When is it Religion and When is it Prejudice?

A story in the Guardian describes:

Judges today ruled that one of Britain's most successful faith schools had racially discriminated against a 12-year-old boy who was refused admission because the school did not recognise him as Jewish....M's mother converted from Catholicism to Judaism under a non-Orthodox authority, meaning the Chief Rabbi does not recognise her as Jewish...."The majority held that JFS had directly discriminated against M on grounds of his ethnic origins."...the judges did not consider the Chief Rabbi to be racist.

It happened in Great Britain and not in the U.S. so there is nothing here to speak of, legally. But having read _Holy Hullabaloos_ recently I was left with a vacant spot in the dialog. And when I read this story I was reminded of it.

When does religion become prejudice? The panel of judges deliberately stuck in a disclaimer to stop people like me from yapping about it. I don't think it should stop me. Largely because it doesn't make sense.

The parents got married and to keep her husband happy, the woman became an official member of her husband's faith. But when they sent their child to a school run by a similar-but-not-identical faith group, he was judged racially-cum-religiously impure which is OK if you're of the similar-but-not-identical faith group.

It reminds me of the job application process at several conservative Christian schools that asks you to "Describe how and when you were saved." It isn't part of Christian doctrine that adults have a non-baptismal-saving (I love hyphens tonight) ordeal in order to be Christian. The official description of Christianity is described by the Nicene Creed as "one baptism for the remission of sins..." so the job application contains an odd requirement. Perhaps even un-Christian.

Sorry.

What bothers me is that in the U.S. we must allow the free exercise of religious beliefs when they interfere with inculcating the faculties of reason and judgment in our young. Luckily, the young are able to withstand most of it the way they withstand the onslaught of education in general.

Open Letter to Senator LeMieux

Dear Senator LeMieux,

This statement from your recent letter disappoints me.

"I have talked with Floridians from Pensacola to Miami and without exception, people are concerned about this bill's proposals to raise taxes, increase health insurance premiums, and cut access to quality care. Citizens tell me they want Congress to scrap this proposal and start over. I agree. We cannot afford the government we have, much less the government this bill seeks to create. We need to be smarter about approaching health care reform and target those areas where we can reduce costs and expand access to health insurance."

I'm sure you are listening to people. The question is, "Who?" Your language is not conciliatory. Your language does not look the way it should after hearing the arguments for universal health care over the last few months. In fact it looks combative. Do you really need to mirror the angry white guys who yell at their TV sets? Are they the citizens whose wants and needs you are representing?

It makes me sad to see you take this stand in opposition to data from countries like Japan that have health outcomes similar to our own but have a mix of public option and multiple payors while maintaining much lower cost structures. These things exist and have been successful. We are in fact one of the last countries in the world with a high standard of living that does NOT include health care as part of that high standard.

You have had access to testimony from public health doctors whose job it is to evaluate and compare health delivery systems across national boundaries, but you have chosen to listen to the voices of special interests. You have had the unique opportunity to hear from a former Aetna manager what he did the last time publicly funded health coverage was brought up in D.C. You have seen the same strategies used a second time, knowing who funded the astroturfing.

I owned a general lines insurance agency from 1974 to 1994 and was among the most profitable independent agents in the U.S. for my size. I understand insurance. I also understand the people. Some of them are generous, smart, and successful. Unfortunately many are fearful and lack the confidence to move into a new economic model.

If we think there is a reason to have national education standards and we want children to grow up to be productive citizens, they must be healthy before they become productive. If we want citizens to be productive, we must keep them healthy and not support a system that by its very design prices out a significant portion of the otherwise productive population in order to keep costs in check. The current system fails to address the more difficult issues, consequently driving a system that has the highest cost in the world.

Colin Marshall Hits the Nail (School) on the Head

The Humanists: Frederick Wiseman's High School (1968)

More important than any overtly political point is a purely mechanical one, to wit, that our educational machine isn't working as desired, or at least as advertised. The mismatch between large-scale education's declared aims and its actual function should come as no surprise to anyone who's spent any time in the system, but here Wiseman has assembled an effective reminder indeed.

Wiseman's notes and contact information.

Standup Comedy & Backchannel Intimacy - (informal talk)

We went to see Jamie Kennedy at the Palm Beach Improv on Friday night. He was interesting and pretty good but not as fluid and adaptable as Dave Attell. But if he had been more adaptable, I wouldn't have noticed the parallel between what was going on in the comedy club and what danah boyd and Joe McCarthy said about backchannel snark.

Previous discussions have centered on Internet identity issues and intimacy. I'm thinking that there may be a stronger influence in the speaker-audience member relationship and how it is cultivated by (1.) the venue and (2.) the speaker. In this situation, the Internet acts as an amplification device.

Here is the short version: As audience members got more lubricated, the conversational gambits used by the comedian to increase intimacy with his audience became less easy to resist.

Joe McCarthy -

I'm trying to imagine conferences in which "the audience is of equal importance as the speaker". Speakers are typically paid - or at least invited - to present, whereas audience members typically pay to hear and see what the speakers have to say and show. The relationship is, by definition, unequal, which becomes evident when one considers the relative impacts of an attendee not showing up vs. a speaker not showing up. Attendees in the audience may have considerable expertise and experience in the topic(s) the speaker is talking about - in fact, ideally, there is such an alignment - but that does not give the audience the right to be rude, and certainly doesn't give them the right to gang up to tear down the speaker.

danah boyd mentions she thinks that backchannel snark is to be expected when the presentation is entertainment as opposed to informing. (This from her post about offensive chatter during a Web 2.0 meeting.) However the actual content of her presentation concerns attention in the sense of that which seizes one's attention.

Stimulation. People consume content that stimulates their mind and senses. That which angers, excites, energizes, entertains, or otherwise creates an emotional response. This is not always the "best" or most informative content, but that which triggers a reaction.

Thus, the character of the snarky commentary on Twitter is geared to attract the attention of other audience members which is a separate issue from the speaker/audience relationship.

From the speaker's standpoint, the audience member is competing with her. This stands out in a comedy club where the venue is fairly intimate. The lighting and ability of the comedian to overcome the audience chatter is key.

Jamie Kennedy did something unusual that attracted my attention. In his quest for audience contact, he kept shading his eyes from the stage lighting so he could feel he was making better contact with them. When he did that, he spoke directly to one of us, again to increase interaction.

I want to point out something here. I don't think the audience at a comedy club is supposed to actually interact directly with the comedian. Our job is to provide feedback by laughing loudly enough to satisfy the performer. The alcohol-fueled members of the audience lose sight of this and buy into the illusion that the comedian wishes to stop performing and discuss the commenter's views. The situation degenerates, beefy men appear, and chairs are thrown.

This may be off topic but there are physiological issues going on as well. I'm not sure how to attack it but the degree of intimacy may provide a key to understanding the phenomenon. For instance, have you heard about the way a puff of air on your skin from intimate speech can change your perception of 'b' and 'p' sounds? Although the synergy of sensation is not new, research into how it changes our understanding is. Moreover, the lack of it may provide insight into dysfunction.

In the meantime, let's post a notice at the door. "Intimacy Level Expected" 1-5 where 1 means the speaker wants you to keep your mouth shut and honestly doesn't give a damn what your opinion is and 5 means you can run around naked.

Phil Jones Hadley CRU admits hiding data of temp decline

When I want a laugh, I go to the comedy club like I did last night.

Believe it (sic) if you wish, but I normally do this:

1.) Do a search for a significant string of quoted text at which point I see the sender got it at DIGG. If you think Kevin Rose ever did anything worthwhile in his life, I guess you can use it but I happen to think DIGG encourages serious methodological errors to happen because of the way it is built. If it were human, DIGG would have every social disease known to man.

2.) Look at the story and then search for repeats in Google to see if there are any stories matching it in mainstream news. NONE. Delinpole of the Telegraph thinks there is a "greatest scandal in science ever" at least once a month because he doesn't understand how science makes progress.

3.) Go to a website I consider reliable to see if the story has been picked up and discussed. in this case:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/#more-1853

If you read that link, you can see that there are some folks at RealClimate whose emails are in the released archive and they are very nice and normal people who have been screamed at and insulted at meetings for years by the some of the same people who show up at town hall meetings screaming stuff about the president being a alien who wants to eat our children.

Let's forget the specifics for a minute and concentrate on method and how I filter crap.

Here is a link to an article by a friend, Howard Rheingold. Howard is the guy who identified the way people in other countries were using their pagers to enable civil disobedience. Later he coined the term "flash mobs" of which you may have heard.

Please read this:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rheingold/detail?entry_id=42805
Howard has included some of my own material in this article, but it is insignificant.

It is important to note that if you compare SlashDot and DIGG, you can see that DIGG's information is essentially unfiltered. It is my belief that Rose's sense of humor is at the root of this because he is entertained by watching idiots. Slashdot has a three level filtering system attached to its ranking system that prevents morons from becoming important community members. No such protection at DIGG. That is not to say that bad stories don't get published at SlashDot, but they aren't the norm. Bad stories at DIGG are common. Why? Entertainment, not evaluation.

Howard posted a link to this totally cool Firefox extension I haven't tried yet:
http://disputefinder.cs.berkeley.edu/

One of the things he doesn't go into in the article is the ecology of information. There is a definite issue of timing that reveals a lot about the motivation behind revealing a story. Obviously pushing an event story such as a political speech or a fire resulting in death is done in the normal course of journalism as quickly as possible. But stories from researchers who normally publish in peer reviewed journals who have chosen instead to tell the newspaper FIRST are pretty common. These stories often turn out to be about poor science because the researchers' work would never make it to a reviewer's outbox.

Then there is the issue of reliability. Let's use the Huffington Post as an example. Ariannna Huffington uses a system of unpaid volunteer bloggers as a significant source of copy. She gets the benefits of inflammatory language to attract visitors and deniability against critics, plus it pays her bills. It's a win-win for her pocketbook but a huge "lose" for readers who have no crap filters.

More subtle is the think tank problem. The social ecology of think tanks is only beginning to be studied. Their social function appears to be as a source of rapid response for government committees because thinking that goes through peer review is too slow. Thus, think tanks attract academics whose work has been slow to be accepted in their own communities. Their funding comes principally from industry but is not disclosed as is required by academic journals. Danger Will Robinson!

Have you considered that the conservative sites you are visiting are deliberately publishing lies? That is another issue entirely. My own thoughts are that there are BOTH deliberate lies and paranoid delusions evident. I'm not saying there are no bad people trying to manipulate political events on the pro-global warming side. Much like the presidential elections, there are entities that fund both sides as well.

I noticed that Coca-Cola is a big mover in the global regulation scene. I would guess that it's pretty obvious they have a huge stake on account of their global distribution system and sourcing of things like sugar. But did they hire people like John Milloy to coordinate and publish lies like Exxon did? We can prove Exxon paid a network of think tank academics as "contractors" in their annual reports. Those people's utterances were picked up by a network of bloggers and low quality news sources like Fox and the Telegraph within minutes across multiple timezones which indicates there was coordination.

If you think the global warming issue had liars on both sides, you are of course correct as they are all human. But when it comes to making "fine" distinctions between people who shoplift and people who release saran sarin into a subway, I think I will go with the shoplifters.

Next time you find something amazing that reveals the black hearts of the evil liberal climate scientists, do what I do. Run it through crap detection.

Open Access, Federation, and Why it's Like Healthcare

Let's look at access to research like access to healthcare.

I hope there won't be many dissenters if I posit an increase in GDP resulting from a healthy populace.

I'm not just talking about outsiders being admitted to the community. I'm saying that information as an ecology has resources that if opened to the community, could provide insights that are unlikely to happen in the current situation. So access is a generally healthy thing, but access for all will be unpredictable in terms of productivity.

Federating all data, irrespective of scale will happen in the near future. Denying access is something I wouldn't want to be remembered for.

Universal Health Coverage - Why and Why

Yesterday, Saturday 11-08-2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a landmark bill that starts the nation on the trek toward universal health care.

At the same time, I encountered this article by Greg Miller at the AAAS site:
An Infectious Problem for the Brain
In which he says "...immune system signaling molecules--like those triggered by infections--can muck with the brain and cause memory deficits and mood alterations."

It gives me permission to speculate on what a healthier citizen might achieve.

Certainly Hans Rosling's provocative statements regarding the effects of good public health allowing a population to create economic value faster than a country without it are an indication that health care has profound economic effects.

On one hand we have the costs of poor health and on the other we have increased productivity caused by more time working. But Miller's article seems to indicate that we may have improvements in general cognitive condition as well.

On the Moving of Cheese

A colleague has taught word processing, spreadsheet, bitmap editing, and presentation skills as a basic computer course for freshmen in high school for fifteen years.

A couple of times, the course title has been changed. This year, it was changed yet again. But this time, the curriculum code was moved into a different department/certification code. The teacher can no longer qualify as "highly qualified" under the state's legal guidelines. As a result, a letter "warning" parents that an unqualified teacher could be messing around doing something bad with their babies may be sent out because the Legislature wants to protect you from this kind of danger. Even though the teacher may be quite good.

No doubt there are far too many schools employing unqualified personnel in Florida. What I AM saying is that the link between what a teacher actually knows and what a teacher is allowed to teach are disconnected.

I am allowed to teach a range of subjects, doing some of which might be a bad idea. A biology teacher is allowed to teach physics, for instance. Can all biology teachers really do it well? Can physics teachers teach biology well?

Perhaps teaching licenses should be based on what you have actual experience doing. Right now, I can teach subjects I took in college - OR - I can teach subjects I took state licensing exams to actually perform for the public. "Either or", not "both and". How odd.

I'm sure there are perfectly good reasons for this. The state would probably have to hire a couple of people to look after this. Maybe even merge licensing databases and push a button.

How about improving professional knowledge? That's a sore spot with me.

I have NEVER EVER gotten credit for any of the money or time I have spent improving the quality or depth of the subject matter I actually teach. I have taken plenty of courses that I received credit for, they just haven't included knowledge that was relevant to my own.

Reason: Classes offering credit are elementary.
Reason: If I take a college course, I won't be compensated.
Reason: If do my own research, I won't be compensated.
Reason: If I go to a professional meeting, I have to log every single item of knowledge, photocopy all of the catalog, and incorporate it into my courses.

Not that I don't actually do these things. I (unreasonably perhaps) object to trying to explain it to someone who doesn't understand what I do. The meeting I attend every year includes over one hundred symposia and workshops. I have learned amazing things and shared them with my students. How do they value keynotes delivered by Nicholas Negroponte, Susan Soloman, Peter Agre or James Gates? The system doesn't value anything it doesn't create. That's the soft gooey center of credential obsession. We make it, therefore we value it. If you make it, we don't.

I don't get professional credit for doing it.

Do you think this generally discourages public school teachers?

Google Reader

Google Reader's new look includes a message when you open the page:

New! Want to see what Huffington, Boing Boing, or Lifehacker read?

Why would you wish to see a feed from the Huffington Post?

Isn't using a news reader *by definition* expressing a desire not to be dumped on by the idiots of the world? SORRY! Meant to say "the indiscriminate" of the world, as in those who can't tell fact from fiction.

Boing-boing is overwhelming and LifeHacker is trivial, but the Huff-Po is like a 10 year-old in the back seat. There, I've said it and I feel better already.

Kudos to the reading department

http://www.collegeboard.com/press/releases/206201.html

eSchool news interpreted it:

Average SAT scores were stable or rising most years from 1994 to 2004, but they have been trending downward since. That's likely due in part to the widening pool of test-takers. That's a positive sign that more students are aspiring to college, but it also tends to weigh down average scores.

The parents-didn't-attend-college group went up a bit and they said it was important, which is probably is but it was only four percent of test takers. The CB attributed it to multiple changes. But from a state Dept of Ed perspective, the increase in ELL student numbers is way up:

Language diversity is increasing as more 2009 SAT takers report that English is not exclusively their first language compared to previous years — 25.2 percent versus 18.3 percent in 1999.

It amazes me that reading didn't fall more than it did. Kudos to the reading department.