Friday, August 26, 2011
Education lies
In a 2005 report, the Duke researchers concluded that the United States produced 137,437 engineers with at least a bachelor's degree in the most recent year, while India produced 112,000 and China 351,537. "That's more U.S. degrees per million residents than in either other nation," Bracey said in The Washington Post. Yet he found the discredited numbers still presented as fact by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, Secretary of Commerce Carlos M. Gutierrez, and Senator John W. Warner (R.-Va.).
Menacing
This week, a San Francisco high school teacher in the Sunset District called police to intervene in a dispute with a student, who "became belligerent and took a fighting stance" after he was told to pull up his pants, according to the San Francisco Examiner.
Thugs
Saggy Pants Prompt Teacher to Call Police
By Chris Roberts| Friday, Aug 26, 2011 | Updated 8:19 AM PDT
The saggy pants saga knows no bounds in San Francisco -- and, apparently, has yet to end.
This week, a San Francisco high school teacher in the Sunset District called police to intervene in a dispute with a student, who "became belligerent and took a fighting stance" after he was told to pull up his pants, according to the San Francisco Examiner.
Police responded to the 2100 block of 24th Avenue at 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday. San Francisco Unified School District's Lincoln High School is nearby. Lincoln High is the alma mater of Deshon Marman, who catapulted to national attention in June when he was kicked off of a US Airways flight at San Francisco International Airport for allegedly failing to follow flight crews' instructions to pull up his pants.
Marman was arrested, but was not charged with a crime after the national outcry. He has sued the airline, which has failed to apologize, and which allowed another passenger, a white male, to fly wearing purple lingerie. Marman, a student and football player at the University of New Mexico, is black.
In this latest instance, San Francisco police took no action, according to the newspaper. No further information is available.
Copyright NBC Owned Television Stations
By Chris Roberts| Friday, Aug 26, 2011 | Updated 8:19 AM PDT
The saggy pants saga knows no bounds in San Francisco -- and, apparently, has yet to end.
This week, a San Francisco high school teacher in the Sunset District called police to intervene in a dispute with a student, who "became belligerent and took a fighting stance" after he was told to pull up his pants, according to the San Francisco Examiner.
Police responded to the 2100 block of 24th Avenue at 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday. San Francisco Unified School District's Lincoln High School is nearby. Lincoln High is the alma mater of Deshon Marman, who catapulted to national attention in June when he was kicked off of a US Airways flight at San Francisco International Airport for allegedly failing to follow flight crews' instructions to pull up his pants.
Marman was arrested, but was not charged with a crime after the national outcry. He has sued the airline, which has failed to apologize, and which allowed another passenger, a white male, to fly wearing purple lingerie. Marman, a student and football player at the University of New Mexico, is black.
In this latest instance, San Francisco police took no action, according to the newspaper. No further information is available.
Copyright NBC Owned Television Stations
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Wilson quarterly
Bad rap on the schools: bad schools are not going to sink the American economic. Despite what the headlines say, U.S. students fare well in international comparisons. It's the schools serving the poor that demand our attention.
The Wilson Quarterly Spring , 2008
OH, LOOK. THERE'S A NEW FILM THAT PORTRAYS American teenagers as distracted slackers who don't stand a chance against the zealous young strivers in China and India. It must be an election year, when American politicians, egged on by corporate leaders, suddenly become indignant about the state of America's public schools. If we don't do something, they thunder, our children will wind up working as bellhops in resorts owned by those Asian go-getters.
The one-hour documentary, conceived and financed by Robert A. Compton, a high-tech entrepreneur, follows two teenagers in Carmel, Indiana, as they sporadically apply themselves to their studies in their spare time between afterschool jobs and sports. The film, called Two Million Minutes, cuts to similar pairs of high schoolers in India and China who do little but attend classes, labor over homework, and work with their tutors. Two Million Minutes has become a key part of the ED in '08 campaign, a $60 million effort by Bill Gates and other wealthy worriers to convince the presidential candidates to get serious about fixing our schools.
Most of the time, I cheer such well-intentioned and powerful promoters of academic achievement. I have been writing about the lack of challenge in American high schools for 25 years. It astonishes me that we treat many high schoolers as if they were intellectual infants, actively discouraging them from taking the college-level Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses that would prepare them for higher education and add some challenge to their bland high school curricula. I share what I imagine is Bill Gates's distress at seeing Carmel High's Brittany Brechbuhl watching Grey's Anatomy on television with her friends while they make half-hearted stabs at their math homework.
Yet it is one thing to say that teenagers don't devote enough time to their studies and another to claim that American schools have fallen behind those in the rest of the world, crippling U.S. economic competitiveness. That is the argument of Two Million Minutes and a good number of very intelligent people, such as former IBM chief Louis V. Gerstner Jr., New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, and former Colorado governor and Los Angeles school superintendent Roy Romer. Their misunderstanding is based on some truths: U.S. businesses are having trouble hiring skilled people and must often go abroad to find more. American high schools have, on average, shown no significant improvement in math and reading in the last 30 years. But the larger truth is that American education is vastly superior to the stunted, impoverished school systems of China and India, which, despite impressive surges of economic growth, are still relatively poor, developing countries.
Making voters angry about education by citing foreign threats is certainly one way to focus attention on the schools, but the flimsy argument is sure to collapse as intelligent people discover the holes in it. It would be better if those of us who want to improve the schools went into this debate armed with the most potent argument: More than 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education (1954), we still have separate and unequal education.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Our best public schools are first-rate, producing more intense, involved, and creative A-plus students than our most prestigious colleges have room for. That is why less-known institutions such as Claremont McKenna, Rhodes, and Hampshire are drawing many freshmen just as smart as the ones at Princeton. The top 70 percent of U.S. public high schools are pretty good, certainly better than they have ever been, thanks to a growing movement to offer Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses.
Our real problem is the bottom 30 percent of U.S. schools, those in urban and rural communities full of low-income children. We have seen enough successful schools in such areas to know that many of those children are just as capable of being great scientists, doctors, and executives as suburban children are. But most low-income schools in the United States are simply bad. Not only are we denying the children who attend them the equal education that is their right, but we are squandering almost a third of our intellectual capital. We are beating the world economically, but with one hand tied behind our back.
As even some of the experts who appear in Two Million Minutes note, the notion that the United States is losing the international economic race is implausible. China and India may be growing quickly, but they remain far behind and are weighed down by huge, impoverished rural populations. Both countries are going to continue to send many of their brightest young people to study at U.S. universities. Stupidly conceived and administered immigration laws give many of these foreign students little choice but to leave once they receive their degrees. Given the chance, many more are likely to stay in the United States, where the jobs pay better; creativity in all fields, including politics, is encouraged; and--another blow to education critics--the colleges their children would attend are far better and more accessible.
Most commentary on the subject leaves the impression that China and India are going to bury the United States in an avalanche of new technology. Consider, for example, a much-cited 2005 Fortune article that included the claim that China turned out 600,000 engineers in the previous year, India graduated 350,000, and poor, declining America could manage only 70,000. The cover of Fortune showed a buff Chinese beach bully looming over a skinny Uncle Sam. The headline said, "Is the U.S. a 97-Pound Weakling?"
This argument became a favorite target for collectors of bad data, including Carl Bialik, The Wall Street Journal's "Numbers Guy," educational psychologist and author Gerald W. Bracey, and a Duke University research team led by Vivek Wadhwa. The source of the China numbers seemed to be the China Statistical Yearbook, a Chinese government publication, which said that the country produced 644,000 engineering graduates in 2004. But a subsequent McKinsey Global Institute report said that about half of those "engineers" would be no more than technicians in the United States. Bialik could not find a source for the 350,000 Indian engineers, but National Science Foundation officials told him that the real number was unlikely to be anywhere near that.
In a 2005 report, the Duke researchers concluded that the United States produced 137,437 engineers with at least a bachelor's degree in the most recent year, while India produced 112,000 and China 351,537. "That's more U.S. degrees per million residents than in either other nation," Bracey said in The Washington Post. Yet he found the discredited numbers still presented as fact by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, Secretary of Commerce Carlos M. Gutierrez, and Senator John W. Warner (R.-Va.).
The Fortune article belongs to an emerging genre of news stories that raise hysterical alarms about the deficiencies of American education in international comparisons while completely overlooking the complexities involved in such studies.
In "More Than a Horse Race" (2007), Jim Hull, a policy analyst at the Center for Public Education, which is affiliated with the National School Boards Association, analyzed four major studies of school achievement around the world. When Hull looked carefully at the numbers, he found that the United States did much better than the headlines suggest. In reading, only three nations' students did significantly better than their U.S. elementary and high school counterparts. "The reading performance of U.S. fourth graders was particularly strong," Hull said. "They scored above the international level ... while our 15-year-olds scored slightly above the average." In science, fourth and eighth graders were above the international average, and only three countries did significantly better than the United States at the elementary school level. (It is worth noting that the studies Hull examined did not include India and China, in part because schooling is so minimal for so many children in these two countries that their performance isn't comparable.)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Hull also examined the frequent charge that American students fare well in international comparisons at earlier ages but fade as they enter their teen years. Some studies did show U.S. fourth graders doing relatively well, eighth graders about average, and high school students below average. But when the American Institutes of Research, a Washington-based think tank, did a more careful, apples-to-apples comparison, making sure the students were actually at the same grade level, those differences disappeared.
Bracey has detected the precise flaws that warp international comparisons. The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS) of 1999, for instance, seemed to show that American high school students were far behind in advanced math. But the alarming news accounts that followed the study's release--and the politicians who echoed them--failed to note an important caveat. A significant portion of the U.S. test takers, unlike the overseas students, had not yet gotten beyond precalculus. The U.S. TIMMS administrators included those students in their sample because, one told Bracey, "we just wanted to see how they'd do." They had not concerned themselves with how the results might look in the newspapers. When the TIMMS experts later reanalyzed the data, comparing overseas students only to American high schoolers who had taken Advanced Placement calculus, the United States did much better. That news, however, wasn't widely reported.
Bracey found other differences that distorted international comparisons. In Europe, many teenagers who hold jobs are tracked into nonacademic schools, but American youngsters commonly combine traditional school and work. Bracey noticed that 55 percent of the Americans tested in the TIMMS study reported working more than 20 hours a week, the point at which, research shows, after-school jobs begin to hurt academic performance. Few European students seem to devote as much time to after-school jobs. In Sweden, the only country for which Bracey found hard data, only 16 percent of students worked more than 20 hours per week.
There is, in any event, scant evidence that test scores have much to do with national economic performance. In the late 1980s, when Japan still seemed on its way to becoming the world's economic superpower, U.S. newspapers published glowing stories about the lofty test scores achieved by Japanese students and suggested that failures of American public education had helped bring on bad times in the United States. By 1998, despite the lack of any significant change in math and reading scores, the U.S. economy was back on top. The Japanese still had good schools, but the bottom had dropped out of their economy (which still hasn't fully recovered). No story.
Robert J. Samuelson, a columnist for Newsweek and The Washington Post, analyzed the disconnect between test scores and economic growth in a column reprinted in his 2001 book, Untruth: Why the Conventional Wisdom Is (Almost Always) Wrong. Samuelson told of the computer guru at Newsweek's Washington bureau who had an English degree but found, through a series of jobs that taught him new skills, that he had become a technological expert indispensable to Samuelson and his colleagues. "People don't learn only at school," Samuelson concluded. "If they did, we'd be doomed. In isolation, test scores hardly count. What counts--for the economy, at least--is what people do at work.... On the job, people learn from supervisors, mentors, coworkers, customers and-most important--experience. One Labor Department study estimates that about 70 percent of training in the workplace is informal. Culturally, this is America's strong suit." What keeps the American economy so productive, Samuelson said, is its flexibility. American companies "have more freedom to set pay rates, hire and fire, and alter work practices."
Other countries have job training too. The Germans are praised for bringing teenagers to a technical level that makes them valuable in the workplace right after high school. But the U.S. system excels all others in allowing enough freedom for people to flounder and fail and change jobs until they find the niche where their talents are put to best use. It's disorderly and unbusinesslike, but it works.
American schools have the same ability to innovate on the run, even if not as freely as one might wish, and foreign educators have begun to realize that they may have something to learn from them. Some U.S. schools now regularly host visiting educators from China, Singapore, and Japan, who want to know how American teachers are able to produce such creative students. They have noticed that American schools produce Nobel Prize winners, and theirs don't. The Chinese have been particularly impressed by the fact that every Nobel laureate of Chinese descent was educated outside China.
None of this is to say that American schools don't have many flaws. But their worst failure is that they betray so many of America's talented young people. The few inner-city schools that are successfully raising the achievement levels of low-income children don't worry about beating the Chinese and the Indians. Their foes are the apathy and hopelessness that lead many young Americans, and their parents, to think they have no chance of getting to college or finding a good job. Yet the success stories show that we can provide these children the education they deserve. It takes, among other things, longer school days and more careful selection and training of teachers and principals. And it takes a commitment to deliver on the American promise of justice and equality.
The politicians and business executives who rail about foreign competition are aware of the needs of America's educationally dispossessed children, but they don't talk about them much. That wouldn't win them as much attention from the news media, and it wouldn't sell as many books. We need a Two Million Minutes that tells a different story, about students who are striving against the odds to make their way to academic success at charter schools in places such as Harlem, Anacostia, and Oakland. That would turn the debate in a more realistic direction and illuminate our real education challenge--not beating economic threats from abroad, but beating our doubts about our ability to help the American children who need it most.
JAY MATHEWS is an education reporter and columnist at The Washington Post. His latest book is Supertest: How the International Baccalaureate Can Strengthen Our Schools (2005). His next book, Teach, Baby, Teach, about the founders of the KIPP charter schools, will be published early next year.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Copyright ©2007 Goliath. All rights reserved. Terms of Use Privacy Statement Help
Best viewed with Microsoft Internet Explorer version 5.0 or higher.
The Wilson Quarterly Spring , 2008
OH, LOOK. THERE'S A NEW FILM THAT PORTRAYS American teenagers as distracted slackers who don't stand a chance against the zealous young strivers in China and India. It must be an election year, when American politicians, egged on by corporate leaders, suddenly become indignant about the state of America's public schools. If we don't do something, they thunder, our children will wind up working as bellhops in resorts owned by those Asian go-getters.
The one-hour documentary, conceived and financed by Robert A. Compton, a high-tech entrepreneur, follows two teenagers in Carmel, Indiana, as they sporadically apply themselves to their studies in their spare time between afterschool jobs and sports. The film, called Two Million Minutes, cuts to similar pairs of high schoolers in India and China who do little but attend classes, labor over homework, and work with their tutors. Two Million Minutes has become a key part of the ED in '08 campaign, a $60 million effort by Bill Gates and other wealthy worriers to convince the presidential candidates to get serious about fixing our schools.
Most of the time, I cheer such well-intentioned and powerful promoters of academic achievement. I have been writing about the lack of challenge in American high schools for 25 years. It astonishes me that we treat many high schoolers as if they were intellectual infants, actively discouraging them from taking the college-level Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses that would prepare them for higher education and add some challenge to their bland high school curricula. I share what I imagine is Bill Gates's distress at seeing Carmel High's Brittany Brechbuhl watching Grey's Anatomy on television with her friends while they make half-hearted stabs at their math homework.
Yet it is one thing to say that teenagers don't devote enough time to their studies and another to claim that American schools have fallen behind those in the rest of the world, crippling U.S. economic competitiveness. That is the argument of Two Million Minutes and a good number of very intelligent people, such as former IBM chief Louis V. Gerstner Jr., New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, and former Colorado governor and Los Angeles school superintendent Roy Romer. Their misunderstanding is based on some truths: U.S. businesses are having trouble hiring skilled people and must often go abroad to find more. American high schools have, on average, shown no significant improvement in math and reading in the last 30 years. But the larger truth is that American education is vastly superior to the stunted, impoverished school systems of China and India, which, despite impressive surges of economic growth, are still relatively poor, developing countries.
Making voters angry about education by citing foreign threats is certainly one way to focus attention on the schools, but the flimsy argument is sure to collapse as intelligent people discover the holes in it. It would be better if those of us who want to improve the schools went into this debate armed with the most potent argument: More than 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education (1954), we still have separate and unequal education.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Our best public schools are first-rate, producing more intense, involved, and creative A-plus students than our most prestigious colleges have room for. That is why less-known institutions such as Claremont McKenna, Rhodes, and Hampshire are drawing many freshmen just as smart as the ones at Princeton. The top 70 percent of U.S. public high schools are pretty good, certainly better than they have ever been, thanks to a growing movement to offer Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses.
Our real problem is the bottom 30 percent of U.S. schools, those in urban and rural communities full of low-income children. We have seen enough successful schools in such areas to know that many of those children are just as capable of being great scientists, doctors, and executives as suburban children are. But most low-income schools in the United States are simply bad. Not only are we denying the children who attend them the equal education that is their right, but we are squandering almost a third of our intellectual capital. We are beating the world economically, but with one hand tied behind our back.
As even some of the experts who appear in Two Million Minutes note, the notion that the United States is losing the international economic race is implausible. China and India may be growing quickly, but they remain far behind and are weighed down by huge, impoverished rural populations. Both countries are going to continue to send many of their brightest young people to study at U.S. universities. Stupidly conceived and administered immigration laws give many of these foreign students little choice but to leave once they receive their degrees. Given the chance, many more are likely to stay in the United States, where the jobs pay better; creativity in all fields, including politics, is encouraged; and--another blow to education critics--the colleges their children would attend are far better and more accessible.
Most commentary on the subject leaves the impression that China and India are going to bury the United States in an avalanche of new technology. Consider, for example, a much-cited 2005 Fortune article that included the claim that China turned out 600,000 engineers in the previous year, India graduated 350,000, and poor, declining America could manage only 70,000. The cover of Fortune showed a buff Chinese beach bully looming over a skinny Uncle Sam. The headline said, "Is the U.S. a 97-Pound Weakling?"
This argument became a favorite target for collectors of bad data, including Carl Bialik, The Wall Street Journal's "Numbers Guy," educational psychologist and author Gerald W. Bracey, and a Duke University research team led by Vivek Wadhwa. The source of the China numbers seemed to be the China Statistical Yearbook, a Chinese government publication, which said that the country produced 644,000 engineering graduates in 2004. But a subsequent McKinsey Global Institute report said that about half of those "engineers" would be no more than technicians in the United States. Bialik could not find a source for the 350,000 Indian engineers, but National Science Foundation officials told him that the real number was unlikely to be anywhere near that.
In a 2005 report, the Duke researchers concluded that the United States produced 137,437 engineers with at least a bachelor's degree in the most recent year, while India produced 112,000 and China 351,537. "That's more U.S. degrees per million residents than in either other nation," Bracey said in The Washington Post. Yet he found the discredited numbers still presented as fact by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, Secretary of Commerce Carlos M. Gutierrez, and Senator John W. Warner (R.-Va.).
The Fortune article belongs to an emerging genre of news stories that raise hysterical alarms about the deficiencies of American education in international comparisons while completely overlooking the complexities involved in such studies.
In "More Than a Horse Race" (2007), Jim Hull, a policy analyst at the Center for Public Education, which is affiliated with the National School Boards Association, analyzed four major studies of school achievement around the world. When Hull looked carefully at the numbers, he found that the United States did much better than the headlines suggest. In reading, only three nations' students did significantly better than their U.S. elementary and high school counterparts. "The reading performance of U.S. fourth graders was particularly strong," Hull said. "They scored above the international level ... while our 15-year-olds scored slightly above the average." In science, fourth and eighth graders were above the international average, and only three countries did significantly better than the United States at the elementary school level. (It is worth noting that the studies Hull examined did not include India and China, in part because schooling is so minimal for so many children in these two countries that their performance isn't comparable.)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Hull also examined the frequent charge that American students fare well in international comparisons at earlier ages but fade as they enter their teen years. Some studies did show U.S. fourth graders doing relatively well, eighth graders about average, and high school students below average. But when the American Institutes of Research, a Washington-based think tank, did a more careful, apples-to-apples comparison, making sure the students were actually at the same grade level, those differences disappeared.
Bracey has detected the precise flaws that warp international comparisons. The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS) of 1999, for instance, seemed to show that American high school students were far behind in advanced math. But the alarming news accounts that followed the study's release--and the politicians who echoed them--failed to note an important caveat. A significant portion of the U.S. test takers, unlike the overseas students, had not yet gotten beyond precalculus. The U.S. TIMMS administrators included those students in their sample because, one told Bracey, "we just wanted to see how they'd do." They had not concerned themselves with how the results might look in the newspapers. When the TIMMS experts later reanalyzed the data, comparing overseas students only to American high schoolers who had taken Advanced Placement calculus, the United States did much better. That news, however, wasn't widely reported.
Bracey found other differences that distorted international comparisons. In Europe, many teenagers who hold jobs are tracked into nonacademic schools, but American youngsters commonly combine traditional school and work. Bracey noticed that 55 percent of the Americans tested in the TIMMS study reported working more than 20 hours a week, the point at which, research shows, after-school jobs begin to hurt academic performance. Few European students seem to devote as much time to after-school jobs. In Sweden, the only country for which Bracey found hard data, only 16 percent of students worked more than 20 hours per week.
There is, in any event, scant evidence that test scores have much to do with national economic performance. In the late 1980s, when Japan still seemed on its way to becoming the world's economic superpower, U.S. newspapers published glowing stories about the lofty test scores achieved by Japanese students and suggested that failures of American public education had helped bring on bad times in the United States. By 1998, despite the lack of any significant change in math and reading scores, the U.S. economy was back on top. The Japanese still had good schools, but the bottom had dropped out of their economy (which still hasn't fully recovered). No story.
Robert J. Samuelson, a columnist for Newsweek and The Washington Post, analyzed the disconnect between test scores and economic growth in a column reprinted in his 2001 book, Untruth: Why the Conventional Wisdom Is (Almost Always) Wrong. Samuelson told of the computer guru at Newsweek's Washington bureau who had an English degree but found, through a series of jobs that taught him new skills, that he had become a technological expert indispensable to Samuelson and his colleagues. "People don't learn only at school," Samuelson concluded. "If they did, we'd be doomed. In isolation, test scores hardly count. What counts--for the economy, at least--is what people do at work.... On the job, people learn from supervisors, mentors, coworkers, customers and-most important--experience. One Labor Department study estimates that about 70 percent of training in the workplace is informal. Culturally, this is America's strong suit." What keeps the American economy so productive, Samuelson said, is its flexibility. American companies "have more freedom to set pay rates, hire and fire, and alter work practices."
Other countries have job training too. The Germans are praised for bringing teenagers to a technical level that makes them valuable in the workplace right after high school. But the U.S. system excels all others in allowing enough freedom for people to flounder and fail and change jobs until they find the niche where their talents are put to best use. It's disorderly and unbusinesslike, but it works.
American schools have the same ability to innovate on the run, even if not as freely as one might wish, and foreign educators have begun to realize that they may have something to learn from them. Some U.S. schools now regularly host visiting educators from China, Singapore, and Japan, who want to know how American teachers are able to produce such creative students. They have noticed that American schools produce Nobel Prize winners, and theirs don't. The Chinese have been particularly impressed by the fact that every Nobel laureate of Chinese descent was educated outside China.
None of this is to say that American schools don't have many flaws. But their worst failure is that they betray so many of America's talented young people. The few inner-city schools that are successfully raising the achievement levels of low-income children don't worry about beating the Chinese and the Indians. Their foes are the apathy and hopelessness that lead many young Americans, and their parents, to think they have no chance of getting to college or finding a good job. Yet the success stories show that we can provide these children the education they deserve. It takes, among other things, longer school days and more careful selection and training of teachers and principals. And it takes a commitment to deliver on the American promise of justice and equality.
The politicians and business executives who rail about foreign competition are aware of the needs of America's educationally dispossessed children, but they don't talk about them much. That wouldn't win them as much attention from the news media, and it wouldn't sell as many books. We need a Two Million Minutes that tells a different story, about students who are striving against the odds to make their way to academic success at charter schools in places such as Harlem, Anacostia, and Oakland. That would turn the debate in a more realistic direction and illuminate our real education challenge--not beating economic threats from abroad, but beating our doubts about our ability to help the American children who need it most.
JAY MATHEWS is an education reporter and columnist at The Washington Post. His latest book is Supertest: How the International Baccalaureate Can Strengthen Our Schools (2005). His next book, Teach, Baby, Teach, about the founders of the KIPP charter schools, will be published early next year.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Copyright ©2007 Goliath. All rights reserved. Terms of Use Privacy Statement Help
Best viewed with Microsoft Internet Explorer version 5.0 or higher.
C.S.A. The Confederacy
We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.
In what later became known as the Cornerstone Speech, C.S. Vice President Alexander Stephens declared that the "cornerstone" of the new government "rest[ed] upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth".[15] In later years, however, Stephens made efforts to qualify his remarks, claiming they were extemporaneous, metaphorical, and never meant to literally reflect "the principles of the new Government on this subject."[16][17]
In what later became known as the Cornerstone Speech, C.S. Vice President Alexander Stephens declared that the "cornerstone" of the new government "rest[ed] upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth".[15] In later years, however, Stephens made efforts to qualify his remarks, claiming they were extemporaneous, metaphorical, and never meant to literally reflect "the principles of the new Government on this subject."[16][17]
A Nation at Risk - Education
L.A. Unified bests reform groups in most cases, data show
Struggling schools under district control see test scores rise more than most operated by the mayor, a charter organization and others, a Times analysis finds.
Graduates celebrate at Locke High School. The charter school saw lower… (Arkasha Stevenson / Los Angeles Times)
August 18, 2011|By Howard Blume and Sandra PoindexterLos Angeles Times
In a surprising challenge to four school reform efforts run by outside organizations, the Los Angeles school district has not only held its own in improving math and English test scores, but in most cases outpaced the others, according to a Times analysis of the city's lowest-performing schools.
The district's showing was even more surprising given that its schools didn't benefit from outside funding and other extra resources brought in by reform groups for their schools.
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"The results are eye-opening, that conventional schools display stronger results," said Bruce Fuller, a UC Berkeley education professor.
One of the most striking comparisons was with a group of schools under the control of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. The mayor's schools — elementary, middle and high schools — all improved less than the district's by some key measures.
The mayor had repeatedly derided the L.A. Unified School District as ineffectual when he unsuccessfully tried to take over the whole system nearly six years ago.
New test scores released Monday showed that the percentage of students in low-performing district-run high schools working at a "proficient" level in math increased 116% since 2008. That compared with a rise of 57% at two high schools under Villaraigosa's purview. The figures were more nuanced in other categories.
Villaraigosa expressed surprise at the results but also complimented the district's success. While his schools "are improving as well, I want them to be improving at a more accelerated rate," he said. "We're committed to the long haul."
He added: "We've decided to go to some of these similar [district] schools that are outpacing some of our schools and look at what they're doing."
The Times analysis looked at district schools whose test scores ranked in the bottom 20% of the state in 2008. Those schools are, in many ways, the ultimate litmus test for local school improvement. They enroll neighborhood students whose families haven't left to take advantage of a growing number of alternatives, including independently operated charter schools and the district's own popular magnet program.
The district scores were then compared with those of schools that have been part of four highly touted reform efforts aimed at boosting achievement at the lowest-performing schools.
All of these groups had the goal of breaking the long-standing pattern of academic failure by bringing in outside expertise, new resources and new leadership to end what critics view as the stultifying grip of district bureaucrats and entrenched faculties.
Three years later, the scores at many of these schools remain poor — often extremely so.
Because so many students started out at such a low level, many schools in the analysis showed large improvements in proficiency rates, despite overall low scores, most notably Locke High School. There, the percentage of students with proficient math scores more than tripled, even as enrollment grew.
Struggling schools under district control see test scores rise more than most operated by the mayor, a charter organization and others, a Times analysis finds.
Graduates celebrate at Locke High School. The charter school saw lower… (Arkasha Stevenson / Los Angeles Times)
August 18, 2011|By Howard Blume and Sandra PoindexterLos Angeles Times
In a surprising challenge to four school reform efforts run by outside organizations, the Los Angeles school district has not only held its own in improving math and English test scores, but in most cases outpaced the others, according to a Times analysis of the city's lowest-performing schools.
The district's showing was even more surprising given that its schools didn't benefit from outside funding and other extra resources brought in by reform groups for their schools.
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"The results are eye-opening, that conventional schools display stronger results," said Bruce Fuller, a UC Berkeley education professor.
One of the most striking comparisons was with a group of schools under the control of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. The mayor's schools — elementary, middle and high schools — all improved less than the district's by some key measures.
The mayor had repeatedly derided the L.A. Unified School District as ineffectual when he unsuccessfully tried to take over the whole system nearly six years ago.
New test scores released Monday showed that the percentage of students in low-performing district-run high schools working at a "proficient" level in math increased 116% since 2008. That compared with a rise of 57% at two high schools under Villaraigosa's purview. The figures were more nuanced in other categories.
Villaraigosa expressed surprise at the results but also complimented the district's success. While his schools "are improving as well, I want them to be improving at a more accelerated rate," he said. "We're committed to the long haul."
He added: "We've decided to go to some of these similar [district] schools that are outpacing some of our schools and look at what they're doing."
The Times analysis looked at district schools whose test scores ranked in the bottom 20% of the state in 2008. Those schools are, in many ways, the ultimate litmus test for local school improvement. They enroll neighborhood students whose families haven't left to take advantage of a growing number of alternatives, including independently operated charter schools and the district's own popular magnet program.
The district scores were then compared with those of schools that have been part of four highly touted reform efforts aimed at boosting achievement at the lowest-performing schools.
All of these groups had the goal of breaking the long-standing pattern of academic failure by bringing in outside expertise, new resources and new leadership to end what critics view as the stultifying grip of district bureaucrats and entrenched faculties.
Three years later, the scores at many of these schools remain poor — often extremely so.
Because so many students started out at such a low level, many schools in the analysis showed large improvements in proficiency rates, despite overall low scores, most notably Locke High School. There, the percentage of students with proficient math scores more than tripled, even as enrollment grew.
Monday, August 22, 2011
Stupid article on the internet
m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Gold august 11
KOVALAM, India Aug 20 (Reuters) - Record gold prices may be heading for a correction of about 8 percent next month, but the safe-haven metal may also rally to $2,400 an ounce next year as investors seek refuge amid global economic turmoil, a global head at INTL FCStone on Saturday.
"Trees don't grow till heaven. I think buyers need to be beware. we are in a 'caveat emptor' market," said Jeffrey Rhodes, global head of precious metals at the brokerage and an industry expert, told reporters at a conference on gold in the southern Indian state of Kerala.
International gold struck a record of $1,877 an ounce on Friday, still on track for its biggest one-month rise in nearly 12 years in August and its biggest one-week gain since early 2009.
Rhodes said gold may retrace to $1,725 by next month, and then race ahead.
"My problem is that people are buying gold and they don't understand why they are buying gold and that's a big problem and that is a classic symptom of a bubble," said Rhodes.
Rhodes said there is an absence of "real motivation" for investors to cash in their gold holdings to cover losses from the equity markets.
On Friday, global equity markets slid anew and gold set a second-straight record high as fears of a possible U.S. slide into recession and concerns related to Europe's debt crisis kept investors on edge. (Reporting by Siddesh Mayenkar, editing by Miral Fahmy)
"Trees don't grow till heaven. I think buyers need to be beware. we are in a 'caveat emptor' market," said Jeffrey Rhodes, global head of precious metals at the brokerage and an industry expert, told reporters at a conference on gold in the southern Indian state of Kerala.
International gold struck a record of $1,877 an ounce on Friday, still on track for its biggest one-month rise in nearly 12 years in August and its biggest one-week gain since early 2009.
Rhodes said gold may retrace to $1,725 by next month, and then race ahead.
"My problem is that people are buying gold and they don't understand why they are buying gold and that's a big problem and that is a classic symptom of a bubble," said Rhodes.
Rhodes said there is an absence of "real motivation" for investors to cash in their gold holdings to cover losses from the equity markets.
On Friday, global equity markets slid anew and gold set a second-straight record high as fears of a possible U.S. slide into recession and concerns related to Europe's debt crisis kept investors on edge. (Reporting by Siddesh Mayenkar, editing by Miral Fahmy)
Valley of Bones
She thought the Dinka were just like the Irish before St. Patrick — warriors, poets, kings of little plots of land, lovers of cattle, she saw in their tall black forms Cuchulainn and Finn, Queen Maeve and King Ailil and the Cattle Raid of Cooley. I believed her because she had a degree in history from University College Dublin and besides I would have believed the Dinka were Choctaws or the Ten Lost Tribes on her say-so, not only because I was entranced with her but also because she could talk the hinges off a door.
Leo Marx opens The Machine in the Garden, his classic 1964 study of technology’s influence on American culture, with a recounting of Hawthorne’s morning in Sleepy Hollow. The writer’s real subject, Marx argues, is “the landscape of the psyche” and in particular “the contrast between two conditions of consciousness.” The quiet clearing in the woods provides the solitary thinker with “a singular insulation from disturbance,” a protected space for reflection. The clamorous arrival of the train, with its load of “busy men,” brings “the psychic dissonance associated with the onset of industrialism.” The contemplative mind is overwhelmed by the noisy world’s mechanical busyness.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Stupid Atlantic article
"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
Also see:
Living With a Computer (July 1982)
"The process works this way. When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen..." By James Fallows
“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”
The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.
The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.
Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.
More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”
Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”
Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.
The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”
Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?
Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.
So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:
I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”
As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
Pure crap.
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
Also see:
Living With a Computer (July 1982)
"The process works this way. When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen..." By James Fallows
“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”
The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.
The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.
Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.
More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”
Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”
Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.
The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”
Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?
Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.
So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:
I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”
As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
Pure crap.
Beckett
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Biographies often begin with a date of birth, the date on which the subject's experiences can be said to begin. In the case of Samuel Beckett there are two difficulties about adopting this simple procedure. One is his claim to have been born on Good Friday, 13 April 1906. The other is his repeated insistence that he had memories of life in his mother's womb.
The idea that he had been born on Good Friday, the day of the Saviour's crucifixion, pleased him, more especially since Good Friday happened in 1906 to have been Friday the thirteenth. What better birth-date could there be for someone so conscious of the suffering which underlies human existence; and conscious also that misfortune, in comic or tragic guise, awaited every venture and departure? In a late work, Company, which is highly autobiographical, the coincidence of his birth-date with the day of the Saviour's death is emphasized. `You were born on an Easter Friday after long labour...' And: `You first saw the light and cried at the close of the day when in darkness Christ at the ninth hour cried and died.' Not only was Beckett pleased with the Christ connection involved in having been born on a Good Friday, but he was never averse to introducing analogies and comparisons between Christ's life-story and those of his degraded characters.
It is a little unfortunate therefore that his birth certificate shows him to have been born on the 13 May 1906, which was a Sunday. The birth was not registered until a month later, on 13 June. Since it was Irish custom to allow a clear four weeks to elapse between birth and registration, this fact would if anything tend to confirm the May rather than the April birth-date, but of course there is always the possibility of error -- even an error of immediate recollection on his father's part, or a slip of the tongue or the pen, neither of which was rare where registration was concerned. Since Beckett was on the whole truthful about such matters and on at least one occasion claimed to have the authority of his mother for the Good Friday birth-date, the balance of probability is in its favour, but it is a pity nevertheless that there should be any doubt about it.
The other difficulty about beginning on Friday the thirteenth is Beckett's claim to have had memories which preceded this date. He told more than one person that he had such memories; and in an interview given when he was sixty-four he said, `Even before the foetus can draw breath it is in a state of barrenness and of pain. I have a clear memory of my own foetal existence. It was an existence where no voice, no possible movement could free me from the agony and darkness I was subjected to.'
On an earlier occasion he had told Peggy Guggenheim that he had, in her words, `retained a terrible memory of life in his mother's womb. He was constantly suffering from this and had awful crises, when he felt he was suffocating.' And with his close friend Geoffrey Thompson, a psychiatrist who tried to help him with subsequent difficulties, he also discussed his pre-natal memories and the feelings of entrapment and suffocation they brought with them.
But not only did he have these generalized memories; he had, he said, a particular memory of being at the dinner table in his mother's womb shortly before birth. There were guests present and the conversation was, perhaps needless to say, of the utmost banality.
In any case Samuel Beckett, son of William -- known as Bill in family circles, but generally to friends and associates as Willie -- and his wife Maria -- known as May -- was born at nightfall, in the family home at Foxrock, a prosperous suburb on the outskirts of Dublin. At the time of his birth Bill and May Beckett had been married almost five years. A first child, Frank, had been born within eleven months of their marriage; the second, Samuel, was not conceived for three more years.
The place of May's accouchement was the bedroom in which the conception had most likely taken place, a big room with a bow window facing the Dublin mountains. It was a difficult labour, the pains lasting all day; and as soon as it began in the morning Bill absented himself, going for a tramp in the mountains with a packet of sandwiches and a flask of whiskey. He returned to find his wife still in labour, and being, like most fathers of the time, neither welcome nor anxious to hear or see anything of the delivery, he took himself off to the garage, where he sat in darkness in the driver's seat of his high De Dion Bouton until a maid came to tell him it was all over and that his wife had been happily delivered of a son. In later life Beckett was fond of the verse in the Book of Job, verse 3, chapter 3, `Let the day perish in which I was born and the night in which it was said, there is a man child conceived.' Mr Tyler in the radio play All That Fall apologizes for cursing, in the presence of a lady, God and man and `the wet Saturday afternoon' of his conception, while Neary, in the novel Murphy, curses first the day he was born, `and then, in a bold flashback, the night he was conceived'.
Whereas Bill and May's first son, Frank, had been healthy and placid, Samuel was a sickly, thin baby who cried constantly.
The Becketts were prosperous people and the house in which the birth took place reflected that prosperity, as did its situation in Foxrock, then a very exclusive suburb of Dublin. Willie Beckett's father, also William, was a building contractor and what nowadays would be called a speculator who had acquired both money and house property in Dublin on a considerable scale. Among the contracts awarded to his firm were those for the new National Library and National Museum, flanking the Royal Dublin Society's headquarters in Leinster House in Kildare Street, which subsequently became the home of the Dail or Irish parliament. These had been begun in 1885 and finished in 1891. There was fierce competition for the contract and some of William Beckett's enemies were pleased when it was established that the Mountcharles sandstone employed had been wrongly used: face-bedded instead of end-bedded, so that it began to crumble almost immediately, though this was never clearly established as the builder's mistake and may well have been the architect's.
The Becketts vaguely supposed themselves to be descended from Huguenot refugees who had come to Ireland from France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, fleeing their homeland to escape persecution as Protestants and settling in a country where persecution of Catholics was just about to begin on a systematic scale. The Huguenots had supplied Ireland with much of its industrial and business energy, bringing with them a knowledge of the linen and poplin trades as well as of banking; and they fitted in easily enough in a country which was in process of transition after the Williamite Wars a place where much was in the melting-pot and most business activity represented a new departure. Within a generation or two the Huguenots generally were as happy to forget their French origins as many other members of the land-owning and business classes were to forget their English; and by the early twentieth century no trace or definite knowledge of a former French connection remained. Samuel Beckett's adoption of France as his homeland would have nothing to do with the French origins of his family: and in fact there is doubt that the Becketts really were Huguenots. The name does not occur in early listings of Huguenot refugees and is not commonly regarded by historians of the Huguenot influx as a likely Huguenot one. The suggestion has therefore also been made that the Irish Becketts were of Norman origin, and those who like aristocratic lineages for their heroes have even claimed that Samuel Beckett's family were descended from the family of Thomas a Becket, the turbulent priest who was Henry II's Archbishop of Canterbury. What makes the Huguenot connection the more likely is that originally the Becketts were silk- and poplin-weavers, a form of manufacture in which Huguenots certainly engaged, and in fact William Beckett senior's father, Samuel's great-grandfather, James Beckett, had been in the silk-weaving business. By the time his son entered the building trade, Irish silk-weaving, which had once been important, was dying out.
In 1869 William the builder had married Fannie or Frances Crothers -- Crowther in one family record, but certainly Crothers -- daughter of a Dublin merchant, Thomas Crothers, who was also of course a Protestant. A talented and sensitive woman, perhaps more talented and sensitive than William Beckett had bargained for, to some extent she broke the mould of philistine business success and introduced other elements into the make-up of the Becketts. She was an accomplished musician, who played the harmonium and composed settings for poems which she thought sufficiently solemn and religious-sounding, such as Tennyson's `Crossing the Bar'. In later life she took to the drink and Dublin gossip was pleased to report on her eccentricities, including the fact that she would lock herself in her room, presumably with supplies of alcohol, for days on end. What in the course of time her grandson, Samuel, would remember best about her was the parrot who always perched on her shoulder and flew into a jealous rage when anyone kissed her.
Fannie and William Beckett had four sons, of whom one, Howard went into the family contracting business, J. and W. Beckett of South King Street; and two, Gerald and James, studied medicine and became doctors. A daughter, also Frances, but known because the boys called her that as Cissie, would have a somewhat less orthodox career, as a painter, member of Dublin's bohemia and wife to an unsuccessful Jewish art dealer. The fourth son, in fact the eldest and christened William after his father, was destined to be the father of Samuel Beckett.
William senior and Frances lived in a house called Earlsfield which was Number 7 Prince William Terrace in the fashionable district of Ballsbridge, and it was there that William junior was born in July 1871. He grew into a burly, athletic youth of a not very studious disposition and left school early to become apprenticed to a member of the trade or profession of quantity surveying. Quantity surveyors were employed to estimate the amount of material likely to be used in any particular building contract, and had begun to appear in the early nineteenth century, when they were known as `measurers'. Originally anybody could set up who had the right connections and thought he could get the work, but by the late nineteenth century entry was being increasingly if loosely regulated by-an apprenticeship and examination system. Willie Beckett was apprenticed to the firm of J. and E. Pannister where he served the requisite five years, after which a partnership was purchased for him in a firm which had offices in Clare Street, near the back gate of Trinity College.
Besides the fact that estimating could prove a lucrative extension of the activities of an already well-established building concern, William Beckett senior, like many successful business people at the time, was anxious that his eldest son should become a member of one or other of the professions. This was a tendency everywhere, but it was especially the case in snobbish Dublin, which was keenly conscious of social gradations. Since William junior showed no interest in a prolonged period of academic study, quantity surveying was a good halfway house. His success, it was felt, would be almost automatically ensured by his connection with the firm of T. and W. Beckett, while at the same time it would be a step up in the world, since quantity surveying took rank as a profession, not a trade. The line between it, civil engineering and architecture was still rather blurred. Quantity surveyors were free to describe themselves as one or the other and frequently did.
Willie Beckett may not have been academically minded, but neither was he a dullard. He had a good, shrewd business brain and he was soon a success in his profession. He was also a socially minded, good-natured, seemingly uncomplicated young man, fond of masculine pursuits, including the game of rugby and the drinking and horse-play that went with it. All the Becketts were athletic and interested in athletics and Willie's brother Jim, one of the two who became doctors, was a famous swimmer and a member of the Irish international swimming team about which later verses would be written:
Dockrell, Taggart, Beckett, where
Now are the men I worshipped there?
In manner Willie Beckett was an extrovert, who appeared glad to see people and was prepared to make the best of them. He was, like his brothers, naturally athletic and besides being a rugby player he was a golfer, a tennis player, a great walker and a year-round swimmer. In the course of time he became a member of several men's clubs, including the exclusive Kildare Street. Until he was over thirty he lived at Earlsfield, a mansion substantial enough to house a British embassy in later years, an active young man already inclining to stoutness. It was an uncomplicated life: the office or the building site during the day, nights at the club with a game of billiards after dinner, summer evenings on the golf course and in the club-house bar. But to go with all this masculine activity and joviality there was church-going with his parents at weekends before Sunday dinner at Earlsfield, often followed by a tramp through the Dublin mountains.
Then he fell in love; and unfortunately with a Catholic -- the seventeen-year-old daughter of William Martin Murphy, the most successful Catholic businessman in Dublin, owner of newspapers, the tramway company and much else, whom he had met at the Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Club, one of the few places where Catholics and Protestants could meet socially. There was talk of marriage and both sides were appalled, the Catholic Murphys even more than the Protestant Becketts. The girl was forbidden to see any more of him and was forced to make a solemn renunciation at her mother's death-bed, the death itself occurring at just the right moment to induce a sense of guilt and transgression. Then, apparently almost before she had time to breathe, let alone weep, she was married off to a distinguished Dublin surgeon, Sir Arthur Chance, a widower with children who happened to be a knight as well as a Catholic and was not only much older than her, but considerably older than Bill Beckett as well: in short, a good match.
Shortly afterwards Willie went down with pneumonia. He appears to have been out of sorts for some time after being parted from his love, with ailments difficult to diagnose and probably evidence of a shock to the psyche greater than was to be expected from his extrovert demeanour; in fact, a breakdown. But the pneumonia was an indisputable reality and he wound up in the Adelaide Hospital, where he was nursed by a tall, thin-faced, serious girl called Maria, or May, Roe, who was exactly the same age as himself.
The Roes had been in Ireland since 1641, before the Cromwellian invasion, and had once been considerable land-owners in County Tipperary, with villages named after them, such as Roesborough and Roe's -- now corrupted to Rose -- Green. The Tipperary Roes had a reputation for wildness which sometimes overlapped with one for oddity but by the early nineteenth century a branch of the family was centered in Leixlip, a small town or village not far from Dublin in County Kildare, and was producing principally clergymen. In the mid-part of the century May's father, Samuel Robinson Roe, son of a clergyman also called Samuel, had possessed a property near Mountmellick in Queen's County, now County Laois. He was also, however, a miller and grain merchant and in 1864 had moved to another property, Cooldrinagh in Leixlip, and another mill in nearby Celbridge. Besides owning the mill he still had land with tenants on it and had therefore not forfeited his right to be called a gentleman; but when he died he left his family in seriously reduced circumstances. Whatever sort of gentleman he may have been, Samuel Robinson Roe was certainly not much of a businessman. He was, as people benevolently say in Ireland, fond of a drop, which means that he was a heavy drinker and he died relatively young. Whatever his failings, however, the religious atmosphere in his household was strong, and was not lessened by his marriage to Anne or Nanny Belas, for the Belases, who were solicitors in Andrew Street in Dublin, were very evangelical. In the days of his prosperity Samuel Roe had rather fancied himself as a speculator and financier. discounting bills and buying up mortgages, but when the mill, which failed to thrive, ate up his capital, including his land, his resourcefulness appears to have been exhausted at the same time. The strong will and character that May Roe exhibited throughout her life seems to have come from her mother, a neat little woman of high -- or should one say low? -- evangelical principle, which she passed on to her daughter.
The Roes had a number of children; and when Samuel Robinson Roe died his daughter May was only fifteen. Since they had not been well provided for, it was desirable that she should find an occupation and eventually she had, to use a phrase of the day, `gone nursing'. The burden on relatives of a large family had to be alleviated in any way possible. What made nursing an acceptable option was the advent in Ireland in the late 1880s of the `lady probationer', the daughter of gentlefolk who entered a hospital for training as a nurse. After this it became quite a fashion for such young ladies to do so. The Adelaide Nursing School was especially popular among Protestants with some social pretensions, but it was also a good place as far as actual training for the profession was concerned, the Adelaide having been among the first hospitals in these islands to institute any sort of training system at all, in 1858, when a colleague of Florence Nightingale's set it up. The financial rewards of nursing were not very great, varying between 12 [pounds sterling] and 30 [pounds sterling] a year when the training period was over, but a nurse might be expected to have good marital opportunities, especially if she had the right social background herself. Samuel Robinson Roe's relatives may well have considered nursing to be as good an option as any other. Whether May had any real vocation for it is a different question. There was not much in her subsequent attitudes which suggested a natural nurse, though she was efficient enough at binding up her children's smaller physical wounds.
While it was not a matter of remark that a young man of Willie Beckett's age and type should still be a bachelor at thirty, a girl of that age who was still unmarried was regarded as in danger of being left on the shelf. When she met Willie, or, as she shortly began to call him Bill, Beckett, May was doubtless under some pressure, whether great or small, overt or otherwise, to find a husband. Bill for his part was on the rebound. He had suffered a severe emotional reverse; and, besides he too would have had urged upon him the necessity of `settling down'. No doubt all this contributed to whatever process of falling in love or falling for each other there was; but on the surface at least they were a somewhat ill-matched pair. Bill was a comfortable fellow, pleasure loving and emotionally undeveloped; she was moody, questioning and exacting. She was also witty, even sarcastic, and she had a vivacious side, being subject to states of comparative elation as well as depression; so he may have seen her as high-spirited as well as serious.
She had been educated at the Moravian Mission School, Gracehill, outside Ballymena, County Antrim, which does not mean that either the Roes or the Belases were necessarily of the Moravian persuasion. Gracehill had been the first boarding school for girls in Ireland. The Moravians were known as good, thorough-going educators. Low Church Protestantism -- which virtually all Irish Protestantism was -- would have little difficulty with their non-doctrinal approach. And in any case their doctrines, such as they are, conform to the mayor Protestant confessions. At school she had frequently been in trouble for indiscretions and breaches of discipline, the sort of high spirits that verge on hysteria; and there had been a threat of expulsion for talking to a boy over the rear wall, an episode to which as a married woman she made occasional reference and of which she seemed rather proud. Probably the extreme high sprits which she occasionally displayed were evidence of a tendency to mood-swings, what a later age would call manic-depressive tendencies, before calling them bi-polar personality traits, but of course that would not have been evident then.
Whatever the degree of attraction between them, the courtship was swift and conclusive. Bill Beckett and May Roe were married according to the rites of the Church of Ireland on 31 August 1901.
Bill's degree of prosperity as a young man of thirty is indicated by the fact that he immediately set about building a substantial new home in the most fashionable suburb of Dublin. Obviously he was good at his job, but he also had family connections; and in truth it was not easy for a Protestant with a good start to fail in business or the professions at the time.
At the turn of the century the grip of the Protestant element on business and professional activity in Dublin was still very strong, though for a long while now they had been conscious of a challenge from upwardly mobile Catholics. This supremacy was largely maintained through the Freemasons and other mutual aid societies. An approach from one mason to another was a recognized way of landing a contract or getting a job or even a bank loan and it was utilized to the full. The Catholics too had their mutual aid societies, such as the Knights of Columbanus, but the masons, with headquarters in a splendid building in Molesworth Street, not far from Bill Beckett's office, still reigned supreme. Both Bill Beckett and his father were masons; and Bill made use of his membership of the order to an extent which his old master Pannister considered to be scandalous, refusing to speak to him because of it.
Like the aristocracy, the Protestant business community of the towns and cities looked down on Catholics as, in general, rather feckless, lazy and dishonest. A sort of right to ownership and control of business as a prerogative of greater thrift and industry, never mind the favour of Providence, was widely assumed. Except perhaps perforce as employers, and to some extent as manufacturers or shopkeepers, they took care to have very little contact with Catholics; and the aim of many Protestant business people as employers was as far as possible to recruit their clerical staff and work force from among their co-religionists. There were then many thousands of lower-middle-class Protestants from among whom to recruit and even a relatively smaller number of working class, of which number John Casey, or Sean O'Casey, was one. Socially too they kept their distance as far as possible. It was a boast among the denizens of Foxrock, the suburb in which the newly married couple were about to live, that one could pass one's day without speaking to any Catholic other than the railway company's employees. As Vivian Mercier has put it:
The males and some of the females of the typical Protestant family took the train every weekday to office, school or university in Dublin. In all these places they were likely to be associating almost exclusively with fellow Protestants. The females who stayed at home spent their leisure time with other Protestant ladies, though their maids and gardeners were usually Catholic. If one preferred to think of oneself as English there was really no reason not to.
But to call this class Anglo-Irish and to lump it in with the Protestant land-owning aristocracy -- the class to which Yeats affected to belong and to which J. M. Synge and Lady Gregory actually did -- is to create considerable confusions. Of course, the two sometimes overlapped: Bernard Shaw's father was, rather in the pattern of Samuel Roe, an unsuccessful Dublin corn merchant who had a bit of land with tenants on it -- as John Butler Yeats, a member of the Protestant professional middle class, also had -- and therefore had pretensions to gentility. But in general the line between people in trade and those deriving their income from land or a profession was very clearly drawn, as it was at that time in other countries; and though Willie Beckett's professional or quasi-professional qualification and May's descent from land-owners freed them from the opprobrium attached to being in trade, it was the business class to which the Becketts really belonged. Anglo-Irish is a misnomer also because in fact the Protestant Dublin middle classes probably looked to England less often and with less social anxieties than did their landed co-religionists. They did not, for the most part, send their offspring to English schools or take their daughters to London for the season, still less disport themselves at Cowes or Ascot. They did not take it for granted that their cadets would obtain commissions in the British army. Though their loyalty to the Crown and the Union Jack was automatic and unquestioning, their sources of income had not been threatened by the sort of legislation which had brutally loosened the aristocracy's grip on the land -- and therefore on Ireland itself -- since the 1880s and so their interest in British politics was less fevered and personal. They were content to vote Unionist and hope for the best.
The other ways in which they differed were the ways in which a bourgeoisie differs from an aristocracy everywhere, but with some exacerbations which were peculiar to the Irish situation. Even among aristocracies, the Anglo-Irish was notoriously improvident and devil-may-care in its outlook. Its tradition of rakehelly violence, celebrated in the novels of Charles Lever and Samuel Lover -- just as its improvidence is bemoaned in those of Maria Edgeworth -- went back to the seventeenth century; and though tamed somewhat by Victorianism, was still being celebrated by W. B. Yeats in the 1930s. Whatever the past history of the Roes, it was far from the outlook of the Becketts and their kind; and far too from the outlook of their offspring, Samuel Beckett, either as a man or as a writer.
As befitted a bourgeoisie the outlook of the Protestant middle class was far more scrupulous, honest and industrious, less eccentric and also less centred on the Vice Regal Court in Dublin Castle with its multifarious snobberies and its petty pretensions. The middle class was snobbish enough, the principal internal manifestation of its attitude being the line drawn between professional people and those in trade, one of the reasons why Bill Beckett called himself a civil engineer in Foxrock when he went to live there. But it was more in touch with reality.
And there was another reason why the term Anglo-Irish for members of the Protestant middle class is misleading. By comparison with Anglicanism the Church of Ireland was a Low Church and had been since Cromwell. But the incumbents of city parishes were expected to be even lower in their practices and their disdain for ritual than their country colleagues and were more jealously examined for traces of Romanism in their ritual or dogma. O'Casey has brilliantly described the violence and obloquy that was visited on the incumbent of an East Wall parish who was adjudged too Anglican in his practices. For the middle class the Bible was the supreme guide and test of religious belief; and in many middle-class homes it was the only reading matter encouraged.
Bill and May Beckett's first home was a substantial late Georgian, rented house in Pembroke Road, fairly near Earlsfield. Three years later they moved to Foxrock, which for most members of the Protestant Dublin middle class represented the pinnacle of social and commercial success. Where he built, inland towards the mountains, new houses were appearing, but nearer the Stillorgan road the merchant princes of Dublin had earlier bought some of the substantial mansions to be found there, each behind its demesne wall with a stretch of driveway croquet lawns and frequently tennis-courts, some of them houses of considerable architectural distinction. As Foxrock spread west towards the mountains it retained its exclusive character, the new houses being sizeable and standing in fairly extensive grounds. At a slightly later period, when suburbia was growing fast, the great Dublin comedian Jimmy O'Dea would describe the more central districts of Rathmines and Rathgar as a purgatory for souls awaiting the heaven of Foxrock'.
The house, which was proudly featured in a supplement to the Irish Builder on its completion in 1903, is sizeable but commonplace, with elements of the mock Tudor in its mullioned windows and projecting gables. When it was sold again in the 1970s, its mock Tudor elements were made a virtue: `This is a charming Tudor style family residence well set back from the road at the corner of Kerrymount Avenue and standing amid totally secluded mature gardens laid out in lawns, tennis court and croquet lawn.' After pointing to the `extremely high standard of finish' and the `spacious proportions' of the main rooms, the advertisement concluded: `Churches and schools are conveniently situated and there are excellent shops situated in Foxrock Village which is five minutes' walk from the property. `Cooldrinagh' is approached by a sweeping gravelled driveway.'
Except that the implied length of the driveway is something of an exaggeration, it is true enough; and of course Foxrock with its little railway station was even more of a village when Samuel Beckett was born. Inside, the house gave an impression of bourgeois solidity and comfort, with mahogany panelling in the hallway and on the staircase, heavy mahogany furniture and thick velvet curtains. It was a time when most people in most social classes preferred evidences of expense, durability and workmanship to aesthetic considerations -- or rather, they equated these things with the beautiful: and the Becketts were no exception. Except for the master bedroom with its big bow window on the first floor the house was rather dark. There were two other bedrooms on that first floor and two more rooms on the top or attic which could be used as servants' or children's bedrooms or playrooms. Downstairs were a drawing room and a dining room. Like the bedrooms, these had bell pulls to which, supposedly at least, a servant would respond. Outside the grounds were, as the advertisement said, spacious enough to accommodate a tennis-court and a croquet lawn, as well as a vegetable garden, flower beds and wilderness areas with larch and pine trees. Besides all these there were outhouses, including a hen-house, a garage and a stable in which, later on, May would keep a donkey. There was also a little wooden summer-house or gazebo with stained-glass windows which is described in the story Company.
The house was called Cooldrinagh after the house which the Roes had owned in Leixlip. Some commentators have identified it with the description of Mr Knott's house in the novel Watt; and certainly it resembles it in its general situation; but Mr Knott's house is much larger, and its American bar, oratory and dairy are taken from the biggest house in the locality, in fact the original `big house' which was there before Foxrock became a suburb, the neo-Gothic Glencairn -- home, when Samuel Beckett was growing up, to the exotic American, the Boss Croker. Cooldrinagh is, however, the model for Moran's house in Molloy, even to the lemon verbena to whose scent he refers, a flower which, by the time Sam was a toddler, already grew in profusion round the hall door, giving forth `a fragrance in which the least of his childish joys and sorrows were and would for ever be embalmed'.
Friday, August 19, 2011
Stupid computer Luddites
By the end of the decade, the enthusiasm was turning to skepticism. Research was painting a fuller, very different picture of the cognitive effects of hypertext. Navigating linked documents, it turned out, entails a lot of mental calisthenics—evaluating hyperlinks, deciding whether to click, adjusting to different formats—that are extraneous to the process of reading. Because it disrupts concentration, such activity weakens comprehension. A 1989 study showed that readers tended just to click around aimlessly when reading something that included hypertext links to other selected pieces of information. A 1990 experiment revealed that some “could not remember what they had and had not read.”
definition of a scared, closed minded "Luddite".
Looking ahead to future applications of electronics, he grew even gloomier. He believed that "electron physiologists" would eventually be able to monitor and analyze "thought or brain waves," allowing "joy and grief [to] be measured in definite, quantitative units." Ultimately, he concluded, "a professor may be able to implant knowledge into the reluctant brains of his 22nd-century pupils. What terrifying political possibilities may be lurking there! Let us be thankful that such things are only for posterity, not for us."
Why "reluctant" brains. Imagine learning the keyboard, Chinese, braille, world history and physics while you sleep. Sleep learning has been a dream for centuries. But it scares this guy because of the political implications. I'd take my chances if it meant playing Rachmaninoff and rapping in Urdu. Please! I hate this kind of chickenshit thinking.
Looking ahead to future applications of electronics, he grew even gloomier. He believed that "electron physiologists" would eventually be able to monitor and analyze "thought or brain waves," allowing "joy and grief [to] be measured in definite, quantitative units." Ultimately, he concluded, "a professor may be able to implant knowledge into the reluctant brains of his 22nd-century pupils. What terrifying political possibilities may be lurking there! Let us be thankful that such things are only for posterity, not for us."
Why "reluctant" brains. Imagine learning the keyboard, Chinese, braille, world history and physics while you sleep. Sleep learning has been a dream for centuries. But it scares this guy because of the political implications. I'd take my chances if it meant playing Rachmaninoff and rapping in Urdu. Please! I hate this kind of chickenshit thinking.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Economy
by John Cassidy
AUGUST 15, 2011
fter the prime-time drama of showdowns on Capitol Hill, agita in the West Wing, and a doomsday deadline averted comes the local news, wherein bad things happen to real people. Friday’s payroll report for July showed that nearly fourteen million Americans are out of work, and more than six million of them have been jobless for more than six months. Those figures were slightly better than expected, but that just reflects how low expectations have sunk. Arriving a day after the Dow tumbled more than five hundred points—and just hours before Standard & Poor’s took the unprecedented step of downgrading the U.S. bond rating—the figures confirmed, if further confirmation was needed, that the country is facing an immediate economic crisis. But, even after the rating downgrade, it isn’t primarily a crisis of debt ceilings shattered, government spending gone wild, or any of the other hobgoblins that have dominated the discussion in the nation’s capital. It is, as President Obama acknowledged again last week, a crisis of jobs and prosperity.
For more than two years, the unemployment rate has been close to or above nine per cent. (That is the official rate; if the government counted people who have given up looking for work or who have been forced to work part time, the rate would be sixteen per cent.) And it’s not just the labor market that is frantically signalling distress. The gross domestic product, after growing modestly in 2009 and 2010, has hardly expanded at all this year. Consumer spending has stalled. In many places, house prices are still falling. On Wall Street, there is renewed talk of a double-dip recession.
A political system that responded rationally to the country’s problems would be concentrating on creating jobs. Washington is moving in the opposite direction: toward austerity and job cuts. In the past few months, the 2009 stimulus program has started to wind down, and the Federal Reserve has withdrawn its emergency-support operation, which pumped money into the financial system. Now comes the debt-ceiling agreement. The deal, which calls for more than two trillion dollars in spending cuts over the next decade, does less than nothing to promote economic growth or create jobs in the coming months, and next to nothing to solve the long-term fiscal challenges facing the country—hence S. & P.’s downgrade. In a statement, the ratings agency said, “The fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics.” If the country is to be solvent ten or twenty years from now, there will need to be reasonable limits on entitlement spending and a substantial increase in federal tax revenues, which are currently languishing at fifteen per cent of G.D.P., the lowest level in sixty years. Yet neither entitlement reform nor revenue increases are dealt with in the agreement.
Still, the downgrade should not be allowed to distract attention from the unemployment crisis. What is needed, and what the system appears unable to deliver, is short-term action on jobs and credible long-term deficit reduction. About the best that can be said of the debt-ceiling agreement is that it doesn’t entail major spending cuts for this year or next. Of the nine hundred billion dollars in cuts already agreed upon, just twenty-five billion—less than one per cent of the federal budget—are slated for fiscal 2012. The cuts get steeper in later years. Where those cuts fall, and whether they are accompanied by significant revenue increases, will be determined by a “super committee” of congressional Democrats and Republicans, which is to report back in November with recommendations on how to find another trillion and a half dollars in deficit reduction. If the members cannot reach an agreement, or if Congress rejects its recommendations, a series of automatic cuts will go into effect in 2013.
In pushing the government to the brink of default, the House Republicans adopted outrageous tactics. Those tactics worked politically, but at great cost to the country. The debt downgrade was a direct result of the political paralysis in Washington. In retrospect, the White House erred last December in not demanding a raise in the debt ceiling as the price of extending the Bush tax cuts. Failing that, Obama should have refused to bargain with the House Republicans and threatened, if necessary, to raise the debt ceiling by administrative order, citing the Fourteenth Amendment.
But this was more than a failure of tactics: it was a failure of strategy. After last year’s midterm elections, when the Tea Party swept into Washington, the Administration moved toward fiscal conservatism, proposing four trillion dollars in deficit reduction over twelve years. This proposal depended on two assumptions: that Republicans would negotiate in good faith, considering tax increases as well as spending cuts; and that the economy was strong enough to sustain an expansion in the face of a shift to austerity policies.
Now that those assumptions have proved to be alarmingly false, the President, while not ignoring the imperative of long-term debt reduction, must return to the economics of growth. He has already put forward some proposals—extending the payroll-tax cut, passing new trade agreements, clearing away some of the red tape that businesses encounter—which would help, but not nearly enough. A substantive jobs bill is what’s called for, and the White House should send one to Congress as soon as possible after it returns from the summer recess.
What sort of policies might make a real dent in unemployment? Providing subsidies to businesses that hire new workers is one. Extending extra tax cuts to firms that build new factories and offices is another. More radical ideas include investing in infrastructure projects, importing a version of the job-sharing scheme that Germany has used, and launching a national community-service program. Most of these things would involve the federal government’s borrowing and spending more money, but that, of course, is what governments are supposed to do in an economic downturn.
On Wall Street, unlike in Washington, there is general agreement that the 2009 stimulus package was one of the main reasons that the economy expanded, however slowly, in the past couple of years. So suggestions that a new jobs package would spook the markets are without foundation. Even now, after the bond downgrade, the markets and credit-ratings agencies would probably embrace a carefully costed package that is limited in duration, because it makes economic sense. The quickest way to reduce the budget deficit is to get potential taxpayers back to work.
The real barrier to a meaningful jobs program is not the markets or the ratings agencies but the G.O.P. If the Republicans were to vote down a jobs bill, however, it would hurt not only the economy but also, potentially, their own prospects. Meanwhile, for a Democratic President, especially one who has disappointed many of his supporters, campaigning as someone who fought to create jobs, rather than as a copycat budget cutter, would seem a winning strategy. ♦
AUGUST 15, 2011
fter the prime-time drama of showdowns on Capitol Hill, agita in the West Wing, and a doomsday deadline averted comes the local news, wherein bad things happen to real people. Friday’s payroll report for July showed that nearly fourteen million Americans are out of work, and more than six million of them have been jobless for more than six months. Those figures were slightly better than expected, but that just reflects how low expectations have sunk. Arriving a day after the Dow tumbled more than five hundred points—and just hours before Standard & Poor’s took the unprecedented step of downgrading the U.S. bond rating—the figures confirmed, if further confirmation was needed, that the country is facing an immediate economic crisis. But, even after the rating downgrade, it isn’t primarily a crisis of debt ceilings shattered, government spending gone wild, or any of the other hobgoblins that have dominated the discussion in the nation’s capital. It is, as President Obama acknowledged again last week, a crisis of jobs and prosperity.
For more than two years, the unemployment rate has been close to or above nine per cent. (That is the official rate; if the government counted people who have given up looking for work or who have been forced to work part time, the rate would be sixteen per cent.) And it’s not just the labor market that is frantically signalling distress. The gross domestic product, after growing modestly in 2009 and 2010, has hardly expanded at all this year. Consumer spending has stalled. In many places, house prices are still falling. On Wall Street, there is renewed talk of a double-dip recession.
A political system that responded rationally to the country’s problems would be concentrating on creating jobs. Washington is moving in the opposite direction: toward austerity and job cuts. In the past few months, the 2009 stimulus program has started to wind down, and the Federal Reserve has withdrawn its emergency-support operation, which pumped money into the financial system. Now comes the debt-ceiling agreement. The deal, which calls for more than two trillion dollars in spending cuts over the next decade, does less than nothing to promote economic growth or create jobs in the coming months, and next to nothing to solve the long-term fiscal challenges facing the country—hence S. & P.’s downgrade. In a statement, the ratings agency said, “The fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics.” If the country is to be solvent ten or twenty years from now, there will need to be reasonable limits on entitlement spending and a substantial increase in federal tax revenues, which are currently languishing at fifteen per cent of G.D.P., the lowest level in sixty years. Yet neither entitlement reform nor revenue increases are dealt with in the agreement.
Still, the downgrade should not be allowed to distract attention from the unemployment crisis. What is needed, and what the system appears unable to deliver, is short-term action on jobs and credible long-term deficit reduction. About the best that can be said of the debt-ceiling agreement is that it doesn’t entail major spending cuts for this year or next. Of the nine hundred billion dollars in cuts already agreed upon, just twenty-five billion—less than one per cent of the federal budget—are slated for fiscal 2012. The cuts get steeper in later years. Where those cuts fall, and whether they are accompanied by significant revenue increases, will be determined by a “super committee” of congressional Democrats and Republicans, which is to report back in November with recommendations on how to find another trillion and a half dollars in deficit reduction. If the members cannot reach an agreement, or if Congress rejects its recommendations, a series of automatic cuts will go into effect in 2013.
In pushing the government to the brink of default, the House Republicans adopted outrageous tactics. Those tactics worked politically, but at great cost to the country. The debt downgrade was a direct result of the political paralysis in Washington. In retrospect, the White House erred last December in not demanding a raise in the debt ceiling as the price of extending the Bush tax cuts. Failing that, Obama should have refused to bargain with the House Republicans and threatened, if necessary, to raise the debt ceiling by administrative order, citing the Fourteenth Amendment.
But this was more than a failure of tactics: it was a failure of strategy. After last year’s midterm elections, when the Tea Party swept into Washington, the Administration moved toward fiscal conservatism, proposing four trillion dollars in deficit reduction over twelve years. This proposal depended on two assumptions: that Republicans would negotiate in good faith, considering tax increases as well as spending cuts; and that the economy was strong enough to sustain an expansion in the face of a shift to austerity policies.
Now that those assumptions have proved to be alarmingly false, the President, while not ignoring the imperative of long-term debt reduction, must return to the economics of growth. He has already put forward some proposals—extending the payroll-tax cut, passing new trade agreements, clearing away some of the red tape that businesses encounter—which would help, but not nearly enough. A substantive jobs bill is what’s called for, and the White House should send one to Congress as soon as possible after it returns from the summer recess.
What sort of policies might make a real dent in unemployment? Providing subsidies to businesses that hire new workers is one. Extending extra tax cuts to firms that build new factories and offices is another. More radical ideas include investing in infrastructure projects, importing a version of the job-sharing scheme that Germany has used, and launching a national community-service program. Most of these things would involve the federal government’s borrowing and spending more money, but that, of course, is what governments are supposed to do in an economic downturn.
On Wall Street, unlike in Washington, there is general agreement that the 2009 stimulus package was one of the main reasons that the economy expanded, however slowly, in the past couple of years. So suggestions that a new jobs package would spook the markets are without foundation. Even now, after the bond downgrade, the markets and credit-ratings agencies would probably embrace a carefully costed package that is limited in duration, because it makes economic sense. The quickest way to reduce the budget deficit is to get potential taxpayers back to work.
The real barrier to a meaningful jobs program is not the markets or the ratings agencies but the G.O.P. If the Republicans were to vote down a jobs bill, however, it would hurt not only the economy but also, potentially, their own prospects. Meanwhile, for a Democratic President, especially one who has disappointed many of his supporters, campaigning as someone who fought to create jobs, rather than as a copycat budget cutter, would seem a winning strategy. ♦
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
James Ellroy
"We're gonna shoot a movie," said Keith. Keith laughed.
Keith wore a polka dot bowtie. Keith wore a porkpie hat. Keith wore a tin badge that said "super stud." Keith had a large caliber weapon in his pants. Oh yeah.
The Puerto Rican cooze wore stiletto heels and a frilly cheerleader skirt. The Puerto Rican cooze had assets. The Puerto Rican cooze had a scar on her neck that drove Keith nuts. The Puerto Rican cooze was all over Keith. "Ooooh, Señor Keith she moaned. "Oooh."
Keith slapped her a couple times. "Wait for the director to arrive, honey." The cooze shrugged. The cooze sparked a reefer and got loooooooow.
Oh shit: there's Big Howard. Big Howard walking in wearing a two thousand dollar white tailored suit. Big Howard H'd the fuck up. Big Howard in outta space.
"Shoooot it," said Big Howard. "Shooot this fucker."
The crew shot the fucker. The crew got all the angles.
Big Howard nodded off in the director's chair.
Keith went back to his trailer. Keith made a martini. Keith kicked back.
Someone knocked on Keith's door. Keith said come on in.
The Puerto Rican cooze walked in. The cooze smiled big. "Señor Keith?" she said. "I come to see you...?"
Keith said to sit down on the couch. Keith made another drink. "What can I do for you, honey?" Keith said.
"Is a shame," said the cooze.
"What, honey?"
"Is a shame. Such a... man. Such a man." The cooze stroked Keith's leg.
Keith saw the knife. Keith's eyes got big. Keith's balls ascended. Keith thought, oh shit. "You kill my husband, Señor Keith!" hissed the cooze.
Keith felt the knife in his throat. Keith dropped the martini. Keith tried to fucking scream.
irritant
20 JAN. 2011 | 1:27 AM CST
Keith went back to his trailer. Keith made a martini. Keith kicked back.
Someone knocked on Keith's door. Keith said come on in.
The Puerto Rican cooze walked in. The cooze smiled big. "Señor Keith?" she said. "I come to see you...?"
Keith said to sit down on the couch. Keith made another drink. "What can I do for you, honey?" Keith said.
"Is a shame," said the cooze.
"What, honey?"
"Is a shame. Such a... man. Such a man." The cooze stroked Keith's leg.
Keith saw the knife. Keith's eyes got big. Keith's balls ascended. Keith thought, oh shit. "You kill my husband, Señor Keith!" hissed the cooze.
Keith felt the knife in his throat. Keith dropped the martini. Keith tried to fucking scream.
irritant
20 JAN. 2011 | 1:27 AM CST
Dig it: Keith's dead on the floor.
Oh shit, thinks Big Howard. Big Howard ties off. Big Howard shoots 600 mg of Chinese heroin into his ass. Big Howard thinks, Who the fuck is gonna be in the movie now?
Black Cow
In the corner
Of my eye
I saw you in Rudy's
You were very high
You were high
It was a cryin' disgrace
They saw your face
On the counter
By your keys
Was a book of numbers
And your remedies
One of these
Surely will screen out the sorrow
But where are you tomorrow
I can't cry anymore
While you run around
Break away
Just when it
Seems so clear
That it's
Over now
Drink your big black cow
And get out of here
Down to Greene Street
There you go
Lookin' so outrageous
And they tell you so
You should know
How all the pros play the game
You change your name
Like a gangster
On the run
You will stagger homeward
To your precious one
I'm the one
Who must make everything right
Talk it out till daylight
I don't care anymore
Why you run around
Break away
Just when it
Seems so clear
That it's
Over now
Drink your big black cow
And get out of here
Of my eye
I saw you in Rudy's
You were very high
You were high
It was a cryin' disgrace
They saw your face
On the counter
By your keys
Was a book of numbers
And your remedies
One of these
Surely will screen out the sorrow
But where are you tomorrow
I can't cry anymore
While you run around
Break away
Just when it
Seems so clear
That it's
Over now
Drink your big black cow
And get out of here
Down to Greene Street
There you go
Lookin' so outrageous
And they tell you so
You should know
How all the pros play the game
You change your name
Like a gangster
On the run
You will stagger homeward
To your precious one
I'm the one
Who must make everything right
Talk it out till daylight
I don't care anymore
Why you run around
Break away
Just when it
Seems so clear
That it's
Over now
Drink your big black cow
And get out of here
Monday, August 15, 2011
Bachman
Bachman belongs to a generation of Christian conservatives whose views have been shaped by institutions, tracts, and leaders not commonly known to secular Americans, or even to most Christians. Her campaign is going to be a conversation about a set of beliefs more extreme than those of any American politician of her stature, including Sarah Palin, to whom she is inevitably compared. Bachmann said in 2004 that being gay is “personal enslavement,” and that, if same-sex marriage were legalized, “little children will be forced to learn that homosexuality is normal and natural and that perhaps they should try it.” Speaking about gay-rights activists, that same year, she said, “It is our children that is the prize for this community.” She believes that evolution is a theory that has “never been proven,” and that intelligent design should be taught in schools.
Michelle Bachman
Often, she will say something outrageous and follow it with a cheerful disclaimer. During the last Presidential campaign, she told Chris Matthews, on MSNBC, that Barack Obama held “anti-American views” and then admitted, “I made a misstatement.” (In 2010, she said that she had been right about Obama’s views all along: “Now I look like Nostradamus.”) In the spring of 2009, during what appeared to be the beginnings of a swine-flu epidemic, Bachmann said, “I find it interesting that it was back in the nineteen-seventies that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat President, Jimmy Carter. And I’m not blaming this on President Obama—I just think it’s an interesting coincidence.”
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Values in a Secularist Culture
Secularist explanations of the world (modern physics, astronomy, evolution) have NOT made the world less wondrous, and have not undermined the validity or the authority of our wonderment. Taking pleasure in the flight of a bird is not undermined by knowing a lot more than our ancestors did about how that bird evolved, and about how it works: on the contrary.
Atheism finds and create its own values, and these are quite varied—for instance, “helping children with their homework or cooking good meals,” or “men campaigning to protect doctors from murderous antiabortion activists or Jews campaigning against Israeli settlements on the West Bank.” He faults Charles Taylor for assuming that modern secular life “is beset with the malaise of meaninglessness.” Weber’s word for disenchantment, Entzauberung, actually means “the elimination of magic,” but it is a mistake to infer the loss of meaning from the loss of magic.
If a malaise besets contemporary life, Robbins writes, it may have been produced not by the march of progress but by the faltering of progress—“by the present’s failure to achieve a level of social justice that the premodern world did not even strive to achieve.”
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