Big Monkey, Helpy Chalk

Child's play

2011-12-19T15:25:00.001-05:00

Child's play
Originally uploaded by rob helpychalk.

Caroline and Joey were playing Buffy using the big lego set up. This is Willow, being held captive by The Master, on the evil side of the lego world.

Who is behind myedu.com, and why do they have so much information about me?

2011-12-12T17:38:00.003-05:00

Myedu.com is a website that lets students compare professors. The main thing they have over sites like ratemyprofessor.com is that they have access to the complete grade records of each instructor, so you can select the instructor who gives out the highest number of As. Here is my profile.

I'm happy that this information is published. I would have offered it to anyone who asked. But how did myedu.com get it? Apparently, someone at LCCC has given them access to our enterprise level software, as have people at many many other colleges and universities. Now myedu.com is a for-profit company that makes its money from advertising, and probably also selling information on its registered users. They have been accused of sending spam using the emails they gather.

The founder of myedu.com got a fawning article in the New York Times, which strikes me as supremely misleading, given that they never mention that the point of the website is to find easy graders.

My question is this: if myedu.com is making money using information we gave them, why don't we get a cut? There is no reason they should be the ones to make money off information that we collect.

Return of the Big Monkey Reverse Difference Principle.

2011-11-23T17:43:00.001-05:00

It is time to invoke what I have called in other contexts "The Big Monkey Reverse Difference Principle."

The plutocrats are motivated in part by a desire for wealth, and in part by a desire for inequality. They want to be sure to have more wealth than others. The Reverse Difference Principle is a rule for balancing these two goals. It says that equality is to be tolerated only to the extent that it benefits the best off.

Imagine two societies. One has a great deal of inequality, but the richest 1% are relatively poor. Another society has less inequality but the richest 1% are much better than the people in the first society. Now which society to you want to be a plutocrat in?

I believe it is now the job of political philosophy to convince the plutocrats of the US this truth.

Dear Chancellor Katehi

2011-11-19T11:18:00.003-05:00

Linda P.B. Katehi
Offices of the Chancellor and Provost
Fifth floor, Mrak Hall
University of California, Davis
One Shields Avenue
Davis, CA 95616

Dear Chancellor Katehi,

I am writing to express my outrage and dismay at the actions of the UC Davis police office who pepper sprayed sitting protesters, now visible to the entire world on Youtube. The Davis Enterprise is reporting that he is Lieutenant John Pike. Numerous cell phone video and still pictures show that Pike's attack was completely unprovoked and the protesters where being assiduously nonviolent.

I have two children who will be college age in a few years. I cannot imagine sending them to an institution that treats its own students in this fashion.

I urge you to relieve John Pike of duty immediately. You also must change your policies toward Occupy protesters. The Enterprise reports that you personally ordered that the encampment be cleared. This incident makes clear the folly of using force to stop students from exercising their freedom of speech when your only justifications are "liability concerns and limited staffing."

Sincerely,

Rob Loftis

Links:

Video of the Attack.

Davis Enterprise Story on the events

UC Davis police professional standards unit. The second and command of the unit seems to be Lieutenant John Pike himself.

Office of the Chancellor: officeofthechancellor@ucdavis.edu

For Armistice Day, Two Poems about Vietnam.

2011-11-11T09:25:00.002-05:00

By my co-worker Bruce Weigl

Song of Napalm

for my wife

After the storm, after the rain stopped pounding,
We stood in the doorway watching horses
Walk off lazily across the pasture’s hill.
We stared through the black screen,
Our vision altered by the distance
So I thought I saw a mist
Kicked up around their hooves when they faded
Like cut-out horses
Away from us.
The grass was never more blue in that light, more
Scarlet; beyond the pasture
Trees scraped their voices into the wind, branches
Crisscrossed the sky like barbed wire
But you said they were only branches.

Okay. The storm stopped pounding.
I am trying to say this straight: for once
I was sane enough to pause and breathe
Outside my wild plans and after the hard rain
I turned my back on the old curses. I believed
They swung finally away from me ...

But still the branches are wire
And thunder is the pounding mortar,
Still I close my eyes and see the girl
Running from her village, napalm
Stuck to her dress like jelly,
Her hands reaching for the no one
Who waits in waves of heat before her.

So I can keep on living,
So I can stay here beside you,
I try to imagine she runs down the road and wings
Beat inside her until she rises
Above the stinking jungle and her pain
Eases, and your pain, and mine.

But the lie swings back again.
The lie works only as long as it takes to speak
And the girl runs only as far
As the napalm allows
Until her burning tendons and crackling
Muscles draw her up
into that final position

Burning bodies so perfectly assume. Nothing
Can change that; she is burned behind my eyes
And not your good love and not the rain-swept air
And not the jungle green
Pasture unfolding before us can deny it.

Elegy for Peter

That night we drank warm whiskey
in our parked car
beyond woods now lost to the suburbs,
I fell in love with you.

What waited was the war
like a bloody curtain,
and a righteous moment
when the lovely boy’s

spine was snapped,
then the long falling into hell.
But lately, you’ve been calling me
back through the years of bitter silence

to tell me of another river of blood
and of the highland’s
howl at dusk of human voices
blasted into ecstasy.

That night in sweet Lorain
we drank so long and hard
we raised ourselves
above the broken places,

mill fires burning
red against the sky. Why
is there is no end
to this unraveling.

Their lies, your power.

2011-10-29T23:17:00.003-04:00

People sympathetic to the Occupy Wall Street movement have frequently noted that the 1% have done nothing that justifies their massive share of the wealth. As Krugman says, "They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs." They're really just a bunch of boiler room hucksters our of Glengarry Glen Ross. Elizabeth Warren reminds us that no one gets rich on their own.

The myth that the rich are responsible for well-being of the economy is the strength of the working class. Things don't grind to a halt if Wall Street stops working. Sometimes it even helps things: that's why Roosevelt declared a bank holiday. They talk about "Going Galt" but they know if they did nothing would change. But if everyone else stopped doing what they do, society would stop. Wall street cannot call a general strike, but main street can. The economy exists because people wake up every morning and make it exist. And if we don't like it we can make it go away. This is the power of nonviolence. They can shoot rubber bullets, but you control the fabric of the world.

Adventures close to home

2011-10-15T15:32:00.003-04:00

There's an estate sale around the corner from us--about 100 yards down our street and another 100 yards down the busy street ours comes off of. Molly sent me there and authorized me to pay up to $100. They had this great workbench, with 8 drawers and wheels and and a vice for 75 dollars. So I say I'll take it. I say, "I guess I'll have to clean all that stuff out of it."

This is when I start running into trouble. The guy says he'll throw in the contents of the bench for another $75. I say $25. He says, we'll lets look what's in it. Couple hammers, some files, copper wire, pipe cutter, trowels and gardening stuff. Ok, I'll pay 75 for it. "That's just for the stuff in the drawers. Another $25 for the stuff on top." "Ok."

He totally upsold me! What started as a good deal for $75 became a crappy deal for $175! I think Cialdini has something to say about why people always fall for this. Ungh.

In any case, since I don't have a car, and its only about 200 yards back to our house, I decide to roll the thing home. Its heavy, the wind is picking up, and I have to push it up hill. I get about 25 yards and a wheel breaks off, the drawers all slide open facing downhill and the whole thing nearly tips over. I'm trying to figure out how to finish wheeling it home, but I really only have the strength to keep it from tipping over.

"So you bought Marcellus's old workbench." A guy who has raking leaves up from his yard has come over to see what's up. We chat. I say I'm going to get a wagon to carry the contents of the drawers away so the thing is manageable. It looks like with his help, though, we can roll the thing up the hill. We get to the top of the hill and turn onto our street when another wheel breaks. Well, the nice man has helped me out enough, so he leaves and I go to get a wagon to empty the thing.

There's a lot of junk in it. Old mouse traps, the kind from the cartoons with the spring and the thwapper. A lot of wood files. Will I ever use these? The electric sander does a fine job for what I need. Nails. Screws. Thistle seed. People plant thistle? Should I plant thistle? A broken gauge of some sort. "2004 Classification and Handbook of Dahlias." Sockets for a socket wrench. Metal things that look like dental instruments for dinosaurs. Drill bits of various sizes.

Even with all the junk out of the drawers, the workbench is hard to roll down the bumpy sidewalk. I go back for twine to tie the drawers in place. It is still tough going. Then another wheel breaks. Well, there's no way to move it with just one wheel. So I home, get the kid's wagon, take of the sides, and plop the whole workbench down on top of it. By some small mercy, the whole thing is stable, and I get the bench home.

Splice

2011-09-30T21:16:00.002-04:00

Unable to stick very long to my resolution to be productive while the family is gone, I have plopped Splice into the DVD player, staring Adrian Brody and Sarah Polley (two very good looking people) as Dr. and Dr. Frankenstein. So far the movie has done a good job of communicating the fundamental horror of human reproduction. You fall in love with what you have made, but they are monsters. Also, as Brody notes into his audio recorder "Observations of feeding cycles show that subject H50 craves sucrose."

Ooh the H50 just listened to Polley, and did what it was told, when it was told not to kill Brody's brother.

More bad news

2011-09-26T07:33:00.002-04:00

This has not been a good year for dogs in our family. Yesterday while walking Neville I noticed that his collar was loose enough that he might be able to slip our of it if he was determined enough. I didn't adjust it though. Later that evening, the kids and I went down to the lake to get some ice cream, and took the dog. Neville saw a dog on the other side of a busy street, broke off the leash, ran out into the street and was struck by a car. I ran to him but didn't know what to do. The driver of the car got out and didn't know what to do. Another woman pulled over, got out of her car, put her hand on my shoulder, and began praying loudly for me to Jesus. An ambulance stopped. The driver told me he had called the police, but couldn't stay, because he had a human patient. A person, did I understand. The generous woman drove Neville and I to an animal hospital and another generous woman walked the kids back to our house. On the way to the hospital Neville died.

Molly has made a donation to petsofthehomeless.org for all our friends who have lost pets this year. There have been too many. We are holding all of you in the light.

one of the things that are wrong with me.

2011-09-20T17:36:00.002-04:00

I've been reading in this book about the hypothesized existence of a "reorientation module." Googling the phrase leads quickly to this article which suggests a genetic component to such a module. Now I get lost really easily, and so did my maternal grandmother. There is also a distinct pattern to the way get lost that seems to go beyond simple inattention to my surroundings.* One problem comes when I go into an area that is psychologically closed off from a larger area--for instance if I am walking along a row of shops, and then enter one of them, or if I am walking along a corridor and enter a room--upon returning to the larger space, I am completely disoriented and unable to identify the direction I was originally traveling.

I don't know if that quite relates to the skills tested in material I'm reading. They mostly look at tasks where people and animal have to find an object hidden in a rectangular room, where you have to remember that the object is in a corner that has the short wall on the right and the long wall on the left. Its interesting stuff. there is evidence of modularity for this kind of task: people who can do it are unable to explain how they did it, the skill is only sensitive to certain kinds of environmental input, etc.

*Although inattention to my surroundings is clearly a factor, too. A few months ago I became lost while traveling from my work to home because I was completely distracted by this Philosophy Bites podcast.

Edie

2011-08-05T12:51:00.001-04:00

Edie, a set on Flickr.

Old friend

Edie Hinshaw. 1999-2011. Good dog.

2011-06-29T12:13:00.004-04:00

We found Edie in the autumn of 2000, when she was approximately one year old. We were newly married had returned from our long cross country bike trip, and were talking about getting a dog, but had reached an impasse, because I wanted a large dog, and Molly wanted a small dog. One day Molly's co-workers saw a small, agitated brown dog rambling around their office parking lot. Catching her immediately became an office project. (The people in Molly's office were always happy for an excuse to drop work.) When they finally lure her into the building, Molly's boss announced "Great, let's call the pound!"

"Wait," said Molly, "No one is going to find this dog's home? We're just going to let it be put down?"

Thus it fell to us to find the dog a home. We put up posters all over the part of Lubbock where she was found, but the only response we got was chastisement for nailing a sign into someone's living tree. And so, we became the caretakers for a small, hyperactive dog.

When we took her in to be neutered, the vet guessed that she had been a stray for a while, based on the pavement wear on her claws. He also told us that she was probably about a year old, and had escaped from where ever she was before in her first heat cycle, which was still subsiding. Based on the way she responded to people, she had probably been abused or neglected. She was part dachshund, part terrier.

We named her "edie" because "idi" means "come here" in Russian, and when Molly was in Kaliningrad, the park was always full of old ladies calling "IDI! IDI!" to their dogs.

When Edie first lived with us, we called her our "decorative under-the-couch dog" because she hid all day, coming out at night only to soil the carpet. Gradually, she learned to sit with us, but she would always try to nip my hands. Eventually I learned that the spot on the back of her head I was patting her was a place dogs don't like to be touched. She would get out a lot in those days, and we spent a lot of time looking up and down the dusty alley behind our house for her. Normally she was waiting home for us when we got back. Once we tried to take her to a friend's house, and she slipped out of her harness and came straight home. It took a long time to get her house-trained. For a while we were putting her in the kitchen behind a baby gate when we went to work, but she could jump clear over it. Those stubby legs could actually push her high in the air.

There was a large park near our house, and we would go on hour long walks many, many nights. She was terrified of bridges and storm drains, and we would often have to take long detours to avoid them.

One night she got out, and I found her wrestling with a larger, yellow dog in the back yard. I couldn't tell if they were fighting or playing. I watched a while, but eventually got nervous and pulled Edie away. In retrospect, they were probably playing, and that was probably a moment of great happiness for her.

After we moved to Auburn, she became completely settled in. We first lived in an apartment across from two women who owned dachshunds. I had always thought of Edie as a wiener dog, but when she stood next to full-blooded wiener dogs, I realized she was only a little wienery. When Caroline was born, we were worried that Edie would not get along with her, but Edie recognized Caroline immediately as a member of our pack.

If it wasn't too hot, I would go on walks in the afternoon, with Edie's leash tied to Caroline's stroller. Getting everyone to go the same direction was sometimes difficult.

Our time in Canton, NY was good for Edie. It was a rural village and she could spend plenty of time outside. There was an island in the Grasse River near our house where we would let her go off leash. Once she spontaneously jumped in the water, swam in a small circle, and then popped back up on land. It was her only experience in water, and I gather like most small-legged dogs, she didn't like it.

We got her little booties to walk in the snow, but she didn't like them.

We had back porch with a small ramp for Edie that sloped into a large, grassy backyard. We could tie Edie to the rail of the porch with a long rope and she sit inside with us, or run down the ramp to pee in the yard. The grass in the area she could reach was dramatically thicker and greener than the grass elsewhere.

There were two nice playgrounds in walking distance of our house, where I would go with Caroline and Edie, tying Edie up to a piece of playground equipment. One day I had her tied up to one of those geodesic domes. We had been using a slip collar to dissuade her from pulling when she walked, and I foolishly hadn't switched to the regular collar when I tied her up. Two bigger girls started teasing her, tangling their legs in front of her while they sat on the bars of the dome. I told the girls to stop, but as I did, Edie let out a low belly growl I had never heard before or sense. She broke off the weak slip chain and bit one of the girls, breaking the skin. Her mom was a econ prof at SLU and she called animal control. To avoid trouble, we enrolled in animal behavior classes. A lot of the training involved walking at heel in a square around the backyard and stopping to sit at every corner. Edie was definitely a calmer dog after that.

When Joey was born, Edie immediately decided he was in the pack. I don't know if the kids ever appreciated that this was a rare honor, afforded by Edie to very few other other animals. Grandma Flo, our current across the street neighbor Joni and Joni's dog Daisy are the only other people who were ever fully accepted. Everyone else was to be barked at.

Our time in Ohio has been the golden years for a mellower, aging Edie. We went on walks down to Lake Erie, or down the train tracks, or just around the block. The yard wasn't as well laid out for a dog. It is narrow and a long rope would let her get into either neighbors yard, where she would cause trouble. Mostly she liked to sit on the couch with us. Caroline would love to pat her and tell her she is a good dog.

In the last year, she put on a lot of weight suddenly, started drinking a lot of water and urinating a lot, sometimes in the house. Her back legs became very weak, and she could no longer go up stairs or jump up on the couch unassisted. We put off doing anything about it because it seemed mostly like aging, but when we went to the vet for a regular check up, we told him our worries. It turned out Edie had Cushing's Disease, a hormonal problem. The weight gain was mostly from a swollen liver. She was on meds for a while. The swelling in her abdomen, which we had thought of as weight gain, went down and her drinking a urination returned to normal.

Two nights ago, Caroline was lying in bed with Edie, and asked me asked why Edie was sick. I started to explain Cushing's disease again to her, and she said, "But no, why is she shaking." Edie was trembling something fierce. I took her outside, thinking she might just need to pee and get some fresh air. The next day she was definitely worse. She really didn't like using her back legs at all. We took her to the vet, and he said she'd be ok. She had a reaction to the meds, but we can just lower the dose. Last night we put her in bed with us and she seemed awful. She didn't want to stand at all. I could tell she was in pain. In the morning she had passed.

I like to think we gave her a good life for a dog.

"Unpaid jobs: The new normal?" by Katherine Reynolds Lewis

2011-03-27T14:17:00.001-04:00

To the editors,

Your article "Unpaid jobs: The new normal?" by Katherine Reynolds Lewis glibly offered readers advice on how to break laws meant to protect workers. Lewis discussed the benefits of getting people to work for free under the guise of "internships" and profiled Kelly Fallis, who uses 50 unpaid interns in her business. Explaining her decision she says "From a cost savings perspective, to get something off the ground, it's huge."

The law explicitly forbids using interns for "cost savings." See item 4 on this Department of Labor fact sheet http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm. Under the "test for unpaid interns" the fact sheet explains that to legally use an intern "The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern; and on occasion its operations may actually be impeded"

I trust that Fortune would not publish an article on how to run a Ponzi scheme. Why would it run an article like this?

Sincerely

Rob Loftis

Some questions to ask about the particular virtues

2011-02-28T13:32:00.002-05:00

In prepping for class tomorrow I jotted down a list of 12 questions that we can ask about any particular virtue. I imagine others have made better lists of questions and systematically answered them, but still, I thought the list might be useful to teachers of virtue ethics.

What is it?
1. Can you give a pithy definition of it?
2. Is it a form of self control with regard to an emotion?
3. Is it a mean between two extremes?

How does it relate to the other virtues?
4. Is it a special case of another virtue?
5. Does it need to be distinguished from another virtue that it is often confused with?
6. Is there a general class of virtue that it falls under?

What can we learn about this virtue from others?
7. Are there relevant findings in empirical psychology?
8. Do different cultures regard this virtue differently?
9. How have people symbolized or represented this virtue artistically?

How do I cultivate this virtue in my own life?
10. Is this one that I am good at, or one that I need to work on?
11. What happens to people who lack this virtue?
12. What habits can I adopt to cultivate this virtue.

Easing into a story

2011-02-25T19:10:00.004-05:00

When authors tell stories, they assume the reader starting at the beginning and going to the end. But that's generally not true for me. Consider how I've absorbed the Harry Potter series so far. Roughly, it breaks down into these steps.

1) Knowing the general cultural buzz and mapping the characters onto standard genre figures. Boy who finds out he's special. Geek girl sidekick. Gandolf figure. Gentle giant.

2) Overhearing Molly read the books to the kids, while I am doing other things. Occasionally I am called on to read portions of the book. I distinctly remember reading the scene where Hagrid shows our heroes his brother in the woods in book 5. This before I know much of anything about the story.

3) Watching all the movies with the family, in order, except for the one that isn't out yet.

4) Getting books 1 and 2 on CD for Christmas. Listening to book 1 while driving around for the holidays. Notice that this is the first time I actually hear a whole book from beginning to end.

5) The present day: Listening attentively every night at bedtime while Molly reads book 5 to the kids and listening to book 2 on CD when I drive to work.

I bet a lot of people learn stories in ways similar to this. Its not introduction, conflict, climax, denouement. Not boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back again. Even now, now that I am trying to get the story in order, I am missing things. I missed a chapter of book five because they read it while I was working, rather than at bedtime.

This seems like it should be significant for aesthetic theory. But I'm not sure how.

In any case, I still don't know what happens in the second half of the last book, so don't tell me.

Lovers' Dialogues I (free writing continued)

2011-02-05T15:11:00.006-05:00

Panos and Sylvia

Panos Aristocles stands naked, pot bellied, and balding at the window, watching the snow under the street lamp.

Sylvia: Panos, sweetie, step away from the window. Someone will see you.

Sylvia sits up in bed, her back against the wall. She has long since reached the age where her breasts point straight down, and further past the age where she cares.

Panos: Don't worry. We're on the second floor. No one ever looks up.

Sylvia: I wish I knew you when you had your buff, wrestler's body.

Panos, sounding less offended that you would expect: You are looking for younger men now?

Sylvia: No, the current you is beautiful. I was just imagining variations on the theme.

Panos: You want the version with the long permed hair and the silly tights? There's a Mexican version where a wear a mask, too.

Sylvia: They all sound delicious.

Panos: It was a preposterous body I had, muscles built for show. They gave the appearance of strength only. I'm surprised you are interested.

Sylvia: I'm a literature professor. Beauty is my business.

Panos: There was no beauty there, only spectacle. I'm glad I'm out of the business. The Mexican circuit didn't even pay well.

Sylvia: Your body would still speak of who you were. It couldn't help it.

Panos: What are you on about?

Sylvia: ...

Panos: The body doesn't speak anyway. The mouth may form words and the hand may write, but these are accidents. The person speaks with the language.

Sylvia: I think I can see facts about who you are--your personality, your nature--by directly looking at you.

Panos: A preposterous thesis.

He is now seated on the window sill.

Sylvia: Your fat--particularly your arms and shoulders--says "athlete gone to fat" not "lifelong couch potato."

Panos: That's my nature?

Sylvia: It is a part of your history.

Panos: Do better than that. Look at my body and directly perceive a mental property.

Panos is standing straight at the foot of the bed, his shoulders square with Sylvia's.

Sylvia: Your pride is shouting at me. I think I will ignore it and say that I can see your playfulness instead.

Panos: And where is my playfulness? Where did you see it?

Sylvia: You were smirking. Slightly. You still are.

Panos: And how do you know that is playfulness, and not insolence or even a mask for anger?

Sylvia: I said this was direct perception. I don't need to give a reason.

Panos: You see it because of your past experience with me. Because we have played together and you know how I play.

Sylvia: Also your writing. You are the most playful writer working in pure metaphysics and formal ontology.

Panos: See, language!

Sylvia: But what is wrong with that? I'm allowed to use past experience to shape my perception. How could I see otherwise?

Panos: It certainly makes your perception less direct.

Sylvia: Whatever, the fact is I am not simply projecting something I already know onto the appearance of you.

Panos: Yes, you are.

Sylvia: Well, here's an easy case for me. If I saw you with your eyes wide open and your jaw agape, I would be directly perceiving that you are surprised, a mental property about you.

Panos: Actually, I don't believe that either, but in that case, I am the one being weird. Your view here is common sense, so i will stipulate it. Can you get from there to directly perceiving my playfulness.

Sylvia: Easy peasy. The cases are exactly the same. In both cases I might be mistaken, and in both cases I am relying in part on past experience and a well functioning biological system of perception. If one counts as direct perception, the other does too.

Panos: One case is an event and the other a disposition. Anyway, what do you mean by "direct perception" and how do you deal with the problem of error in perception.

Sylvia: Oh Pan, I don't have any fancy philosophical theories. I teach stories about people. Are you just going to stand there, or are you going to come to bed?

Panos: I'm going to stand here.

Sylvia, wrapping a blanket around her shoulders: Suit yourself. Look, all I meant by "direct perception" was that the objects of my perception are the ordinary things they seem to be, such as foolish naked men who won't come to bed. And when I perceive them as having a property, like being tall, or pale or devilishly handsome, it is my perception that gives me knowledge of these facts. I'm actually trying not to be philosophical here. I'm ruling out funny theories about sense data or qualia or whatever that I never understood or cared for anyway.

Wait, don't open your pretty little mouth. I know where you go next. You are going to bring up two cases. In one I see, oh I dunno, a snake. And in the other, I merely think I see a snake, but really I'm just looking at a rope on the ground in dim light. The perceptions in each case are indistinguishable, but the realities are different. From this you conclude not just that perception is different than reality, but that the object of perception is not the object in reality, because the object of perception is the same, but the reality changed.

Panos: A snake, Sylvia?

Sylvia: I've been reading Śaṅkara.

Panos: And yet you hate philosophy.

Sylvia: No, I just hate philosophers.

[To be continued. I need to read about direct perception (Jackson?). I've also written down that I should write about Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self .]

Authority and Inequality

2010-12-28T22:59:00.002-05:00

In this podcast, Alex Voorhoeve points out that one important problem with inequality is that it gives one person power over another. The problem isn't just that you are rich and I am poor, but that as a result of this, you can fuck with me. I do more than resent your success, I fear for my safety.

Over the last few years, I've grown into the habit of thinking of the moral emotions in terms of Haidt's five fold system, and as a part of this, I thought of all issues of equality and all sorts of Rawlsian concerns as matters of fairness. If one person is rich and one is poor, this is a problem for the "fairness/reciprocity" set of instincts which liberals recognize. But a lot of times that's not the problem. The problem is with the authority/hierarchy instincts. These are instincts that conservatives think of as moral, but liberals are indifferent to. Conservatives believe that obedience and dereference to your betters are good, while liberals think that all urges toward obedience are irrational and should be expelled.

So here's my big revelation: the authority/hierarchy instincts are not just amoral. They are immoral. They aren't just irrelevant for moral thinking. They systematically lead us astray.

If this is right, it is big. The typical liberal critique of the conservative moral emotions is that they are prejudices. The big example here are the moral emotions associated with purity and sanctity, which include the feelings of disgust we have at people whose sexual practices violate our rules. Liberals tend to reject these instincts, which is all well and good when it comes to accepting gays, but is harder to when it comes to rejecting instincts against incest.

Personally, I do accept the moral importance of some purity instincts, including the instinct against incest. But I want to go farther than simply rejecting the moral importance of the authority/hierarchy instinct. It is not just mistaken. It is systematically the opposite of true.

Ok, now I've written that. I'll see if I believe it in the morning.

test driving free plagiarism detection software.

2010-12-07T15:18:00.004-05:00

I just caught a student cheating, so now is a good opportunity to check the various free plagiarism detection services which are out there. Using Google, I've found one online source which is a close match for one of the student's paragraphs. I want to see whether the free online services will be able to find the match I found and match the rest of the document. I am particularly interested in output: I'd like to see side-by-side comparisons of the paper and the original source, with the matching passages marked. This is what I did for the one paragraph match I found

If you have comparisons like this for the whole document, you are pretty much justified in throwing the book at the student. I have redacted the student's name, which is what I believe is required by FERPA.

See Sources Seesources.com

This page is a freebie teaser for a pay version called Plagscan, which costs about a penny a page and is available at plagscan.com. It lets you upload your whole file as an attachment, rather than cutting and pasting paragraphs into a little field. The nice looking output is reserved for paying customers. What I got looks like this.

The software caught matches I did not, but it only caught direct quotes, and not slight paraphrases like "Hypothetical Imperatives conditionally demand" for "A hypothetical imperative conditionally demands." You could use these to get to the rest of the copying, though. More interestingingly, at a penny a page, blanket coverage for me would only cost $5-$10 a semester, which I could pay out of pocket.

Plagium

Didn't catch anything. FAIL.

Plagiarism Checker.

Produced by the University of Maryland Department of Education. This is again a free teaser for a subscription product, which at $8 a month is again something I could pay out of pocket. The whole thing is Google driven, and when it finds a hit, it just gives you links to a Google search for the exact phrase it hit on. The subscription version will let you upload files directly and will ignore material in quotes. If this is all it adds, it doesn't seem worth it. Output below.

Ok, the kids are freaking out. I'll finish this later. I need to check these two.

Copy Tracker

copytracker.ec-lille.fr

Chimpsky.

http://chimpsky.uwaterloo.ca/

Scholars of the Valley.

2010-12-03T15:09:00.003-05:00

The Grand Mother-Empress summoned the greatest scholars of the River, the impuritans of the lower valley and the Maximalists of the upper valley, to debate her divinity. Privately, she hoped she was not divine.

The impuritans, charged with negative position, sent as their first arguer, a boy of eleven. Boy-of-eleven was quite a prodigy, to be sure, but no one expected him to win an imperial debate. The Maximalists clearly didn't expect him to win, as they sent out an over-the-hill back bencher, who was scarcely an imperial class arguer when he was in his prime. Looking uncomfortable in a brand new formal suit, Boy-of-Eleven looked like he had just come from his manhood ceremony, which would in fact not be for two more years. Back-Bencher wore the suit he wore when he won his most famous argument, some twenty years ago.

"Hey kid. Don't think for a moment that I'm going to take it easy on you because your a kid." Back-Bencher said as the two shook hands.

The kid won the toss, and got to choose the style of argument. "Dissent" he called. "I'll take the skeptical position." This was a safe move for him. In a dissent all the skeptic has to do is prove that the positive side has not made its case. In a debate, by contrast, both sides have positions they are trying to prove, and it is possible for the argument to end in a tie.

"Inductive reasoning," Back-Bencher replied, "from plausible premises." He was, at least, not simply handing the boy the match. If he had called for deductive reasoning or self evident premises, he would have a harder row to hoe. Perhaps he knew his limitations.

"I assert the divinity of the grand Mother-Empress," declared the Back-Bencher, "and as evidence I offer the prosperity of the valley."

With this opening move, the grand Mother-Empress sighed, not loudly, but enough that that she could be heard by her chief advisor on her left and her eldest son on her right.

Free writing

2010-11-15T16:46:00.003-05:00

That Fred believed a combination nursing home and whorehouse was a splendid idea would surprise no one who knew him. It was somewhat more surprising that he could find so many RNs who were also experienced prostitutes. It was genuinely alarming that he had gotten this far along in the loan application process at one of the largest banks operating in Nevada. "Health care and sex work have a lot in common both in terms of the skills you have to bring to them and the outcomes you can expect with the clients," he said to the assembled skeptical faces.

Free writing

2010-11-15T10:58:00.002-05:00

Silk Worm Moon had decided that it was time to bring the religion of The Users out of the fictional world of Tron and into the real world. Having worked in translation of one sort or another all her life, this seemed a natural thing to her. It helped a lot that philosophers were now regarding the idea that we live in a computer simulation to be a live possibility, rather than a skeptical hypothesis. She thought about bringing the religion to some of the corners of the internet she knew where such proposals are received with exactly the level of seriousness she had. She worried, though, that the voices there would have questions about the video game, the comic book, or the new movie. A user, she thought, would be a kind of semi-demi-urge: not ultimate creator, nor the creator of this world, merely someone who had customized this portion of the world to suit his needs. A city god, or tribal god. A guardian spirit or animal guide. Should she first show that the world is really a computer simulation? She didn't want this project to end like her youthful attempt to recreate the Pythagorean cult. Most of all, she needed to know what her user wanted her to do.

Free Writing

2010-11-14T10:49:00.003-05:00

In recent ship-wide elections, the Conservative Party gained control of the starboard engine, and have vowed to shut it down. If Labor, which retains control of the port engine, decides to massively increase thrust, the ship may start traveling in tiny circles. However, the most politically likely outcome is that the massive asteroid vessel will fly straight into the sun.

Free writing

2010-11-13T15:07:00.002-05:00

"Ha ha!" cried the villain, "with this device I shall go all the way back in time, to the very beginning, and change it so the universe as a whole never existed!"

Free Writing

2010-11-12T12:26:00.003-05:00

Free Writing

2010-11-11T10:09:00.003-05:00

The people of his planet had large hands that were extremely sensitive. Indeed, their language had a hand-holding form, in addition to a spoken and a written form. The cost of this sensitivity was that the hands must be kept extremely cold, about 20 degrees colder than human body temperature, a fact that Captain Patel found very inconvenient whenever she was in a relationship with one, which was surprisingly often.

Time to Vote!

2010-10-21T09:49:00.002-04:00

Again, here are the much coveted Helpy-Chalk endorsements. This election we are also pushing early voting. By voting now you can save the Dems much needed money on turning out other voters later.

Also, this esteemed blog is recommending judge4yourself.com for information on the down-ticket judicial races no one ever seems to know about.

And now the endorsements: For every state and national level office & the county council race: The Democrat.

For Cuyahoga County Executive: Tim McCormack. He's a longtime Dem running as an independent because of the corruption of the local party. He sounded very good in his WCPN interview.

Chief Justice of the Supreme Court: Eric Brown (over Maureen O'Conner). This is a race between two sitting judges to see who will be chief justice. The court itself is an embarrassment, that frequently rules in favor of large corporate donors to the campaigns of the judges. The very fact that judges are allowed to rule on cases involving donors is a disgrace that has been featured in the New York Times.

For a long time before Brown was appointed, the court has been all Republican. Brown was appointed by Strickland after the former Chief justice died. He has been endorsed by the Plain Dealer and Call and Post and gets higher ratings from the local bar associations. I'm just hoping that as an outsider to the court appointed by a Democrat, he is more likely to push against the corruption.

Justice of the Supreme Court: Mary Jane Trapp (over Judith Lanzinger) See above for the background. Lanzinger is the incumbent in this bad system. Trap gets better ratings from the bar associations and has the recommendation of the Call and Post. The PD went with Lanzinger, but I distrust their endorsements.

8th district court of appeals: Kathleen Ann Keough and Eileen Gallagher, based on judge4yourself rating.

Judge of the Court of Common Pleas Lance Timothy Mason (over Baker), on judge4yourself ratings

Judge of the Court of Common Pleas Dick Ambrose (over Hall), This is one of those places where the judge4yourself ratings are very helpful. Ambrose's opponent received a "not recommended" from all four local bar associations, a sign of serious incompetence or corruption.

Judge of the Court of Common Pleas McClelland (over Clancy). McClelland has all excellent ratings from the local bars, but the newspapers went with Clancy. I decided to trust the bars, on the grounds that at this level simple legal competence is more important than political connections. Also, the bar associations listed include the associations for women, African Americans, and defense lawyers, so I feel the less powerful are represented.

Judge of the Court of Common Pleas Michael Astrab. His opponent, Bridget McCafferty has been indicted in the corruption arrests that have swept the county but still might when the election because women with Irish last names do well around here.

Judge of the Court of Common Pleas Rosemary Grdina Gold (over Marshall). Marshall's ratings are so bad it is natural to suspect incompetence or corruption.

Issue 1: Money for the public schools: YES. Always vote for the schools.

Issue 2: Allow attached housing in some business districts Yes. Sounds like it would be good for walkability.

Should people give final exams?

2010-10-17T10:37:00.002-04:00

The Boston Globe has a piece up about the declining use of final exams, and In Socrates' Wake responds with more general thoughts about frequent, low-stakes testing vs. infrequent high-stakes testing, as a part of their ongoing discussion of the issue. I have long been on the frequent, low-stakes side, which mostly means I spend a lot of time shuffling paper. ISW comes down in favor of retaining some role for the final exam, but everything I'm seeing here reinforces the idea that frequent low-stakes testing is the way to go.

The Globe article was prompted by a change in Harvard's policy about scheduling finals. Rather than assuming that every class will have a final, and them booking a room for it which may go unused, Harvard now requires instructors to request a room for a final. This decision in tern was prompted by the discovery that only 23% of the classes at Harvard actually have finals. (This, by the way, is a change that LCCC might want to consider as well. Our inefficient room scheduling has been cited by outside consultants as a place where we might save money, and our finals scheduling has often been a mess, with rooms double booked.)

I know there is research out there backing the frequent, low-stakes side, but I've never really delved into it. The Globe article one cites on empirical study, by M. Vali Siadat, which showed that algebra students who were given small weekly quizzes did better overall, and on the final exams, than those who were given less rigorous weekly assignments. (This makes me feel good about the structure of my logic class.) This is the original study. A commenter at ISW also mentions the spacing effect, which shows that periodic reinforcement over a long period of time leads to better memory than short cramming sessions. This, by the way, has been known since 1885.

Michael Cholbi at ISW suggests that the frequent low-stakes vs. infrequent high-stakes may a be a false dichotomy. Indeed, the Siadat study seems to have really been about two different versions of the mixed approach, with the winning strategy leaning more to the frequent low-stakes side. My logic class follows roughly that structure, with 10 short quizzes (down from 15 in a 15 week course.) In place of a final, you are allowed to re-take 3 of your quizzes. I think this definitely works for math-like subjects. The issue is more complicated for the humanities.

Dr. Church Message to LCCC Students on Issue 17 - General

2010-09-24T13:39:00.000-04:00

Vote Yes on Issue 17

Hey math teachers!

2010-09-20T16:23:00.000-04:00

My colleague in math and a friend at a nearby community college are producing free online math textbooks aimed mostly at the kind of students we teach. So far they have college algrebra and pre-calc. You can download the .pdf file for free or have the book printed by Lulu for $15. If you want your students to get hard copies through your bookstore, you can make courspacks or order in bulk from Lulu. These are books that ordinarily cost $100+ and all shared via a Creative Commons license.

Smells Like Teen Spirit at 19

2010-09-10T21:40:00.002-04:00

Jim H on facebook reminds me that "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was release on this day nineteen years ago.

I had graduated St. Johns and was working at the Tower Records on University Avenue in Seattle. I had no idea how to survive in the real world, and had only gotten the job at the record store through the intervention of my friend Doug, otherwise I would be completely unemployable.

I think Doug must have brought home the single for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" when it was released to radio, two weeks before Nevermind came out. Doug and I shared the basement of our house. He had the finished part of the basement, and I had a corner of the unfinished part, walled off by plywood. We listened to the single by the laundry machines. I remember thinking that it sounded more or less like the Nirvana I had been listening to all summer. I was obsessed at the time with the CD single for "Sliver" and the live version of "About at Girl" that came with it. The new Nirvana was just a hair slicker, though. I distinctly disliked the bweep BWEEP you hear during the verse (bweep BWEEP/load up on guns...)

I was working the night Nevermind itself came out, and I remember telling the manager around five that I was taking my dinner break. She said, "Don't you want to wait an hour to go to the Nevermind record release party at Beehive." Beehive was our competition around the block. I waited till six and wound up seeing Nirvana in a small shop that looked just plie my place of work, but it was full of sweaty people. Never got a chance to see them that close again.

Dennis Lambert for County Council First District.

2010-09-03T13:22:00.004-04:00

Information gets thinner when you look at candidates for the Democratic nominatino for County Council first district. I'm going with Lambert mostly for the way he talks on corruption issues. He also mentions on his website that he has been both a union representative and a manager. I'm not as confident in this vote as I was for the county executive vote.

These notes are mostly from the Plain Dealer website and focus on stances on specific issues in the campaign.

James D. French (Lawyer): Not sure if he wants to release minutes of executive meetings. Doesn't want to raise taxes. Gets the Plain Dealer's endorsement. I haven't lived here long enough to decide what that is worth.

Walt Halun (Director of purchasing at some company): Will publicize the minutes, won't raise taxes.

Nicole Daily Jones (City councilwoman for North Olmstead): Wants to reduce taxes. Will release the minutes of executive meetings.

Dennis Lambert (Customer service supervisor at the post office, former Fairview city councilman.): Has a degree in accounting. He talks explicitly about ending the patronage system when he talks about ending corruption, rather than talking vaguely about accountability and transparency, as the other candidates do. Wants to release the executive minutes in a limited form. Wants to reduce taxes.

Pete Matia (retired UPS driver, former city councilman for Fairview Park): Will release minutes, will not raise taxes.

Maureen Sweeney: would consider raising taxes, would not change the policy on minutes of executive sessions.

Terri Hamilton Brown for Cuyahoga County Executive.

2010-09-03T10:20:00.004-04:00

Cuyahoga county government has been mired in corruption for years, but stands a chance of turning around now that a new structure with a strong central executive has been put in place. Terri Hamilton Brown is the candidate most likely to clean up the corruption, and hereby gets the much coveted Helpy-Chalk endorsement. Below are my notes on the four candidates for the Democratic nomination for county executive.

Terri Hamilton Brown: Her most important qualification is her work cleaning up corruption at the Cleveland Metropolitan Housing Authority: Few dispute that Hamilton Brown, 48, cleaned up CMHA, where her predecessor was fired for shady dealings and later went to federal prison for theft of public funds and other crimes. That links is to her plain dealer profile, which opens with a compelling description of Hamilton Brown going ballistic over the failure to remove snow from public housing sidewalks and parking lots after a big storm. She comes off well, and the Plain Dealer isn't even endorsing her; they are endorsing Ed FitzGerald.

The PD also has thisvideo from Hamilton Brown. She doesn't talk about corruption of CMHA. Instead, she just talks about finding savings and efficiencies in government working, and says that if we do this, we won't have to raise taxes. She also advocates greater transparency, including making executive meeting minutes publicly available.

She gets my vote for competence as an administrator of a public institution and ability to fight corruption.

Ed FitzGerald: is a former FBI agent. His profile at the Plain Dealer makes him look mostly like a law-and-order candidate, with detailed proposals for improving the police. The PD endorsed FitzGerald, citing Hamilton Brown's aggressive management style, which might make it hard for her to work with the County Council. They also imply a conflict of interest, because her husband works for Cleveland mayor Frank Jackson. I'm not particularly impressed by either of these arguments. If the goal here is to clean up corruption, I think we need someone who can stand by her principles. And I'm not exactly sure what the conflict of interest with Hamilton Brown's husband is supposed to be. Frank Jackson and his team have a reputation for being bland technocrats, competent people who play by the rules.

The other two candidates for the democratic nomination aren't serious. James F. Brown is a bus driver with a high school education, no experience leading large organizations, and no organized campaign. Dianna Lynn Hill uses ALL CAPS a lot in her statement to the plain dealer. When asked what she would do first on taking office, she writes: "The first thing I will do upon taking office would be to SALUTE the people of Cuyahoga County Ohio who have endured generations of corruption and chosen the less traveled road toward reform and revitalizing the American Spirit of our citizens at large by standing up for change!!!"

One final note: this story by our local NPR affiliate states that many candidates for office this election have extensive criminal records, including things like murder and soliciting sex with a minor. But then the story provides no information at all on who these people are or how we can avoid voting for them. Grrr.

Thought while listening to Studio 360.

2010-08-22T10:42:00.001-04:00

Suppose you can travel back in time, and the rule is that you can change things that don't have any effects that endure to the future time you came from. You can then meet someone to whom it seems you can do anything. That person would then have to confront the fact that in a concrete, measurable way, nothing they do really matters.

I suppose some sci fi story somewhere has dealt with this idea.

"A standing army is like a standing member...

2010-08-15T22:07:00.001-04:00

A standing army is like a standing member. It's an excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure."

NYT on textbook prices.

2010-08-13T09:28:00.004-04:00

The New York Times money blog has a post about saving money on textbooks. Mostly it just covers the standard advice on finding cheaper books, but it does contain a couple interesting statistics.

"College textbook prices rose about 6 percent, on average, every year — that’s twice the rate of inflation — from 1986 to 2004."
...
“We are finding that 75 percent of students still prefer print to digital,” Ms. Allen added."

For my students the number is around 95%. Our population is a little older, but more importantly, they are a lot poorer.

Thankfully, federal rules that went into effect in July may help ease the pain. Publishers can no longer bundle their textbooks with accompanying materials like workbooks without offering the items separately, and they must reveal their prices to professors when making a sales pitch. Colleges, meanwhile, are now required to provide students with a list of assigned textbooks during course registration, which allows for more time for shopping before classes begin.

I heard people at the AAPT talking about the regulations and what a pain they are, but we have nothing at our institution regarding this. I'm pretty sure I could get in compliance quickly if I needed to, though.

Loftis, J. Robert: "Breaking the Back of Perverse Incentives: Ending High Textbook Prices for Good with Free Online Textbooks"

2010-08-08T13:41:00.004-04:00

I gave a talk at the AAPT arguing three connected theses:

Textbook prices are an injustice
Philosophy teachers have a professional duty to create and use free online textbooks
This duty is best fulfilled using what I call the Open Office model

. The Open Office model simply means that you try to replicate functionality of the existing closed access product without innovating a lot. This contrasts with the Linux model, which tries to displace an expensive product by creating something that works better, but is unfamiliar and difficult for most users. Most existing free textbooks, I think, are written on the Linux model.

At the conference, a lot of people were talking up concept mapping software, xmind in particular. So the night before the talk I decided to give xmind a whirl by making a concept map for my talk. this is what I came up with. I think I made the whole thing too big. It is hard to figure out what the print area of these diagrams are.

This is the handout, which lists free textbooks and course materials databases along with little descriptions and recommendations.

A sample from our garden

2010-08-04T13:16:00.001-04:00

A sample from our garden
Originally uploaded by rob helpychalk.

While we were out of town, everything went crazy.

Peter Bradley, John Basl, Rudy Garns "Social Networking Technology and Teaching Philosophy."

2010-08-01T13:49:00.004-04:00

Peter Bradley, John Basl, Rudy Garns "Social Networking Technology and Teaching Philosophy."

Peter

Textbooks are like client-server systems; we need textbooks that work more like peer networks.

Why not make distributed textbooks? Every part of writing a textbook is social, so lets doing social media.

He actually has a free online critical thinking textbook, that comes with a printed version, and in use at 3 schools. USE THIS.

He is collecting critical thinking examples at http://inquiry.mcdaniel.edu/, and wants start crowdsourcing the database of examples.

John (remotely using wimba classroom)

Twitter!

What can you get your students to do on Twitter? Write a haiku or a tweet summarizing the reading.

#PhilQ is the hashtag for philosophical questions

I am now following him on twitter.

Google Wave!

Rudy

All his stuff is here

He uploaded his slides to slideshare.com. Use this in the future.

Mostly familiar technologies. He puts his classes on groups.diigo.com for social bookmarking. Also netvibes.

Alexandra Bradner, Chris Weigl & Emily Esch, "Pedagogical Issues in Experimental Philosophy"

2010-07-30T13:32:00.001-04:00

“Clickers and experimental philosophy”

Alexandra:

Sample survey

Emily

What experimental philosophy is.

Empirical philosophy: Any philosophy where people use empirical work, generally from other disciplines. People have been doing this for ever. John Doris Lack of Character

Experimental philosophy: Philosophers who run their own experiments.

Negative project vs. positive progress

Negative: Bashing conceptual analysis. Intuitions are suspect, subject to framing effects, etc.

Positive: Finding out what folk concepts people actually have. Useful work on personal identity and free will. Sean Nichols on agency.

Knobe (2006). [Josh Knobe founding father of movement.)

Environmental question: chairman of the board intentionally harmed the environment but not intentionally helped.

Chris

What unique discussions can experimental philosophy bring to a class?

Nahmias and Nadelhoffer “Polling in teaching philosophy” in teaching philosophy.

Guy goes off on whether these should be called “thought experiments” or “hypotheticals”

Why does this matter?

How can we best integrate experimental philosophy with traditional texts?

Intro level: In the background while talking about thought experiments
Upper level: As an explicit metaphilosophical issue.

What special challenges does teaching experimental philosophy face?

Emily

Introduction to philosophy with experimental philosophy
Units covered: Morality, personality Identity, Epistemology, Free Will, God

Thought experiments covered: Trolley, transplant, experience machine, ship of Theseus, soul switching, eletransporter, Gettier, truetemp, trapped conversationalist, drug addict, Pascal’s wager

She used the thought experiment at the intro with no background. Surveys on pencil and paper. Tabulated by prof.

Benefits

Comprehension: Its worse than you thought. People don’t understand the thought experiments

Participation

Variation: increased rigor makes the variation in intuitions more salient.

Justification: leads people to justify their answers.

Alexandra:

Paper version of original survey. “Always have a plan B when you are working with technology”

Turningpoint Anywhere. With Response XR clicker.

Her recommended system:

Bioethics guy has a turning point ppt on the turning point website. This si very good.
Polleverywhere.com

Use cell phones or laptops

Disadvantage: It just draws attention to people who are lower income.

Surveymonkey:

Best for research. Lets you do branching surveys. Easy to print from.

Frogmetrics

Coolest clicker ever.
Higher ed unfriendly.
Great metrics.

Chris

Namias, et al., Nichols and Knobe. Good articles using x-phi in the free will area.

Stephen Finn “Creating in class exercises to hone philosophy skills”

2010-07-30T13:28:00.000-04:00

Stephen Finn “Creating in class exercises to hone philosophy skills”

He’s under contract to create an exercise book—this is part of the writing of it. Send him an email if you want to use any of his exercises.

[Kinds of exercises:
Writing
Arguments/critical thinking
Intuition listing
Looking carefully over schemes/lists
Close reading
Decision making/question answering.]

Today the agenda is to develop a list of philosophy skills and exercises that work those skills.

What are the skills students need to succeed in a philosophy course?]

Critical reading for philosophy
Finding an argument.
Identifying intent
Indentifying larger conversation.
Analysing arguments
Writing skills
Articulation
Citation.
Reflective equilibrium.
Rauhut’s quizzes
How to ask a question.
Socratic prompts from changingminds.org.  good
Engaging other views.
Oral presentation.
“understanding the question to which their reading is the answer”
Dealing with thought experiments
“Distinguishing fact and opinion claims” (AARGH why would a philosopher use this distinction.)

He hands out some exercises.

We do Skill #3 analyzing philosophical texts: What is the au doing—claiming, arguing, questioning, informing, defining, etc.

Group one on skill one
• Group response: “We got hung up on just what you meant by the instructions.”
• “I like to emphasize re-reading. Have them read it. Say what they think. And then read it again.
• Use one sheet per group to force group interaction.
• “what did you learn new on the third reading”

Group two and three: Skill three
• You need background on what these things are.
• Write numbers next to sentences. Let students write multiple numbers.
• Annotate text on a smart board. Give them your own annotated text with you system.

Group four on skill 9
• Group response: “We got hung up on just what you meant by the instructions.”

“Are there uniquely philosophical skills?”
“No. what we are doing is reinforcing skill sets across disciples. Right now, the way the university is compartmentalized, students compartmentalize not just their knowledge, but their skills. Philosophy breaks that down.”

Small groups again

• State elaborate exemplify: Reading exercises. For each passage state the point, elaborate on it, exemplify it. “Do you add evaluation later” “Not that this stage.”
• Analytical outline for their own writing. You’ve got a draft, try to figure out what it actually says. “Does this carry over into other texts?”
• Have two students attempt to summarize the same paragraph. See if they match.
• Powerpoint arguments with blanks.
•
“I think the more structure the better with introductory students.”

Understanding Bakugon

2010-07-11T23:29:00.002-04:00

Joey is obsessed (for this week at least) with Bakugon, so I thought I'd make an effort to understand the game underlying the product line. Joey doesn't understand it either, but I thought if one of us did, we could have more fun.

Right away, I am perplexed by things that I imagine kids just blow right over. The video says "Bakugon represent six important attributes," and then list six funny made up names. How do you "represent" an "attribute"? Based on other things Joey watched, I think they mean that there are six kinds of Bakugon. But they might mean that each Bakugon has six properties that you need to keep track of. Why is this so ambiguous? For all the fancy animation, did they not bother to get a good translation of the original game instructions?

Other comments: I don't want to show Joey these instructional videos, because he's going to want to buy too many things. Also, he will want to simply watch the video repeatedly with me. And then he'll want another movie. And then he'll want to spend the day watching Youtube videos.

At least the don't insist that the kid who wins the game gets to keep the other kid's toys.

So what is the smallest amount of money I can spend and still have enough plastic crap to sit down and play a game of Bakugon with my son?

Bakucoin? There is a Bakucoin? What does that do?

Ok, if you buy a Bakutriad pack you get 3 Bakugon, three gate cards, and three ability cards, which is enough for one side of a Bakugon battle. If we purchased two of these, we'd have enough for a game. Next question: If we scoured the house and sorted through all the plastic crap would we find this much Bakugon paraphernalia?

Baku = explode
Gan = sphere.

And again, it is hard to tell what exactly you are purchasing, if you try to buy the product on Ebay.

If we went to Target or Toys 'r' us to get Bakugon, we could make it a fun expedition what would get the kids out of Mom's hair for several hours. But we'd probably wind up buying more crap than we wanted.

Do we even want to go down this route? The game is designed to encourage you to buy more crap.

Federal Health Care Aid for Illegal Immigrants

2010-06-26T11:53:00.003-04:00

So far I've been avoiding researching the situation with illegal immigrants and health care, even though every time I teach medical ethics, I have students claim that it is unfair that they have to pay for health care while those illegal immigrants get it for free. This year I'm going to deal with, though, because I have a couple very intelligent, hardworking students writing papers on it, one with personal experience on the subject.

So I've just tried to get people to be more specific about what federal programs they are actually talking about. My thought was that this would deflate hysterical rhetoric of the "OMG those lazy, coddled immigrants get free everything, like health care, and pie!" sort. The problem with this tactic is that the law here is simply a mess. We are dealing with two of the most incoherent, contradictory legal areas in the US: health care payments and immigration. If you could find a way to throw in the tax code, you would have a federal gibberish trifecta.

So far, one of my students has cited the The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act of 1986 and the Alien Emergency Medical Program, which is mandated as a part of the Welfare Reform Act.

This might wind up as a case of justice vs. compassion, at least if you read all arguments with maximum charity, which would be interesting.

The Opposite of Mother is not Father, Dammit.

2010-06-18T10:08:00.002-04:00

One of Caroline's activity books asserts that the opposite of "mother" is "father." Actually, a lot of children's books and toys make mistakes like that. If two things are commonly paired, the designer of the product thinks they are opposites. So salt and pepper are opposites. I've emphasized to Caroline that these people are simply wrong. To be opposites, the member of a pair must cancel each other out. Still, I'm particularly galled by idea that the *opposite* of "mother" is "father."

Scoobie-Doo Realism

2010-06-16T09:25:00.000-04:00

wants to posit that there is an intellectual movement that should be called "Scoobie-Doo Realism." People take up a stance of Scoobie-Doo Realism when they pose as hard nosed advocates of science and objectivity, because they can unmask a traditionally mysterious figure. This despite the fact that their own explanations make no sense and they hang out with a talking dog.

Experts: "We're Fucked"

2010-06-14T11:41:00.004-04:00

The industry professionals at The Oil Drum suspect that the real leak in the Deepwater Horizon site is not at the blowout preventer, but 1,000 feet below the sea floor. BP may have even been trying to increase the flow at the sea floor to relieve pressure on the leak 1,000 feet below.

The post is full of technical industry talk (and rather badly edited) so it is hard for me to figure out exactly what they are saying, but there seem to be two further catastrophes to fear. Apparently the sea floor there is just silt that doesn't really provide any support for the blowout preventer. The preventer is just resting on the 1000 foot pipe beneath it, which now seems to be buckling. The other problem is that the sea floor itself might be opening up, causing the whole oil reserve to come to the surface at once. I'm not sure how this outcome is compatible with the worry about the pipe collapsing, since it seem to imply that the sea floor is a solid mass that can shatter, which they just said it wasn't. I'd like to see more explanations of this stuff.

Update: Prof. Goose from The Oil Drum has stopped by Unfogged to explain some things http://tinyurl.com/3xunewu. He points out that the article is by a TOD commenter, not a regular writer. Goose points to comments on The Oil Drum thread that undermine dougr's original post. A guy calling himself R2-3D points to other signs that would be present if there had been a casing blow out beneath the sea floor. Maybe we should leave this to the experts to debate before we reach higher levels of panic than we have currently.

End of the School Year

2010-06-04T09:14:00.001-04:00

Every weekday this year, a small line of first graders (including Caroline) has formed on my front lawn, waiting to board the bus. Often one child's younger brother got in line too. He is around three and was inevitably wearing pajamas. He just wants to be like the big kids. His mom made sure he didn't actually get on the bus. School is over after today, and I will miss this little ritual.

Collateral damage in a defensive action against birds

2010-06-01T22:49:00.005-04:00

The kids and I were picking strawberries to give to our neighbor for her birthday, when we found this guy, caught in the netting I had put up to keep out the robins. He had been still as the dead until I took one step closer than he liked, and he zipped away as far as the net would stretch.

Chipmunk with wound and attached netting
Originally uploaded by rob helpychalk.

I was scared to handle him at first, thinking that he could carry disease and might scratch me, but it quickly became clear that he would not be able to get all four of his claws out of the net on his own. The weird thing is that once I got all his claws free, there was just a glob of netting attached to his side for no apparent reason.

clear shot of wound and attached netting
Originally uploaded by rob helpychalk.

Also, he had rubbed a big patch of fur clean off from his shoulder trying to escape.

scared chipmunk
Originally uploaded by rob helpychalk.

The only way to free him was to cut the glob of netting with scissors. Once free, he scurried into some PVC piping connected loosely to the downspout of the gutters of my house.

Some background. I've seen him in the garden before, sometimes scurrying into the PVC pipe, sometimes scrambling around the southwest corner of the garden, looking for a way out. Sometimes it looked like he did find a way out--the base of the fence consists simply of flagstones piled together, and there are plenty of chipmunk sized holes. The PVC pipe is another story. The downspout comes down at the corner of the house, which is adjacent to the northeast corner of the garden. It empties into this PVC pipe, which goes under the garden fence, one side sticking into the garden and one side sticking out. The pipe is a natural varmint highway, and up until now I have dealt with this problem with the simple expedient of putting a large rock on the sticking-out-of-the-garden side. But the rock is often moved and doesn't cover the hole right, so I am not surprised that it has still served as a direct route to my garden.

Ok, so the chipmunk is in the pipe and the kids having been briefly entertained by The Chipmunk Incident, are now asking to do something new and exciting. I am not satisfied with the situation, however. The 'munk is scared, cowering in the pipe, and may think to leave out the side that exits the garden, and might not. So, with the kids watching, I proceed to try to disinter the PVC pipe, slide it out from under the fence, and coax the chipmunk out. This is not entertaining to children, who whine and make escalating demands, including that I stop what I doing any play Uno. Finally, unable to take the pestering, I yell

Can't you see I'm trying to rescue and injured chipmunk here!!!

which in retrospect, is kinda a weird thing to yell. In any case, it scares the kids off, and I am able to remove the pipe and clean it out. It turns out the whole thing is packed full of dirt and live roots. There is no way it would carry water, an issue which never came up, because the downspout and the gutter that feeds into it are also completely clogged. About halfway through the process of emptying the pipe, the 'munk scurries out and runs into a nearby evergreen bush. I imagine I will recognize him if I see him again, because he has a glob of net sticking out from his side. I should name him, but the only name that comes to me is "Leibniz" which I am not satisfied with.

Leibniz the chipmunk
Originally uploaded by rob helpychalk.

I am also worried that his wounds will mean his early demise. I can't figure for the life of me how the net got stuck to his side. Molly has suggested hopefully that Leibniz (for want of a better name) might have a mate who will help groom out the netting. But the whole thing still worries me.

I spent the remainder of the day restoring the PVC pipe to its proper place and fashioning grates at either end to be sure to keep all varmints out. I also took care that it was tipped so that, if the gutters of the house are ever repaired and actually empty water into the PVC pipe, it will be appropriately tipped so that the water pours into the garden, and not out of it. I even measured with a level.

little philosophers

2010-05-27T15:34:00.002-04:00

Joey, from the back seat of the car: "Why I don't believe in God, is that God is a person, and God created persons,* so who created God? And why Caroline** doesn't believe in God is that God created Caroline, but then..." Here he pauses and stammers as he tries to remember the argument. "God created Caroline, so why didn't God make Caroline believe in God?"

_____
* Joey pronounces "person" as "perthon" and "persons" as "perthonth"
** Pronounced "Care-wine"

NFM campaign to help adjuncts get unemployment insurance.

2010-05-26T11:51:00.002-04:00

Adjunct faculty who find themselves without work are often eligible for unemployment insurance. New Faculty Majority has launched a campaign to help adjuncts get the money they deserve. Employers sometimes claim that adjunct faculty have "reasonable assurance" that they will be hired in the future, but this has been successfully challenged in California and Washington. NFM president Maria Maisto says in a press release

In other industries, seasonal employees who face similarly precarious circumstances do not have to prove 'no reasonable assurance'; neither should college teachers who are denied continuing contracts. This situation stems from higher education's overdependence on contingent employment, which is devastating the teaching profession and is detrimental to education."

New Faculty Majority is a advocacy group fighting for adjunct and contingent faculty. This is the first of what will hopefully be many campaigns to improve working conditions for the 73% of the academic workforce that is not on the tenure track. Please help spread the word to adjuncts you know.

Dear Idea of a Human Centipede

2010-05-25T22:41:00.001-04:00

Dear Idea of a Human Centipede: Please get out of my brain. Please get out of the casual conversations I have. Please let me forget your existence.

You enter my thoughts at least three times a week, sometimes spontaneously, sometimes from the words of another. This cannot go on. Your presence hurts me.

I sometimes imagine that the writer/director of the movie The Human Centipede was in a similar position. Once you, this poisonous idea, got into his head, he couldn't stop thinking about it. Maybe he thought that by making the movie, he would be spared, sorta the way in The Ring if you show the cursed video to someone else, and curse them, then you won't die. Maybe he didn't think he could rid himself of the evil thought, but he resented the rest of us so much for being free of it that he wanted to bring us down to his level.

In any case, Idea of a Human Centipede, please leave my brain.

Joey Camps Out in the Back Room

2010-04-18T23:09:00.001-04:00

Joey Camps Out in the Back Room
Originally uploaded by rob helpychalk.

Now is my chance to liveblog an episode of Space 1999

2010-04-08T22:15:00.006-04:00

The family is away. I have the house to myself. What should I watch that no one else in the family would watch with me?

SPACE 1999. Episode: Mission of the Darians.

00:30 Middle school geometry is used to express awe:

"Twenty miles long by five miles wide!"

"A hundred square miles of space ship!"

00:33. I was going to make fun of the characters for being unsurprised that the aliens speak English, but rewinding I see the inserted the line "Signal decoded." But how did they decode it?

Battlestar co-creator Ron Moore said that the Eagles were the coolest looking spaceship ever. He's right.

Dramatic music!

This Episode: Funky Music! Absurd Costumes! Guest Star Joan Collins!

And once again, people get information from computers by reading cash register receipts.

Again, Barbara Bain is stuck in the smurfette role.

360 degree panning shot, starting with the character speaking. When the camera returns to the spot where it started, the speaking character is no longer standing there, but we can still hear him.

Dwarfs! Mute Dwarfs!

Now a violent big guy.

Sinister dwarf hand.

When I was a kid I was fascinated by how the Space 1999 guns were different than Star Trek phasers.

There is going to be a taking off the space suit helmet reveal.

The dwarfs are enemies of the big guys.

AAANND... the aliens do speak English after all. The nice thing about Space 1999 is that once you accept the basic premise that they are all on the moon, which has been blasted away from earth and is now wandering to all the interesting parts of the universe...well, anything else is plausible.

We first meet Joan Collins with a long shot of her hips and thighs. In fact, we see the hips and thighs, then get a whole nother scene, and ontly then do we get the face reveal (also featuring silly headgear.)

The weird headdress has a matching wig.

"You have to understand, apart from this small area, our ship is a wasteland."

"out of 15 thousand darians, only 14 survived intact."

Throw the dwarf in the glass elevator!

Throw the just introduced for this episode character in the glass elevator!

"Have you considered how similar our situations are? Our ship? Your moon? Both victims of an unfortunate disaster."

Premise reveal (?) Lost generation ship offers to team up with lost moon.

AND NOW BARBARA BAIN MUST WEAR THE SKIMPY OUTFIT!

"A hundred years. Its a very long time."

The show accurately predicted that chunky shoes would be hip in 1999.

The aliens are eating people! Maybe each other! Will they eat our heroes?

Ahh, they don't eat each other, they eat the people lower than themselves. It is a metaphor.

The food people are rising up against the eating people, but the eating people are only doing it to preserve "the undamaged genetic material of our race."

Glowing orbs.

Here I am, doing my paperwork in my super short bright pink dress.

"You Darians have one of our people. A WOMAN. I want you to take us to her."

The eating people use the food people for transplant organs and for amino acids that run the ship, but i don't think they actually eat them. In any case, THEY WANTED TO EAT OUR HEROES.

"Once our race is established on the new planet, we will gladly die."

The food people say to head eating person "You are not a god," and throws him head first into the glass sheet that preserves his genetic code.

"Listen! The only chance you people have is to help each other! and to live together!"

I have the house to myself until Saturday.

2010-04-07T21:55:00.002-04:00

All those times I said to myself, "I could get this done if I just had a moment of peace and quiet." Now is the time. So what am I getting done?

Listening to old records on vinyl. So far: Miles Davis Get Up With It, The Hated Every Song. Now playing: The Fugs, The Fugs II.

What are we looking for a natural history of?

2010-04-03T21:28:00.002-04:00

Looking for this book, I type "a natural history of..." Google, helpfully offers these suggestions

the senses,
love,
peace,
the sonoran desert,
the dead hemmingway
the romance novel
seeing
the dead
california
western trees

Stupid fucking backyard trampoline

2010-04-02T16:28:00.002-04:00

The ad for a comparable new model says it takes 45 minutes to assemble. We have been working on this project off and on for a month now, including things like a week spent waiting for a tool we ordered and sweaty afternoons spent doing work we just had to undo later. Of course, we did not buy the new model, which would be ~$850. We got a used one for free on freecycle (plus like fifty dollars to rent a truck to pick it up and 90 dollars on replacement parts, so far). (It was Molly's find.)

The whole thing is driving me apeshit, and I mostly have myself to blame. We didn't get instructions with it, so we just winged it. Later we checked for instruction son line and found them right away. If we had done that first, we wouldn't now be in a position of having to take the whole damn thing apart and start over.

I WILL be productive today

2010-04-01T09:22:00.003-04:00

Big important tasks

Assemble kids' backyard trampoline
Finish grading ethics outlines
Organize and enter ethics in class assignments

Smaller less important tasks

Return/pick up library materials
put screen in storm door
clean clean clean
put out & water plants
go to open bookkeeping budget meeting
Fix slipper

I'm shooting to get all these done today, but I predict I will get one major task and all the minor tasks done.

Empirically verifying models of competences

2010-03-31T15:18:00.002-04:00

The ethics textbook I use is called Moral Competence, and its focus is just what it says it is. The book develops a five-fold model of a morally competent decision maker. Although the book is riddled with arguments--for instance claiming that virtue alone, as the book defines it, is not sufficient for moral competence--it doesn't make an effort to empirically verify the system as a whole. This makes sense for what the book is trying to do. The model is presented mostly as a framework for students to deliberate on their own moral competence and for synthesizing results and ideas from a wide range of philosophers and psychologists.

Still, something could be gained by looking at the ways that other disciplines have developed models of competences and verified them. The focus on language competence in Chomskian and post Chomskian linguistics would be a good model. A lot of emphasis is placed there on error patterns. It is a big deal that children frequently overgeneralize grammatical rules, but never simply spit out strings of words without any grammar. Something similar happens in neuropsychological models of different abilities. A stroke can impair one aspect of the ability but not another--for instance a patients ability understand written number words like "One thousand fifty four" but not Arabic numerals like "1054"--and this says something about how we model the competence.

I'm trying to figure out what the equivalent data for moral failings would be. Liszka's system encompasses many classical distinctions between kinds of moral failings, such as Aristotle's distinction of failures of knowledge and failures of will. It also brings in psychological theories of failure, like ideas about anti-social personality disorder and failures of empathy. But I still don't have a good sense of what the data to be explained is.

Are there kinds of moral failure we just don't see, akin to Chomsky's grammatical mistakes that don't get made? Are there cases of selective impairment that would help us here?

If I still had time for a research program, I would do more reading in the moral psych literature to figure this out. Right now, though, the things I've seen really work orthogonally to this issue. So now I'm just wondering out loud.

Philosophical Mission Statement #1

2010-03-19T13:19:00.001-04:00

143 Let us now imagine the following kind of language game: when A goes to B and asks him to write down a mission statement.

The first step of this game is to look at the mission statements of other departments. —How does he get to understand their assertions?— First of all, he will be required to copy them. And here already there is a normal and an abnormal learner’s reaction. At first he might simply transcribe them, substituting the phrase “Philosophy and Religious Studies” for the term “Biology; but then the possibility of getting him to understand will depend on going on to independently write a mission statement that is appropriate for philosophy and religious studies.—And here we can imagine, e.g. that he does write the mission statement independently, but he substitutes jargon, saying “In support of the college’s wider excellence, the Department of Philosophy and Religion strives to provide mission with a solid sustainability and diversity.” And then communication stops at that point.—Or again, he makes ‘mistakes’ in adapting the statement to philosophy by writing the mission statement in the style of one or another great philosopher. Here we shall almost be tempted to say that he has understood wrong.

Scientist in white lab coat: 62% Perky reality TV show host: 82%

2010-03-17T10:25:00.003-04:00

A French producer has created a one-episode reality TV show based on the Milgram experiments. (Here's a Salon article and a Agence France-Presse story). The kicker: while Milgram could only get 62% of his subjects to deliver a lethal shock, the reality TV show got 82% compliance: apparently lethal shocks delivered before a cheering crowd. There are a lot obvious of reasons for this. The crowd has to help a lot. Also, the subjects were not randomly selected--they were self selected fame hounds. Finally, I think we have to recognize that perky reality TV show hosts hold an awesome amount of authority in our society.

R. Crumb's Illustrated Genesis.

2010-03-15T21:50:00.003-04:00

I've been reading R. Crumb's illustrated version of the Book of Genesis, and I've been meaning to blog about it for a while, because it routinely floors me. Unfortunately, every post I can think to write about it would sound like this:

You know that part when Judah hires a prostitute, and he doesn't know it is his daughter-in-law because she is wearing a veil, and he gets her pregnant, and then when she is going to be burned at the stake for being a whore she says "Judah is totally my baby daddy, and here I've got his ceremonial seal to prove it."
That's fucked up, man.

Crumb totally made the right decision to simply illustrate Genesis at face value. He even portrays God as a man with a long white beard. By taking Genesis at its word, Crumb transforms his amazing comics mojo into a conduit for the total fucked-up-edness that is the Bible.

Also fucked up: the fact that Tamar (the daughter-in-law) is pretending to be some kind of temple prostitute and that her fee is a baby sheep.

Alien Envy

2010-03-06T15:13:00.001-05:00

Alien Envy
Originally uploaded by rob helpychalk.

from Tedra: National Geographic has pictures of rare black penguin. http://bit.ly/cTdqkW. PK points out that its standing on rock beach & hypothesizes that color could prove 2B advantageous adaptation & that other planets would envy earth for having such a cool penguin.

"Teacher evaluations have little to no impact on the quality of education or student learning"

2010-03-02T21:01:00.005-05:00

The research is resoundingly consistent: Teacher evaluations have little to no impact on the quality of education or student learning (Colby, Bradshaw, Joyner, 2002; Flesher, Sommers, Brauchle, 2000; Frase & Streshly, 1994; Peterson, 2000; Cousins, 1995; Joint Committee, 2008; Shinkfield & Stufflebeam, 1995; Stiggins & Bridgeford, 1985).

That one of the early statements made in this article by Lindsay Noakes in the Journal of Multidisciplinary Evaluation. The most striking thing here is that Noakes is referring to all forms of teacher evaluation, including not just student evaluations but interviews, competency exams, student performance and classroom visits by peers and supervisors. The articles she sites are about K-12 teacher evaluation, but it looks like the complaints will carry over to the community college level. Surveys are criticized for not being tested for their validity (whether they measure what they say their measure) and reliability (whether they give similar results in similar situations). Class visits are criticized for the variety of subjective biases that come form the observer. Her bottom line rings true for me: "This is either because teacher evaluations cannot or, more likely, are not being used for the purpose of teacher improvement."

Noakes' article actually isn't that interesting apart from what it cites. She basically lists problems that other people have identified with teacher evaluation, and then borrows a checklist for good evaluations from someone else and says it should be applied to teacher evaluations. Noakes is a grad student at the Evaluation Center at Western Michigan University. In any case, here are the citations for the quotation above.

Colby, S. A., Bradshaw, L. K, & Joyner, R. L. (2002, April). Perceptions of teacher evaluation systems and their impact on school improvement, professional development, and student learning. Paper presented at the meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, LA. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No.
ED464916) Link.

Cousins, J. B. (1995). Using collaborative performance appraisal to enhance
professional growth: A review and test of what we know. Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education 9(3), 199-222. Link

Flesher, J., Sommers, C., & Brauchle, P. (2000). Enhancing instructor evaluation. Performance Improvement, 39(8), 26-29. Link

Frase, L.E., & Streshly, W. (1994). Lack of accuracy, feedback, and commitment in
teacher evaluation. Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education, 1, 47-57. Link

Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation. (2008). The personnel evaluation standards (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin. Link

Peterson, K. D. (2000). Teacher Evaluation: A comprehensive guide to new directions and practices. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin. link

Shinkfield, A. J., & Stufflebeam, D. L. (1995). Teacher evaluation: Guide to effective practice. Boston: Kluwer. link

Stiggins, R. J., & Bridgeford, N. J. (1985). Performance assessment for teacher
development. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 7(1), 85-97 Link

Practical Ethics: "Shall Ape Be Allowed to Kill Ape?"

2010-02-26T13:54:00.003-05:00

Over at Practical Ethics they are asking "Shall Ape be Allowed to Kill Ape."

However, the defenders of rights for great apes and other animals often miss a crucuial point about the extension of universal human rights to animals. It is not only humans that are liable to violate any rights that non-human apes might hold. Other apes are liable to do so as well. Consider the right to life. It is well known that chimpanzees have a propensity to kill one another ... If we take the idea that non human great apes have the right to life then surely we have a responsibility to police all ape communities to uphold the right to life, in the same way that we try to ensure that the right to human life is upheld, by policing human societies.

People commonly object to vegetarianism by saying "Other animals eat each other, so why can't we eat them." The standard reply is that humans have free will in a way that animals do not, so we must hold ourselves to a higher standard. I actually think this reply needs to be beefed up a little, but it is very interesting to note that it doesn't seem to apply at all here. Advocates of personhood for all great apes push the idea that chimps and the like really do have human like levels of self-awareness and self-control. If we extend the moral community to them, it looks like we have to extend both rights and responsibilities.

What the practical ethics post misses, though, is that the other apes have their own communities and already are policing their own behavior. Just as we allow different nations to handle their own murder cases for the most part, we should probably allow other ape communities to handle their own ape-on-ape violence for the most part. We make exceptions in the international case when the violence rises to the level of crimes against humanity, or when the justice system of the nation seems hopelessly broken. Perhaps we could identify similar thresholds for the other apes. Chimpanzee troops fight wars. Might we be obligated to send in peacekeepers?

Should We Ban Cognitive Enhancing Drugs from Schools?

2010-02-23T11:26:00.003-05:00

Barbara Sahakian wonders if cognitive enhancing drugs, such as Ritalin and modafinil, should be banned from schools the way performance enhancing drugs are banned form sports. (The abstract of her talk is here; a write up from the Guardian is here.) Anders Sandberg at Practical Ethics does a good job at undercutting this argument, especially when he points out that at rock bottom, school is not a place for competition, but for learning.

Missing from this discussion, though, is the fact that very common mild stimulants like coffee and cigarettes are excellent cognitive enhancers. (I recently learned that someone i went to college with took up smoking in medical school because it gave her a cognitive edge. She is now a transplant surgeon. I don't know if she does lung transplants.) Do coffee drinking students have an unfair advantage over Mormon students because they can caffeinate before a test?

Arise butterflies

2010-02-22T22:41:00.001-05:00

Arise butterflies
Originally uploaded by Pippypippy.

by pippy

Today is munday but thear is no scool ya

2010-02-20T16:20:00.001-05:00

Today is munday but thear is no scool ya
Originally uploaded by rob helpychalk.

This week in mandatory ugliness

2010-02-19T14:17:00.003-05:00

Often in class I create little hierarchical charts on the fly in MS Word. In Word 2003, I am able to make a chart like the one on the right while I am explaining it. In Word 2007, the same chart comes out like the one on the left, and there is no way to remove the double balloons. (Or if there is, I can't find it.) The result is that more visual space is taken up with junk that carries no information, and there is less room to put in more explanatory text.

GRRR.

Joey liked the package from Grandma Mimi

2010-02-14T16:00:00.001-05:00

Joey liked the package from Grandma Mimi
Originally uploaded by rob helpychalk.

This week in stupid

2010-02-11T14:47:00.003-05:00

Its been a big week for stupid. Here are some highlights.

An article on Read Write Web features the words "facebook" and "login" in the headline and deals with some trendy topics, so it gets to be the number 1 google hit for "facebook login." The comment thread then is flooded by people who think they are at the facebook login page and are complaining that they don't like the new interface.

A US college student was detained and interrogated by federal agents at an airport because he had English/Arabic flashcards.

The Virginia legislature debates a bill that would ban employers from putting microchips in their employees against their will. No business is even considering doing this, but Delegate Mark L. Cole explains that people worried about this because the Mark of the Beast described in Revelations might actually be a microchip installed by a one world government to control commerce.

Via Apostropher, Chris G, and minivet.

Same class, two sections, two completely different sets of evaluations

2010-02-10T14:43:00.005-05:00

I taught two land-based sections of ethics last semester, one right after the other, using the same syllabus and lessons plans, and the course evaluations could hardly be more radically different. The whole thing is a good case study in interpreting student evaluations.

The chart above is just one measure of the difference. In the 10 AM section, a big majority (70%) of the students strongly agree that I was an effective teacher. For the 11AM section, few strongly agree that I was effective, and some even disagree with the idea that I was effective at all. (Note, there is a strong bias toward positive evaluations on this question. You simply won't see evaluations that are the exact inverse of my 10AM question unless the teacher was, like, drunk in class.)

The written comments paint a bigger picture of the 11AM section. I got twenty seven comments, and only four were positive. This was actually the first page I saw when I opened the envelope, and the whole thing hit me like a sack of bricks. They hated me, they hated the textbook, they hated the assignments, they hated the syllabus. Almost everyone used the word "confusing." It gave me one of those "Have I really chosen the right career?" moments. The 10AM section, on the other hand, only had four comments, all of which were blandly positive.

A typical response from teachers here would be that course evaluations really don't tell you anything, and this is evidence for that. Responses are all over the map, and they only reflect the idiosyncratic responses of students, who don't really know what is good for them anyway. But this would be a big mistake.

Thing is, I knew the 11AM section wasn't going well while it was happening. The students were so unengaged that I had the cameraman move to the 10AM section so we'd get better video for distance learning. I didn't realize how bad it had gotten, I think, because the good earlier class put a halo over the later class. But I knew there was a difference. The negative evaluations for the second section reflected a real difference in student experience and student learning.

Here are the real lessons I take home. The first is something every customer service representative knows: unhappy customers give a lot more feedback than happy ones. I don't have two pages of effusive comments about how great I am from the 10AM section, even though they all checked that I was a good teacher.

The second is that you can't design a course that will appeal to all students. Is the design of my ethics course sound? It is for some students. I suspect that this course, in particular, works for students who were better prepared for college. One positive review from the 10AM section said "Its challenging in a very good way." The wave of negative reviews from the section section all said "confusing" and "too advanced for an introductory class."

Ideally, you would respond to this situation by tailoring the class to fit the students, so that if you see that a section is floundering, change the syllabus. But this is a lot harder to do when you have, say, 100 students in three sections of ethics, plus another class or two. To keep your own workload manageable, you need to keep all the sections doing the same material.

Another observation is that classes tend to consolidate around an opinion of you. If any one of the dissatisfied students in the 11AM section were moved to 10AM, they would have softened their critique, because they would have seen other students responding positively, rather than having their negative opinions reinforced.

There are definitely things I'm going to change about the class. The negative comments are far from useless. They also hurt a lot, too. I had to buy some junk food after reading these. I also needed to write this post to put things in perspective.

Never doubt that slippery slopes can be very very real

2010-02-09T22:28:00.003-05:00

A Dutch group is pushing for legalized physician assisted suicide for people over 70 who are "tired of life."

Oddly, part of their argument is that the initial decriminalization of euthanasia in The Netherlands did not lead to any worse consequences: Says Eugène Sutorius (63): "It was thought to be the first step on a slippery slope that would lead the medical profession to lose its integrity. But I have seen nothing of the kind happen."

Apparently, since the first step down the slippery slope didn't lead to any other steps down the slope, we can go ahead and take another few steps down the slope.

At the bottom, at least to my mind, is euthanasia as a treatment for depression.

spin fail

2010-02-09T14:19:00.002-05:00

LC3 has put out a flier for those interested in "Music and Theater Careers" that tries so hard to be optimistic that it includes this: "Many openings will also arise out of the need to replace those who leave the field each year because they are unable to make a living solely as musicians." That's right: so many people are fleeing the business, that it has to be a good place to look for openings. Also, wouldn't the jobs that open up be basically guaranteed to be ones where you couldn't make a living solely as a musician?

Hey look kids, the part/whole fallacy!

2010-02-03T16:56:00.000-05:00

"If one person has freedom of speech, then multiple people banding together -- such as a corporation (but also unions) also have freedom of speech."

Dream in four parts

2010-01-07T10:40:00.003-05:00

Vignette one: I have borrowed a train

I have borrowed a train and need to return it before daybreak, when the people who actually use it will need it. The problem is that I do not know where I am supposed to return it to or how to drive it. I am also aware on some level that I did not actually get permission to borrow the train, but at no time during the dream do I think, "I have stolen a train." The landscape in front of me is lightly wooded and hilly, and probably suggested to me by one corner of the campus of Stuffwhitepeople Like University, where I used to teach. The train tracks go up and down the hills and around in a complex pattern, and I am at the top of the tallest hill. If I start the train down the hill it might roll around to the right location, like I was pushing wooden trains around on the kids' train table. But where I am trying to get the train to go? Suddenly, I realize the train automatically returns to the station, like the Roomba returning to its recharging stand. I am safe. But...

Vignette two: Acid zombies heart BitchPhD

There are men at the station wearing T-shirts that say "I Heart BitchPhD." I am aware that they are wearing these shirts ironically. The men have an acid that when they spray it on you, continues to eat away at your whole body until there is nothing left. They spray my left arm. Soon I will die. I am aware that the men are someone doing this as a theatrical critique of liberal politics. Now lots of people have been sprayed and we are in an open field. If a sprayed person touches another person, they spread the acid, giving he other person a death sentence. I, like most people, avoid touching anyone. But some people come together as couples, smearing each other with their acid covered bodies in an effort to die quicker. This is looking like a good option to me.

Vignette three: Acid rain

I am back at the train station. The men are now dressed in police uniforms. They have a device that looks like a white prism. If you jump into it, you are instantly disintegrated and a flash of light sends you into the sky. The policemen are jumping into it to avoid slow death by acid. They see me and throw me in. I am grateful.

But once the acid people are in the sky, they fall down like rain. I am cowering in the entryway to an office building, to avoid the fatal rain, but the rain is dissolving the building. I go deeper into the basement of the building. There are lots of people all over, but no one can decide what the best shelter will be. I am in a shopping plaza. I am at the beach. The world will end.

Vignette four: The movie is over, but I am still here

It is now obvious to me that this is a movie, what with the overtones of zombies and apocalypse. The credits roll, thankfully. But I am still here. What is going on? I push behind the movie screen onto the stage. There are props and flats around. Will I go back to the zombie world? I push behind another wall. And another. Then I wake up.

Pure Joy

2009-12-25T09:45:00.001-05:00

Pure Joy
Originally uploaded by rob helpychalk.

Merry Christmas everyone!

My Holiday Writing Project: Smashing Perverse Insentives

2009-12-22T17:25:00.002-05:00

My goal this break is to revise For All x, a logic textbook made available free under a Creative Commons license, so that it is appropriate for my community college students. Textbook prices are salt in the wounds of students who have trouble paying from college, but right now teachers have no pressing reason to assign cheap or free textbooks, since they don't have to pay for them. (The economists call this kind of situation a "perverse incentive.") Most free logic books are written for geeks by geeks and aren't useful for the sort of student who is hurt most by textbook prices, so I think my project will help more than just my students.

I'm already running into problems, though. The changes I want to make are fairly basic: I want to rearrange the order the material is presented in so that more of the basic stuff comes first, and then I want to create more exercises for that basic material. (I'm just calling my version of this text a "remix.") But simply moving around text is turning out to be difficult. Magnus wrote the whole thing in LaTeX, which I don't know, so I've been opening the files in MS Word, replacing the formatting tags with formatting in Word, and then making the alterations I want to make. I was then going to convert the whole thing to a .pdf and send it to Kinko's to create $3 coursepacks for my students. Getting all the formatting straight is a big pain, though. Which leads to questions

Should I just learn LaTeX? Can I do this over the break and get the text ready in time for my stduents? Is there a reader I should use to show how the marked up text will appear in print? How do I put this all in a form that Kinko's will accept?

If I don't learn LaTeX right now, how do I get my formatting to look like Magnus's? How can I figure out what fonts he is using given the LaTex files or a .pdf file? If I'm just approximating his formatting, what fonts should I use?

These are just my initial worries. I haven't even begun to do things like generate new exercises yet. I'm still hung up on the mechanics of producing a book. Anyone have advice?

Worst science reporting ever.

2009-10-06T14:26:00.002-04:00

Be sure to click through to read the story. Remember, science reporting gets really bad, and this is the worst ever science reporting.
Worst science
Originally uploaded by perca fluviatilis.

More on Issue 2

2009-10-02T13:42:00.004-04:00

My colleague Ben and a woman from the Ohio Farm Bureau have raised some interesting points about issue 2. I'd like to respond to them publicly because in order to clarify some misconceptions.

The Oversight Board Would Be Undemocratic

Ben points out (on Facebook) that in general, oversight boards are a good thing, and a board that overseas farm animal welfare could be good for animals. While this is true in general, it is not the kind of board we are looking at here. The goal of this board is explicitly to keep decision making about animal welfare in the hands of the agriculture industry, and not in the hands of voters, by making a change in the state constitution.

The vote Yes campaign is being run by Ohioans for Livestock Care. The flyer I have from them begins "Ohio farmers know best how to care for their flocks and herds." This tagline is repeated at in an announcement on the Ohio Farm Bureau website about a Yes on 2 rally. The content of the ballot issue is perfectly in line with this goal. Eleven out of the thirteen members of the commission would come from within some aspect of agriculture (farmers, farming organizations, deans from agricultural schools, etc.) There be one person representing consumers and one representing animal welfare, but the animal welfare representative cannot come from national organizations of animal activists. This last point is crucial, because the real aim of this ballot issue is to block efforts by the Humane Society of the US. (More on them soon.)

Now wait, you might ask, don't farmers know how best to treat their animals? Why shouldn't the oversight board be dominated by the farmers themselves. Well, well obviously farmers have first hand knowledge of the lives of their animals, but they do not have an interest in the welfare of those animals. Their interest is in maximizing profit, and this means raising veal, chickens and brooding sows in boxes so small the animal can't turn around. In order for everyone's interests to be honored, decisions made about animal welfare have to be made democratically, and include people who can speak for the animals.

Ballot Issue 2 is an amendment to the state constitution. It is fundamentally about taking power away from the legislature, power that it now has under the constitution, and giving it to industry.

The Oversight Board is Aimed at Blocking a Good Legislation.

Everyone involved in this debate admits that the driving force behind the issue is a recent California law that animals be kept in pens large enough to "to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and turn around freely." The law was passed as a ballot initiative in California and was backed by the Humane Society of the US. Afterwards, the HSUS met with Ohio lawmakers to discuss bringing a version of it here. The lawmakers response was to immediately put issue 2 on the ballot, so that they would have the power to enact any such laws.

The California law effectively eliminates three industry practices. First of all it would eliminate veal crates. People who eat veal like the pale tender meat that comes from anemic calves. Starting in the 1950s, farmers have learned that they can produce a lot of this sort of meat by keeping calves in pens where they are unable to turn around, groom themselves, or lie down while extending their legs and feeding them a liquid diet of milk powder, vitamins and growth hormones. The only justification for doing this is the consumer's preference for pale, tender, anemic meat. Second, the law eliminates battery cages for egg laying hens. To maximize profit, hens are again raised in stacks of wire mesh cages, with each bird having an area about the size of a piece of paper to move around in. Again the only motive here is profit. The third practice, crates for brooding sows, is a little different. Pregnant pigs are generally kept in gestation crates because they are extremely ornery and likely to fight

once the big gives birth, they are kept in farrowing crates like these, so the piglets can nurse while the mother remains immobile

here the worry is that the nursing pig would roll over on her young, or perhaps eat them. To my knowledge, though, there is no actual evidence that this happens. Furthermore, there is no evidence that any crazy behavior by the pig isn't actually brought by other aspects of their environment, like poor diet, lack of access to the outside, etc. Certainly in the wild, the pigs must be able to raise some of their offspring to adulthood. So again, we are left with little justification for treatment that creates incredible suffering.

The Personal Attacks

I originally got on to this issue because someone from the Ohio Farm Bureau left some flyers in support of Issue 2 at our office, along with a basket of fresh bell peppers. I sent around an email to the rest of the department about the issue, and shortly thereafter, the woman from the Farm Bureau wrote me back. The first thing she did in her email is attack the Humane Society of the United States, including sending a flyer about them produced by the food industry organization the Center for Consumer Freedom.¹

Some of her complaints are reasonable. The name of the organization misleadingly implies that they run local animal shelters, when in fact most of their work is activism on the issue of farm animal welfare. Other attacks were false, including that the HSUS seeks to end all animal agriculture. From their policy statement: "The HSUS supports those farmers and ranchers who give proper care to their animals, act in accordance with the basic ethic of compassion to sentient creatures under their control, and practice and promote humane and environmentally sustainable agriculture." Still other complaints made by the woman from the Farm Bureau and the Center for Consumer Freedom are things I can't evaluate, like accusations that HSUS mismanaged charitable donations and has a spokesman for a terrorist organization on its board of executives.

Well, as a teacher of critical thinking, I am duty bound to remind you of the existence of the ad hominem fallacy. The moral character of the HSUS is simply not relevant to whether Issue 2 is a good constitutional amendment.² Bad people can argue for good causes and good people can argue for bad causes.

Annoyingly, it looks like I'm going to be writing more on this in the future. Next up: finding my copy of Bernie Rollin's Farm Animal Welfare and researching the European laws on gestation & farrowing crates.

^1. For the record, she sent me the flyer to correct an erroneous statistic about HSUS fundraising she had given in her first email. She didn't repeat the accusation of terrorism herself.

² Although it is worth noting that The New York Times describes the HSUS as the "least radical" of all the animal rights groups.

Ohioans: Vote NO on Issue 2.

2009-10-01T17:33:00.003-04:00

Issue 2 would create an industry dominated "animal care" council to set standards for farm animals in Ohio. The goal is to head off the state from passing anything like California's Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act (which banned veal crates, gestation cages, and battery cages) by taking the power to regulate farm animal treatment away from the voters.

Now this is how to educate.

2009-09-29T22:57:00.001-04:00

The way he recommends you address other people, and the way he addresses the viewer. This is high end shit.

"He'd send in the army"

2009-09-08T16:07:00.001-04:00

Via Jim H on facebook.

Stanley Kaplan and the legacy of gaming standardized tests

2009-08-29T11:33:00.003-04:00

Christopher Caldwell has a piece in the Financial Times titled "The Opposite of Education" about the lasting effects of Kaplan test preparation. The most prominent change in the post-Kaplan era is the awareness of motivated students of how to game game standardized tests.

Kaplan’s insight was to figure out that there was an idiom to multiple-choice tests. Choices tend to be offered in predictable ways. For instance, if a problem about ratios has the answers (a) 2/3, (b) 4/5, (c) 6/7, (d) 3/2, the right answer is probably A or D, with one of them meant to “catch” a test-taker who has reversed the terms. His study guides are full of wisdom about the prose styles of test-composers, such as: “If guessing, a good rule of thumb is: the longest choice is often the correct one.” Kaplan insisted he was a respecter of subject matter. But figuring out the “tricks” of testing would give you a leg up, whether you had mastered the subject matter or not.

The advice works. The trick about choosing the longest answer, in particular, works well unless you have a test writer who is aware of the problem, and purposely puts in wordy incorrect answers. The problem comes up because the test writer knows that the correct answer is something very specific, and needs to explained precisely. The incorrect answers, on the other hand, are just things you make up and don't need to have much content. If you are in a hurry, it is easy to skimp on the effort needed to create plausible wrong answers.

The whole thing is really an arms race, and unfortunately, too many teachers never make the effort to write good multiple choice questions. The practice questions that come with the online supplement of my ethics textbook can all be beaten using the "longest answer" rule. This kind of laziness leads a lot of teachers to assume that multiple choice testing is a tool for fake education and decide not to use them at all. This is unfortunate, because in the real world, we all have situations where we need to evaluate large numbers of students en masse, and a good multiple choice test is a valuable tool in those situations.

Another interesting thing about the Kaplan techniques is that some of them are farther removed from content than others. The ratio rule, for instance, does have some bearing on content. Students who use it are aware of the fact that swapping numbers is a common mistake in this sort of problem. I tell my students explicitly about this sort of Kaplan-technique as a way of getting them closer to the content while seeming to only be teaching to the test. I tell them to know what the common mistakes are for the kind of problem you are working on, and look for the answers that seem to be testing for this common mistake.

(We had a job candidate here at LCCC who played a related trick on students. He would say he was going to tell them secrets for ticking your teacher into giving you an A. Then he would offer advice like "Buy a dictionary and bring it to class. Be sure you sit so the teacher can see you have a dictionary. Then when the teacher uses a word you are unsure of, be sure to look it up right in front of him. This will be time consuming, so you will also want to be looking up words from your readings at home.")

The legacy of Kaplan (and its nemesis, the Education Testing Service) is an education system built around teaching to tests. As Caldwell writes

Now that not just children but school systems are rewarded and punished for their performance on tests, public education has been colonised by the Kaplan philosophy. Entire school systems have hired testing companies such as Kaplan to undertake the Monty Python-esque task of teaching teachers to teach students test-taking skills.

The situation is not beyond hope, though. The thing we need to do now is have tests that are worth teaching to. You need to write tests that can't be gamed by techniques completely unrelated to content. You need to write tests that actually measure the knowledge, skills, and values you are concerned with promoting. In the terminology of the industry, you need tests that are valid and reliable. The biggest obstacle to education right now is that too many people have an interest in making sure the test isn't worth teaching to. Administrators and parents of privilege want tests that can be gamed so they can game them. Teachers don't want to take the effort to write good tests or change the way they teach to match a good test. Caldwell laments

So everyone wound up back in the same place. SAT scores still tend to track parental income fairly faithfully. Except that educational advancement now goes not so much to those who know the periodic table or can translate an English passage into Latin, but to those who have learnt to outsmart an educational bureaucracy

This is true, but at this point an educational bureaucracy is inevitable. We just need to create one that is harder to outsmart

Reasoning with children

2009-08-29T09:02:00.002-04:00

Molly: "That's not just Halloween costume, that's an advertisement. If you wear that, you will be turning yourself into a walking advertisement for Hanna Montana."

Caroline: "But you're going to let Joey wear the Wolverine costume, and that's just an advertisement for Wolverine."

[Look, a counter example! Its reflective equilibrium!]

Molly: Yes, but it is not an advertisement for something I hate.

[Revising the rule in light of the counter example.]

Molly: Also, I'm not as excited about the Wolverine costume as I was about the Princess Dragon Ninja costume that wasn't an advertisement at all.

[Adding nuance to the rule to make the whole thing more plausible.]

Does Socrates use the Chewbacca defense?

2009-08-28T13:19:00.002-04:00

I use this all the time in Critical Thinking and Introduction to Philosophy courses (Discussion question: does Socrates use the Chewbacca defense?). But I couldn't find it last time I needed to grab it in class, so I'm putting this up my future reference.

new twitter feed: shitmydadsays

2009-08-28T12:17:00.002-04:00

I just signed up for twitter so I can get this guy's feed, where he writes down the things is 73 year old father tells him. Example: "You need to flush the toilet more than once...No, YOU, YOU specifically need to. You know what, use a different toilet. This is my toilet."

Elderly people are concerned that "The government will take over medicare"

2009-08-12T18:04:00.004-04:00

A HuffPo columnist notes that most of the people disrupting town hall meetings are over 65. They are also very very confused about the current state of healthcare and what is being proposed. One demand that seniors repeatedly make is that the government shouldn't "take over" Medicare. You'd think seniors would be aware that Medicare is already a government run program, but I guess not. Bob Cesca, the HuffPo columnist notes that one person shouted "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!" at Rep. Robert Ingles. The LA Times reports that someone contacted Rep Jim Tanner saying, "I'm happy with Medicare, don't let the government take it over."

So where is this wacky talking point coming from? Republican activists with the assistance of the major news networks Arthur Laffer, economics advisor to Ronald Regan and a leading figure in libertarian economic thought, went on CNN and said "If you like the post office and the Department of Motor Vehicles and you think they're run well, just wait till you see Medicare, Medicaid and health care done by the government." No one on CNN challenged him.

OMG! 9353! CREATURE FEATURE!

2009-07-28T11:56:00.001-04:00

Via Colin M on Facebook.

Song number two

2009-07-28T00:32:00.003-04:00

"Song number one is not a fuck you song" --Fugazi

But if you are going to sing a fuck you song, this is the one.

No booe's are e lawd but rob is u lawd

2009-07-24T23:11:00.000-04:00

One of the largest ___ graveyard

2009-07-23T23:40:00.003-04:00

One of the largest ship graveyards: the bay of Nouadhibou

The whole site is full of pictures of abandoned industry. Its amazing.

Via Emily B on facebook

Update: OMG check out the pictures of the boats abandoned in the retreat of the Aral Sea.

For the sake of contrast:

2009-07-22T16:49:00.002-04:00

A couple of years ago, my neighbor locked herself out and figured she could save the locksmith charge if she could get to an unlocked door on her second floor porch. A Cambridge police officer happened by and helped us carry an extension ladder across the street from my garage. He even held the ladder steady while my nimble neighbor ascended to the porch. The police officer never asked two laughing Caucasian women to prove we were not burglars.

The rest of the article, by someone who has dealt with police misconduct cases, discusses in detail about what was screwy in the way Sgt. James Crowley treated Skip Gates

I approve of this website

2009-07-17T09:57:00.001-04:00

There, I Fixed it.

Nom nom nom

2009-07-15T17:40:00.000-04:00

Via Thomas on facebook.

Skeptoid on Locally Grown Produce

2009-07-14T15:17:00.003-04:00

Brian Dunning, the skeptoid, has a post up arguing that locally produced food is not actually better for the environment. His central claim is that getting your food locally doesn't actually reduce the amount of fuel used in shipping, because systems of direct delivery are less efficient than systems with distribution centers. This sounds like a good argument, but it contains a subtle fallacy. Basically, when he shifts from talking about locally vs. internationally produced to talking about direct delivery vs. distribution centers, he changes the topic. Granted, if you look at two complex distribution systems of the same size, the one with distribution centers is going to be more efficient than the one that relies only on direct delivery. But what about a local system that uses distribution centers compared too a global system that uses distribution centers? Dunning assumes that once a system starts using distribution centers, it no longer counts as local. But his own example is of a local system that switched to distribution centers because it was more efficient. The system didn't start importing beef from New Zealand, but Dunning wants us to believe that because one local farmers group switched from direct delivery to distribution centers that it is more efficient to ship food globally. This just doesn't follow.

There are a lot of problems with locally produced food. Peter Singer has a good argument that supporting agriculture in the developing world is just as important as reducing carbon footprint. He also points out that transporting cargo by ship is much much more efficient than transporting by truck. But broad, almost data free, arguments like Dunning's just don't cut it.

In general, calculations of environmental impact are incredibly complex, and the rhetoric of skepticism really doesn't work here. Skeptics and debunkers always frame debates as cases of reason vs. superstition. The tone is "I'm rational, and you're not." But environmental debates are generally not cases of reason vs superstition, but conflicting ways of calculating costs and assessing risks. If one person uses a model that only takes GDP to be a basic good, while another person tries to include, say, the rights and interests of non-human animals, neither side is being irrational. They are using different frame works with different assumptions about value.

Good fences make good neighbors!

2009-07-14T13:49:00.002-04:00

Which is why I'm building a fence across the middle of my neighbors' yard and putting up a security checkpoint in their living room!

The ad. The explanation.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Kale, Chard, and Basil

2009-07-13T18:26:00.001-04:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, Kale, Chard, and Basil
Originally uploaded by rob helpychalk.

A pile of leaves from our garden.

Father's Day 2009

2009-07-06T15:41:00.001-04:00

Father's Day 2009
Originally uploaded by rob helpychalk.

"I colored a band for you because I know you like bands"

Joey

2009-06-28T21:39:00.001-04:00

Joey: A gazzoom is part rabbit part flamingo. It is white and always eating nothing.

Mash-up: Buffy v. Edward Cullen

2009-06-27T16:34:00.001-04:00

via

Joey Picks Up Taglines

2009-06-13T21:33:00.003-04:00

All day Joey has been saying "Creepy? Creepy is my middle name!" I recognized this as a line from Scooby Doo II, which is the kids' new favorite movie.

Then Joey started adding "Look for it at Creepy Dot Com!"

This is not from the movie.