Frustrating Stuff

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas and Nice White Parents by the Serial podcasting crew both get at the same frustrating theme: even people who espouse progress and change may also be perpetuating a beneficial status quo.

Giridharadas exposes the truth of MarketWorld. Business people use corporations to exploit workers and the environment and the law to make huge sums of money, and then-- once they have become extraordinarily rich-- these same people abrogate democracy and construct win-win business-oriented solutions to the very problems they have relied on for their success. 

It's not a fun read. The system is skewed, corrupt, and weighted impossibly in favor of the wealthy. Money can even bend ideas. Public intellectuals become thought leaders.

I think the only answer is unions. Workers need more power, not the well-meaning philanthropy of people interested in preserving the same systems that got them all their money and power. 

If you don't feel like reading the book, watch the "Why Billionaires Won't Save Us" episode of Hassan Minaj's excellent show Patriot Act. I can't embed it because it's from Netflix, but here's Giridharadas on The Daily.

The new podcast Nice White Parents treads similar ground. It's tracing segregation and diversity in New York Public Schools all the way back to the 1950s. Again, the liberal white parents of NYC talk a good game about progress, de-segregation, and change, but when it comes down to it they want to preserve the system. They're not ready to sacrifice their kids' education for their ideals. 

This makes sense. It's hard to change the system where you have succeeded. Frustrating stuff, if you're on the other side.

How Much Would You Pay NOT to Live in 1989?

I highly recommend The Indicator, a very short podcast that tells compelling economic stories, and this recent episode (Internet a la Carte) about a white paper (Using Massive Online Choice Experiments to Measure Changes in Well-being) that attempts to measure how people value free services on the internet is typical of the show-- it's a fascinating premise: asking people how much they would pay yearly not use a particular internet service and using this data to value the services-- but it also seems that the numbers are somehow skewed; Cardiff Garcia and Stacey Vanek Smith discuss this for a moment, but then the rest of the thinking is up to you . . . there is  definitely something weird about the median values and how much time people spend on each service . . . it seems as if social media is undervalued, especially since the companies that provide these services are worth so much money, but perhaps social media is just a guilty pleasure and could easily be replaced by disco dancing, roller-blading, duck-pin bowling, gin, or latch-hook . . . anyway, these are the numbers-- they are strange but interesting, especially since if you paid for all of these services, you'd be out quite a bit of cash:

1) All Search Engines $17, 500

2) All Email  $8,5 00

3) All Maps  $3, 500

4) All Video  $1,100

5) All E-Commerce  $850

6) All Social Media  $322.

The Upside of Genocide

Sentence of Dave does not endorse the act of genocide (although Dave occasionally endorses arachnicide, particularly in the film Starship Troopers) but that doesn't mean that the aftermath of a murderous apocalypse can't have some benefits; in Rwanda, after Hutu extremists slaughtered more than a million people (mainly Tutsis) in 100 days, there weren't many men to be found-- the population was now skewed to 70% women, and so while a typical feminist movement takes time, and goes from Rosie the Riveter to Gloria Steinem to Hillary Clinton, in Rwanda, things moved at a breakneck pace and women's participation in the legislature is mandated; the result is that Rwanda is the only country in the world where more women than men serve as elected officials . . . and this doesn't make everything perfect for women, while they've moved into many typically male professions, they still suffer discrimination at home-- but this may be a last ditch effort for men to preserve traditions that are on the way out (e.g. Donald Trump) and once women enjoy a few generations of economic success and political clout, even those rather sexist Rwandan norms will erode; for more on this topic (and theme) and a compelling story about an all girl Rwandan debate team, listen to Invisibilia: Outside In.

Does the PARCC Make Students Puke?

While the PARCC test itself doesn't seem to be too grueling for students (although some kids have been "clicking through" and others have been "napping through" and I heard rumors that one kid wrote his essay in French and another wrote the lyrics to "Bohemian Rhapsody") the actual administering of the test has been a logistical nightmare for my high school-- you've got kids coming and going at all times of day, classes that start with eight kids and then kids return two at a time until you've got a room full of thirty, classes divided by the kids taking the PARCC, the kids opting out, and the kids who don't have to take it because it's not their day-- teachers aren't supposed to give quizzes or tests for the two weeks of testing and then try to "spiral back" over curriculum that test-taking kids missed -- and this could be anyone because there aren't enough computers to administer all the tests at once, so some kids take it in the AM and some kids take it in the PM, sophomores take it one day, and juniors another, and all the different math levels take different tests, many teachers (including myself) have to proctor at times when they normally grade or plan, and many teachers (including myself) have their classrooms changed for the duration of the test, so kids are wandering all over the school, trying to find their classes . . . the loss of instructional time is enormous, everyone-- teachers, students, and administrators-- has been completely disrupted by this thing, so unless the inherent value in taking the test and the data collected from the test (which is getting more and more skewed by the day, as smarter kids decide to opt out so they don't fall behind in their classes) so unless the experience of this test somehow proves more valuable than all the time and education lost, then I don't think it's going to last very long without some major changes (and-- perhaps because of all the anxiety and frustration produced by the major changes in schedule, there have been two hallway puking incidents during the test . . . yuck).

Together at Last: Daylight Saving Time and Skewed Data!

My zealous fans know that the only thing I love more than pontificating about skewed data is ranting about Daylight Saving Time and now-- finally!-- this Monday morning these two topics will collide in a perfect blend of peanut butter and chocolate when students across New Jersey take the PARCC test . . . some students started taking the test last week, but the snowstorm prevented them from finishing, so they will finish taking the test after "springing ahead," which is always devastating to high school students, who don't get enough sleep as it is . . . and some kids completed the test before "springing ahead" while other kids will take the entire test this week, as sleep deprived zombies . . . and while the time change won't affect elementary kids quite as much, it will affect their parents, who will be crabby and running late, and that will affect the kids . . . so Pearson either needs to find a way to correct the scores for this anomaly or --better yet-- with all the cash they rake in from their testing and data analysis, they should wage a campaign to eradicate Daylight Saving Time once and for all-- because Daylight Saving Time skews the results of the PARCC! do you hear that Pearson? your data is skewed! . . . this is not a threat, it's the truth-- so get rid of Daylight Saving Time for the sake of our children (and for the sake of testing our children, and for the sake of producing reams of unskewed data about our children so we can rank and place them appropriately).

You Should Print This Out

Ferris Jabr's article "Why the Brains Prefers Paper" presents some interesting evidence as to why reading a book or magazine is better than reading on a screen; there are tactile reasons of course, and people comprehend texts better when they read them on paper (and remember more) and students suffer less eye-strain, stress, and fatigue when they take tests on paper-- as opposed to on a computer-- and they actually score better . . . so this is an interesting rebuttal to the new standardized tests students will be taking on computer this year-- in our school, kids are taking the PARCC test and they will be taking it completely on computer, but there is also a paper-and-pencil version of the test . . . so I wonder if the results between the two mediums will skew the data . . . I certainly hope so, as there's nothing I enjoy more than skewed data (except Campbell's Law . . . which often leads to skewed data).

My Team Is Losing . . .

In Hanna Rosin's new book The End of Men and the Rise of Women, she uses the stark contrast between how her son and how her daughter get organized for school as the anecdote that illustrates her copious statistics . . . girls are far more equipped to handle the rigors of modern education than boys, and so while her daughter makes to-do lists for tasks that lie weeks in the future, Rosin is doing everything in her power "not to become her son's secretary," and this dichotomy now continues from elementary school right through college, where women outnumber men on almost every campus and certain elite schools are practicing "affirmative action" for the boys, so that the male/female ratio doesn't get incredibly skewed (and I can already see this trend in my own house -- I have two boys-- and the rule is that "the homework isn't done until Mommy checks it" because Daddy is incompetent, overlooks things, and doesn't read directions).

Unreasonable Expectations

Though he had the best intentions, my brother set up my son Alex for much future disappointment; he gave us tickets to see the Red Bulls' home-opener and the seats were in the sixth row, on the end-line near the corner flag, so it was hard to see diagonally across the entire field, but it was a great view of the goal . . . and I warned my son-- who is eight and doesn't usually have the attention span to watch sports for very long-- that you have to pay close attention to a soccer game or you might miss the only goal . . . and then the game began and the Red Bulls scored two goals in the first six minutes, right in front of us . . . it was wonderful and spectacular, we got to see Thierry Henry score and assist, and this kept my son riveted to the game (despite the fact that it got quite slow-- when you take a 2-0 lead that quickly, then you just sink back and knock it around) but in the second half we also got to see Colorado score an excellent goal in front of us as well . . . and while this was a superb first professional sporting event for my, son I think he now has a skewed and unrealistic view of soccer, and doesn't realize just how slow-paced and boring the game can be; I will have to take him again to set things straight in his mind (this brings to mind my first Yankee game . . . or games, as my father thought I would enjoy a double-header, but I think my attention span was exhausted by the end of batting practice, which made for a long afternoon).