In The Know: Should The Nation’s Unemployed Be Buying New Apple Computers?

It’s a knock on Mac users, but really it goes beyond that. It’s the perfect encapsulation of our entire nation.

I have some issues with how public employees are compensated, but in the abstract this does not strike me as particularly unreasonable.

A contract negotiated between California Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration and the politically powerful prison guards’ union could prove costly to taxpayers because it lets guards bank unlimited vacation time that must be paid out when they retire, a legislative analyst said Tuesday.

The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office said the average correctional officer already has nearly 19 weeks of accumulated leave time, currently valued at $600 million. Adding more time will cost the state in the long run, said fiscal and policy analyst Nick Schroeder, though he couldn’t say how soon or how much.

By and large, I don’t think that leave time should be capped for anybody. I’ve worked at places that re-set everything to 0 at the end of the year. This has a couple of effects, one detrimental to the company and one helpful to it. Detrimentally, one employer did a lot of business in December in order to accommodate new laws to take effect in January, and it wasn’t good for people to take time off in December (meanwhile, January and February were usually slow months). But they turned this to their advantage because they would simply deny vacation time. You can’t have everybody out at the busiest time of the year, after all. Of course, the end result was that those that were the best forward thinkers and had the seniority would be the ones to request and get the time off. So during the most important time of the year, you had the new people and the people who didn’t think ahead.

The logistical problems at my former job are only a part of the story. The thing is, unless you’re willing to guarantee time off when asked, it’s simply not fair to limit accrued time off. Either their presence is important or it is not. If it’s importance, and you don’t want the headaches of having to pay them for a year after they leave the company, then pay them at the end of the year for any accrued time they didn’t utilize. Or if they’re not that important, force them to take the time. Instead, you have a problem like this:

“It’s virtually impossible for those employees to get time off,” she said. “They’re in this catch-22 where they can’t use the time off they have, so it’s become impossible for them to not exceed the cap.”

That being said, this is part of the problem:

The contract gives guards more than eight weeks off work annually, including the unpaid leave, making it more likely they will bank time to be paid out on retirement, according to the legislative analysis.

They shouldn’t have that kind of time if they can’t use it. The money should be rolled up into their salary. Of course, if the money is there. Which, in California, it isn’t. Now really isn’t the time to be asking for new benefits.

It’s an oldish story, but I just recently ran across it:

According to the New Hampshire Union Leader (via Slashdot), police in the town of Weare charged a man with unlawful “interception of oral communications” - a felony* - because he used his phone during a traffic stop. According to police, the call was a crime because the driver ended up leaving a message, so they claim that the voice-mail service on the other end of the call recorded the officer’s communications without his consent.

That is, they charged him with wiretapping because the officer’s voice could be heard in the background of his phone call.

The story gets mildly less ridiculous when you read the background. Basically, the guy was leaving a meeting of libertarians and the phone call was to the voicemail of said libertarian group, which has been in trouble with the police before on similar(ly specious) “wiretapping” grounds. So, in a real sense, it may have been an end-run around the provisions preventing people from recording interactions with the police. If one believes that it is beyond the pale to record a police officer, this makes a degree of sense.

That’s a big “if”, of course. As mentioned before, the arguments against being able to record police encounters is dubious. Especially since they regularly record their interactions with us.

More broadly, though, I think that the entire notion of recording our experiences is questionable. I can see some reasons for it, like sex tapes or something where we want a strong expectation of privacy. Even then, I wonder if the videotaping itself should be illegal so much as any distribution of said recording. Sex tapes (unless released by mutual consent of all involved - and maybe even then) are distasteful, but one can think of scenarios where a “sex tape” is a defense against accusations of rape.

I’m not sure that I shouldn’t be able to have a camera and microphone in my classes at all time so that I could, if needed, go back and account for my time.

Delosa has pretty loose against wiretapping, at least as far as audio goes. Basically, as long as one participant in the conversation is aware that it’s being recorded, it is a legal recording. So you can’t stick a bug in someone’s apartment and listen from afar, but you can carry a wire on your person. That’s my understanding, anyway, and that strikes me as about right.

But even if you don’t agree with going that far, it’s a no-brainer when it comes to police. They are encouraged to record their interactions with you. The expectation of privacy is minimal or non-existent. The primary issue is who gets the recording. The notion that it should be the police, and only the police, is pretty suspect on its face.

* - The charge was later reduced to a misdemeanor.

Per Comics Alliance:

Superman replies that it was foolish to think that his actions would not reflect politically on the American government, and that he therefore plans to renounce his American citizenship at the United Nations the next day — and to continue working as a superhero from a more global than national perspective. From a “realistic” standpoint it makes sense; it would indeed be impossible for a nigh-omnipotent being ideologically aligned with America to intercede against injustice beyond American borders without creating enormous political fallout for the U.S. government.

While this wouldn’t be this first time a profoundly American comic book icon disassociated himself from his national identity — remember when Captain America became Nomad? — this could be a very significant turning point for Superman if its implications carry over into other storylines. Indeed, simply saying that “truth, justice and the American way [is] not enough anymore” is a pretty startling statement from the one man who has always represented those values the most.

It doesn’t seem that he’s abandoning those values, however, only trying to implement them on a larger scale and divorce himself from the political complexities of nationalism. Superman also says that he believes he has been thinking “too small,” that the world is “too connected” for him to limit himself with a purely national identity. As an alien born on another planet, after all, he “can’t help but see the bigger picture.”

Superman has shifted around from being Metropolis’s guardian, America’s, the world’s, and the universe’s. The renunciation of his citizenship is new, however. From a corporate standpoint, it does seem likely that this is related to a desire to make the character more appealing to international audiences, not unlike GI Joe’s shift from Real American Heroes to International Heroes. If it’s a change that sticks, though. It does point to the differences in the way DC does things compared to Marvel, though. With DC, it’s a globalist perspective. With Marvel, it would have happened several years ago and been attributed to how terrible George W. Bush was - or alternately, a repudiation of people that harbor “mean” attitudes towards illegal immigrants. In DC’s way of doing things, it’s simply a matter of Superman being too big for his country. From an external standpoint (the international popularity of the character), this is actually somewhat true. From an internal standpoint, doubly. Having one of the most powerful men in the world limiting his activities to a single country (much less a single city) doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

On the other hand, it’s actually a somewhat questionable decision from an internal-logistical standpoint. Superman, unlike Batman and others, derives a lot of his influence from the legitimacy granted to him by his local and federal government. He is given access to information and personnel that a world hero wouldn’t get. In part because it is expected that his loyalty will be, primarily if not solely, to the United States. Stepping out of his country jeopardizes this. It makes his ability to work in the world’s (for now) premier economy more difficult. It’s one thing for the US to overlook the fact that Hawkman (one of them) was a native Thanagarian. They can sort of grand him a visa or even citizenship informally (it’s sitting at the social security office, if he cares to pick it up!). It’s different to do so with someone that has specifically and publicly renounced their citizenship. And even if they were willing to overlook this, and they might because he’s Superman, the more deference they give him, the more of an “American” he is likely to be considered to be. Not wrongly, he would be seen as an agent of the American government, as he is now. It’s not just his citizenship which would lead Iran (and others) to believe he is an agent of the US feds. It’s his relationship. He’ll have to do more than surrender his citizenship. He’ll have to surrender his relationship.

By not having anyone to report to, he does more than free himself up from constraints. He makes himself an outsider.

There have been times, in Superman’s past, where he has dabbled with this role. Things have generally not turned out particularly well. When trying to deliver food to third world countries, he essentially had the option of either giving the food to dictators to be distributed among their people (or, more likely, not distributed) or essentially going to war against said dictators. What does Superman really hope to accomplish in Tehran? As powerful as he is, what can he do that the combined forces of the United States military cannot? I’m sure the answer to that is that he can stand as a symbol for truth, justice, and a third quality to be named later (freedom, probably). But he would be doing so, if not as an American, as an outsider. A westerner. A non-Muslim. Success in that arena is far from assured - and the attempt comes at a pretty steep price.

The relationship between nations and their superheroes was explored in Wildstorm’s The Authority series. Told from the superheroes’ point of view (and Wildstorm’s treatment of the government, dating back to the Clinton administration, is that it is essentially a criminal enterprise), the results were somewhat harrowing from the perspective of the average citizen. With the collection of superheroes being more powerful than the federal government, neither had much leverage over the other. And they dug in their heels. And eventually, The Authority formed its own government. As flawed as our government might be (in that world, and our own), there is at least a modicum of accountability that does not exist when the world must bend to what superpowered beings think is right.

No doubt Superman knows this and does not have imperial ambitions. But it does go back to the notion that he will be dealing with the same diplomatic constraints that the US government has. Even if we were to grant that the United States government deals internationally in a charitable fashion without its own interests primarily in mind, it’s unclear as to what we would be able to do. Just as it is unclear - even in a world where green rings grant you the ability to fly and a chemical bath makes you run real fast - what Superman would be able to do. Even if, and this is a big if, the powers that be abroad choose not to simply view Superman as an American anyway.

-{This comment is an extrapolation of a comment made on OTB}-

The New York Times has an article about snoring:

Scientists say there are two types of snorers: those who snore only when they sleep on their backs, and those who do it regardless of their position. After sleep researchers in Israel examined more than 2,000 sleep apnea patients, for example, they found that 54 percent were “positional,” meaning they snored only when asleep on their backs. The rest were “nonpositional.”

Other studies have shown that weight plays a major role. In one large study, published in 1997, patients who snored or had breathing abnormalities only while sleeping on their backs were typically thinner, while their nonpositional counterparts usually were heavier. The latter group, wrote the authors, consequently suffered worse sleep and more daytime fatigue.

But that study also found that patients who were overweight saw reductions in the severity of their apnea when they lost weight. According to the National Sleep Foundation, in people who are overweight, slimming down is generally the best way to cure sleep apnea and end snoring for good.

I fall into the “positional” category - or at least I did before I lost weight. It’s very frustrating because I am a back sleeper. Put me on my back and I can sleep longways on a chair. On my side? It’s just not comfortable for me. It’s become a lot less of an issue as I lost the weight. What used to be pretty regular getting-woken-up-to-be-informed-I’m-snoring has become pretty rare.

It was actually one of the two main things that allowed us not to set up the bed in the guest room until my sister-in-law came to visit. It was a frequent destination whenever I was snoring and didn’t want a notification wake-up again. The other main thing is the comfortable couch downstairs, which I simply allow myself to fall asleep in if I’m stuffed up and worried that I am going to snore.

This article from The Frisky has gotten attention, where the writer takes a women’s group to task for putting Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow on a sexiest list:

But Tebow has one major problem in my book: he’s openly and loudly very anti-choice, to the tune of taking out an ad during the Super Bowl in order to share his pro-life views with the world. Why, for the love of Ryan Gosling, would a major woman’s website feel the need to laud a man like that? I mean, after all, it’s not like a woman’s right to choose has been in any way compromised this year or anything. Luckily, their other 24 picks are decidedly less lame.

Abortion politics aside from the moment, this is an extraordinarily narrow way to look at it. First, a crush is not a declaration of loyalty to everything about a person. I’ve had crushes on some of the most inappropriate people over the years. It’s daydreaming of a sort. But if we’re going to take this more seriously, Tebow’s position on abortion is part of a much larger picture. He’s a fundamentalist Christian. There are aspects of this that even a liberal can appreciate, like when he entered the BCS national championship game carrying flowers to give to his mother (not a Christian thing, per se, but part of the family-is-all-important-bundle). But there are aspects that (secular) liberals can’t. Abortion is only one of it.

Perhaps the strongest argument against dating someone with different views on abortion than your own are the practical implications. From a man’s perspective: if she gets pregnant, will she abort? Some will hope so, others will hope not. From a woman’s perspective: if I choose to abort, will he be supportive? The asymmetry of this question actually makes the question more important for men than for women. Since, legally speaking, he has to live with whatever her choice is. But for Tebow, and regarding relationships with people like him, it’s at least somewhat off the table unless (a) you don’t want children after you’re married or (b) you would be willing to abort - within the context of marriage - because the timing - or the baby - isn’t right.

I say “after you’re married” because, if Tebow is sincere in his beliefs (and all indications are that he is), there is no sex prior to marriage anyway. The second is a bigger factor. But, again, it’s all part of a bigger picture. Tebow likely has very traditional attitudes towards male-female relations and these are guided by his Christian values. Even if abortion isn’t an issue (say, one of them is infertile), it seems doubtful that this Frisky writer would be on board with the larger context through which Tebow sees marriage.

But practical implications aside, to what extent should we consider the other’s views on this contentious issue? I take a pretty laid back attitude towards such things. I’ve dated everyone from birthers to card-carrying members of the Green Party, from pro-life to having had 3.5* abortions. Perhaps it’s because I don’t fit precisely into a liberal or conservative mold that I don’t have a particular tribe to choose from. So to me, I guess, it almost always comes down to practical implications. Almost, anyway. I would have had a hard time marrying Clancy if she had been an abortion doc. So in that sense, I can understand where the author is coming from, given how strong her views are on the subject.

It doesn’t strike me as reasonable, though, to expect everyone in your gender to share not only your views on abortion, but also to feel so strongly about it as to refrain from crushing or fantasizing about someone with differing views.

On the other hand, Tim Tebow for President does represent an ideological unseriousness (or a right-wing bent from a site where you wouldn’t expect it). I find it bizarre that the Frisky author found the inclusion on the list objectionable rather than the pseudo-endorsement.

* - The .5 is a miscarriage that probably would have been aborted.

So going to bed at 10, waking up at 5, driving two hours round trip each day. Little access to the Internet throughout the day.

So I’m falling behind on some things, including Hit Coffee. Bear with me.

Maria made a comment a while back about new math and spiraling. I had to look it up. I’d heard about this thing called “new math”, but really didn’t know what it was. Math is math, as far as I knew. The thought also occurred to me that maybe this new math was actually was I was taught. Well, sort of. In addition to the traditional way for multiplication, I was taught The Lattice Method. It was kind of neat, but I didn’t really see the point except for those allergic to the traditional method. I commented at the time that it was math for people that preferred drawing pictures to doing math.

Anyhow, when looking it up, I ran across this site, which has a helpful video that outlines the new way that math is being taught:

With the exception of Lattice, I had never heard of it before as a bonafide method. Truth be told, though, it’s something that I have used in my head. Once you learn the way it’s really done, it’s pretty obvious. I’m not entirely sure what the rationale is for teaching it this way. The video gives a couple of explanations that don’t really make sense, but they’re critics so perhaps they are not giving the best reason.

In any event, I am glad that I watched the video because, it turns out, Arapaho is a “new math” state. Actually, they teach math both ways and let kids choose the method. It seems that everyone chooses “cluster math” over the traditional way. Cluster math, for those that don’t want to bother watching the video, basically says that instead of doing it the “normal” way (breaking, say, 38x27, down into 38x7+38*20), you reason it out your own way. So you might say “38x10 is 380. Okay, do that twice and you’re at 380+380. Since multiplying it by 5 would be half of that, you’ve got 380+380+190. So you’ve accounted for 25 of the 27. Simply add 38 in there a couple more times and 380+380+190+38+38 gives you your answer.

It was great that I watched the video because, when I was tutoring some kids, I would not have had a single clue what they were doing otherwise. This way I was at least able to get an idea of what they were doing wrong if they weren’t getting the right answer.

Cluster math seems most problematic because it is hugely error-prone. Kids try it out one way, hit a wall, then start over. Before you know it, they have multipliers or 38 written down all over the place and when it comes time for the final addition, they don’t know which counts. In the above case, his answer was over 2,000. He groaned when I asked him to do it in the traditional way, but he got the right answer.

So what is the appeal of cluster math? Why fix something that isn’t broke? I have a theory that teachers like to try new things out of boredom. I have another theory that teachers in general don’t like math, blame it on the way they were taught (the monotony of a single algorithm, to be precise), and so want to do it a different way. I can also understand a different appeal: it’s interesting to watch kids reason things out. It was much more interesting to watch him figure out all the ways to add multipliers of 38 to try to get to the answer. But on the whole, I am not impressed.

Notably, Arapaho’s standardized math scores are considerably less impressive than Delosa’s (once you factor racial demographics), but their reading scores are pretty good. I wonder if this is why.

Non-custodial parents have a right to see their children’s grades:

“The court concludes the following: (a) an order requiring a student to produce proof of college attendance, course credits and grades as a condition for ongoing child support and college contribution does not violate the student’s rights to privacy under FERPA; (b) both the student and the custodial parent each have a responsibility and obligation to make certain that the non-custodial parent is provided with ongoing proof of the student’s college enrollment, course credits and grades.”

This strikes me as something that should be relatively uncontroversial, though it does strike me as more complicated than the more traditional scenario. My parents didn’t have the right to see my grades, but they were free to stop paying for college if I did not provide them. The question lies, I would guess, in the child support arrangement that the father has with the kid. I know that in some cases, as with my childhood best friend Clint, the arrangement specified his father’s obligations towards paying for college. So it seems to me that as long as Clint was able to prove that he was attending, his father might look at the F’s and get angry, but there wouldn’t be a whole lot that he could do about it.

I’m not sure the degree to which that is true for this case. On the one hand, it seems that there must have been some concrete obligations for him to have to go to court to see the grades. On the other hand, the ruling suggests that if the father wanted to pull his support on the basis of his daughter’s grades (as opposed to attendance or enrollment), he would have the right to do so. Otherwise, why would she need to provide more than the enrollment paperwork? The only thing I can think of is so that he can go back to court and get out of the arrangement on the basis that the daughter is not attending school in good faith.

UPDATE: Brandon Berg pointed out that the actual decision was linked to on the page. I probably saw it, but whenever I see a link to the entire decision I assume that it’s going to be really long or in a language I do not understand. It’s actually pretty straightforward. The issue is, if the daughter is not taking and passing a full courseload, he doesn’t have to pay because she can effectively become emancipated and he can be off the hook. So what’s probably happening is that the daughter failed one or more of her courses and she and the mother don’t want to lose the financial support.

Half-Sigma today:

For some reason, I’ve never had any desire at all to edit Wikipedia. Nerdy value-creation skills are undervalued as it is. Why should I do it for free?

Even nerdier than editing Wikipedia is working for free on Linux or some other open source project. I find it even more mystifying that people want to do that for free.

Mr. Blue a few days ago:

We want the 9-5 people. They’re not the ones killing the job sector. We are. We’re the ones who keep coming up with “free alternatives” to the stuff that people should pay for. We’re the ones that allow Mark Zuckerberg to create a bajillion dollar company, employing virtually nobody, because we’ll make the widgets that make Facebook cool. We’re the productive ones that let the IT companies reduce their staff without taking productivity hits. If more of us were like them, there’d be more jobs to go around.

So let’s kill the “geek culture”. Let’s force the women in. Let’s make it so that we want to leave at the end of an 8-hour day. Bring on the apathy that dominates virtually every other field out there. Let’s spend more time making sure that everyone feels welcome and less time getting shit done. The shit we get done just makes more of us redundant. The wisepeople have spoken (utilizing the technology that we built). They apparently know something we don’t about what’s important.

UPDATE: Dave points to this article:

But many startups today have crossed over the line into freestrapping. Pay isn’t “low”, it’s “no”. Operations aren’t lean, they are free. Revenues aren’t small, they don’t exist. That’s right — no revenue and no overhead that can be strictly assigned to the business. Workers work virtually so there’s no office. Or maybe they spend hours at the local coffee shop mooching Internet access. They work for free, sustaining themselves some other way. Maybe they work part-time, have a working spouse, still collect unemployment or have “walk-away” money from their last gig. There are no materials in the strictest sense since they are creating a web-based or mobile application. Even their tools are free. Can you say open source? Or maybe they are using a “free 30 day trial” of a development tool. (Ah, so that’s why the agile development scrums are so short!) They are creating something from nothing. (And, yes, guilty as charged. That’s how we did it. There were a few out-of-pocket expenses but so far nothing that seriously cut into my coffee habit.)

If you are an experienced bootstrapper, this all sounds familiar, right? You are used to making nothing or next to nothing. The difference, and the trouble lies in the lack of revenue or prospects for revenue and the use of free raw materials and tools. The expectation of free has become so pervasive that we are harming our economy’s ability to grow. How can we make a living if we give everything away for free? And why should we expect anyone to pay for what we produce when we don’t pay for the tools we use?

I ran across this article on how to make hard-boiled eggs. Despite loving HBEs, I was never formally taught how to make them. I’ve mostly been winging it. So I took the American Egg Board’s (I love that there is such a thing) advice:

Because eggs are hugely high in protein (which makes them an excellent source of protein in our diet), boiling them a long time toughens them. Protein fibers are very sensitive to heat, Helmer said.

The American Egg Board recommends this method for hard-cooked eggs, which Helmer said is “not only foolproof, I’m telling you — you can stake your life on it”.

1. Place eggs in saucepan large enough to hold them in a single layer. Add cold water to cover eggs by 1 inch. Heat over high heat just to boiling.
2. Remove from burner. Cover pan. Let eggs stand in hot water about 15 minutes for large eggs (12 minutes for medium eggs; 18 for extra large).
3. Cool completely under cold running water or in a bowl of ice water. Peel and eat.

The end result a complicated eating procedure wherein I ended up just sucking the yolk out of mostly-raw eggs. It wasn’t bad, but I’m sure Dr Wife will inform me that I did, in fact, “stake my life” on their recipe given the potential health hazards of raw eggs.

Every actor from all of the Law & Order spinoffs up until L&O Los Angeles (which didn’t/doesn’t have an opening sequence).

When your software takes up 50% of my CPU capacity and half a GB of RAM, it’s not going to stay on my computer very long. On the other hand, if you can come up with something that has a smaller footprint, it’s going to take a lot longer to notice and you can collect more information on me to use for your nefarious purposes. Discipline, people!

Jezebel Anna North argues that women aren’t entering engineering because engineering is mean to women:

In Stemming The Tide: Why Women Leave Engineering, two University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professors report on their survey of over 3,700 women with engineering degrees. They found that just one in four women who had left the field reported doing so to spend more time with family. One third left “because they did not like the workplace climate, their boss or the culture,” while almost half departed due to “working conditions, too much travel, lack of advancement or low salary” (respondents were allowed to check more than one reason). The researchers also found that among women who got engineering degrees but never entered the field, a third made that decision “because of their perceptions of engineering as being inflexible or the engineering workplace culture as being non-supportive of women.” And, unsurprisingly, “Women engineers who were treated in a condescending, patronizing manner, and were belittled and undermined by their supervisors and co-workers were most likely to want to leave their organizations.” Writes study author Dr. Nadya Fouad, “Bottom line — it’s not all about family for most of the women who left engineering.”

North argues that this puts an end to the myth of “the underrepresentation of women in engineering fields is entirely due to the choices they make about family time. ”

But does it, though? For one fourth, it’s directly cited as an issue. And half cite a slew of factors including two, travel and (to a lesser extent) working conditions, that can be related to, if not family specifically, a work-life balance that women (in the aggregate) put a higher priority on than men. Ditto for engineering being “inflexible”, if that’s related to inflexible work hours. Low salary is not a gender-specific complaint, nor is (necessarily) advancement opportunities. It could be gender-specific if women within the field (working the same hours, etc) are making less money than their male counterparts or if they are less likely to see advancement. But these are boilerplate reasons.

Now, on to the guts of it. Women are less likely to work in environments where they feel harassed or have issues with their coworkers and engineering is more likely to be one of these environments. This may or may not be gender-specific, and if they are it might be directly or indirectly so. I mean, if it’s “oooh, girl in the server room, let’s harass her!” then that’s pretty unforgiveable. But I suspect that, as often as not, when women are communicated to the same way that men are communicated with in engineering and techie environments, they are more likely to find it off-putting. Which brings us around to the question of whether men should change their work environment to accommodate women that don’t presently work there.

Matthew Yglesias thinks so:

Not that shocking, but important nonetheless. Dysfunctional social norms that drive talent out of key fields are a real burden on the country, as well as on the individual women impacted.

Women are not the arbiters of what is and is not dysfunctional. That they don’t like an environment does not make that environment “wrong”. I say this as an only guy that has sat in teacher’s lounges while the women talk about the hot black dude from CSI and feel pretty uncomfortable in the process. I’m not wrong for being uncomfortable, but they’re not wrong for relating to one another the way that they relate to one another. Different business environments have different cultures. If there’s actual harassment going on, that’s one thing. If it’s just “not for me”, that’s another.

And, as I mentioned in my Geek Flag post, it’s not as though there are no tradeoffs. The same environment that some women don’t like, the men who work there thrive on. People that could have done a lot of thing go into IT specifically because the culture is there. The culture guided them into it. The culture makes workplace tolerable (for a lot of people that, ahem, don’t find a whole lot of social environments tolerable). It’s not exactly great that women are leaving the field, but it is good that a lot of people are really happy with it. You may not be able to address the former without negating the latter.

And to tie this all up, the notion that the women don’t like the men does not make the men jerks. As I say, they are not arbiters of what is or is not functional. And it could just as easily be that the women simply don’t like the men then that the men are doing anything wrong. It could be that you wouldn’t just have to get rid of the irritating things that the men do, but rather would have to get rid of the men themselves (the irritating things being signals more than anything else). So you’re getting rid of the men that like what they do and are good at it, for the sake of women that might or might not be the same. Forgive this former geek for being a little incredulous of the notion that if geeks can reform their image just by being nicer to girls as if the only problem is that we’re jerks. I think that on an individual level this is true, but on a group level, well, it’s as much culture clash as anything (and that does not make our culture “wrong”).

Again, none of this is to say that sexual harassment is okay. Women should not be condescended to (nor should men, of course). But not liking “the workplace climate, their boss or the culture” is not necessarily indicative of something being wrong with the workplace climate, the boss, or the culture.

One of my recent assignments was as more of a tutor than a teacher. The teacher sent me out with a student that completely didn’t understand the previous day’s lesson. Basically, rounding to the nearest ten and adding. 76+49=80+50=130. That sort of thing. The girl was having a really, really hard time understanding the concept. So I sat with her for a half-hour and got it to the point where she very reliably narrow it down to two options (64 rounds to either 60 or 70) and gets the right answer about 80-90% of the time.

She was quite proud of herself. So was I!

So we went back into the classroom and the teacher asked if she got it. I said, half-jokingly, that she either got it or was very good at faking it.

She burst into tears. “I WAS NOT FAKING IT!”

Oops.

The problem with the gender gap.

The United States has the worlds largest energy reserves. And it’s not just coal!

The Commodore computer is back. Sort of. Not really. It’s kind of surprising to me that a new entrant into the PC world didn’t license the once-familiar name. I know that it was considered on multiple occasions, but nobody really went forward with it.

Verizon is ending one-year contracts for new cell phones. I’m not surprised that they would claim it’s due to lack of consumer interest. But seriously, it’s one of those things that doesn’t actually cost the company anything (since people on one-year contracts pay more for the phone itself), so what’s the real reason? The real reason is, according to internal memos, lack of consumer interest. Which I guess doesn’t surprise me too much. I considered a one-year contract when we signed on, but the way they subsidize phones makes it so that you’re really better off taking a chance on a two-year contract. Of course, in a perfect world, I could switch to Verizon without having to buy a new phone to do so.

The FCC has ruled that mobile carriers have to share their data towers with smaller competitors. Not surprisingly, I consider this a good thing. Particularly in light of the relative scarcity of major carriers. If their position in the marketplace is protected - and it is by spectrum limitations - then they have public-interest responsibilities to the society that grants them that protection.

If you’re going to claim disability and seek alimony, be careful what you say on Facebook.

Canadian broadcasters seek to regulate Netflix. They actually have a bit of a point. Canadian broadcasters are required to air a certain number of Canadian programs. No such requirement exists for Netflix and as Netflix is a continued competitor for viewing eyes, that gives Netflix a distinct advantage. On the other hand, Canadian broadcasters never bothered to release all of Da Vinci’s Inquest to DVD. If they’re looking for ways to make more money, getting mileage out of the shows they do make would be a good start. Okay, that’s a lame retort, but it’s been bugging me lately.

Women have a higher tolerance for discrimination (than men) against just about everybody, all the way from a particular group I’d rather not discuss to the genetically disadvantaged. I add the asterisk because the poll was conducted following the 9/11 attacks, which may not be the best time to be asking about foreigners. Notably, and possibly worthy of future comment, women understate their tolerance for discrimination while men overstate theirs.

Fun and informative videos: You Suck At Photoshop.

Three cheers for the Michigan legislature and governor Rick Snyder, who took a step towards sanity on the subject of sex offender registries. You no longer have to register if you had consensual sex with a minor if you were under the age of 20 at the time. Apparently their arms were twisted by the feds, so perhaps I should be cheering Barack Obama or Eric Holder.

Decided to put the second pic below the fold because while it cracks me up, it’s not above-the-fold material. (more…)

There are a lot of good reasons not to let your spouse, girlfriend/boyfriend, or sexual partner also be your doctor (or dentist), but this does strike me as retarded:

One rabble-rouser calling for change is Burlington dentist Larry Pedlar, who, for half a century, counted his wife among his patients. A year ago, he was mortified to learn that if he continued doing this he could be found guilty of sexual abuse and have his licence pulled for five years.

That’s when the Ontario Court of Appeal issued a decision saying that the province’s Regulated Health Professions Act makes it clear that health professionals cannot have sex with their patients. The appeal court was ruling on a case involving a Waterloo chiropractor who had treated his girlfriend. The chiropractor was found guilty of professional misconduct for sexual abuse and lost his licence.

Since the act also applies to dentists, the profession’s regulatory college and professional association immediately put word out to their members, warning that the ruling could have implications for them.

“If I treat my wife, it means I am sexually abusing her,” says an incredulous Pedlar, 72. “It means I would be an outlaw.”

I expect more from Canadians.

Clancy is not and never has been my doctor. If something is wrong, she’ll check me out, but that’s about the extent of it. Callie is the first place that I have even sought care where Clancy works, primarily because it’s one of only two hospitals in town. I met my doc while Clancy was interviewing here and took a liking to him. Previous to Callie, I either didn’t have a doctor (Cascadia) or had a doctor in a completely different town (Estacado and Deseret). But the main reason why I wouldn’t want Clancy to be my doctor is that I wouldn’t want one relationship to interfere with the other (and it can be randomly* problematic if she’s writing me prescriptions).

But dentists? I don’t see a real problem there. They just clean and fix your teeth and mouth. Obviously, there are stories of dentists doing bad things while a patient is under anesthesia, but that’s something of a different bird.

* - I say “randomly” because there’s no rule against it, but if we were to relocate to another state, that state’s medical board could have a problem with it if it’s forbidden there even if it’s not forbidden where she did it.

For some reason, I am no longer getting email notifications of comments. That means I will be somewhat less quick to respond or pass comments through moderation. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Salmon Kahn Khan, of Khan Academy not-really-fame-YET, thinks that we should switch schoolwork and homework around. James Joyner is skeptical on the basis that it robs kids of even more of their childhood the same way homework does*, assisting only those that have the stable environment that likely will have them doing well anyway.

I’m not entirely sold on Khan’s idea, though I think it’s one that is worth exploring. I think it’s one of those things that would fall into the category of changing how we’re doing things. If you were to go forward with this, I think that you would have to look at either (a) shortening the school day or (b) having workstations where they watch the videos while at school. For instance, splitting half the day into consumption and output. Given how untenable shortening the school day is with parents’ work schedules and the like, I think that you’d have to go with the latter plan.

What the video, Joyner’s post, and the ensuing conversation got me thinking about it is virtual-ed and computers in the classroom. If you’d asked me a year ago what I thought about “computers in the classroom”, I probably would have rolled my eyes. It’s a gimmick. It’s a way for school districts to ask for more money for the latest toys. When I was considering graduate school, I was pushed towards Instructional Technology due to my IT major and education minor. One of the reasons I doubt I would have gone that route is because I was (to say the least) unsure about its core mission.

This is one of the biases that actual fieldwork has brought into question. The different schools in the Redstone district have different ways of doing things. Some utilize computers with a lab, some with computers in the classroom (and maybe a lab, too), and some not-at-all. There are three layers to teaching, as near as I can tell: maintaining control of the classroom, keeping kids’ attention, and then educating them. You can’t get to the second layer without passing the first. You can’t get to the third layer - the ostensible purpose of schooling - without passing the first two. To say the least, it’s hard. At least in K-8.

But one of the things that completely astonished me is that classroom order for even the most unruly class becomes nearly a non-issue once computers enter the equation. The same class that I have inordinate amounts of difficulty keeping focused during a lesson or cooperative exercise are suddenly pounding away at their keyboards with the interactive lesson on the computer. And it really doesn’t matter if the program itself is strictly educational (as in an exercise to identify European nations, not play Where In Europe is Carmen San Diego). Part of it is that they know as soon as they finish, they can move on to the learny-type games** that are more fun. If they get questions wrong, they have to go back over it. As best as I can tell, almost all of the incentives are pointed in the right direction: stay focused (if you’re chatting with a classmate, you won’t finish), get it right (or you’ll have to repeat the lesson), and behave (if you’re messing around on the computer, you get a boring worksheet).

Two schools in particular had great programs set up so that as soon as you finish your regular coursework, you were to go to one of the computers or to the computer lab and complete educational exercises. From a teacher’s standpoint, this is golden. You know why teachers give out busywork? To keep kids busy. There’s nothing worse than having ten minutes left in a class and everyone having finished their work. The schools incentivize their computer time with rewards for the more exercises they finish. Whatever they’re giving out, it seems to work. And it provides incentive for the brighter kids to keep learning more.

Which brings me to what I think is perhaps the best thing about the potential of computerizing education, which is individualized instruction. Web and I have both complained in the past about our frustration that the class moves only as fast as its slowest students. One solution to this is tracking, but even within tracked classes you run into variations of the same problem. Even among kids of similar aptitude, you have some that will figure out this lesson quickly but then struggle with that one and others where the reverse is true. Letting those that pick up quickly on one lesson move on to the next is not only good at keeping them busy (and becoming 30-something bloggers complaining about what school was like two decades ago), but good with keeping their minds going and allowing them to go further than they otherwise would. This takes most of the more controversial aspects of tracking off the table. The kids track themselves. Pretty much the only objection here would have to involve outright admitting that you don’t want the smart kids learning anything if the dumb kids can’t learn it, too. Besides, letting the faster and even middling kids take care of themselves (for the most part) allows more resources to be devoted to the slower ones.

There are two other primary objections to going “too far” with computers in the classroom (by which I mean replacing human instruction with computer instruction). First, it separates kids from one another. Second, it’s all part of an attempt to screw the teachers. Tackling the second one first, even if we expanded virtual schools, I doubt that teaching itself would ever become redundant. I, for one, would always want to make sure that there is the option for kids to be taught by teachers in a traditional classroom environment. Most of the time, parents will want the daycare that comes along with school (and many the socialization). So teacher’s roles might change to more of being a supervisor first and tutor second, but to some extent the education establishment has already decided that this is the case with more focus on adolescent psychology than on subject matter. So this is, in a sense, a completion of that aim.

Beyond that, look… I don’t have any particular animus towards teachers. They educated me, after all, and I work with them day in and day out. Most are great people. It’s not with any great enthusiasm that I would suggest a path that could (eventually) put their current job (or job description) in jeopardy. But if there is a better way of going about it involving computers that either produces better results or saves money… well, welcome to the modern age. As I say, I am skeptical that all teaching opportunities would evaporate, but it could become something that much fewer people do. And schools could become more selective. We always talk about how we want a better group of teachers, right?

On socialization, to say that I think it’s overrated is an understatement. Some days I wonder if K-12 socialization isn’t a net negative, where a lot of us have to spend more time unlearning what we socially learned in K-12 than it would take to simply learn through less intense exposure. But even if I’m wrong about that, there’s no reason that the kids can’t go off to a school and still spend recess, lunch, PE, and so on together. Except for group exercises, socialization detracts from education. When they should be learning, they’re talking. Second, even if what I believe about negative socialization is mostly wrong, there are kids for whom it is right. It doesn’t take but two or three kids to hijack an entire classroom. And sometimes kids with other kids is a bad combination.

A while back I was talking to an instructor at the local school for hardened kids. He was talking about how a lot of the kids just need structure, some get worse, and some he wonders why they ever arrived in the first place. Sometimes, you take the kid out of a particular environment and the problem just disappears. If a parent is worried about negative influences on his or her kid, allowing them to be removed can help and a lab with a computer is a place to move them to. To some it sounds dreadful, though for me it would have been heaven as often as not. My friend Clint got three days of in school suspension once where all he got was the days assignment. Best three days in high school, as far as he was concerned.

Except on the cost front, there aren’t too many people “against” computers in the classroom, though there is a contingent to make absolute sure that we don’t rely too much on them. My concerns could not be further from the opposite. Redstone’s schools have a decent half-way solution on a shoe-string budget, but I think that if we are going to do this, let’s really do it. Or try and see what happens. To me, a worst-case is where we are supplying all of the computers with a laptop - which is costly - and not changing the way that we do things - which is also costly. If it doesn’t work, I will be the first to admit it and change my mind. I’ve already changed my mind once, after all.

* - I am of a mixed mind on this. I hear enough complaints about the enormous amounts of homework that kids get that I think that there must be some truth to it. And I am against homework in general. On the other hand, my limited experience suggests that a whole lot of the homework is self-induced. They have time to work on it in class. They choose not to. As someone that would try to race through the coursework so that I didn’t have homework, I kept wanting to ask “Do you really want to have to do this at home?!” And I did ask and the answer was always yes. They didn’t say so, but the reasoning was obvious: at school, they’re surrounded by peers. At home, they’re not.

** - Like Carmen San Diego. Before you laugh, though, I learned far more about European geography through Spies in Europe than I ever did in school.

Back when I was choosing a major, Business actually had a pretty good rep. Everyone my brothers knew were doing really well with their business degrees, so I figured it had to be a “good major”. Then, when I chose Southern Tech, I went to a school with a really good business program that was particular about who they let in and who they let stay in. So I was kind of surprised when I started reading articles referring to business degrees as something of a joke. Looks like it’s going (or has gone) the way of colleges of education:

That might sound like a kids-these-days lament, but all evidence suggests that student disengagement is at its worst in Mr. Mason’s domain: undergraduate business education.

Business majors spend less time preparing for class than do students in any other broad field, according to the most recent National Survey of Student Engagement: Nearly half of seniors majoring in business say they spend fewer than 11 hours a week studying outside class. In their new book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that on a national test of writing and reasoning skills, business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college. And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than do students in every other major.

This is not a small corner of academe. The family of majors under the business umbrella—including finance, accounting, marketing, management and “general business”—accounts for just over 20 percent, or more than 325,000, of all bachelor’s degrees awarded annually in the United States, making it the most popular field of study.

It seems like just about any major that gets a reputation as a pathway to a good or at least decent job, but isn’t inherently difficult or selective, runs the risk of attracting people looking for little more than a pathway to a good or at least decent job. As a subject field, business falls somewhere in between the liberal arts and technical or scientific fields. Unlike, say, engineering, it doesn’t require the black-and-white tough courses. Unlike liberal arts, it does have the potential to be directly applicable as vocational training. I didn’t end up going into the College of Business, but the business courses I did take have proven to be about as helpful as the technical classes I took.

The temptation has to be strong for universities to water everything down because, unlike with some other vocational fields, you can. And there’s really no cap to the number of graduates that can be produced. My brother was warned against engineering because of the lack of jobs available at the time. His particular field of engineering was cyclical and enough others took that advice that by the time he graduated, they were in demand again. But since you can’t point to a specific cycle for business (if the “business” sector is bad, you’re screwed no matter what you major in), there’s nothing to move people towards other avenues of study.