Testify Before Congress
The five-hour hearing, along with a transcript, can be found here courtesy of C-SPAN.
What Colleges Have COVID-19 On Their Campuses?
This interactive New York Times feature, while not comprehensive, does list the hundreds of colleges that have reported coronavirus on campus; many institutions did not report citing privacy concerns.
How Are Other Countries Reopening Their Schools?
This backgrounder from the Council on Foreign Affairs offers some insights; Science also provides some solid information supplemented by additional links. Other valuable sites include: Education Week presents some cases studies; utilization of safety measures in a handful of cities as presented by Education Source highlight what procedures should be employed; Brookings investigates reopenings in Denmark and Finland; Weill Cornell offers What Other Nations Can Tell the U.S. About How To Safely Reopen Schools During the COVID-19 Pandemic; and The Conversation publishes How other countries reopened schools during the pandemic – and what the US can learn from them.
New CDC Guidelines for Reopening Schools
You can find the revised guidance here.
University of Michigan Press Books Freely Available Online
The University of Michigan not only fields winning football teams, but it also hosts a powerhouse university press. This site has at last count 168 tomes on a wide variety of topics; most of these titles are of recent vintage. If you come here, you will have access to some of the press’ earlier volumes, more than 1400.
Following COVID-19 Vaccine Development
We are starting to read about a ever-increasing number of COVID-19 vaccines, drugs, therapies; trying to keep all the news about them to manageable level is proving problematic at best. However, The New York Times has produced a daily-updated feature called Coronavirus Drug and Treatment Tracker. It lists the various drugs and treatments, 19 of the most widely-mentioned products, and gives us a range of observations from “widely used” to “pseudoscience or fraud”. There are embedded references within each entry for additional information.
Here Is the Article on the Oxford COVID-19 Vaccine Trial Results
Again, tough reading for a layperson, but you can tease out the important information.
Greek Stone Inscriptions
Those who know me know of my fascination with ancient Greek and Latin history/language/culture; I spent years studying Latin and a lesser amount of time with Greek. Here is a tool consisting of primary source documentation revolving around ancient Athens and its environs – Attica. Attic Inscriptions Online presents English translations and annotations of the hundreds of inscriptions that have been found, cataloged and produced in numerous scholarly volumes. There are multiple access points to these writings, along with explanatory papers. It is a remarkable achievement.
Here Is the Scientific Report on Moderna’s COVID-19 Vaccine
It is heavy going, but this is the original document that has given hope to many.
Reopening K-12: The Recommendations from the National Academies
The National Academic Press has just released Reopening K-12 Schools During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Prioritizing Health, Equity, and Communities.
The first recommendation is:
“Districts should weigh the relative health risks of reopening against the educational risks of providing no in-person instruction in Fall 2020. Given the importance of in-person interaction for learning and development, districts should prioritize reopening with an emphasis on providing fulltime, in-person instruction in grades K-5 and for students with special needs who would be best served by in-person instruction.”(Summary, 3)
Another recommendation is that:
“Based on what is currently known about the spread of COVID-19, districts should prioritize mask wearing, providing healthy hand hygiene solutions, physical distancing, and limiting large gatherings. Cleaning, ventilation, and air filtration are also important, but attending to those strategies alone will not sufficiently lower the risk of transmission. Creating small cohorts of
students is another promising strategy. (Summary, 5)
2020 Audubon Photography Winners
For an escape into color and glory, please go to this site where you will find stirring photos of birds in their various guises and habitats. Each entry has a “story behind” the work as well as a “bird lore” section. A wonderful respite from the daily news.
CDC Guidelines for Re-opening K-12 Schools
For those who may have missed this guidance that is now the subject of intense debate, here it is. Here is a webinar from the Brookings Institution that addresses some of the concerns; an informative and relevant study can be found in the June 2019 issue of Preventive Medicine Reports. An Ethics Framework for the COVID-19 Reopening Process from Johns Hopkins is worth a perusal; it has also issued the COVID-19 School Reopening Response Checklist, and JHU Tracking State and National School Reopening Plans.
New Jersey’s plan is The Road Back: Restart and Recovery Plan for Education.
National Security Reports – June 2020 Update
2019 Report to the President (Information Security Oversight Office); Homeland Security and Public Safety ( a separate section of the RAND Corporation replete with current, apposite reports); The Changing Landscape of Domestic Terrorism, With Bruce Hoffman (podcast, CFR); Formal methods as a path toward better cybersecurity (Brookings); 17 New US School Districts and Colleges Compromised by Ransomware, a Total of 94 in the Past 15 Months (Armor); Artificial intelligence: From ethics to policy (EU Parliament Library); Hong Kong: National Security Legislation (UK House of Lords Library); Defense Space Strategy Summary (DoD); Journal of Advanced Military Studies (Marine Corps University); and Fire and EMS Civil Unrest Response: Best Practices (FEMA).
Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Design for Great Power Competition; China Moves to Impose National Security Law on Hong Kong; Global Economic Effects of COVID-19; Congressional Primer on Responding to and Recovering from Major Disasters and Emergencies; Emergency Authorities Under the National Emergencies Act, Stafford Act, and Public Health Service Act; Kuwait: Governance, Security, and U.S. Policy; National Security Implications of Fifth Generation (5G) Mobile Technologies; Army Security Force Assistance Brigades (SFABs); and China’s Engagement with Latin America and the Caribbean (all CRS).
Open Access Books – UCL (University College of London)
One of the oldest and most prestigious universities in Great Britain (I know them through their now-named Centre for Water and Development), UCL Press has published dozens of academic monographs on a wide variety of topics from the papers of Jeremy Bentham (on whose principles UCL was founded) to works dealing with social media in various countries. It is worth a look.
UN Publications on COVID-19
From reports to working papers, here is a listing of relevant writings.
What Will Work Look Like in a COVID-19 Environment?
This insightful report from McKinsey poses many questions that need to be answered about the nature of work and the need to acknowledge a new reality in the workplace.
Guided Reading Lists
JSTOR has started publishing curated lists of accessible writings pertaining to current topics of interest. From African American studies to disability literature to pandemic articles, these timely and scholarly collections provide insightful explorations of relevant literature. Well worth a perusal.
