Joey Camps Out in the Back Room

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

Now is my chance to liveblog an episode of Space 1999

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

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%

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.

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

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"

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?"

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?

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?