FOR STEM for parents reacting to the name of the series or those

familiar with its subject matter.

Assassin’s Creed Has a New Mission: Working in the
Classroom In this version of the game, though, players guide their
chosen avatar. It can be the sheriff-like character Bayek, the
original protagonist of Assassin’s Creed Origins, or one of 25
possible others including Bayek’s wife, Aya; their son,
Khemu; Cleopatra; Julius Caesar; Roman legionnaires; and
even ordinary Egyptian, Greek and Roman adults and
children.

A view of ancient Alexandria as seen in the Discovery Tour

mode of Assassin’s Creed:

By Justin Porter

History has long served as a backdrop in the Assassin’s

Creed video games, whose story lines center on pivotal
times in history — from the Third Crusade to Imperial China
and beyond. But when players of this Ubisoft series rush
from mission to mission, as agents of events both great and
small, their purpose is rarely to take the time to appreciate
history itself. Duty always calls.
Until now.
Following last year’s release of Assassin’s Creed Origins, set
in Ptolemaic Egypt, the team behind it decided that allowing
players to learn more about life in ancient Egypt might make
for a pretty cool teaching aid. So they traded in the quests
and violence for antiquities and history lessons, and created
a mode with a series of Discovery Tours. By putting history
front and center, the game may give teachers a new way to
connect with some students.
Edyeli Marku, a middle-school teacher at Intermediate
School 230 in Jackson Heights, Queens, said there could be
“tremendous value in it,” for both students and educators
— particularly for students who might test as primarily
visual, auditory or kinesthetic learners. For those students,
she added, “exposing them to a different learning vehicle is
always beneficial.”
Players guide their chosen avatar to places like the great
wall that enclosed ancient Alexandria.CreditUbisoft
A voice-over details the objects on view, including artifacts
like pottery, scrolls, farm tools and baking ovens. The 75
available tours cover daily life, monuments, agriculture, the
lives of Greek and Roman settlers, and other topics. At some
locations, non-playable characters are seen performing
tasks like baking bread, tilling a field or inscribing scrolls.
Here players can elect to have their chosen avatar perform
the activity. Maybe Cleopatra and Caesar never knelt before
a bread oven to remove a hot loaf from the coals, but here
players can have that experience.
The Library of Alexandria is another stop. In recreating it,
Mr. Durand said, his team looked to the remnants of the
Library of Celsus, which is still standing amid the ancient
ruins in Ephesus, Turkey.
Of course, a lot of history’s secrets are lost to time. That’s
where a Behind the Scenes feature comes in. The makers
use it to explain how and why they chose to represent
certain objects. Mr. Durand said he hoped this would also
prompt students to think critically about how games are
created and the way stories are told.

Ms. Marku said she understands the importance of games

to her students and has even used Oregon Trail as a
teaching tool.

“They go on the phone like it’s nothing,” she said. “They go

on an iPad, and they can spend hours in front of it.”

Maxime Durand, who has been the lead researcher and

history consultant for the Assassin’s Creed franchise since
2010, and Jean Guesdon, the creative director on Origins,
said they had often heard from educators who saw the
potential of using the games. Some had even used small
portions in their lessons. But so much of Assassin’s Creed, A map in the game shows how the city of Alexandria was
given its violence and fictional narrative, is problematic in a built on a Hippodamian grid plan, with wide straight roads
school setting. and canals running beneath them.

Even Ms. Marku said the violent content could hamper the Marc-André Éthier, a professor at the University of
franchise’s acceptance for education purposes, especially Montreal who studies materials that are being used to
teach high school history, noticed that traditional tools like
textbooks were being used less. When he heard about the
Discovery Tour, he said, “I was intrigued, and I prepared a
study to test if Discovery Tour could teach someone as
much as a lecture.”
Mr. Éthier said he approached Ubisoft with an idea for what
eventually became a study of some 330 students, 12 to 16
years old, in nine schools in Montreal. Students were
divided into groups of 40. First, all the students were given a
test. Then half of each group took the Library of Alexandria
tour, and the other had a lesson with a teacher. Afterward,
they took a second quiz. Mr. Éthier said the students
working with a teacher did better on the test than the ones
who had only taken the tour. Though the test scores of the
students who took the tour still showed improvement, of 22
percent to 44 percent.
To make the games accessible to broader range of schools,
which typically have computers or tablets rather than game
consoles, Ubisoft released a stand-alone version of the
Discovery Tour for computers, even those with aging
hardware.
Khafre’s Funerary Complex as seen in the Discovery Tour
mode of Assassin’s Creed: Origins.CreditUbisoft
Evelyne Ferron, who specializes in Egyptian history and
worked on the project, said she wanted players to “realize
the colors of Egypt.” Today the Sphinx, the pyramids and
temples are bleached white, but they were once vividly
colored. Players can see the gold and blue of the sphinx, and
the rich browns, blues and greens of the hieroglyphics and
murals on the temple walls.
Still, she said, full realism is not always possible and is
sometimes less important when entertainment is the goal.
“When you create a game,” Ms. Ferron said, “you need to
create immersion.” A historian taking a strict view of history
would not sacrifice realism, she said. “Sometimes you have
to trick history.”
This psychological evidence is backed up by neuroscientific
findings. Neuroimaging studies show that brain systems
necessary for cold cognition are mature by mid-
adolescence, whereas those that govern self-regulation are
not fully developed until a person’s early 20s.
If the voting age were lowered, would that necessitate
changing other laws to bring them into alignment? Of
course not. We use a wide variety of chronological ages to
draw lines between minors and adults when it comes to
smoking, driving, viewing violent or sexually explicit movies,
being eligible for the death penalty and drinking alcohol.
Although the specific ages used for these purposes often
lack a good rationale, there is no reason lowering the voting
age would require lowering, say, the drinking age, any more
than allowing people to drive at 16 should permit them to
drink or smoke at that age as well.
In addition to the scientific case for lowering the voting age,
there is also a civic argument. Consider the dozen or so
countries like Argentina, Austria, Brazil and Nicaragua that
allow people to vote at 16 in national, state or local
elections. In such countries, voter turnout among 16- and
17-year-olds is significantly higher than it is among older
young adults. This is true in parts of the United States as
well. In Takoma Park, Md., a city that permits 16- and 17-
year-olds to vote in local elections, that age group is twice
as likely to vote as are 18-year-olds.
Why is higher turnout among 16- and 17-year-olds so
important? Because there is evidence that people who
don’t vote the first time they are eligible are less likely to
vote regularly in the future. Considering that people
between 18 and 24 have the lowest voter turnout of any
age group in the United States (a country that has one of
the lowest rates of voter turnout in the developed world),
allowing people to begin voting at an age at which they are
more likely to vote might increase future turnout at all ages.
The last time the United States lowered the federal voting
age was in 1971, when it went from 21 to 18. In that
instance, the main motivating force was outrage over the
fact that 18-year-olds could be sent to fight in Vietnam but
could not vote.
The proposal to lower the voting age to 16 is motivated by
today’s outrage that those most vulnerable to school
shootings have no say in how such atrocities are best
prevented. Let’s give those young people more than just
their voices to make a change.
FOR STEM
With a Simple DNA Test, Family Histories Are Rewritten
Widespread DNA testing has shed light on the ancestry of
millions of Americans. But these services have limitations,
and the results can be uncertain.
Bob Hutchinson at his home in Pacifica, Calif. He
learned of his mixed-race ancestry through a genetic
test, and discovered relatives.
By Gina Kolata
Aug. 28, 2017
Bob Hutchinson’s mother told him and his siblings almost
nothing about her family, no matter how often they asked.
“She was good at brushing people off,” said Mr. Hutchinson,
60.
Growing up, there were no photos of his mother as a child
in the home, or of her own parents. She said that she was
an only child, that her parents were dead. Her heritage, she
claimed, was Italian and Swedish.
Mr. Hutchinson suspected there was more to the story.
Then his sister-in-law, digging into the family past, found his
mother’s childhood home listed in a 1930 census. The family
had lived in Montclair, N.J., and was described as “Negro.”
Mr. Hutchinson, who runs an advertising agency and lives in
Pacifica, Calif., had never been told he had African-American
heritage.
These days, family secrets like this one are becoming harder
to keep. A growing number of companies now offer DNA
tests that promise to pinpoint a customer’s heritage and,
with permission, to identify genetic relatives. The firms
include generalists like 23andMe and Ancestry.com and
specialty companies like African Ancestry.
Millions of people have signed up for the tests, sending
saliva samples to laboratories and paying $100 to $350 or
more for an analysis. The customers are eager to know
where they came from, to find a familial context that may
be lacking. The answers hidden in DNA can be revelatory,
shedding light on hidden events occurring decades earlier
and forever changing the family narrative.
But a new analysis of DNA test kits by The Wirecutter, a
review site owned by The New York Times, finds that the
services also have limitations that the providers do not
always fully acknowledge.
Mr. Hutchinson decided to have his DNA analyzed by
23andMe. The report revealed he is one-eighth sub-Saharan
African, which means that his mother was of mixed race.
There was some Italian and Swedish heritage. Mr.
Hutchinson also learned that his mother was not an only
child, but had a brother. A genealogist helped him track
down some first cousins in Alabama, who said they had
been told never to contact Mr. Hutchinson or his family.
The cousins were delighted to hear from him. He plans to
visit next year at Mardi Gras. Mr. Hutchinson’s results were
enlightening, but in other contexts ethnicity has posed a
particularly knotty problem for DNA testing firms. The very
definitions of “race” and “ethnicity” are fuzzy, said Joseph
Pickrell, a computational geneticist at the New York
Genome Center laboratory, and affiliated with Columbia
University.
“Different people mean different things when they say
‘race,’” he said. In the United States, for example, a person
with almost any African ancestry often is identified as black.
“That’s not necessarily the case in other parts of the world,”
Dr. Pickrell said.
Researchers at 23andMe acknowledged the difficulty in a
recent paper, writing, “It is important to note that ancestry,
ethnicity, identity and race are complex labels that result
both from visible traits, such as skin color, and from cultural,
economic, geographical and social factors.” In a recent
study, the researchers decided to use Census Bureau
definitions — black, white, Hispanic — to ask how often
people who identify as one race actually have genetic
markers indicating a mixed heritage.
After examining data from 160,000 customers who agreed
to participate, the geneticists learned that 3.5 percent of
those who said they were white actually had DNA that was
1 percent or more African in origin. The chances of having
African ancestry were highest in the South, and highest of
all in South Carolina, where at least 13 percent of those who
said they were white had African ancestors.
Among those who said they were black, genetic ancestry
over all was 73.2 percent African, 0.8 percent Native
American and 24 percent European. Experts say the large
proportion of European DNA found in African-Americans
can be traced to before the Civil War, and the rape of
enslaved African women. The ancestry of those who said
they were Hispanic was something of a hodgepodge. Some
had no Native American ancestry; others had 50 percent or
more.
Mr. Hutchinson’s family photographs. Through the genetic
testing service 23andMe, Mr. Hutchinson learned that his
mother had a brother, and a genealogist helped him track
down some first cousins in Alabama, who said they had
been told never to contact Mr. Hutchinson or his family.
Hispanics living in the South tended to have more African
ancestry. As a group, their DNA was 6.2 percent African, 18
percent Native American and 65.1 percent European.
Jewish ancestry, on the other hand, is far easier to discern.
Historically, these populations were small and Jews tended
not to marry outsiders. As a result, they share telltale
sequences of DNA, easily identified by testing. But is this
sort of ethnic categorization really instructive? Human
beings share more than 99.9 percent of their DNA; what
makes us different is vanishingly insignificant in terms of “I feel bad that the technology was not available for her,”
genetics. Ms. Musumeci said.

If testing “tells me I’m 95 percent Ashkenazi Jewish and 5
percent Korean, is that really different from 100 percent
Ashkenazi Jewish and zero percent Korean?” Jonathan
Marks, an anthropology professor at the University of North
Carolina at Charlotte, wondered in The Wire cutter. The
question of ethnicity is enmeshed with another difficult
challenge for DNA testers: geography. Genetics researchers
generally know which DNA sequences originated on which
continents. But pinpointing a particular country of origin, as
many testing services claim to do, is far trickier. Scientists
simply do not have good data on the genetic characteristics
of particular countries in, say, East Africa or East Asia. Even
in more developed regions, distinguishing between Polish
and, for instance, Russian heritage is inexact at best.
If DNA testing has the potential to shed light on new family
relationships, it also can muddy those that had seemed
settled. While putting together The Wirecutter’s own
report, one researcher learned that a grandparent was in
fact not biologically related.
Such news can be burdensome — or freeing.
Mark, a banker in Delaware, got his test results back from
Ancestry.com along with a list of relatives in its database.
Oddly, there was no one on the list from his father’s side of
the family. There was one name he recognized, though: his
father’s best friend. Who, it turned out, actually was his
biological father.

The precise numbers offered by some testing services raise
eyebrows among genetics researchers. “It’s all privatized
science, and the algorithms are not generally available for
peer review,” Dr. Marks said.
“That’s why their ads always specify that this is for
recreational purposes only: lawyer-speak for, ‘These results
have no scientific standing.’” For many, though, the point of
DNA testing has nothing to do with ethnicity. Theresa
Musumeci, 49, of Hockessin, Del., wanted to solve a
longstanding mystery in her family. Who was her biological
grandmother?
Mark, 43, whose last name was withheld to protect his
family’s privacy, is estranged from his mother, and the man
he knew as his father died more than a decade ago. So he
reached out to his father’s best friend, who confirmed an
affair with his mother decades ago. The two live near each
other and have gotten together several times recently. The
secret that the older man thought he would take to his
grave is well out of the bag.
On one recent outing, Mark said, “he even showed me the
place where I probably was conceived.”

Mr. Hutchinson’s cousins Sandra Green, left, and Eve Clark.

Ms. Green and Ms. Clark are mail carriers in Daphne, Ala.,
and Mr. Hutchinson has plans to join them for Mardi Gras
next year.CreditBryan Tarnowski for The New York Times

Decades ago, Ms. Musumeci’s mother had discovered she

had been adopted after she overheard the nuns at her
Catholic high school in Camden, N.J., talking about it. For
years, she searched for clues to her birth mother’s identity,
eventually learning her name: Mary Culliton. But Ms.
Musumeci’s mother died in 1995, at 55, without learning
much more.

Ms. Musumeci decided to continue the quest by submitting

a sample to Ancestry.com, which also will notify users of
relatives in its database if they have given permission.
Among the matches was Ms. Musumeci’s half-brother and a
few well-known cousins — but also a man she had never
heard of. His great-aunt, it turned out, was Ms. Musumeci’s
great-grandmother — Mary Culliton’s mother. He filled her
in on the woman’s life.

Eventually Ms. Musumeci discovered other long-lost aunts

and uncles. “I found five great family members,” she said.
Yet there is one regret: Her mother did not survive long
enough to learn the story.
FOR STEM

Gender Gap among Math High Achievers Evident by Grade
9, Just Gets Wider
By Dian Schaffhauser 09/13/18
Every year several hundred thousand students from 6,000
schools participate in the American Mathematics
Competitions (AMC), a program by the Mathematical
Association of America that helps teachers identify talent in
math among their students and to foster a love of math.
The results of that "friendly" competition provided the data
for a research project to understand the dynamics of the
gender gap in high school math achievement. (AMC is also
delivered in middle school, but for this project, the focus
was on students in secondary schools.)
The report cited a 2012 study that found female
participants in a TV game show tended to earn less than
male contestants and to "exit the game prematurely at a
faster rate." Other research found that while men who lose
a contest react by "seeking greater challenges," women will
react by "ceasing to compete."
While many male students may respond to disappointment
by "redoubling" their efforts next time, female students
may more commonly just opt out of participation in future
years. Girls are more likely than boys to cease participating
in the AMCs when they experience a disappointing
outcome; and even those girls with scores just below the
cutoff will be 5 percentage points less likely to participate in
the following year than girls who barely hit it.

According to a working paper recently published by the

National Bureau of Economic Research, "a clear gender gap"
among high-achieving students has already shown up by
ninth grade, and it just widens through the remainder of the
high school years.

The AMC contests are 25-question, multiple-choice tests

designed to identify students working at high performance
levels. Those who fall into that category tend to take the
test year over year through their high school career. The
AMC contest has multiple stages. By hitting a threshold
score, students move into additional exams. Researchers
Glenn Ellison, a professor in MIT's Department of
Economics, and Ashley Swanson, an assistant professor of
healthcare management in the Wharton School at the
University of Pennsylvania, examined AMC data from 1999
to 2007.

They found that girls made up an ever-declining share of the

top achievers with every passing year of high school. For
example, among the top 5,000 students, female students
made up 30.5 percent in grade 9, 26 percent in grade 10, 24
percent in grade 11 and 22 percent in grade 12. By grade 12,
females made up just 7 percent of the top 100 students. The
largest change occurred between grades 9 and 10, but it
was a "fairly steady process clearly visible in every year."

The research also discovered that high-achieving girls

improved by less on average from year to year than boys
did with similar performance levels in the first year.

The researchers cautioned that the "widening gender gap"

was "clearly a multifaceted phenomenon with several
contributing factors." For instance, there could be gender
differences in the decision to participate in competitions in
the first place. And the "discouragement effect" could play a
role.
FOR STEM
Holiday
The word “holiday” is always pleasant to hear,
whether we are participating in one or we are hearing about
one from something else. We might think of the term
originating from “holy” and “day,” and that is not far from
the mark. Below, we will explore the etymology, definitions,
and uses of this common word that everyone loves.
The origin of the term came from Old English when
describing the Sabbath. The Sabbath is a period of time of
worshiping and remembering God. For the Jewish people,
the Sabbath lasts from Friday evening to Saturday evening,
whereas it is only on Sunday for Christians. The word is the
equivalent of “holy” plus “day,” but in Old English it was
written as “hāliġdæġ.” This ancient word is cognate (comes
from the same linguistic derivation) with “West Frisian
hjeldei (“holiday”), Danish helligdag (“holiday”), Norwegian
helligdag (“holiday”), Swedish helgdag (“holiday, feast”)”
(Wiktionary). From Old English, it traveled to Middle English
in a variety of forms: halyday, holyday, halidei, haliȝdei.
Luckily, in Modern English, we have chosen just one spelling
of it.
Now let us move onto the definitions of “holiday.” I
always trust Oxford Dictionaries to give me the correct
definitions of terms. According to this resource, British
people use this noun as “An extended period of leisure and
recreation, especially one spent away from home or in
travelling.” In America, we usually replace “holiday” with
“vacation.” A more specific definition is, “A day of festivity
or recreation when no work is done.” It can also be used as
a modifier: “Characteristic of a holiday; festive.” For
example, “this is quite the holiday atmosphere.” In its turn,
it can also be used with a modifier: “A short period during
which the payment of installments, tax, etc. may be
suspended.” For instance, “It seems the workers are taking
a tax holiday.” In Britain, it can be employed as a verb on
occasion: “Spend a holiday in a specified place.” For a look
at this slang: “he is holidaying in Cambodia right now”
(Oxford Dictionaries). As you can see, over time, the word
was associated with the Sabbath, but later turned into a
more secular term that is commonly used in work
environments.
There are so many different types of holidays and
holidays themselves that it would be difficult to count them
all. However, holidays can be broken down into winter
holidays, national holidays, international secular
observances, unofficial holidays, and religious holidays. For
examples of winter holidays, one can name Thanksgiving
and New Year’s Eve. In fact, from the period of November
until the new year, it is known to be the holiday season. In
terms of national holidays, each country, republic, and
nation has its own holidays based on what its government
proclaims as a day of celebration. Independence days are
commonly celebrated in every country, for instance. Some
examples of international secular observances are days
marked on the United Nations Calendar of Observances,
such as commemorating World War II veterans and
International Women’s Day. Unofficial holidays have
become increasingly popular as well. Arbitrary holidays
seem to pop up on social media all the time. There might be
holidays celebrating monkeys, cucumbers, guns, and what
have you. It all depends on organizations, groups, and other
platforms that want to make their own holidays. Some
holidays such as April Fool’s Day are popular forms of
unofficial holidays that have caught on through the
generations. But perhaps the most prominent number of
holidays come from religious organizations. There are so
many religious holidays within each faction of spiritual
belief that it would take lifetimes to count them all and to
understand them. Though Christian holidays are some of
the most famous (Christmas, for instance), there are also
plenty of Islamic, Judaist, Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu holidays
that could fill encyclopedias. The Hindu religion alone has
hundreds of holiday traditions, based on each of their
hundreds of gods. This is not to mention the many minor
religious groups and spiritual practices that have their own
holidays and observances. Even more mind boggling is when
people are from interfaith organizations, and they will
celebrate holidays from multiple religions at a time.
Taking all this information in, we can say succinctly
that “holiday” derives from Old English and moved onto
Middle English, until it landed into modern usage. The
definition of the term transferred from being associated
with the Sabbath and became connected with vacations
from work and school. Additionally, there are thousands of
national, international, unofficial, and religious holidays one
can talk about. All this discussion has led me to one thing: I
think it is time for me to take my own holiday.