Video of the day: Solitary Man

Can one ever hide from Facebook and Google?

A few days ago, a friend had posted in his Facebook page a link to a news item about his philosopher/musicologist grandfather.  I followed up on that link, and shared it with my siblings, through whom the news reached my parents, whose lives are untroubled by computers.

Later, when I returned to that same newspaper's website, as I do every day, it troubled me when the site listed the news items that a few other Facebook friends had shared with others.  Because I had read that news about the musicologist through my friend's Facebook feed, now the newspaper had data on who my Facebook friends are, and with a simple cross-checking with the database it tells me who else had read and shared other news items.

I now had to take my love-hate relationship with Facebook to the next level.

So, I am hoping that the solution I have come up with will work: all my regular web-related activities are through Firefox, while Facebook will be via the clunky and slow IE. 

Take that, Facebook, because now you won't know what I am up to :)

(It doesn't look like Facebook searches for Firefox cookies when I am using IE; maybe they will soon add that code, you think?)

Meanwhile, I am being stalked by Google!  It scans my emails, keeps track of what I am searching for, and who knows what else!

If you use the full range of its products, Google knows the identity of everyone you communicate with by email, instant messaging and phone, with a master list – accessible only by you, and by Google – of the people you contact most. If you use its products, Google knows the content of your emails and voicemail messages (a feature of Google Voice is that it transcribes messages and emails them to you, storing the text on Google servers indefinitely). If you find Google products compelling – and their promise of access-anywhere, conflagration and laptop-theft-proof document creation makes them quite compelling – Google knows the content of every document you write or spreadsheet you fiddle or presentation you construct. If as many Google-enabled robotic devices get installed as Google hopes, Google may soon know the contents of your fridge, your heart rate when you’re exercising, the weather outside your front door, the pattern of electricity use in your home.
Google knows or has sought to know, and may increasingly seek to know, your credit card numbers, your purchasing history, your date of birth, your medical history, your reading habits, your taste in music, your interest or otherwise (thanks to your searching habits) in the First Intifada or the career of Audrey Hepburn or flights to Mexico or interest-free loans, or whatever you idly speculate about at 3.45 on a Wednesday afternoon. Here’s something: if you have an Android phone, Google can guess your home address, since that’s where your phone tends to be at night. I don’t mean that in theory some rogue Google employee could hack into your phone to find out where you sleep; I mean that Google, as a system, explicitly deduces where you live and openly logs it as ‘home address’ in its location service, to put beside the ‘work address’ where you spend the majority of your daytime hours.
Some people find all this frightening.

Yep, I am one of those "some people" who find all these very, very troubling.  And, at how much complacent we are about all these.

And now this:

I hope Rick Perry stays on :)

For a little while, at least ... because ....

And then, eventually, this will happen, of course :)

If we are interested in student learning, does it matter if the teacher has a PhD?

One can easily imagine that many school districts in Oregon will be in situations similar to the Salem-Keizer School District, which is about $20 million short in its budget. 

We can expect education budgets to further tighten up because economic conditions might not dramatically improve soon—neither in Oregon nor in the country.  The anemic recovery from the Great Recession means that serious budget issues will continue to dog school districts for a couple of more years, at least.

If ever a case can be made that a crisis is also an opportunity to reexamine how we have always done business, then, in this context, I hope that school districts and state officials will look into the issue of the master’s degree salary bump.

Oregon, like most states, pays higher salaries to teachers with master’s degrees compared to those who do not.  However, when it comes to student learning and outcomes, there is nothing conclusive about differences between teachers with master’s degrees and otherwise.  Yet, compensation packages for teachers typically are higher for those with the master’s degree.

A national study completed in 2007 estimated that about 2.1 percent of expenditures were caused by the master’s degree bump.  The same study estimated that the master’s bump cost Oregon almost $110 million. 

When officials are searching for pennies in the budgets, and parents are ready to hold bake sales, do we want to overlook this expensive line item?

Advanced credentials alone do not make a successful teacher who can improve student learning.  One only needs to check with students in my classes in order to find out that even a doctorate doesn’t make a good teacher out of me!

To make things worse, by paying more for master’s degrees, we have also instituted an incentive system for the generation of graduate degrees, which are also partly paid for by taxpayers at public universities, including where I teach.  Thus, according to the same study, over a decade, the highest growth rate was in graduates in master’s degrees in education.

That means we taxpayers end up paying twice: first in partly subsidizing the production of these master’s graduates, and then paying higher salaries because teachers have those very degrees.  We do all these even though a master’s degree is neither required nor sufficient to improve student learning.

I should underscore here that this is not any partisan position.  President Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, stated a few months ago that “state and local governments should rethink their policies of giving pay raises to teachers who have master’s degrees because evidence suggests that the degree alone does not improve student achievement.”

Perhaps this is the right time to ask ourselves, “does one really need a master's degree to teach at the elementary school level?” 

I love the pursuit of knowledge, and recognize that degree programs offer structured routes to advanced education.  But, with a stalled economic recovery and budget shortfalls, can we afford to pay more for these artificial salary bumps in schools, especially when they do not necessarily improve student learning?

This is exactly why I love the New Yorker cartoons :)

Reading the New Yorker is, to quite an extent, like reading the Scientific American, in that I need to have a minimum level of literacy to be able to read and understand the materials there.  And reading them is not any casual business either--requires attention.  I love the New Yorker because I get actively engaged in the process.

And, here is the best part: that active engagement part is applicable even when it comes to most of the cartoons, which, BTW, are the ones I scan through first.

Take the following cartoon, for instance:

This one requires cultural-literacy of sorts.  This cartoon will not, get across to most people who might not know anything about baseball--like how I was before I got to this country.  Back in India, the joke here would have simply sailed passed me like, ahem, a wild pitch :)

But, having been acculturated, and knowing the little bit that I do about baseball, made me pause for a sec, grasp the situation and then chuckle. The dog excitedly waiting with a leash and looking towards the pitcher who is not in the picture, with the catcher .. nah, I will let the magazine's cartoon editor explain it::

[If] you don’t know what sign catchers give when they want an intentional walk, or recognize that a dog wagging his tail often means he wants go for a walk, you won’t get this cartoon. And explaining it to you, as I have, won’t make it any funnier.

More here on my cartoon mania.

So, a college degree for all ...

There is a part of me that wonders whether it was my op-ed that triggered an opinion piece authored by the university's provost, in the same Statesman Journal.  Perhaps I am one of those he implies in writing "some people have suggested in various public forums (including this newspaper) that one's time and money may be better spent not pursuing a college degree."

In any case, that is immaterial.   There is a lot to debate, but I have a class to teach :)  More on this later today, time permitting.

BTW, last evening, I emailed the editor of that paper an opinion essay, for possible publication as an op-ed, in response to this news item.  If it is published, I would assume then that my name will be axed from more Christmas lists!  But, that is the nature of the business, I suppose.

The end of liberal education. Has it already happened?

First this news update from the state, er, Republic of Texas, where Governor Rick Perry led the charge on making higher education more efficient and cost-effective:

Almost half of undergraduate programs at public colleges and universities in Texas are in danger of being eliminated because they do not meet a new state requirement of graduating at least 25 students every five years, UPI reported. ... Raymund Paredes, the Texas commissioner of higher education, said he would not back exceptions to the rule. "In this budgetary environment, we can't afford the luxury of programs not producing graduates," he told UPI. "It's up to academic departments faced with closure of programs to salvage them."

So, if physics is one of those programs that students are not gravitating towards, then where are the enrollments?  In professional and vocational programs--from nursing to criminal justice. And that generic "business" major.

This is the trend all across, and the university where I teach is no exception--business, criminal justice, teaching, nursing are the kind of programs that churn out graduates.

Yet, my employer describes the university as "a steadily emerging as a leading comprehensive public liberal arts institution," making me wonder, and worry, where exactly we champion the liberal arts!

The traditional liberal arts colleges are dying, and it is one hell of a rapid decline in their intellectual health and well being:

Students who major in liberal arts subjects are becoming fewer and fewer. Fifty-one of the 225 colleges had more than 50 percent vocational majors. Do we count those as those liberal arts colleges?

Truth in advertising might require universities, including mine, not to market themselves as "liberal arts" institutions when a majority of their graduates are not students who graduated in what would be considered the traditional liberal arts.  But then the notion of colleges and universities being truthful might be asking for too much anymore, eh :)

I, with my undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, am not opposed to professional and vocation education at all. There is a place for that, and I resonate with this:

I’m not against vocational education; I’m suspicious of how good it is. I know for a certainty that one does not learn how to be a lawyer in law school. Do you learn how to be a parks and recreation person by taking parks and recreation courses? It is better to work at place as an unpaid volunteer even if you make nothing. You’ll still be better off than if you paid tuition. The problem is everyone says, “But you need the credential to get in the door.” Credentials are getting more important as the number of people looking for jobs is getting larger.

I have written in the past that "higher education" has now been downgraded into some kind of a job credentialing service.  I would way prefer that it is not viewed and treated that way, and I hope that external forces would actually take this credentialing aspect away from the mission of education and knowing.  That moment might be much closer than one would imagine:

The day when other organizations besides colleges provide a nondegree credential to signify learning might not be as far off as we think. One interesting project on this front is an effort to create “digital badges,” which would allow people to demonstrate their skills and knowledge to prospective employers without necessarily having a degree.
Badges could recognize, for example, informal learning that happens outside the classroom; “soft skills,” such as critical thinking and communication; and new literacies, such as aggregating information from various sources and judging its quality. And in a digital age, the badge could include links back to documents and other artifacts demonstrating the work that led to earning the stamp of approval.
...
At the announcement in Washington, the U.S. secretary of education, Arne Duncan, called badges a “game-changing strategy” and said his agency would join with the Department of Veterans Affairs to award $25,000 for the best badge prototype that serves veterans looking for well-paying jobs.
Under a badge system, colleges would no longer be the sole providers of a credential. While badges could be awarded by traditional colleges, they could also be given out by professional organizations, online and open-courseware providers, companies, or community groups.

Welcome to a brave new world of higher education!

Jobs? Not going to be easy to get anymore?

So, jumping through a few hyperlinks (have no idea where I started) I ended up reading this:

The paradox is this. A job seeker is looking for something for a well-defined job. But the trend seems to be that if a job can be defined, it can be automated or outsourced.
The marginal product of people who need well-defined jobs is declining. The marginal product of people who can thrive in less structured environments is increasing.

As if he we reading my mind, and extending this logic of if it can be defined, it can then be automated, Farhad Manjoo has an awesome piece with a warning that you ought to be scared shitless--even if you happen to be highly educated and have a well-paying job"

if computers have already come for middle-skilled workers, and if low-skilled workers aren't an attractive enough target, who's left? That's right: Professionals—people whose jobs required years of schooling, and who, consequently, make a lot of money doing them. As someone who is fascinated with technology, the stuff I found in my investigation of robots and the workforce tickled me. I got to see a room-size pill-dispensing robot, machines that can find cervical cancer on pap-smear slides, and even servers than can write news stories. As someone who likes his job (and his paycheck), what I saw terrified me.

All the more the reason why developing our creative abilities becomes important, right?  It is only there, at least for now, computers fall behind human brains.

The Economist, while slicing and dicing through the data regarding Rick Perry's boasts on being a one-man job-creating machine, notes:

[An] argument has emerged that American politicians must focus on job quality, not just quantity. In general, any job is better than no job, but it is true that some jobs are dangerous, distressing, or fail to put workers above the poverty threshold. That last is a particular concern: on September 13th the Census Bureau announced that in 2010 the poverty rate was 15.1%, up from 14.2% in 2009.

Or, maybe we should go with the what Ken Jennings, the Jeopardy uber-champion, wrote in his answer to the final question, "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords" :(

Pakistan is a Catch-22 character, writes Hitchens. Yes, indeed!

Re-reading Catch-22 as a middle-aged fellow was one heck of an immeasurably more pleasing experience than when I read it a long time ago as a teenager.  Of course, reading it against the backdrop of insane wars, it was breathtakingly insightful.

One can, therefore, easily imagine how much my excitement multiplied over when I read the opening lines of Christopher Hitchens' column at Slate:

In Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Lt. Milo Minderbinder transforms the mess accounts of the American airbase under his care into a "syndicate" under whose terms all servicemen are potential stakeholders. But this prince of entrepreneurs and middlemen eventually becomes overexposed, especially after some incautious forays into Egyptian cotton futures, and is forced to resort to some amoral subterfuges. The climactic one of these is his plan to arrange for himself to bomb the American base at Pianosa (for cost plus 6 percent, if my memory serves) with the contract going to the highest bidder.

One of the very few times I know exactly what Hitchens is writing about!  What a neat way to start a new academic year :)

Anyway, Hitchens writes that Pakistan is operating like Minderbinder.  How does this guy so easily connect the otherwise unconnected dots in the literary and geopolitical worlds!

Hitchens remarks that Pakistan makes an amateur out of Minderbinder:

In return for subventions of millions of American dollars, it now turns out, the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence agency (the ISI) can "outsource" the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, and several other NATO and Afghan targets, to a related crime family known as the Haqqani network. Coming, as it does, on the heels of the disclosure about the official hospitality afforded to Osama Bin Laden, this reveals the Pakistani military-intelligence elite as the most adroit double-dealing profiteer from terrorism in the entire region.

Minderbinder, er, Pakistan presses on full steam ahead; its foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar struck a defiant note:

Ms. Khar, however, lashed out at the role of the CIA, which most recently orchestrated the covert strike against Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. She said to Al Jazeera channel: “If we talk about links, I am sure the CIA also has links with many terrorist organisations around the world, by which we mean intelligence links.”

In a remark that raised eyebrows in both New York and Washington, Ms. Khar added: “And this particular network, which the U.S. continues to talk about, is a network which was the blue-eyed boy of the CIA itself for many years.”

Finally, we are all bound to lose it the way Yossarian did, after Snowden's blood and guts spill out on to him :(

The only saving grace is that, even though this might sound like "other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" the overall level of violence in human history has been decreasing, and decreasing really fast in recent years.

Violence has been in decline for thousands of years, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in the existence of our species.
The decline, to be sure, has not been smooth. It has not brought violence down to zero, and it is not guaranteed to continue. But it is a persistent historical development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars to the spanking of children.

If Pakistan played well with the rest of the world, we can speed up the process even more ...

Photo of the day: Paul Krugman loses it :)

"I’ve Never Actually Seen the Resemblance" captions Krugman, from whose blog I got this graphic:

Pretty good, eh :)

Secular people oppose capital punishment, while the religious prefer death?

Christopher Hitchens clearly articulates my muddled thinking, which had the same bottom line as Hitchens'.  That guy is one talented and gifted intellectual!

Hitchens writes, while discussing the difference in the manner in which the US differs from the West:

The point of the penalty was that it was death. It expressed righteous revulsion and symbolized rectitude and retribution. Voila tout! The reason why the United States is alone among comparable countries in its commitment to doing this is that it is the most religious of those countries. (Take away only China, which is run by a very nervous oligarchy, and the remaining death-penalty states in the world will generally be noticeable as theocratic ones.)

And he concludes thus:

In a primitive society or a theocratic state based on moral absolutism, there may be a certain “rough” justice in hauling the condemned man straight from his “trial” to the place of stoning, where at least the aggrieved relatives of his victim can have their moment of cruel catharsis. But in a modern state that allows for appeals, judicial review, and the admission of new evidence, the death sentence is only the beginning of a protracted and tortuous process to which we give—and I apologize for using the expression myself—the apotropaic name of “Death Row.” At once too random and too institutional and systematic, this dire business has now become an offense both to law and to justice.

Yes, an "offense both to law and justice."

Kathleen Parker, whose columns I usually do not care for, addresses the death sentence, and writes

I'm no wimp when it comes to justice and spent the first few decades of my life backstroking in the Old Testament. An eye-for-an-eye was fine by me.
But I have matured and these days wear glibness — and righteousness — like a hair shirt. Satisfaction can never come from the termination of a human life except to protect one's own and that of one's dependents. Thus, our barbaric practice of capital punishment, premeditated and coldblooded, is, since we're in a biblical mood, an abomination. That we grant the state the power to end a citizen's life is a harrowing-enough thought. That we do so even when we know with certainty that sometimes innocents are killed is beyond comprehension.

Dahlia Lithwick noted the unfortunate irony that most of the ardent supporters of the death sentence are simultaneously the same ones denouncing the role of government, and their primary reason is that the government can't get any damn thing right:

when you hear Republicans moan about the bureaucratic burdens and failures of government-run education, health care, and disaster-relief systems, doesn't any part of you wonder why they have such boundless confidence in the capital justice system

But, you can't argue with logic, can you, with these people!  They are notoriously anti-logic, anti-intellectual arguments, and rely on their gut instincts :(

Photo of the day: One heck of a funny juxtaposition :)

As one who always is interested in every damn thing, a couple of months ago I downloaded the Groupon app in order to find out what it was all about.  Soon, given my lack of interest in goods and services that are only in the discretionary category, I figured Groupon was one of those in the been-there, done-that list.

But then I haven't figured out yet how to delete apps!  Which is why Groupon and a few others continue to stare at me, and then sometimes I end up checking them ... and so I checked out what deal Groupon had for me this time ...

Turned out that it was a hilarious juxtaposition of two unrelated advertisements on the same screen, but if you are into pun as much as I am (or more!!!) then you will certainly laugh at the screen that I immediately captured with my camera :)