The Underground Grammarian describes crackpot schemes to improve readings scores:

Like all cockeyed social notions, the plain English movement invites us to look around and see who's going to make a profit from it. A paranoid observer might think to detect a massive conspiracy. And here's how it goes: First we start providing the schools with lots of taxpayers' money to support research into quaint and curious innovations in teaching children how to read. This results in some extraordinary gimmick, and a very profitable one, not only for some professionals of education who are paid to cook it up but especially for that massive educational-industrial complex that makes and sells at high prices books and flash cards and sets of gadgets to go with every new fad. These people, of course, would like to see as many new fads as possible, because each one makes all the old stuff obsolete. What the gimmick is, is not important; for a while, and in some schools still, it was the weird notion that reading would be better taught without reference to the sounds of letters but rather through identifying whole words as symbols of something. The latest gimmick seems to be speed reading, which will make it possible, at a stiff price, to read a complete gothic romance in three minutes and forty seconds, thus ensuring a steady market for gothic romances. A well-trained keypunch operator could go through sixteen of them on her lunch hour, provided of course that she ate something like a sandwich or a slice of pizza. Speed reading does require the use of at least one hand.

Let the gimmick be whatever it is. Think of your own, if you need an example, something like printing vowels in different colors or providing new and tricky shapes for certain letters. These, of course, have been done, so you’ll have to stretch a bit; and, when you do come up with something that seems unspeakably zany, keep your mouth shut. If you mention it in public, it won't be long before someone offers to fund it. It's best to avoid offering the occasion for sin. But enough. Let's say we have a gimmick.

Now we experiment, being careful to use methods and controls that would make a first-year chemistry student blush and stating the problems and the expected results (those we call "outcomes") in the silliest possible jargon. Don't worry, we'll "prove" the efficacy of our gimmick (remember the new math?). As a result, or outcome, although we'd rather not use that word in the singular, more and more students in the public schools will read less and less.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that this means that our gimmick has failed. Pay attention. This means that the gimmick has succeeded. Remember, we have taken the role of dentists handing out lollipops to ensure that there will be no falling off of customers. Now that things are worse than ever, we view with alarm the "reading problem" in the schools. It's time for a new round of grants, projects, experimental proposals, expensive consultants, packets of materials, instruction booklets, sets of visual aids, more teachers, carpeted classrooms, air conditioning, just about anything you can imagine. It's all good for the education business, and if it seems to have been exaggerated, just you go footing around yourself and find anybody anywhere who proposes that we can teach reading (or anything else) better by spending less money.

The problem is not only researchers doing silly studies with negative results. The real problem is that any zany reading-improvement scheme is likely to work initially. The teachers who pick up a new scheme are the most likely to be dedicated, caring teachers who want to find a way to make their students read better. The extra attention from the teacher is likely to improve the students reading skills. The student is likely to be aware that something unusual is going on and may try harder. At least, the student will benefit from a temporary increase in attention because something new, wierd, different is being tried.

This extends to other learning of course (math, writing, history or whatever) and beyond. Zany schemes arise frequently in software management to improve software quality or programmer productivity. After discussing "Extreme Programming. one day, Ekr suggested "Butthole Programming". A practitioner of Butthole Programming (BP) may only write code when one thumb is shoved up his butthole. BP improves code quality because with only one hand on the keyboard, the BP practitioner can't write as much code. As we know, more code means more bugs. Therefore, BP means less bugs.

I wish I could recall where I read recently that many productivity studies in many industries suffer from the problem that the productivity increase is often the result of the study being done, not the new technique. Workers who are in the midst of being studied while performing a new technique just tend to do better overall, unless the new technique is truly a bad idea.

I went to a very small school in rural Ontario for grades 6 through 8. There were only eight girls in my class and sixteen boys. Most of the kids were white, rural Ontario natives, living in small towns or on farms. There were four who stood out in my class as being possibly wierd, to my memory. The first was a Jehovah's Witness and he was required to sit out during music class and participate less in activities relating to Christmas and Easter. Then there was Wilma, an old-order Mennonite, who had to wear a dress every day, even during gym class when she wore shorts underneath her small-print floral dress and ran fiercely around the field hockey field wielding that curved hardwood stick like a weapon. I was quite odd too -- I don't think there were any other kids from a different province who were bookworms and atheists. I "talked funny", "like a dictionary". Finally, there was Corey, the black kid, the only kid who routinely got better marks than me in class. He stood out more because he was at the top of the class than because he was black. Although he was the only non-white kid, Corey was in many ways perfectly normal. He was certainly better integrated into the classroom social structure than I was, or than that poor Jehovah's Witness.

I've been thinking about Corey lately because I just finished reading "Losing The Race" by John McWhorter. This book discusses the black American cultural distrust or emotional distance from reading books and enjoying intellectual activity and achievement. Black kids apparently may get teased for "acting white" if they enjoy books or intellectual pursuits. It's a well-written book that focuses on reasoned arguments, and I enjoyed it. In this entry, I'm not so much making a comment on the book as riffing off the thoughts it triggered.

"Losing the Race" made me wonder how much different Corey's experience would have been had he grown up in the US, instead of Canada. He was adopted by white parents (who had two of their own kids, plus three other adopted kids of various shades) who clearly valued education, but what would have happened had he been immersed in American black youth culture? I'd like to think he would have excelled anyway. He was motivated (which I wasn't during those years, at least not motivated enough to actually work to get A+ grades since I was getting A grades without trying). He was proud of his intellectual achievement, and perhaps a little jealous of his status. As an interloper, an outsider, a loser who yet constantly threatened his previously undisputed top-of-the-class position, I suspect Corey didn't like me. That's too bad, because I always kind of liked him, and wish I knew what he's doing now. I thought we might have something in common that I didn't find in any other kid in my class -- certainly not my best friend, Jenny. Although Jenny was terrific and I needed her social skills advice desperately, in our graduation speeches (we each wrote a speech about a classmate) she claimed she liked me even though I read encyclopias. That wasn't true, by the way -- I merely consulted encyclopedias, and browsed them from time to time. Heh.

That school had caring and dedicated white teachers, both male and female. There was one main teacher for each of the four grades. I remember Mrs. Rose Marigold, the fifth-grade teacher, pink and fluffy-haired and maternal. Mr. Wilson was the sixth-grade teacher who was wierd and threatening, but he took us all on a riverside night-time hike and mass sleepover associated with reading Tom Sawyer, which was way cool. I remember the music teacher, who was an erratic and shrill disciplinarian but truly loved music and dragged the entire school through a full musical production every year. The eight-grade teacher Mr. Siddall was the coolest because he treated the eighth graders almost as adults, or so we felt, which combined with being the oldest in the school, meant that eighth-graders ruled. There were a few other teachers but remember this was a very small school. Despite that, we had a fair number of activities: basketball and volleyball teams which competed against other local schools, an arts publication that I wrote a couple stories for and drew a couple pictures for, and the yearly musicals. There was a bare idea of both remedial and enrichment classes in this school, I can recall once or twice going to talk to somebody who was supposed to provide enrichment services for our school as well as several others but it was really rather useless. The only student in my class who was involved in notably enriching activities was Corey. In eighth grade he took ninth-grade math to get a leg up on high school the following year. We both however competed in the province-wide yearly math contests for top math students, where I probably did better than him.

Many things changed the following year when we all got bussed to the township high school. Now there were over a thousand students in grades nine through "OAC" year (equivalent to a thirteenth grade, a now-defunct extra year of high school unique to Ontario -- stands for Ontario Academic Credit and supposedly prepares students for university). Now my poor social skills really crippled me, because the students in the smaller school had truly been kind and tolerant. Maybe the class was just too small for anybody to tolerate actual meanness. In high school however, with many more students, particularly thirteen-year olds in the throes of teenage crises, anxious to establish their roles in a much bigger social environment, I experienced real cruelty. (Wilma and the Jehovah's Witness did not come to high school. Wilma had to quit school altogether due to her Mennonite church rules.) Corey did not, I believe, experience cruelty (although nor did he perpetrate it).

Interestingly, both Corey and I were relatively short yet capable basketball players, at least capable enough to make the school teams. We both had no fear, dribbling the ball right under the tall guards and getting bruises as those kids came down from the rebound with their elbows out and into our faces. We both continued to get high grades, although Corey now savvily downplayed this. He made his way into the truly popular crowd. I made friends with Nathan (where are you, Nathan?) who was as geeky and excluded as me but shared a love of science fiction. I also made friends among a group of serious Christians who found me, again, odd (atheist) yet acceptable, and they even gave up on trying to convert me. I guess I benefitted from some of the high moral standards inculcated in these exceedingly Christian student group members, although I recall their high moral standards and spirit of acceptance didn't extend to gays. We knew one likely homosexual teen from another high school -- one of these extremely Christian kids declared he wouldn't let that homo into his house and another was sure his parents wouldn't either. So real social exclusion was for geeks, like me, despite the cachet of making the basketball team, and gays.

I was the only girl in the computer science class in grade ten, moreover I was taking it a year early. The teacher was a gentle intelligent Indian (from India, not native). He bemusedly recognized that I was the best programmer in the class by far, getting me involved in programming competitions and extracurricular projects. He also recognized that as the only girl in the class I was a serious distraction, when I finished the hour's work in the first 20 minutes and then hung around chatting with whoever else wasn't programming. "Lisa, why don't you let the guys get back to work?" I guess when there are no other females around at all, and when the popular kids aren't there to see you do it, it's OK to talk to the geek girl. I had my first taste of socio-sexual power in grade ten, when I was fifteen. OK, so "socio-sexual power" is vastly overstating it. I got the second-highest score in the year's math competition in the entire county. The awards ceremony was an evening affair with dinner in Waterloo. I was sick and tired of being "the geek" but didn't know how to break out of the pigeonhole I found myself in, so I considered not going. Instead, my mom advised me to wear a low-necked top and short skirt. I remember exactly how the top and skirt looked because that evening I received the first positive attention ever -- from seventeen year old boys, no less! It was just me and a couple guys having a mature conversation, with them appearing interested in what I was saying and showing approval in their smiles and genial tones, but this was entirely new for me -- the first time that attention was paid by boys to me at the same time that other girls (even geekier!) were present. The popular girls and boys had been flirting for years, but not me. This evening clearly made a big impression on me -- for the next few years I still achieved high grades in school, but now I also cultivated short skirts (previously non-existent in my wardrobe which consisted mostly of corduroy pants) and low-necked or tight shirts. This didn't change my popularity at my high school but it worked somewhat with people who didn't have pre-conceived notions of me.

Back to Corey. Although I now never interacted with him, and we probably didn't have many classes together, it was impossible to ignore him. In grade twelve he ran for student body president. His campaign was supported by many and it was really clever. He was still the only black student in the entire grade, and at times the only black kid in school. In this nearly uniformly white atmosphere, he appropriated the slogans of black civil rights activists: huge dramatic posters with "Black is Back" and "Black Power" were strung in our hallways and cafeteria. I believe most high school students had no awareness of the symbology behind these slogans. It was simply a campaign to remind everybody that Corey was the obvious, best candidate for the job, so obviously it didn't need to be stated explicitly -- and as a reminder that he was cooler than anybody, since coolness was the real winning characteristic in high school elections. When the election finally came, it was no contest -- he won handily.

So what am I saying? I guess I'm saying a certain level of discrimination is normal. Kids just do it to certain other kids. I minded at the time, I don't now. I found more of "my own kind" eventually, in youth orchestra, then in university. It's one of the challenges we might have to face. What Corey did with his high school life was good - whatever challenges he faced, though they weren't the same ones I faced, I know all teens find the teen years difficult. He succeeded in school and on the basketball team, developed leadership skills and went on to university. In the meantime he wasn't cruel, at least not to me. What you start with matters, and so does what you're given, but what you do with your life matters so much more.

The message in this comic (where an Indian programmer, I think, educates a dumb white American sales guy) passes for enlightened. But it's simply not true that globalization lowers the standard of living for Americans while raising it for less prosperous countries. The most common outcome of any specific example of globalization (e.g. reducing garment import taxes decreases consumption of US-made garments) is for a small set of US workers to lose their jobs or change jobs, while every US consumer benefits from lower costs of goods. Lower costs of goods is generally understood as an increase in standard of living.

I'm morally opposed to the bumper stickers police fundraisers hand out when people donate. These bumper stickers say something simple along the lines of "I support North Podunk Police". This is purely concern for the police officer on the street, of course. When I'm pulled over by a police officer for speeding (or, as last time, having one broken brake light), I would hate for that officer to suffer from any conflicting feelings by noticing that I donate to his pension fund.

This seems like a fascinating conference (link via Ole).

I've only started hearing about commercial establishments that ban photography recently. Apparently Starbucks does so (Instapundit mentions this and Lessig suggests the obvious counter-attack, and a long discussion can be found here) but I noticed Macy's forbids photographs too. Oddly enough I went into Macy's several weeks back to try on dresses for the Black and White Ball. I had my friend Brian take about 20 leisurely digital photos of me with different dresses on (so my boyfriend could check out the dresses without coming all the way into San Francisco -- I fully intended to buy a dress from Macy's if I chose one from Macy's, but I didn't, I bought a dress from a boutique). On my next visit to a Macy's I then noticed the "no photography" sign at the street entrance. Since it was two different Macy's they might have different policies. I wonder how long this policy has been there, and how cheap digital photography affects it one way or another?

After a bit of search, Comments on Lessig's blog point to many, many other commercial spaces banning photography:

• Fry's Electronics
• Lenox Square in Atlanta and other unnamed malls
• a camera store(!)
• Toys R Us
• McDonalds
• Harrod's
• "any mom & pop fish or vegetable market in San Francisco's Chinatown"
• Crate and Barrel
• Apple retail stores
• Giant Foods Grocery
• In N Out burger

In addition there were some governmental locations mentioned (NY subway, a state government building, many museums). And, no surprise, strip clubs ban photography. But Starbucks is the one that has bloggers up in arms! There's a downloadable "Photographer's Rights" flyer that relates to this issue.

I agree with so much of this, from Colby Cosh from May 27:

How are markets like science? Science existed for a good long while before, at some point, science became an object of study in itself, resulting in a "revolution" within Western civilization. People became aware of the power and methodology of science more or less simultaneously. Markets, similarly, have always existed, but only recently became an object of study. Adam Smith was the Francis Bacon of markets. The Market-istic Revolution is still ongoing, and it is as important as the Scientific Revolution. There are a lot of people who still don't, and won't, get that. I believe that, at some future time, the authority or credibility of the market as a means of organizing a certain kind of social activity will be taken for granted, much as science's authority or credibility is now taken for granted by those hostile to it. Science is bogusly criticized for not being able to arrive at all possible truths--deemed useless or inferior (or challenged as a quasi-religion) because it is, at any given stage of history, incomplete or imperfect. Similarly, because there are some kinds of social ordering which the market cannot handle, it is sometimes written off (and very often as a quasi-religion) on similar grounds. We will one day--I am certain of this--feel the need to teach economics as a basic subject in schools, as we now teach science.

Colby thinks that's obvious, but I'd have to say only to people who think similarly. There exist a number of people who refuse to treat economics with anything like the seriousness they afford to science (and you rarely find the other way around).

An article I wrote has been published in Czechoslovakia, under the name Lisa Dusseaultova. Sorry it's just an image, not the article -- Xythos developers in Brno scanned this in for me.

From Kunstler's online memoirs:

The main difference between the person I was before and the one I became after is that I came to understand how much I was responsible for what happened to me in all aspects of my life, and responsible too for how I felt about what happened to me. In fact, I learned that mostly things don't just happen to us. We make choices to act, or to not act, and that makes all the difference in the world. Here you are in the world. What will you do?

Lileks reviews Lifeforce today:

I have a crick in my neck from ducking the chunks it blew.

Yet it's a long funny review -- sometimes the worst movies are the best for a rant. See also Ekr's review of Shaolin Drunken Monk if you haven't already.

An unlikely event like this (link via Sullivan) makes you wonder if our probability estimates are wrong. Then again, given enough chances, unlikely events are eventually likely to happen.

From Ask Cecil:

The rear wall ... is parabolic in cross section when viewed from above, and the porcelain finish is conducive to laminar flow. The principles of fluid dynamics tell us that a fluid striking a smooth surface at an oblique angle will tend to flow along that surface. Assuming the source of the fluid is near the focal point of the parabola... the fluid will run straight down the wall with little or no splashing.

He is, of course, discussing a urinal, in response to a question about where to aim. I'm glad to hear that considerable Science goes into the design of these. I only wish equivalent Science went into making sure that toilets flushed reliably, but judging by the homes I've lived in, that isn't yet entirely successful.

Mark Steyn, interviewed on Enter Stage Right, illustrates Canadian anti-Americanism:

The other day The Ottawa Citizen had a letter from a Vancouver lady objecting to any Canadian participation in continental missile defence on the grounds that an intercepted nuke could wind up scattering contaminated debris over the Canadian countryside. The logic of her position is that she'd rather that nuke continued on its way over the border and took out Dallas or St Louis. Say what you like, but that 's consistent.

And Natalie Solent fights UK anti-Americanism, pointing out that the British Margaret Drabble's hatred of airplanes painted with vicious faces doesn't justify the feelings it aroused given the RAF has also followed that practice.

Today I've been following links to blogs I don't usually visit (in between working). The Agora caught my attention due to the sentence

Palin is to educational TV what Jean Sebelius is to 20th Century classical music: an unlikly person to take a form that has failed to live up to its seemingly infinite potential, and astound you with a presentation of a vast subject in a simple and intimatly human performance.

I feel compelled to pay attention to the aesthetic opinions of a man who can make that kind of comparison.

More non-serious stuff: Psycho Kittens. These made me laugh so hard tears came out of my eyes. I'm still giggling remembering them.

A link containing Science for Terence and Ekr.

The US government has now increased its official estimate of the oil reserves in Alberta. (Link via Colby Cosh)

At a briefing on this year's EIA International Energy Outlook, EIA Administrator Guy Caruso ... raised Canada's proven oil reserves to 180 billion bbls from 4.9 billion bbls, thanks to inclusion of the oil sands - also known as tar sands - now considered recoverable with existing technology and market conditions.

My dad has had a little to do with this recent technology. This is a perfect example of what I've discussed before (unfortunately links back to this blog archive are not working).

The Remote Fart Machine. Link courtesy Ami Simms.

Ekr and I have discovered a simple new toy recently: MegaMagz or GeoMags. They're clearly fun for adults, to the point where he and I fought over them one evening soon after getting a small set. Adults can figure out how to make hinges or rotational joints, maximizing the magnetic attraction by the careful arrangement of the balls and bars in certain alignments, maximizing rotational momentum and so on. Yet they're also fun for kids below the suggested lower end of the age range. We gave a set to a 3-year old on his birthday and he immediately constructed a stick out of several short bars, then discovered that his magnetic stick was able to pick up a ball bearing just by getting near it. He named this his "finder stick" and started rolling the steel bearings under the couch so he could then stick his "finder stick" in there to retrieve them. Last week we gave a set to a 4-year old for her birthday and now her mother tells me:

[She] has suddenly discovered that magnets can not only stick things together, but can attract and repel each other. She's been walking around with pieces of the magnetics set you gave her, building things and showing everyone how it works, for a day and a half.

I guess the age ranges they put on toy boxes are completely arbitrary. Sure a three year old can swallow a ball bearing -- but they can also get into far more dangerous stuff. Better just to teach them judgement and motor control by that age and then deal with the occasional mishap (like when I was three and I stuck a bean up my nose and couldn't get it out) with as much calm as you can muster. Somebody on Epinions has similarly ignored the age recommendations -- she recommends Magz and talks about how her four-year-old plays with them.

In a lovely essay on being persecuted by the number 7 (link via Colby Cosh), George Miller presents (among other things) the concept of recoding to remember more stuff. There are some nice illustrations of how this works:

It is a little dramatic to watch a person get 40 binary digits in a row and then repeat them back without error. However, if you think of this merely as a mnemonic trick for extending the memory span, you will miss the more important point that is implicit in nearly all such mnemonic devices. The point is that recoding is an extremely powerful weapon for increasing the amount of information that we can deal with. In one form or another we use recoding constantly in our daily behavior.