decorabilia

4521 and done

2011-09-26T07:12:00.000-07:00

If you hadn't already heard via Twitter, this is the official announcement: I'm getting out of blogging. Thus endeth decorabilia.

I started blogging seven years ago largely for my own benefit. Over time, the landscape changed: I began debate-blogging, which drew my time away from other topics, and turned me into a national expert in LD. Along with that honor came a gigantic obligation, an obligation I can no longer fulfill. I simply don't have the time to blog consistently anymore, and I don't want to keep readers hanging on in expectation of posts that will likely never arrive.

Life changed in even greater ways: in those seven years, among all the other events both amazing and banal, I got married and was divorced (there the passive voice is intended), living out a life lesson in failure that I might have taught my students. In these seven years at CHS, I took on more and more responsibilities, and am now English department chair, debate coach, APEX online coordinator, Powerful Teaching and Learning facilitator, unofficial tech support guy, and... I can't remember what else.

Most important, my life has radically and profoundly changed for the better. In the last six months, I met an amazing woman, Stefanie, with two lovely daughters, Keira and Miranda. Now, married again and a father for the first time, life is more exciting and busy and rewarding than I could ever hope or imagine.

I don't bemoan the loss of blogging. Instead, I'll celebrate the time I'll have to share with my wife and kids, and to explore the personal pursuits I had largely abandoned, including reading and writing for fun. It's been a while.

Thanks to my readers, especially debaters, who've made it fun and intellectually stimulating. For current and future readers, I won't erase anything. The archives are still there, with all kinds of advice--just click the labels. I'll someday string together all my LD thoughts into one gigantic post for your information. That someday will be soon, when I can finally catch my breath.

4,521 posts. This is the last.

Thanks and good night.

robopocalypse delayed

2011-08-31T12:55:00.000-07:00

Robot apocalypticists often presume that artificially intelligent beings will be all-too-eager to cooperate to destroy humanity. Which is why this video is so reassuring.

[via Mark Frauenfelder]

not for the squeamish

2011-08-23T13:32:00.000-07:00

Though it gets flippant when discussing the philosophical implications, Jesse Bering's piece is a nice (nice? not the right word at all) introduction to the many and diverse kinds of parasitic twins.

thoughts about animal rights

2011-08-22T17:15:00.000-07:00

The first post about the animal rights resolution has sparked a lot of great questions. Rather than try to answer them in the comments, I'll tackle them here, all at once, and see what other thoughts I can add.

First, a reader writes,

[If] we were to affirm, would major corporations such as McDonalds and Burger King be in violation of these rights, and if they were, would they be shut down by the government, costing thousands of people their jobs and adding to the country's unemployment rate?

This is one of the most critical points in this resolution: it doesn't define the nature or scope of animal rights. For all we know, animals could only have negative rights of a fairly limited extent, such as the right not to suffer cruel and unusual treatment. (It may seem morally strange to allow a person to kill and eat something, provided it doesn't suffer while alive, but that's just one of the morally strange things about trying to blend carnivorous and animal rights.)

So, unless animal rights include a "right not to be killed," we simply can't answer the question.

Next, reader nesh asks, "Didn't we as humans create this system of justice that the resolution speaks of?"

That's a great question that won't find an easy answer. In this view, rights are socially constructed. They're invented by humans, for humans--but this also makes rights a matter of human whim, changing with times and cultures. This gets tricky quickly, leading to cultural / moral relativism, and slippery grounds for disapproving of moral horrors like murder or rape.

Even if rights are human constructs, does it follow that animals are excluded from rights-talk? Not necessarily. There may be a good reason--a utilitarian or pragmatic reason--to extend rights to animals so that all humans benefit. More on this later.

A less constructivist approach is to argue that rights exist independent of human thought, but are discovered by rational actors, much as mathematical concepts exist on their own plane, waiting to be plucked out by mathematicians. Humans might disagree on the nature of rights, but they can't merely construct them. Animal rights could exist in a like manner, waiting for the first John Locke of the dolphins to squeak out a treatise. Even if such an event never occurs, however, a creature that can articulate animal rights--a human being--already exists, and can potentially assign those rights to animals.

An anonymous reader writes,

I do not like anything on the aff side... people will say that there are animals with "near human intelligence" and like arguments. This is not a good argument on several levels... First, that only occurs in certain cases. Not a true reason to affirm, and secondly if they were so smart they would protect their own rights

Giving animals rights for inherent reasons--they're intelligent, they can suffer, they're cute and fuzzy--is only one approach. Another is utilitarian, as I mentioned above: when we assign rights to animals, we protect their welfare, which not only improves their lives (and the environment), but may make us more moral as human beings. To wit, a person who treats animals with respect is more likely to treat humans with respect. (The opposite may be true as well; stereotypically, it's the psychopathic serial killer who's cruel to animals at a young age.)

Furthermore, an ethicist like Peter Singer will argue that the same reasons we defend the rights of defenseless, pre-rational human babies can be extended to the defense of non-rational animals.

As a different anonymous reader writes later on,

As for the justice approach, you're gonna have to be specific about the definition of justice, or what justice really is and what it applies to. Is justice a human-only concept? If we talk about justice and its benefits, is it utility for humans only? and if it is or isn't, why?

Amen and amen.

I'm running out of time at the moment, so I'll stop there for now. More questions, and concomitant answers, coming soon.

Resolved: Justice requires the recognition of animal rights.

2011-08-15T07:54:00.000-07:00

The September / October 2011 Lincoln-Douglas debate topic has been released:

Resolved: Justice requires the recognition of animal rights.

It's a fairly straightforward sentence with a lot of deep philosophical implications, and is a great way to start the season.

To get started, here's a thought-experiment.

An alien spaceship descends on your hometown, bug-eyed spindly-legged creatures emerging from its bowels. "Great," you think. "This is gonna be great." You've always wondered whether there was intelligent life elsewhere in the universe--and here it is, practically knocking down your door.

Actually, it is knocking down your door, and vaporizing your furniture, and corralling you and your family into cages, until you're whisked off to some distant galaxy, ostensibly to serve as entertainment for Emperor Garthron of Planet X.

You try to reason with your captors. Their eyes are blank with apathy, however; they cannot hear, nor can they understand your rudimentary bleating. They ignore your gestures and are unfazed by your scribblings. Your actions are meaningless to them, beyond the detached interest of idle alien curiosity.

How would you convince one of these aliens that their behavior is unjust, and that they've violated your rights?

Or would you even bother to try?

Clearly, your rights exist regardless of your ability to articulate them to an outsider. But what if the situation were reversed, a la District 9? Would intelligent aliens have rights?

Or, more to the point, what if animals find themselves in the same position regarding their human neighbors?

How wide is the circuit of our moral concern? Should it include organisms of different species?

Why do we care about animals?
Suppose you feel anger or sadness about recent reports about whales' susceptibility to industrial toxins. Your sentiments could arise from many sources: appreciation of the whales' beauty and power and intelligence; pity for their helplessness; respect for their unique place in nature, or for divine mandates for environmental stewardship. You could also take a different tack, highlighting their instrumental value--for instance, their essential role in the oceanic ecosystem, or their utility as a food source.

The last makes the problem particularly acute. It's tough to concede rights to something you might grill on the barbecue. Here the culturally arbitrary nature of our attachments becomes evident: some folks dress up their dogs in funny clothes, while other folks eat them. (And if dogs have a right not to suffer, why not whales?)

How do we define "animal?"
Dictionary.com (based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary) gives us at least three workable definitions.

1.any member of the kingdom Animalia, comprising multicellular organisms that have a well-defined shape and usually limited growth, can move voluntarily, actively acquire food and digest it internally, and have sensory and nervous systems that allow them to respond rapidly to stimuli: some classification schemes also include protozoa and certain other single-celled eukaryotes that have motility and animallike nutritional modes.

This scientific definition would set up an interesting affirmative:

All humans have rights.
All humans are animals.
Therefore, some animals have rights.
Thus, we affirm the resolution.

The second and third definition are much narrower:

2. any such living thing other than a human being.
3. a mammal, as opposed to a fish, bird, etc.

The former sets up a distinction between human rights and animal rights, which is the traditional manner of thinking about such things. The latter is even more restrictive, making it so the affirmative would have to defend rights for whales and grizzlies and gibbons, but not for lobsters, snakes, or chickens. (Serious efforts to grant rights to apes and to cetaceans already exist.)

Which animals would have rights?
The definition chosen points to a potential answer; other arguments might revolve around distinctions based on sentience or intelligence.

Which rights would these animals have?
Hard to say. In Spain, for instance, non-human apes have rights of life and freedom from suffering.

Where do rights come from?
If they come from God, we may have to turn to some kind of scripture to answer the question.
If they're inherent, we have to figure out whether they're inherent in animals.
If they're social constructions, we have to decide whether our society admits nonhumans.
If they're contractual, we have to wonder whether non-signatories are covered by the contract.
If they're legal constructs, we have to determine whether the law assigning rights to animals is wise.
If they're a matter of utility, we need to know whether a life with animal rights increases utility.

Recommended Reading
The SEP's entry on the moral status of animals.
Lawrence Hinman's list of relevant links and resources.

As always, your ideas and questions are critical. Fire away in the comments.

Note: this is a slightly modified repost of the topic preview from last year, since, following custom, the Sept/Oct topic is the least popular top choice from the 2010-2011 list.

barbecue tour photos: part deux

2011-08-11T14:46:00.000-07:00

[first installment here]

the fast and the furious

2011-08-06T14:38:00.000-07:00

Johnette Howard of ESPN has written a fascinating summary of the triumph and travails of Oscar Pistorius, the path-blazing runner who might get a shot at the Olympics, as well as the controversy created by his technologically facilitated racing. Even the scientists disagree as to whether Pistorius' prosthetics give him an unfair advantage. Quite the paradox.

is your car winking at me?

2011-07-31T17:26:00.000-07:00

Problem: your car isn't flirtatious enough.

Solution: eyelashes!

Linnenkohl gets his shot

2011-07-27T06:28:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to Capital grad Alex Linnenkohl, who was signed by the Chicago Bears to a 3-year contract, getting a shot at center. The Olympian reports:

Linnenkohl, who finished his college career last season as one of Oregon State’s all-time best centers, signed a rookie free agent contract with the Chicago Bears on Tuesday afternoon, fulfilling his longtime dream of getting a chance to play in the NFL. He was one of two undrafted centers signed by Chicago, joining Mississippi State’s J.C. Brignone.

“This is all I’ve ever wanted,” Linnenkohl said Tuesday from Olivet Nazarene University in Bourbonnais, Ill., where the Bears will begin training camp Saturday. “It’s pretty surreal right now. It hasn’t really hit me yet.”

What follows is one of those I-knew-him-when's: Back in 2006, I appeared on the same stage as Linnenkohl in an improv comedy show. The papers always report his work ethic (second-to-none) and his determination (at only 303 pounds, he's small for a center), but what they miss is his quick wit and killer sense of humor.

Best of luck, Alex. Strike that: do what brought you here, and keep working hard. If you get a Superbowl ring before the Seahawks do, I won't even complain.

"wear it humbly"

2011-07-24T16:53:00.000-07:00

In my time, I have twice grown a full beard, once for a competition, and once for a fundraiser. My barbaric exploits are nothing, though, compared to those of young Burke Kenny, beard champion at 26:

The 26-year-old Olympia resident recently returned from the World Beard and Mustache Championships in Trondheim, Norway, where he took first place in the "full beard with styled mustache" category. He won the same title four years ago in England, when he became the youngest international facial-hair champion....

The international competition featured about 20 categories. The Americans brought home six gold medals, and four of those were grown by men from Washington state, Kenny said. Besides Kenny, they were Bruce Roe of Bremerton, who won for Hungarian mustache; Craig "Rooty" Lundvall of the Everett area, who won for full beard natural; and Keith "Ghandi Jones" Haubrich of Seattle, who won the freestyle mustache category.

What is it that makes the Evergreen State such a haven for bearded folk? Could it be the 58-degree rainy weather in July?

the barbecue tour

2011-07-20T20:52:00.000-07:00

Things have been awful quiet around here, and for good reason: I've been on the road, enjoying the best barbecue the country has to offer--and some outstanding natural beauty along the way. Since the state figuring most prominently in my plans has more in the way of smoked meats than scenery, I'm focusing on the culinary experience, calling it my Barbecue Tour.

Why a gastronomic excursion through the heartland? Because I love smoked meats, and because I need to gain weight.

I'll add more photos as I take 'em.

Added: More photos from the new Nikon.

the LED bulb has arrived

2011-07-06T18:23:00.000-07:00

As Farhad Manjoo explains, a company called Switch Lighting will soon ramp up production on an LED bulb that looks as warm and inviting as an incandescent--at a fifth of the energy costs.

On average, an incandescent bulb lasts about 1,000 hours—that's about a year, if you keep it on for about three hours a day. Electricity in America also costs about 11 cents per kilowatt hour (that's the average; it varies widely by region). In other words, a 50-cent, 60-watt incandescent bulb will use about $6.60 in electricity every year. Switch's 60-watt-equivalent LED, meanwhile, uses only 13 watts of power, so it will cost only $1.43 per year. The Switch bulb also has an average lifespan of 20,000 hours--20 years. If you count the price of replacing the incandescent bulb every year, the Switch bulb will have saved you money by its fourth year. Over 20 years, you'll have spent a total of about $142 for the incandescent bulbs (for electricity and replacement bulbs) and less than $50 for Switch's 60-watt bulb.

Getting Americans to give up incandescents won't be easy, even with their 2014 phase-out. Migraine sufferers have a reason to be concerned: up until now, the least expensive viable option, compact fluorescents, were a known migraine trigger. As far as we know, though, LEDs are a safer alternative.

Now, if only they could find a way to salvage the Easy-Bake Oven.

Guerilla Running's 4K Moon Run / Walk, Saturday, July 9th

2011-07-04T14:08:00.000-07:00

On what promises to be a completely awesome evening, Guerilla Running is hosting the first ever 4K Moon Run / Walk this Saturday, July 9th, at Capital High School, to benefit CHS's Debate Team. I hear that 200 women have signed up to race, earning custom-designed sterling silver necklaces and post-race pampering.

There will be a raffle with great prizes from Olympia businesses, including The Alpine Experience, 510 Interiors, BeHive Massage Therapy, and Nathan's Performance Gear. Swing Wine Bar Cafe will provide desserts for the runners, served by volunteers including Debate team members.

Saturday night at 8 p.m., come watch, hang out, buy raffle tickets, and enjoy the race. If you'd like to donate prizes, cash, or time, feel free to contact me.

See you at the race!

Need more info? Check it the Facebook page.

survey says: fast food stinks

2011-06-30T10:18:00.000-07:00

A recent fast food survey reveals nothing new: the food stinks, and the service isn't much better. Nobody orders healthy fare. Sbarro is the worst restaurant in America, if not the world.

I'd like to see a followup, ranking fast food joints with added geographical nuance. For instance, which fast food restaurants are most likely to abuse your palate?

1. Standalone
2. Shopping mall food court
3. Airport
4. Tourist trap
5. Grocery store-attached
6. Freeway overpass / rest stop

America needs to know!

summertime blogging blues

2011-06-25T10:37:00.000-07:00

With summer commencing, if not weatherly, at least calendrically and vocationally, I was ready to write a series of blog posts on some tidbits I'd gathered from around the Web and stored in my Chrome bookmarks. Then, without warning, Chrome's "sync" feature devoured them all, and apparently has regurgitated them into a parallel universe.

So, more blogging to come, just not quite yet.

While I'm on the subject of summer: it's summer, so I have a series of backburner projects that are moving to the front burner. I won't say too much because I don't want to jinx myself, but it'll be great to have a couple months of serious writing time.

Creative chickens. That's all I'll say for now.

nobody likes a whiner

2011-06-21T15:58:00.001-07:00

Whining is more annoying than a buzz saw, says a recent study...

In raw numbers, people made more mistakes per math problems completed when listening to the whines than any of the other speech patterns or noises (though the only statistically significant differences were between whining, the table saw and motherese).

And people completed fewer subtraction problems when listening to the whining, crying and baby talk than when it was completely quiet.

...that will soon be posted on refrigerators and in teacher's lounges all across the country.

you are not your genes

2011-06-20T17:07:00.000-07:00

You aren't. (And yet you are.)

But you aren't.

LD topics for 2011-2012

2011-06-20T07:00:00.000-07:00

Whitman U's Jim Hanson sends along word that the NFL has released its slate of potential topics for 2011-12:

1. Resolved: The United States ought to extend to non-citizens accused of terrorism the same constitutional due process protections it grants to citizens.

2. Resolved: It is morally permissible for victims to use deadly force as a deliberate response to repeated domestic violence.

3. Resolved: In the United States, possession of handguns ought not be an individual right.

4. Resolved: The use of eminent domain for private economic development is just.

5. Resolved: Estate taxes are just.

6. Resolved: A government has the obligation to lessen the economic gap between its rich and poor citizens.

7. Resolved: A just society ought to prioritize environmental concerns over the production of energy.

8. Resolved: In the United States, law enforcement ought to be required to have probable cause to search data an individual has stored on remote servers.

9. Resolved: Targeted killing is a morally permissible foreign policy tool.

10. Resolved: Individuals have a moral obligation to assist people in need.

The "targeted killing" resolution is my initial favorite, not only because of its timeliness, but because it's focused without seeming too specific. (#8, for instance, seems too narrow for my tastes.)

What's your favorite?

the GPS had murder on its mind

2011-06-18T13:15:00.000-07:00

This wasn't the first time, and it won't be the last:

Three women from out of the country drove their car into Mercer Slough in Bellevue early Wednesday while trying to follow directions from their GPS.

The women, from Mexico, told police they had been following the device about midnight but obviously took a wrong turn.

The women went into the water with the rental car but were able to get out safely, said Carla Iafrate, spokeswoman for the Bellevue Police Department.

OEA ratifies contract; RIF defunct

2011-06-16T17:50:00.000-07:00

The Olympia School District will be able to return all its RIFed teachers this year, thanks to the new contract overwhelmingly ratified by the Olympia Education Association last night.

Some of the major changes for the next contract year include...

* A reduction from 30 staff development (optional training) building, District, and teacher-directed hours to 12 teacher-directed hours.

* Reduction to 177 student days; 3 days out of the 180 in the school year are now non-student training days.

* A cap on overload payments at $866,0760

* 3 additional "optional day" hours (to mitigate a portion of the pay cut)

* School's out June 15, 2012, absent any snow days

The three non-student days are at least a little closer to the furlough the state didn't provide.

All in all, this is good news. Not great news--cuts are cuts--but good news.

a fond farewell to CHS's graduating debaters

2011-06-14T16:49:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday marked the end-of-the-year celebration for CHS's Speech and Debate team. It's a celebration I've come to relish. We find a park if the weather's good, or a team member's home if it's not, and potluck it. Games, conversation, food, and, of course, speeches to recount triumphs, visions of the future, and, for the seniors, parting wisdom.

And gifts.

A few years ago, the team started a tradition of cobbling together some mementoes for the coach. This year's soon-to-be-graduates led the charge , and I have to say, the swag pile is pretty impressive, with reading material (Catch-22, The Encyclopedia of Useless Information), folk music, Guatemalan worry dolls, hair gel (gorilla snot? really?), a puzzle book, and a leopard-print Snuggie, which I will never, ever wear. Grace's handmade collection of Mr. Anderson Quotes (that have never made Twitter) was a delightful surprise, too. (Sample: "Well, let's just make a shot that will keep people from becoming Satanists, because that's a public health concern." I swear, it was valid in context.)

Their generosity and good humor should surprise no one, for this year's seniors are a special group. Sure, they've shone competitively, including a 2nd-place finish at the State I.E. tournament, but more important, they've always valued truth over trophies, and have always competed with character and class. As often as I have coached them, I have merely stood out of their way, and watched them triumph through their own effort and persistence.

They're good people made better by their experiences in forensics, leaders in the classroom and in the community. They're writers, scientists, actors, scholars, artists, doctors, politicians, and whatever else they can imagine. They are tireless, and their possibilities are limitless. It's humbling to see how much they've grown in four years, and more than a little sad to see them leave. They leave behind a history of accomplishments and a legacy of leadership, already inspiring their younger teammates to greatness.

So, to Jackson, Grace, Cameron, Matthew, Vamsi, Josie, Jesse, Layne, Shira, and Aaron: thanks for everything. I'll be so proud to see you walk across the stage tonight, out of CHS and into the wider world, bold representatives of a new generation.

The scaffolding is complete. The rest of the future is yours to build.

(re)defining violent felonies

2011-06-12T18:49:00.000-07:00

A while back, while blogging about the juvenile justice resolution, I tried to find a solid definition of the phrase "violent felonies," looking to the Armed Career Criminal Act of 1984.

A recent Supreme Court ruling hinges on an ambiguity I hadn't explored: section 924, (B) (ii):

(ii) is burglary, arson, or extortion, involves use of explosives, or otherwise involves conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another[emphasis added]

In a 6-3 decision, SCOTUS found that fleeing from police in a vehicle constitutes a violent felony under this definition.

Mr. Sykes’s flight was dangerous, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority. “Sykes wove through traffic, drove on the wrong side of the road and through yards containing bystanders, passed through a fence and struck the rear of a house,” Justice Kennedy wrote.

But, Justice Kennedy went on, the issue was not whether Mr. Sykes’s actual conduct had been violent. Rather, it was whether the crime he had been convicted of was as a general matter a crime of violence.

As a matter of both common experience and statistics, Justice Kennedy wrote, the answer was yes. Fleeing from the police in a car, he wrote, “is a provocative and dangerous act that dares, and in a typical case requires, the officer to give chase.”

Scalia penned the strongest dissent:

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing only for himself, issued a vigorous dissent. He said the provision of the federal law under review (“involves conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another”) was a hopelessly vague Congressional “drafting failure” and that “today’s tutti-frutti opinion” produces “a fourth ad hoc judgment that will sow further confusion.”

The phrase "otherwise involves conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another" may be broad, but the context--as part of a "crime" or "act of juvenile delinquency"--limits the scope, which is probably why six justices lined up in favor of the broad reading.

As an aside, what is a "potential risk?" Isn't any risk inherently "potential?" Lawyer friends, help me out here.

[via Glenn Reynolds]

decriminalization no longer a fringe movement

2011-06-06T06:09:00.000-07:00

A mix of former global political figures and business executives are calling for an end, of sorts, to the War on Drugs. The Guardian's Jamie Doward reports:

Former presidents, prime ministers, eminent economists and leading members of the business community will unite behind a call for a shift in global drug policy. The Global Commission on Drug Policy will host a press conference at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York to launch a report that describes the drug war as a failure and calls for a "paradigm shift" in approaching the issue.

Those backing the call include Ernesto Zedillo, former president of Mexico; George Papandreou, former prime minister of Greece; César Gaviria, former president of Colombia; Kofi Annan, former UN secretary general; Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former president of Brazil; George Shultz, former US secretary of state; Javier Solana, former EU high representative; Virgin tycoon Richard Branson; and Paul Volcker, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve.

The commission will call for drug policy to move from being focused on criminal justice towards a public health approach. The global advocacy organisation Avaaz, which has nine million members, will present a petition in support of the commission's recommendations to UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon.

But don't expect an armistice--or even a truce--any time soon. Jacob Sullum explains:

As the report makes clear, the commission, whether for ideological or tactical reasons, is not prepared to renounce the use of force to stop people from consuming politically incorrect intoxicants. It wants to lighten up on users and low-level suppliers while cracking down on "violent criminal organizations...in ways that undermine their power and reach while prioritizing the reduction of violence and intimidation." But it is prohibition that enriches and empowers such organizations while encouraging them to be violent. As the Mexican government has vividly demonstrated since 2006, fighting drug cartels escalates the violence associated with the black market, which will persist as long as supplying people with the drugs they want remains illegal. The commission knows this: It quotes a study concluding that "drug-related violence and high homicide rates are likely a natural consequence of drug prohibition" and that "increasingly sophisticated and well-resourced methods of disrupting drug distribution networks may unintentionally increase violence."

Violence that continues apace.

you, too, can be a championship speller

2011-06-04T10:25:00.000-07:00

In a neat little article, Slate's Nina Shen Rastogi asks, "How Would You Do at the National Spelling Bee?" She gives you 14 prize-winning words, pronounced properly, with parts of speech, definitions, sample sentences, and language of origin. You can use as many or as few hints as you need.

How'd this former National Spelling Bee loser fare?

10 out of 14. (I missed #s 1, 3, 4, and 13.)

today's science links

2011-05-31T17:40:00.000-07:00

Mars rover Spirit is gone for good? Probably.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome caused by a rodent virus?? Probably not.

Government funds ridiculously wasteful research??? Not exactly.

Cell phones cause cancer???? Uh, insufficient evidence, thanks.

Washington teen discovers that diaper powder increases crop yields????? You better believe it.

Added: Now with a panda tie bonus.

the vuvuzela as a biological weapon

2011-05-30T21:18:00.000-07:00

Enjoy your vuvuzela, you germ-spreading hooligan, you.

Evergreen's Science Carnival: more science than carnival

2011-05-29T11:20:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's Science Carnival at The Evergreen State College brought a lot of science, and a little bit of carnival, to the public. The Olympian sent reporter Rolf Boone to cover the story:

Elementary school students descended on the campus Friday as part of school field trips, while more children – this time with their parents – attended Saturday.

Over the two days, more than 150 science presentations were primarily presented throughout three buildings on campus, with an emphasis on hands-on activities.

I sampled some natural soda (dandelion blossoms should not, under any circumstances, be carbonated), saw how bacteria can power a fuel cell, and learned how oyster mushrooms are crucial to mycoremediation. The only disappointment: the cancellation of the 1:00 showing of "That's a Chicken?!" I never did learn what the putative quasi-chicken was, or what it all meant.

The carnival closed with Mentos/Diet Coke fountains set to "Thus Spake Zarathustra," which mostly made a mess of Red Square and the students manning the event.

Oh, and to Jimmy S., the commentator on the Olympian's website who claims that "The words science and Evergreen do not belong in the same sentence," you are obviously right. Clearly, an institution that sponsors cutting-edge phage research, has a "Research Ambassador Program" to connect science to the community, gets high school teachers involved in lab work, and has several top-notch programs in various scientific fields (with unparalleled opportunities for undergraduates to participate in research!) , and, for goodness' sake, HOSTS A SCIENCE CARNIVAL, has nothing to do with science.

Added: Science!

identity in duality: craniopagus twins

2011-05-27T07:07:00.000-07:00

The story first caught my attention in November. Now, in a humane and insightful piece, the NY Times magazine gives the incredible, philosophically- and neurologically challenging tale of craniopagus twins the long-form treatment.

The explanation Cochrane proposes is surprisingly straightforward for so unusual an outcome: that visual input comes in through the retinas of one girl, reaches her thalamus, then takes two different courses, like electricity traveling along a wire that splits in two. In the girl who is looking at the strobe or a stuffed animal in her crib, the visual input continues on its usual pathways, one of which ends up in the visual cortex. In the case of the other girl, the visual stimulus would reach her thalamus via the thalamic bridge, and then travel up her own visual neural circuitry, ending up in the sophisticated processing centers of her own visual cortex. Now she has seen it, probably milliseconds after her sister has.

The results of the test did not surprise the family, who had long suspected that even when one girl’s vision was angled away from the television, she was laughing at the images flashing in front of her sister’s eyes. The sensory exchange, they believe, extends to the girls’ taste buds: Krista likes ketchup, and Tatiana does not, something the family discovered when Tatiana tried to scrape the condiment off her own tongue, even when she was not eating it.

Even knowing about the tests and what Cochrane believed, I listened to the family’s stories with some amount of skepticism. Perhaps they were imagining it or exaggerating for the sake of a good story. Then in one of the many idle moments of the five days I spent with the family, the girls were watching television, and I absent-mindedly gave Tatiana’s foot, which Krista could not see, a little tickle. She turned to me and smiled, and then Krista spoke: “Now do me,” she said. Had she felt the sensation but wanted the emotional experience of knowing that she, too, was receiving that kind of playful attention?

If you TL;DR this one, you're going to miss out.

National Board bonuses preserved (mostly)

2011-05-26T06:34:00.000-07:00

One of the bigger surprises of the 2011 legislative session, at least from this board-certified teacher's perspective, is that the bonuses for NBCTs came out relatively unscathed. A little accounting trickery, plus a reduction for first-year certificate-holders, saved roughly $61 million. The rundown:

Two changes are made to the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) bonus program. Beginning in the 2011-12 school year, The Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction must pay bonuses on July 1 of each school year, achieving a one-time savings in fiscal year 2012. Additionally, first year national board bonuses will be prorated by a factor of 60 percent (a 40 percent reduction), to reflect the percentage of the school year newly NBPTS-certified teachers are certified. The proration produces a first year base bonus amount of $3,054, and a first year high poverty school bonus of $3,000. With the exception of the first year proration, the $5090 base bonus and $5000 high poverty school bonus are fully funded in the 2011-13 biennium.

I heard from several sources that NBCTs were some of the most persistent, consistent, and articulate gadflies at town hall meetings--which squares with my experience with a local NBCT advocacy group-- and apparently we got results.

final budget: not the worst of the worst

2011-05-25T06:44:00.000-07:00

For this post, I'm not going to focus on the budget deal now heading for the Senate, which includes a 1.9% pay cut for teachers, which was expected, but not the worst case scenario. We won't know the impact in the Olympia School District until the Board adopts its budget, slated to take place June 28th, although we'll probably soon get an update from District officials.

Instead, without comment, I'm going to zoom in on this bit of behind-the-scenes reportage:

"You go on adrenaline," Dunshee said, noting there were no catered dinners. "You sort of forage around the building looking for something. You find some old Girl Scout cookies or granola bars."

Sen. Ed Murray, D-Seattle, said he can tell lawmakers are ready to go home. "People are flipping out over different things ... People are exhausted," he said. "I'm so tired it kind of scares me."

when Wal-Mart called

2011-05-24T16:08:00.000-07:00

After school. The phone rings. I answer it, trepidatious.

"Hi, this is [redacted] from Wal-Mart, hoping to talk with you about [redacted]."

Excellent. I am a reference for a former student seeking gainful employment. Shall I expound, at great length, as to [redacted]'s character and accomplishments, fortitude and charisma? Shall I relate a piquant anecdote, recount [redacted]'s classroom odyssey of learning? Possibilities! Ask, dear Wal-Mart, and I shall--

"Do you have any reason to believe that [redacted] poses a violent threat to any other person?"

Uh... No.

"Do you have any reason to believe that [redacted] lacks integrity or honesty?"

No.

"One last thing. Is there any reason you would not recommend [redacted] for a position at Wal-Mart?"

No.

"That's all. Have a nice day."

Click.

budget deal within sight?

2011-05-23T06:58:00.000-07:00

Up until now, negotiations over worker's compensation were the major holdup in Washington state's budget wrangling. No more:

A path emerged Sunday for lawmakers to wrap up their work without delaying their overdue exit any further. It came in the form of an agreement between the Legislature’s four top leaders and Gov. Chris Gregoire to reduce the costs of the state-run insurance system for injured workers by $1.1 billion by 2015.

Lawmakers are putting the plan on a fast track to approval as early as today, giving the business lobby a version of what it has been demanding: an option for workers hurt on the job to take payments to settle their injury claims.

There's been movement, if not progress, on the education front, too:

Teacher pay remained one of many spending items on the chopping block. Rep. Kathy Haigh, D-Shelton, was resigned to seeing a cut to teacher salaries and said top budget negotiators had rejected her idea to cut the number of school days by a corresponding amount.

School districts that can’t persuade teachers’ unions to accept the pay cuts, she said, would have to make the cuts elsewhere.

If the extra session wraps up on Wednesday, teachers will know shortly after just how bad the bad news will be.

attention

2011-05-22T09:56:00.000-07:00

I.
Earlier this year, I recommended Lawrence Rosenblum's See What I'm Saying, which explores the lesser-known aspects of sensation and cognition. What I didn't mention was that I had two of my English classes read an excerpt, then head out into the halls to test our echolocating skills. Since we had so little practice, we were terrible at it--but we could hear the possibilities. Navigational failure was a pedagogical success.

I was reminded of that experience when pointed by Maggie Koerth-Baker to this blog entry by neuroscientist Bradley Voytek.

We're used to thinking of our senses as being pretty shite: we can't see as well as eagles, we can't hear as well as bats, and we can't smell as well as dogs.

Or so we're used to thinking.

It turns out that humans can, in fact, detect as few as 2 photons entering the retina. Two. As in, one-plus-one.

It is often said that, under ideal conditions, a young, healthy person can see a candle flame from 30 miles away. That's like being able to see a candle in Times Square from Stamford, Connecticut. Or seeing a candle in Candlestick Park from Napa Valley.

Similarly, it appears that the limits to our threshold of hearing may actually be Brownian motion. That means that we can almost hear the random movements of atoms.

Voytek calls humans "inattentive superheroes," our skills fundamentally underdeveloped in a world full of noise. We underestimate the value of silence, of darkness, of time spent alone. We'd like to be more focused, but we don't know how--and we keep filling our lives with more things that siphon attention away.

II.
Much of the siphoning is well-intentioned, an attempt to remind us--to alert us--to pay attention. You're rolling through a residential neighborhood, at the wheel of a two-ton death machine. In the corner of your eye, a yellow warning: "Children at Play." It's a safety measure that can be--and will be--easily ignored. And probably should be torn down.

The National Cooperative Highway Research Program, in its "Synthesis of Highway Practice No. 139," sternly advises that "non-uniform signs such as "CAUTION--CHILDREN AT PLAY," "SLOW--CHILDREN," or similar legends should not be permitted on any roadway at any time." Moreover, it warns that "the removal of any nonstandard signs should carry a high priority."

One of the things that is known, thanks to peer-reviewed science, is that increased traffic speeds (and volumes) increase the risk of children's injuries. But "Children at Play" signs are a symptom, rather than a cure--a sign of something larger that is out of whack, whether the lack of a pervasive safety culture in driving, a system that puts vehicular mobility ahead of neighborhood livability, or non-contextual street design. After all, it's roads, not signs, that tell people how to drive. People clamoring for "Children at Play" signs are often living on residential streets that are inordinately wide, lacking any kind of calming obstacles (from trees to "bulb-outs"), perhaps having unnecessary center-line markings--three factors that will boost vehicle speed more than any sign will lower them.

If, at our best, we're "inattentive superheroes," at our worst, we're overly confident, cognitively-deficient supervillains.

As is often the case in driving, when we meet the enemy, it is us. You want difficulty in judging spatial relations? Consider the research, by Dennis Shaffer, that showed people reporting 10-foot-long highway stripes to be two feet long. You want difficulty estimating speed? Consider this study, which found drivers underestimating their speed in the presence of children by upwards of 50 percent. You want exceeded sensory abilities? Consider the widespread phenomenon of "overdriving" one's headlights. You want trouble estimating distance? Ask any driver how many feet they'll need to stop, driving at 65 mph. You want impulsive? Who's reaching across the seat for that buzzing BlackBerry?

If "Children at Play" signs are ineffective at capturing our attention--or doubly ineffective when they do--what about other supposedly helpful road signs: speed limits, "Road Narrows," "Koala Crossing?" (We'll leave aside "One Way" for now.) What if they were gone--all gone? John Staddon points toward a possible future:

So what am I suggesting—abolishing signs and rules? A traffic free-for-all? Actually, I wouldn’t be the first to suggest that. A few European towns and neighborhoods--Drachten in Holland, fashionable Kensington High Street in London, Prince Charles’s village of Poundbury, and a few others--have even gone ahead and tried it. They’ve taken the apparently drastic step of eliminating traffic control more or less completely in a few high-traffic and pedestrian-dense areas. The intention is to create environments in which everyone is more focused, more cautious, and more considerate. Stop signs, stoplights, even sidewalks are mostly gone. The results, by all accounts, have been excellent: pedestrian accidents have been reduced by 40 percent or more in some places, and traffic flows no more slowly than before.

Of course, all of this could be moot once automobiles become truly auto. And then we can turn our attention toward more important things.

III.
For some, it's even harder than usual to block out the tumult of the everyday. In the fourth part of a fascinating series, Marie Myung-Ok Lee describes how her autistic son was finally able to learn how to ride a bike.

After my husband and I bought him a bike with training wheels, he would sometimes sit on it for a minute or two, try to pedal, and then have a tantrum, hurling the bike in frustration. His classroom bike-riding lessons weren't going any better. At a school meeting, the consensus among his teachers and other professionals was that independent bike riding was something he'd probably never learn.

They probably would have been right, were it not for Lee's persistence in seeking out a remedy: high-grade marijuana.

[C]annabis not only mitigates J's pain, it also seems to help him to focus... [M]arijuana's effect on short-term memory allows a user to focus intently on a single sensation (that "Whooooaaaa, man... look at that flower" feeling). One feature of autism is a heightened, disordered, nondiscriminating sensitivity, so that autistics seem to see and feel and hear and smell everything at the same time.... But with cannabis (which also regulates anxiety and stress), I noticed that J had a much higher tolerance for activities that involve multiple steps, like unloading the dishwasher.

Bicycling, when you think about it, involves myriad functions: coordination of gross motor movement with the vestibular, visual, and proprioceptive systems that regulate balance. On a nice weekend I brought J, his bike, his helmet, and a wrench to a nearby private school that has a bunch of wide, paved paths. I removed the training wheels from his bike, put him on it, and gave him a push, figuring that once he realized how good it felt to bike--to move along on his own power--he was going to love it. He pedaled and immediately tipped over, laughing, as he was expecting the training wheels to be there holding him up. But after a few tries, he started to get it. And before the afternoon was over, he was biking independently.

Lee's story is inspiring and infuriating; our federal government's increasingly bizarre insistence on persecuting medical marijuana users made her take unnecessary personal and medical risks. In a saner world, her doctor would have been able to prescribe a standard, fully-tested treatment, and her son's triumph would have been heartwarmingly ordinary.

It may tax your 21st-century attention span, but start with the first part and keep going until you're done.

Asides
When I was young, I could get so wrapped up in a book (or so focused on my Legos) that I'd shut out the world. Maybe that's why I've never been interested in trying pot: that "Whooooaaaa, man..." sensation may not sit well with a brain perfectly comfortable managing its own focal point.

When we let someone else sort the signal from the noise, we risk missing the whole signal. Call it a "filter bubble," algorithmically facilitated attention-narrowing.

Just because you can see a photon from space, doesn't mean you should drive without your glasses.

Driverless cars? Soon. But not quite yet.

Olympia in springtime

2011-05-17T18:38:00.000-07:00

Robert "Berd" Whitlock is one of Olympia's indispensables, a photographer who blends politics, philosophy and imagery from his unique, and uniquely Olympian, perspective. Regardless of your partisan proclivities, you can enjoy his work--and, if you're like me, it'll inspire you to go outside / get a better camera / learn how to actually use the better camera.

Here's his latest set, in which he somehow manages to make the Ugly Building look beautiful. And here's his Flickr stream. Enjoy.

smoke 'em if you have the proper permit for 'em

2011-05-17T17:28:00.000-07:00

The Washington State Senate has passed a bill re-legalizing indoor smoking--in select locations.

The plan would permit up to 100 cigar lounges and 500 retail tobacco shops to allow smoking.

The bill would reverse part of a wildly popular 2005 initiative, which banned smoking indoors in public buildings and places of employment.

The bill may hurdle the House, but I'd be surprised if Gregoire signs on. After all, as Attorney General, she made her political reputation by leading the campaign to sue tobacco companies for deceptive practices, to the tune of $206 billion, $4.5 billion of that for the Evergreen State alone.

Even if the bill passes, don't go celebrating the moderately reasonable rollback of nanny-state social engineering, or lament the death of democracy. There's one overwhelming reason for the exemption:

Businesses would have to pay annual fees of $17,500 to obtain cigar lounge endorsements and $6,000 to obtain tobacco store endorsements.

Olympia Awesome Film Festival lives up to its name

2011-05-15T12:28:00.000-07:00

The Rundown
Last night's Olympia Awesome Film Festival, the first ever, showcased the talents of twenty filmmakers from all over the U.S., with 24 low-budget short films in 5 hours--sci-fi, action-adventure, music videos, slasher parodies, documentaries, mockumentaries.

The festival's producers and attendees clearly loved all things cinema, bringing great energy to the evening. The event's sponsors also played a huge role in the festival's success, giving away hundreds of dollars in gift certificates, from pub fare to oil changes. (I'm not even mad that I didn't win one.)

The Subjectively Chosen Highlights
The audience favorite, Daniel Klockenkemper's Deathwalker, shot on Super 8 stock for an especially Carpenteresque look, had some of the best moments of visual humor. Apparently a foldable walker + a shotgun = comedy gold. (Couldn't find it on YouTube, sorry.) Accepting his award, Klockenkemper noted that the short was ten years in the making. Here's hoping the sequel comes out a little faster.

For its composition and overall excellence, the judges chose--and chose well--Never Been Used, a simple premise neatly executed, short and sweet. Unsurprisingly, it was 1st runner up at the Seattle 24 Hour Film Race in 2010.

Documentaries deserved their own award, but since there wasn't one, I'd pick Hamilton: Town at the Tipping Point, a thought-provoking look at "FEMA welfare."

The animation Asteraceae and the mockumentary (at least, I think it's a mockumentary) Rats also entertained.

The two biggest "WTF" moments* were the slasher Waffle, perhaps the festival's riskiest entry, and My Brother's Dog Helen, a documentary that, in a few painful and surprisingly poignant minutes, deconstructs notions of family and forgiveness.

The Suggestion Box
The following suggestions are offered in love, as I'd really like to see the festival become an Olympia tradition.

Speed it up a bit. The festival started close to six, and wasn't over until 11:00. A good chunk of the audience left early, missing out on the final raffle and the prize announcements, probably because that's a lot of seat time (in a fairly stuffy venue, which, to be fair, wasn't the organizers' first choice). Cut a few films (see below), shorten up the breaks, and count votes while the raffle's going.

Quality over quantity.
A small festival, starting out, is in a tricky spot. You want to attract a wide variety of talents, and you want to attract and retain an audience. You want your films to be good, but you don't want to be so picky that you entirely shut out amateur auteurs.

Limiting to one film per director might help--did we really need two "instructional" films, Let's Shoplift and Save and Hot Wiring Made Easy, where the joke and the execution were nearly identical?

Also, to keep quality high while simultaneously building buzz, why not include your potential audience in the selection process? Choose, say, five flicks you're not sure will make the cut, put 'em on the website, and let the Internet vote for their faves. The top choice makes it into the festival, while the other four at least get some exposure, without slowing down the action. Everybody wins.

The order matters.
Selection and arrangement are critical. The festival had great variety in tone and style, but ended, I thought, on a bit of an anticlimax, an actioner with great production values (and lots of fight sequences) but a thin storyline--and only Part 2 of a 3-part series.

Concessions
It's small, but important: if this is a film festival, let's have film-quality popcorn. Butter it up.

In Summary
The Olympia Awesome Film Festival has great potential. I hope there's another next year--and I hope to see you there.

*And I should point out that this is meant as a term of endearment.

defining "national interest"

2011-05-15T10:20:00.000-07:00

Recently, a reader noted,

I am having a lot of trouble defining "national interest". I feel like definitions are going to be extremely important for this resolution.

I agree that it's difficult to precisely define "national interest"--and that a good definition is critical for the universal human rights resolution.

Here's my brief attempt to un-muddy the waters.

National interest is usually defined in terms of the actions or policies that advance a nation's economic, cultural, or political standing. In the introduction to Michael Roskin's incisive analysis of the phrase, Col. John Mountcastle offers a decent summary:

The "national interest" is a composite declaration derived from those values that a nation prizes most--liberty, freedom, security. Interests are usually expressed in terms of physical survival, economic prosperity, and political sovereignty. The list invariably expands, and is ultimately shaped by subjective preferences and political debate. As an object of political debate, the concept of national interest serves to propose, justify, or denounce policies.

Roskin himself begins,

The student new to international relations is often at first intoxicated by the concept of "national interest." It seems crisp, clear, objective: what's good for the nation as a whole in international affairs. (What's good for the nation as a whole in domestic affairs is the public interest.) National interest lies at the very heart of the military and diplomatic professions and leads to the formulation of a national strategy and of the calculation of the power necessary to support that strategy. Upon reflection, however, one realizes how hard it is to turn concepts of national interest into working strategy.

The boundary between international and domestic concerns can be fuzzy, since the two are often (or always?) intertwined. Also, it's possible that national interest-seeking is a zero sum game--that one nation's interest rises only as another's falls, or, in other words, we have to define a nation's interest relative to other nations' interests.

Roskin traces the history of the phrase from Machiavelli to Morgenthau and beyond, summing them up in the overall concept that a nation's sole interest (from a practical and empirical perspective) is in preserving its own power. Roskin also notes the difference between vital and secondary interests, which could be important to clarify the debate.

For the LDer interested in this resolution, Roskin's essay is quite useful. Check it out.

zombies can vote?

2011-05-14T14:41:00.000-07:00

Note: although I attended a political protest this past week, it was not this one. Nor did I give this speech.

Seven Ways of Looking at a Necktie: a Twitter poem

2011-05-13T15:22:00.000-07:00

Apologies to Wallace Stevens.

One time, while surfing in the bluest ocean that ever evaporated into sky, I accidentally swallowed a sea slug.

Swirling dust in a desert of cupcake mix.

When flowers rained like diamonds, and distant strains of a pan flute grazed mist-soaked hilltops, a forlorn sheep bleated in the afternoon.

Three tigers prowl in a jungle of their own making.

As they argued over the nature of the soul, Picasso became enraged, and punched Matisse in the mouth. Matisse bled pure color.

Fiesta, a party. Fiesta, a car.

Burning with the fury of a thousand sunlamps.

[Original version starts here and ends here. Oh, and the tie is here.]

WEA Chinook rallies at the Capitol

2011-05-10T18:02:00.000-07:00

WEA Chinook hosted an impromptu rally at the state capitol Tuesday, and about 110 teachers showed up to gather, mill about on the capitol steps, and wander peacefully into the building to chat with whomever might still be around. It started at 4:00 by the John L. O'Brien building, and ended roughly at 5:30, with a few latecomers trickling in as the early birds departed.

It was a low-key, friendly protest, with nary a chant or incident. Did it accomplish much? Probably not in the grand scheme of Washington politics. But it did remind this sometime-jaded political participant/observer that even in a maelstrom of despair, there are a lot of good people holding on to hope.

Pictured at the front of the slideshow is Capital's own Mike Deakins, a master of activism and sloganeering. (Ask him to write you a ditty sometime.) I hope to add links once the WEA posts their own official photos / writeup.

Update: WEA photos are now available. If you look closely, you'll find me in a few of them, protesting and such.

The Olympian hears about Olympia's RIF

2011-05-10T07:05:00.000-07:00

They're a little late to the party, but at least they have the story now.

The Olympia School District is notifying 48 teachers this week that they might not have jobs in the fall, as it works to close a $2.3 million deficit.

Of course, the real number of teachers who could lose their jobs – and the actual amount of the deficit – depends largely on how things play out in the state Legislature’s special session, and how many teachers decide to retire, resign or take a leave of absence during next school year. “The majority of those folks will be offered their jobs back,” said district spokesman Peter Rex.

So far, 27 teachers have indicated they don’t plan to work next year. The district plans to basically leave 40 positions vacant to balance its budget. Unless there’s more attrition, about 13 teachers will lose their positions, Rex said.

More accurately, the 40 positions vacated may help balance the budget. There are other cuts planned; you can read all about the details here. If teaching positions are salvaged in the best-case scenario, many of the other cuts will still be necessary.

Chapter One of the worst case scenario has already been written, I should point out. As expected, the House has voted to suspend I-728 and I-732. Again.

The votes were lopsided but not unanimous to suspend initiatives 728 and 732 in the state House of Representatives Monday. The two iconic education-funding measures were first approved by voters in 2000 to provide class-size reduction funds and also to provide K-12 public school employees with annual cost-of-living raises.

The vote was to temporarily suspend the voters’ will on both measures, saving more than $1 billion in general fund outlays over the next two years.

We'll know in the next 15 days or so how the next chapter plays out.

do or do not. there is no "be."

2011-05-09T16:06:00.000-07:00

Sartre meets Star Wars.

[via Maggie Koerth-Baker]

the happiness gene

2011-05-09T07:02:00.001-07:00

On some level, it's obvious that happiness is genetic. Your ability to think and feel come from the brain you own (and that owns you), and the basic instructions to build a brain are found in your genes.

On another level, though, the complex interplay of environment, culture, genetics, and development means there's no gene for happiness.

Survey says: sort of.

The happiest people tended to have a long variant of a gene called 5-HTTLPR. This gene makes a transporter molecule for serotonin, a chemical that brain cells use to communicate with each other, and the long variant helps to recycle serotonin faster and more efficiently than the short one.

De Neve extracted his data from the US National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which has been following the same set of adolescents for 13 years, from 1995 to 2008. Genomic information in this study allowed him to distinguish respondents who had two long versions of 5-HTTLPR from those who had two short versions, or one of each.

Twice as many respondents with two long versions said they were very satisfied with life compared with carriers of two short versions.

Conversely, 26 per cent of those with two short versions of the gene said they were dissatisfied with life, compared with 20 per cent of people carrying two long variants.

Since there's not yet a truly objective way of measuring happiness, one wonders if 5-HTTLPR is just the gene variant for optimistic self-delusion. Or so says my skeptical gene.

conglomerated edu-blogging

2011-05-08T16:05:00.001-07:00

For a while, I was writing about educational issues on three blogs--this one, 5/17, and Washington Teachers. At the time, it made sense to divide my efforts along personal, local, and state-based lines. Eventually, though, it became a time management nightmare--and the latter blog, a group effort, dwindled into nothingness as my co-bloggers and I were too busy elsewhere.

But it's not like I've run out of educational opinions. Now, thanks to the 5/17 label, you can access them all in one convenient location.

You're welcome.

the RIF hits home

2011-05-08T12:41:00.000-07:00

Friday, OSD officials came to Capital High School to personally deliver RIF notices to six teachers, our rookie staff who find themselves in the "lower 48." Having barely scraped through the '04 RIF, I can speak to the fear and uncertainty the process creates. (It got my students fired up, let me tell you.)

Capital's situation is a little more precarious than some, not only because of the political and economic climate, but because of our shifting demographic. With anticipated enrollment declines, we're overstaffed by 3.2 FTEs--and could lose an additional 1.8 positions if the Superintendent's proposed cuts are adopted.

The good news, at least as good as we can get at the moment, is that the 48 RIF notices mean, even in the worst case, a loss of 13 positions beyond the 29 already eliminated. The bad news is that even if a legislative miracle occurs and all the 48 teachers are retained, we're still going to face larger classes and fewer course offerings. Departing or retiring teachers just won't be replaced. But let's close on better news: District and school officials are optimistic that the worst case is unlikely.

Tomorrow's OSD Board Meeting (Knox Building, 6:30 p.m.) is your first chance for public comment on the proposed cuts. Can't make it? There's a survey.

blogging by request

2011-05-08T11:48:00.000-07:00

Recently my life outside of decorabilia has become, paradoxically, both simpler and more complex, and I'll write about it when I'm ready. Until then, my blogging is going to be a little less debate-heavy than usual, a little more locally focused, and a lot more sporadic.

Casual readers and passers-by might not even see a difference, but some of my more ardent fans may have already noticed the changes, especially when it comes to debate-blogging.

I'll still provide the same level of quality, excellence, and customer service. Not getting the blogging you need? All you have to do is ask, either via comment or email.

And yes, I have a life outside of decorabilia. Promise.

The Wire short-circuits in Seattle

2011-05-06T18:23:00.001-07:00

Anyone interested in criminal justice and civil liberties in the Age of Perpetual Terrorism should read Brendan Kiley's deconstruction of an FBI investigation gone wrong--because it could never go right.

"The degree of surveillance and monitoring has been extremely expensive," the officer tells Rick, sounding equal parts intimidating and frustrated. "When you've gone to the QFC and Corsair and Tubs. Think over the last two years—everything you've done in private and on the streets, people you've talked to, what you've had in your possession, conversations, intentions, plans... I have to emphasize the level of surveillance we've run over the last two years. Tell us about all the drug deals in The Yard. You want me to tell you about the red cabinet where you keep the drugs? The cocaine? We have hundreds of hours of surveillance, wire, video..."

"That would seem to be an absurd waste of state financing and funding," Rick says. "And that actually scares me more than the charges... You guys aren't after anything bigger than this? This is it?..."

The Seattle police seem to think that Rick's guns point toward some kind of guilt.

"Why the need to have so many weapons on the premises?" one of the officers asks.

"My home?" Rick asks, sounding flabbergasted. "That's my home. I own a small amount of firearms legally, most of which are locked in an extremely secure gun safe in an unloaded manner. I'm a man from Oklahoma," he continues, "and there's no such thing as a man from Oklahoma who doesn't own a firearm or two. Even the hippies own guns."

The agents sit silent, seemingly flummoxed. They've pursued this target for years, luring him into a bust that they hoped would scare him into giving up some valuable intelligence about domestic terrorists, or city politicians, or at least some drug dealers. But they've fundamentally misunderstood their own investigation.

And what does it get them? Four indigent poker players.

The defendants are quiet, well dressed, and bewildered by the charges. One of them told me that the poker stakes were so low, he would lose or win $100 at most in the course of a night. ("All those guys were broke, broke as a joke," Mia Brown agrees. "They'd borrow five dollars from someone to go put on the card table. It was small and it was stupid.")

The defense lawyers will be bewildered by what they find in the discovery process--all the paperwork and evidence and audio and video surveillance accumulated by the two-year investigation that involved the FBI, SPD, SWAT teams, and federal firearms and immigration and customs agents. One defendant's discovery request turned up nearly 2,000 pages of documentation and over 100 CDs and DVDs, and even that defendant's attorney had to file extra requests because he said there were big gaps of time missing.

Why did law enforcement dedicate such massive resources to bust some penny-ante card players for charges that only one person has faced in the past 10 years?

One of the defendants, Brady McGarry, had a simple explanation: "If you spend that much time and money, you have to put somebody up on that cross."

Read the whole thing, if you have the patience--and stomach--for it.

the context of the Olympia School District RIF

2011-05-05T19:56:00.000-07:00

As announced yesterday, the Olympia School District is planning to send RIF notices to the 48 least senior teachers in the district.

To understand why, it's important to know a little bit about how teachers get paid here in Washington.

In the Evergreen state, your standard teacher's paycheck comes primarily from state coffers--and, more specifically, from sales tax receipts. Districts receive allocations based on student enrollment, divvied into FTEs--Full Time Equivalencies. Cut state funds, and you have two choices: shorten the school year, or cut teaching positions. (Or both? Don't say both.)

When the Great Recession tanked Washington's economy, sales tax collections tanked as well. Now, with the gap between will and way sitting somewhere near $5 billion in the coming biennium, the Legislature, at least until this point, has refused to consider new revenue sources by closing tax loopholes*, or--horrors!--raising taxes. (If anything, the recent $263 million boon from Sales Tax Amnesty proved that the state isn't yet entirely competent at collecting the taxes we're already supposed to get.)

Word is now coming from Governor Gregoire that she'll support closing the gap with a 1.9% pay cut for teachers--purportedly to keep things in line with the cuts other state employees have taken. Fair is fair, right?

Not exactly. As The Olympian's Brad Shannon writes,

The House and Senate are negotiating daily during a 30-day special session on the 2011-13 operating budget, and the pay cut has left the chambers at odds. The House took a different approach, suspending COLAs and saving almost $57 million more by cutting “step” pay increases granted each year to teachers, based on their years of service and educational attainment.

House Education Appropriations Committee chairwoman Kathy Haigh, D-Shelton, has said she would prefer to shorten the school year so that teachers would work and earn less – while avoiding the sticky problem of having rich districts cough up money to avert the pay cuts while poor districts cut pay.

Other state employees have received furlough days commensurate with their salary reductions--but the Legislature finds itself in a bit of a constitutional mess, knowing that the state's mandated "paramount duty" is to fund public education, which seemingly prohibits shortening the school year, currently 180 days. Learning Improvement days can disappear--and they're gone--but school days are sacred.

Gregoire's accommodation is at least better than the Senate plan, which would not only eliminate the LID, but cut an additional 3%. Hats off to local rep Chris Reykdal, a former teacher who gets what's at stake.

Reykdal, a freshman who has been out-front among Democratic lawmakers this year in trying to raise new revenue by closing a few tax breaks, said there is a fairness issue for teachers. While the Senate wants additional 3 percent pay cuts to match the 3 percent pay reductions Gov. Chris Gregoire has negotiated with many public employee unions, Reykdal said the general-government cuts are accompanied by an equivalent amount of extra time off for workers.

“So our unit cost didn’t change” per day worked, Reykdal said. In the Senate plan, he said teachers see it as a cut in pay with the same workload.

And it is.

The rumble around the lunch table doesn't yet involve serious talk of strikes or walkouts or Work-to-the-Contract days or Wellness Walks, but if the Legislature foists its fiscal decisions onto local districts, abdicating its responsibility and leaving teachers in the lurch, you can bet that the rumble will turn into a roar.

* But that may soon change.

Olympia School District faces RIF

2011-05-04T19:35:00.000-07:00

This afternoon, the Superintendent of the Olympia School District released a recommended list of budget cuts for the 2011-2012 school year. Thanks to a legislature that's still squabbling over state budget particulars, local school districts have had to draw up worst-case contingency plans. The OSD's proposal assumes a roughly $2.3 million drop in the next fiscal year.

Since the bulk of the District's funds go toward personnel, two of the biggest potential cuts involve increased class sizes, and, concomitantly, lost teaching positions.

Increase elementary class size by about 2 per class, at grades 1-5. This is consistent with the new state funding schedule which provides 1 teacher for each 25 students in grades K-3. (OSD continues to subsidize kindergarten class size at about 23 students where the state pays for 1 teacher for each 25 students.)
Increase secondary class size by 1.3 students from 28.7 students per teacher/section to 30 students per teacher/section. This represents an increase in the average; as is the case today, class sizes will vary depending on content and student interest.

According to the more detailed outline, this means a loss of 8.2 and 7.8 positions, respectively. Add (or subtract?) the nearly 14 positions lost to declining enrollment, and more (of an uncertain number) lost to vaporized federal stimulus money, and the District is looking at losing dozens of teachers--or, in the "best" case, simply not replacing those who leave.

Other recommendations include charging students for zero-hour classes, converting all middle school sports into intramurals, delaying social studies textbook purchases, and cutting the reserve from 4.3% down to 3%.

The OSD Board of Directors will take public comments on the budget at several upcoming meetings, beginning with a 6:30 p.m. meeting, May 9th the Knox Building. And if you live in (or teach in) the Olympia School District, you should take this survey, too.

Update:

The RIF communication team has more details:

We are writing to share difficult news. Although the State Legislature has not completed their budget work, the District is moving forward with its proposed budget and reduced education plan for the 2011-12 school year. This reduced education plan prompts a reduction-in-force (RIF) process that includes, but will be limited to, the 48 least senior certificated employees on our seniority list....

There are important considerations to keep in mind in this process. Although the employees who fall within the 1-48 seniority rank will receive RIF notices, the actual number of positions the District will eventually reduce will be fewer. Factors that will be taken into consideration to determine the final number of reduced positions include:

* The eventual number of retirements, resignations and leave of absence requests;
* The final state budget which will determine the actual revenue loss for the District;
* Updated projections of District expenditures for the remainder of the school year;
* Enrollment changes; and,
* Decisions made by the School Board.

No mention yet in The Olympian.

Added 5/5: The RIF in context.

Resolved: When forced to choose, a just government ought to prioritize universal human rights over its national interest.

2011-05-01T09:58:00.000-07:00

The NFL has released the topic for the 2011 national tournament:

Resolved: When forced to choose, a just government ought to prioritize universal human rights over its national interest.

It's classic LD, a clash between cosmopolitanism and sovereignty, and among competing visions of the social contract. It's timeless--and, thanks to recent American involvement in Libyan strife, perfectly timely.

I wrote about this resolution in my summer preview of my favorite topics; it was number three on my list. It reminds me of the UN vs. sovereignty resolution from a few years ago, and will include some of the same basic arguments.

I've reposted some of my initial thoughts, have added more, and will continue to add more material as demand arises.

First, some key questions:

What is a "just government?" What is the nature of its social contract? And which contractarian gets it right? If the world is a Hobbsean "war of all against all," the argument is quite different than if the ideal of justice is Rawlsian egalitarianism.

I'd imagine that many Affs would have a value of justice aligned with a criterion of "protecting rights." But the Neg has to ask in Cross-Ex, immediately: where do rights come from? What defines or limits them? If "universal human rights" includes, for instance, trade or labor rights, must nations abandon protectionist trade schemes, or, conversely, stop trading with nations that allow sweatshops--even if it means a loss of economic security?

Why have nations at all? Why not have a universal government? Wouldn't that be the best way to protect universal human rights? Would affirming the resolution lead to a super-state?

Who or what defines "national interest?" Who is the "agent of action" in the resolution? The people? Government agents? Can we make any assumptions about the nature of the government in the debate?

What situations might lead to an forced choice between universal human rights and a nation's interest? (Some might include, but are not limited to, war, torturing terror suspects, immigration / refugee crises, trade agreements, dealing with dictatorships / oppressive societies.)

If a nation's citizens know that its government is going to prioritize universal human rights, will they remain loyal in a time of crisis? What are the upsides of nationalism?

What obligations follow from prioritizing universal human rights?

Do universal human rights exist? Can the Aff, for the sake of clarity, presume that they do--otherwise there's no forced choice?

Links, Analysis, etc.
1. Which human rights? A post from the vault noting the fractious origins of the United Nations' approach to human rights law.
2. Speaking of, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
3. The SEP's article on human rights is, as typical, excellent.
4. How should we define "national interest?"

The Finland Phenomenon

2011-04-27T19:34:00.000-07:00

Near the Arctic Circle, Finland is ice cold. In educational circles, though, Finland is smoking hot, recently lauded by pundits as a model for reform in the United States. How did it get that way?

Harvard's Tony Wagner attempts to answer the question in an hourlong documentary titled The Finland Phenomenon. Weaving together interviews, classroom observations, and provocative factoids, Wagner tries to tease out the complex strands of cultural values, teacher training, and governmental initiatives that have made Finland a global educational vanguard.

In my favorite moments, Wagner sits down with with Finnish students, who are just as gangly, bright-eyed, and emo as their American counterparts, and listens as they share their hopes for the future. He sits in on lectures by accomplished and rookie teachers, and holds court with educational leaders who sound like a lot of people I've been working with lately: realistic and optimistic, theoretically solid and practically focused.

It so happened that I watched the documentary after a day of leading Powerful Teaching and Learning observations in a local school, and I was struck by the similar approaches, both philosophically and pedagogically, between PTL and the Finnish system of teacher preparation. Roughly 10% of the Finnish university students who apply for training programs will make the cut; once they're in, they're entrusted with tenure in a relatively rapid timeframe, and given a large measure of control over their classrooms.

And that's where I think the strength of the Finnish system lies. It's culturally established that teachers are professionals ("knowledge workers," in trendy/clunky edu-jargon) who are academic leaders committed to continuous improvement. The best American reform initiatives-- among which I'd include the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, the Common Core Standards movement, Powerful Teaching and Learning, Professional Learning Communities, and Teach for America--share that reflective, collaborative focus. They bring teachers together, but their impact is fragmented, at least for now, because none is comprehensive in its adoption or reach.

And none is a cure-all. Any successful educational reform has to change the culture of schools, which, in turn, changes the wider culture of the community. Our policymakers seem addicted to quick fixes and instant results, but in Finland, Wagner reports, the process has taken 25 years.

As Wagner points out, some of Finland's success may be due to its smaller schools and classes, its emphasis on vocational education (and concomitantly low dropout rate), and its curricular flexibility. There's at least one strand missing from Wagner's analysis, though: Finland's income equality. Socioeconomic status is a strong predictor of educational attainment, so, in my estimation, general equality in SES would not only reflect and influence a wider cultural consensus that education is valuable, but its opposite would reflect and influence a divergent value structure in which outcomes are similarly divergent.

For instance, Wagner compares Minnesota to Finland because of its similar population and demographics, noting that the Land of a Thousand Lakes, 17th globally in math, ranks well below Finland in achievement--but without mentioning the vast difference in, say, their Gini coefficients (mid-40s for Minnesota; mid-to-high 20s for Finland). The relationship between income inequality and educational attainment may be a mere correlation, but it's worth investigating.

My complaints about the film's production values are few and minor. A couple shots (especially of Wagner's "talking head" moments) look cheaply lit, while some action shots have annoying digital artifacts. However, for the most part, the film is well-paced, smoothly edited, and deftly scored.

The Finland Phenomenon premiered in D.C. back in April. At a time when education reform is both critical and in critical condition, its thought-provoking observations deserve wide viewing.

Full disclosure: Dittoe Public Relations sent me a free copy of the film for review. If you're interested in something similar, just send me an email.

trauma and nostalgia at the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee

2011-04-25T07:27:00.000-07:00

When my sister told me that she had three free tickets for the SecondStory Repertory's production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, (through April 30th; see it!) I was cautiously pessimistic. I was a little worried that the trauma of past failures would keep me from fully enjoying the show's irreverent sendup of the nerdiest of nerd pastimes.

When she said that she wanted to volunteer me to take part in the Bee, though, my whole attitude changed. All of a sudden it became yet another nerdy adventure--I've recently had a few--and a chance to re-experience the trauma firsthand.

So of course I said yes.

Upon signing up to be one of four non-actor contestants, I was given three simple instructions:

1. Always ask for a definition.
2. Always ask for the word to be used in a sentence.
3. Don't act.

The first two were essential to set up jokes. The third instruction was to ensure the right contrast between the actors and the amateurs. If I had attempted to ham it up--and believe me, the temptation was real--I might've spoiled the show. So I didn't act.

I just spelled.

The first word was easy: "xanadu." My only concern was that I'd make a silly mistake and screw up--my pulse raced, my voice broke a little at the end, but I nailed it. I didn't expect real nerves for a fake bee, but there they were.

The second was easier: "putsch." Also easy. I had encountered it in a real bee back in the late 80s, and I believe I misspelled it then. No way I would fail this time.

I forget the third word, which I spelled right, either because it wasn't a real word, or I was darned lucky. (It was an Irish something, starts with a K, and I can't find it in my unabridged Webster's.)

I figured it was my time to exit the show when I was called up immediately afterward. Lo and behold, I went out on "pheochromocytoma," which I heard wrong, starting with a T, so they sounded the fateful bell, leading to the hug and serenade and juice box from Mitch.

At least I was the last non-actor standing. Ignominious defeat never felt so good.

Everyman at Saint Martin's, or A Morbid Campus Tour

2011-04-21T20:08:00.000-07:00

Everyman is about to die, and Death wants a reckoning. Not wanting to go it alone, Everyman asks friends, relations, and others to assist in accounting for his life as he takes an allegorical journey to the grave. Who'll come along?

You should.

Saint Martin's University is currently showing a unique version of the classic medieval morality play, making the campus the stage, incorporating walkways, buildings, roads, and more. Everyman starts in a courtyard near the O'Grady Library, and ends, fittingly, in the cemetery at sunset.

The acting is solid, with the title character (played by sophomore Olivia Baumgartner), Death (Zoe Ford), Good Deeds (senior Ninalynn Benitez), and God (Olympia veteran Josh Anderson, no relation) standing out. The marching band accompanying the trek does fine work, adding levity and solemnity and irony to the proceedings. The finale is poignant and unnerving, as Everyman departs with Death amid very real graves.

It runs April 20-23 and April 27-30, it's only $5, and you need to brush up on your 15th-century theater. Go see it.

It'll be the strangest, most morbid campus tour you'll ever take.

Added: Christian Carvajal of The Weekly Volcano also gives the play a thumbs-up.

Ondrej Smeykal, didgeridoo genius

2011-04-18T07:19:00.000-07:00

This weekend, I was fortunate to hear--experience--the mastery of a twenty-year veteran of the didgeridoo, Ondrej Smeykal, at the Matrix Coffeehouse in Chehalis. Smeykal's music is impressionistic and multitextured, surging in volume and tempo. It echoes the sounds of crashing surf, passing trains, pulsing synthesizers. It washes over you in waves. It fills your heart and your belly with gladness.

It makes hippies dance.

It makes hippies gambol and whirligig and gyrate with abandon.

The video above is the briefest possible sampling of Smeykal's lyrical and rhythmic ingenuity, a pale shadow of his live performance. Smeykal is returning to the Northwest in August, so if you're in the area, seek him out.

And bring your hippie friends.

Emily Lockhart comes to CHS

2011-04-16T12:49:00.000-07:00

Northwest author Emily Lockhart came to Capital Friday afternoon, sharing her experiences with six English classes. In a presentation that was relatable, self-deprecating, and honest, Lockhart spoke about her life as a student and as a writer--and explained how the two were intertwined. She grew up in Seattle, and first attended a "granola" and "bohemian" prep school; as she put it, "We all had to promise to never buy a car."

A loner, the sort of person others avoid in the cafeteria, Lockhart decided to transfer to Lakeside School, where she was able to reinvent herself in a surprising fashion:

I didn't change anything about myself--how I looked, how I acted. I just showed up to see what happened. What happened was, I made friends.... I had a totally different life. I saw high school life from somewhere near the top, and somewhere near the bottom.... that's why I keep writing about it.

As Lockhart explained, unlike many places in the adult world, high school throws together people of every conceivable disposition and circumstance, with no real option for escape. The conflict that results is what interests her, and her young adult books are full of italicized, capital-D Drama.

Like a lot of fiction writers, Lockhart took time to get noticed. Her first attempt at publish non-fiction was rejected 70 times; her first success, a children's book, was rejected 30 times--and then, when published, "it was a lovely experience, but nobody read it." She wrote five unnoticed novels before The Boyfriend List finally caught readers' attention. Now, she's published a book a year for the last eight years. In her words, "It's not an easy way to get rich, but you can make a living."

You could sense Lockhart's palpable enthusiasm for her craft when she talked about the way she develops narrative.

You become a little bit fond of the character. I gave Ruby traits that I like--some of them are mine. I liked Ruby. Once you create a character that you like, as a fiction writer, what you have to do is torture them. If you have a story about a happy person with a good life, and they continue to be a happy person with a good life, you don't have a story, you have a description. Your job as a writer is to ask, "What's the worst thing that could happen?"

Some of Lockhart's best advice concerns her writerly motivation.

I don't feel like writing a lot of the time. I make myself do it. I write junk... I set a goal. I'm going to write 500 words, and then I can have a chocolate chip cookie.... Some day it's really fun and the best job ever. My writing teacher [in her university program] thought I sucked. But I'm the only one from the class who became a published writer. Why? Because my books are finished.

Lockhart's down-to-earth persona and frank advice seemed to resonate with the students in her audience. Even though YA Teen Drama isn't really my thing, I'm going to check out a couple of her books, and recommend her work to my students.

And one last thing: Lockhart pointed out, "I'm on Twitter, you can come follow me." (She's @elockhart.)

no mercy on an empty stomach

2011-04-15T06:57:00.000-07:00

Is a hungry judge a merciless judge?

Jonathan Levav of Columbia Business School in New York and his colleagues analyzed 1,112 parole hearings for inmates of four Israeli prisons, made by eight judges over a ten-month period.

Judges' days were divided into three sessions broken by two meal breaks -- a morning snack and lunch. Judges decided when to break, but had no control over the ordering of cases, which was determined by when a prisoner's attorney arrived.

At the beginning of a session, a prisoner had a 65% chance of being paroled, the authors found. This declined to almost zero by the end of a session, and leaped back to 65% after a break.

The severity of the crime, the time served in prison, any previous incarcerations, and the availability of rehabilitation programs were not enough to explain the effect on the probability of parole, and the nationality or sex of a prisoner made no difference. The findings are published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The article, as all scientific articles do, includes the appropriate dose of skepticism. And it's obviously wrong to presume that the judges are too harsh when they're hungry; after all, they might be too lenient when full.

Still, it makes one wonder what would happen if courts instituted mandatory snack breaks.

Resolved: The United States has a moral obligation to promote just governance in developing nations

2011-04-13T21:07:00.000-07:00

With North Africa and the Middle East exploding in conflict, now's a perfect time for the NCFL's LD resolution for the May championship.

Resolved: The United States has a moral obligation to promote just governance in developing nations.

At a reader's prompting, here are some initial thoughts.

First, generally, why might just governance in developing nations be important? Lots of potential reasons, each of which would require some research for warranting:

* It's just / the right thing to do, which is reason enough
* Improves lives / protects rights of citizens of those developing nations
* Reduces conflict / promotes international stability
* Economic security for nations and their trading partners
* Just governance probably better protects the environment
* Reduces the growing pains of globalization

Still, we're not yet to the level of a moral obligation; not all good things are obligatory. We have some hurdles to clear:

1. The Affirmative has to warrant the notion that nations have moral obligations.
Such obligations could arise from several places: the social contract, universal moral schemes (utilitarianism, Kantianism), or legal frameworks (the Constitution, treaties, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, international law). They may be corporate (the U.S. as a government has the obligation) or aggregate (the U.S.'s government agents as a collection of independent moral actors have the obligation).

The choice of moral framework will be critical to establishing the level of the obligation as well. Even from a purely pragmatic or instrumental perspective--that the U.S.'s only moral obligation is to its own needs--if, empirically, promoting just governance is critical to the U.S.'s own security, then we vote Aff.

2. "Just governance" has to be clearly, compellingly defined
Here's where a broader contractarian perspective offers a coherent framework without demanding particulars (What kind of governmental structures? What sort of democratic institutions, if any? What kinds of civil rights?). Delving into specifics potentially makes the Aff an uphill battle. However, it's not impossible to narrow the focus to something like international legal norms, which offer a widely agreed-upon set of "best practices" for just governance.

3. What does it mean to "promote" just governance? Does mere cheerleading suffice?
On the Neg, I'd use a "fork" strategy:
a. If the obligation is mere cheerleading, it's not morally significant, and therefore no obligation.
b. If the obligation requires economic or military action, it's too costly, and therefore no obligation.
c. If the obligation is something else--diplomatic efforts? winning a war of ideas?--it's ineffectual and pointless and wasteful, and therefore no obligation.

4. Is it ever to the U.S.'s advantage to allow--or even promote--unjust governance in developing nations?
It sounds like a question a terrible person would ask, but then, political philosophers are terrible people. We can't presume that just governance provides automatic benefits for surrounding or affiliated nations, never mind the citizens of the developing nation, unless we construe "just" so broadly as to include beneficial outcomes by definition.

In fact, for the U.S. to maintain economic and military hegemony, perhaps it's best to let developing nations remain mired in dictatorships or muddle their own way through. As the Egyptian non-intervention and the Libyan intervention shows, getting involved isn't automatically the best option. More cynically, if developing nations gain power through just governance, they may threaten the long-term interests of the United States.

At any rate, there are no easy, knock-down arguments for either side, although it seems that the Negative, by sheer number of hurdles, has the advantage in this debate.

If you have any questions or would like any further analysis, let me know in the comments. I don't usually cover the NCFL, so I won't blog extensively on this resolution without your prompting.

"I (heart) boobies:" will SCOTUS take the case?

2011-04-13T07:17:00.000-07:00

Is it sad or awesome that it took a federal ruling to uphold a high school student's right to wear an awareness-generating bracelet that uses the word "boobies?"

Breast cancer fundraising bracelets that proclaim "I (heart) boobies!" are not lewd or vulgar and can't be banned by public school officials who find them offensive, a federal judge in Pennsylvania said Tuesday in a preliminary ruling.

The ruling is a victory for two Easton girls suspended for defying a ban on their middle school's Breast Cancer Awareness Day.

"The bracelets ... can reasonably be viewed as speech designed to raise awareness of breast cancer and to reduce stigma associated with openly discussing breast health," U.S. Judge Mary McLaughlin wrote in a 40-page ruling issued Tuesday. She added that the school district had not shown the bracelets would be disruptive in school.

Since it's just an appellate decision, and students' free speech rights have been curtailed in other jurisdictions, one wonders how long it takes "I heart boobies" to become the "Bong hits 4 Jesus" of the 2010s.

Take the case, SCOTUS. This time, though, get the right result.

Update: The district that lost will appeal, making SCOTUS involvement a live, if distant, possibility.

do vegan androids dream of electric tomatoes?

2011-04-11T17:46:00.000-07:00

Science brings us the sunless hyperfarm:

In their research station, strawberries, yellow peppers, basil and banana plants take on an eerie pink glow under red and blue bulbs of Light-Emitting Diodes, or LEDs. Water trickles into the pans when needed and all excess is recycled, and the temperature is kept constant. Lights go on and off, simulating day and night, but according to the rhythm of the plant - which may be better at shorter cycles than 24 hours - rather than the rotation of the Earth.

In a larger "climate chamber" a few miles away, a nursery is nurturing cuttings of fittonia, a colorful house plant, in two layers of 70 square meters (750 sq. feet) each. Blasts of mist keep the room humid, and the temperature is similar to the plants' native South America. After the cuttings take root - the most sensitive stage in the growing process - they are wheeled into a greenhouse and the chamber is again used for rooting. The process cuts the required time to grow a mature plant to six weeks from 12 or more....

Meeuws says a building of 100 sq meters (1,075 sq. feet) and 14 layers of plants could provide a daily diet of 200 grams (7 ounces) of fresh fruit and vegetables to the entire population of Den Bosch, about 140,000 people. Their idea is not to grow foods that require much space, like corn or potatoes. "We are looking at the top of the pyramid where we have high value and low volume," he said.

At this point, why stop with "natural" plants? Using them as a template, throw together some genetic engineering and 3D printing, and you can create more efficient vascular and metabolic systems to grow foodstuffs in a sci-fi agricultural dreamscape.

Also, I'm hungry. Vic's Pizza, anyone?

handsome in pink

2011-04-09T10:39:00.000-07:00

Everybody knows that baby boys wear pink and baby girls wear blue.

Right?

[via Maggie Koerth-Baker]

the irrational creepiness of a private military firm

2011-04-09T09:35:00.000-07:00

The other day, while attempting to answer a reader's debate question about the use of PMFs in South Korea, I came across the website of Xeros Services.

Xeros supplies men and materiel for war-making, and offers "cross-structural value," "risk mitigation," and "a nuanced approach." Take away the images of surface-to-air missiles and armored personnel carriers, and you might think you're being sold a 401K. (Take away the website, and you can't even be sure the company is real: they're barely mentioned on the Web, outside of some duplicated Wikipedia entries.)

PMFs are criticized for making conflict too convenient, and it's hard to argue when faced with a sales pitch like this:

"Our 24-7-365 guarantee means we can help you react quickly and decisively to any unexpected developments, no matter the scale. For a small premium you can have complete peace of mind - and we'll handle the paperwork."

Do you want an army at your disposal? Log in with your password, charge your corporate credit card, and a platoon will be delivered to your door.

It's conflict outsourcing, and it's more than a little creepy.

a real American at 95

2011-04-06T08:06:00.000-07:00

Wonder if I could ever find myself in this situation:

For all his life, 95-year-old Leland Davidson had been what you might call an undocumented American.

Until now.

Born in Canada to American parents who moved him to the United States when he was 5, Davidson grew up and lived his life like any other American. He started voting as soon as he could, obtained a Social Security number when he was 21 and served in the U.S. Navy during World War II.

Yet his U.S. citizenship, automatically derived from his parents, came into question last summer — as it has been for a growing number of Canadian-born Americans — when he was planning a trip to British Columbia and applied for an enhanced Washington driver's license.

The licenses are for U.S. citizens only — allowing re-entry into the United States from Canada. Davidson was shocked when Department of Licensing staff told him: "You're still a Canadian."

After months untangling his status, the Centralia man Tuesday received a long-overdue recognition of his U.S. citizenship, when he and 51 others — most of them children — were granted certificates of citizenship.

Born in Canada, of an American father and a Canadian mother, I'm an American citizen. I have a "Certificate of Birth Abroad" and a current passport, but if I were to, say, vacation in British Columbia and lose my passport--stranger things have happened--how would I prove that my citizenship is legit? (It doesn't help that "Jim Anderson" is a terribly common name.)

Oh, I remember: just sing all the words to The National Anthem.

pick a sovereign, any sovereign

2011-04-05T09:38:00.000-07:00

Don't like democracy's tyranny-of-the-majority, but can't think of an acceptable alternative? How about "choice democracy?"

It could work like this: before an election, each political party would lay out its governing principles - what services it will provide, how its taxes will be structured, what social policies it will pursue, and so forth. After the election, each voter pays taxes to the party they voted for, and receives that set of services - cultural and educational subsidies, for example, or unemployment benefits - until the next election. This would require doing away with secret ballots. On some things, parties may choose to band together to govern specific services - military defence, for example, or monetary systems - where economies of scale are important.

It's federalism without the geographic constraints, possible only either in tiny or technologically-saturated nations. It would turn voting into a sort of game--play with the same cards, but different rules when you switch election cycles. In one sense, it's the most legitimate form of government possible. (Somewhere, a 21st-century Thomas Hobbes is having a heart attack, while his Rousseauian counterpart furiously scribbles on a napkin.)

There'd have to be a way to cap the number of political parties for practicality's sake, lest the solipsists and anarchists gum up the works. I'd imagine it'd also raise the stakes for voter fraud, with people appearing in multiple virtual jurisdictions. For instance, someone would claim allegiance to the Flat Tax party while signing up for free flu shots from the Universal Health Care party. And then there's the prospect of a society completely fragmented on partisan lines, with its desires, needs, and values more ephemeral than ever.

Still, it's an intriguing combination of democratic legitimacy and market efficiency, and a few years hence, when we're all avatars in a digital lifescape, it just might work.

today's flim-flam links

2011-04-04T10:54:00.000-07:00

1. Was Steinbeck's Travels with Charley a whole lotta hooey? And, if so, why don't more scholars care? [via Jesse Walker]

2. Does every continent have its own James Randi?

3. Gandhi demythologized. [via ALDaily, although Orwell got there decades earlier.]

4. In which a con artist gets 20 to life.

5. Jackie Chan is alive and kicking.

new views

2011-03-31T17:13:00.000-07:00

Blogger's offering interesting new ways to view content.

Check out this blog's optional formats, starting with "Flipcard," pictured above, and found at http://decorabilia.blogspot.com/view/flipcard.

Wye Oak brings the noise

2011-03-29T15:15:00.000-07:00

Put Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack in front of a brick wall in a wood-floored record shop, and expect some kidney-rattling, soul-shaking rock.

Wasner describes their method:

We won't admit this to ourselves often, but the way we play live is based on loud-quiet breaks, like super-huge jumps in volume and distortion. Sometimes it's really important to explode with huge amounts of volume. Whether it's out of a creative impulse, or just an angry one where it's like, "Hey everyone, look over here!" We wanted to have the option of having dynamics and volume work to our advantage in certain conditions. And it's fun to absolutely dominate a room for a couple of seconds.

On Monday night, dominate they did, blistering the bricks at Sonic Boom Records in Seattle, with thirty minutes of free music from Civilian and My Neighbor / My Creator.

Early in their set, Civilian's "Holy Holy" was a perfect encapsulation of Stack and Wasner's dynamism, beginning with driving, distorted guitar and then settling into an aggressive, thumping groove. The chorus, the first time, sounds hymnlike--which happens now and then in Wye Oak's music--but the second time, the distortion kicks back in and, if we're still in the sanctuary, at least we're blasting out the stained glass windows.

Live, Wasner's voice is stronger, Stack's drumming more urgent. See them when you get the chance, and worship at the church of rock and/or roll.

at the Washington Mock Trial state championship

2011-03-27T21:29:00.000-07:00

At the prompting of an attorney friend, I spent a good part of Saturday afternoon observing the YMCA Mock Trial state championship at the Thurston County Courthouse. I sat in Courtroom One, which I remembered fondly from my drug trial--by which I mean, the time I was called in for jury duty, but, as so often happens, a plea bargain cut things short and I never got my chance to pay my civic dues.

Someone who blundered into the room would've figured they were interrupting a real trial. Students were competent attorneys, fielding motions and objections, making speeches, and handling incisive questions from Snohomish County Judge Bruce Weiss. Witnesses put on a great show, too, whether as the unctuous colleague of the defendant, the punctilious crime scene investigator, or the nervous garbage truck driver. Teams had been preparing since October, and it showed.

The fictional case, written by Judge William Downing, was all too timely: a police officer on trial for 2nd-degree murder, having shot a "person of interest" in an arson investigation. The case featured dark alleys, ambiguous turns of events, conflicting testimony, dubious emails, political fallout--all the hallmarks of the nightly news.

With one exception: there must be some sort of rule requiring jokey names in a mock trial. When I was in 7th grade, I tried to prove that Herschel C. Lion was responsible for the murder of a local salmon. Saturday's trial featured a Detective Josephine Viernes ("Joe Friday") and medical examiner "Dr. Kildare." (Generation gap, anyone?)

Apparently I lucked into one of the best rounds ever, at least according to Judge Weiss, who had effusive praise for the young advocates, saying that they "did better than a lot of attorneys who appear before me as a part of their job." I was also quite impressed by what I saw, which I think was my friend's intent. Is Capital going to be able to field a Mock Trial team? I don't know. It requires a lot of training and prep work, and I'm already a stretched-thin debate coach. But it's certainly worth pursuing.

LD mailbag: 1AR tactics and analytical warrants

2011-03-23T17:21:00.000-07:00

Now that the postseason is winding down, it's time to focus primarily on general LD questions. The first concerns tactics in the first Affirmative rebuttal (1AR). A reader writes:

On the negative, all the reading I've done suggests limiting a case to 1-2 contentions. Some of my opponents, though, have negative cases with 3 contentions, 3-4 subpoints apiece. I understand the idea of prioritizing arguments when I'm aff, but when I don't address all of the subpoints explicitly in the 1AR, flow judges extend the individual subpoints and often vote on these "dropped" arguments. One thing I've tried is grouping subpoints under a main idea (e.g. group his contention 1 subpoints because they all pertain to how PMFs aren't accountable), but this is often too general a response. How can I avoid this dilemma in the 1AR?

There are a few ways to handle this.

1. If you know you have a flow judge who can handle speed, go faster and hit every subpoint, even if only with a blippy argument. This may be better than the phantom "drops."

2. Effective grouping may depend on which way you're addressing your opponent's argument. Are you actually taking down the whole argument at once, logically speaking, or just claiming that you are because you think it's necessary?

For instance, consider an opponent who argues:

C1: Private Military Firms (PMFs) are necessary for military operations
a) Speed
b) Flexibility
c) Staffing
d) Superior Resources

If you group and try to argue that PMFs aren't necessary because we could always institute a draft, in a way you've taken out the whole contention, but you haven't really addressed its logic. A draft defeats warrant (c), but doesn't compete with (a), (b), or (d). So your opponent could legitimately argue that you've dropped 3 out of 4 warrants, and her point still stands.

If you group and try to argue that PMFs are both morally abhorrent and that overstretch is good because it limits US military foreign adventuring, now you have two reasons to dismiss the entirety of the contention without even addressing its warrants--first, that moral considerations trump practical considerations, and secondly, a retort or "turn" that actually provides you with offense.

3. The problem with drops is asymmetric, since you lack the time in the 1AR to dismiss your drops as irrelevant or insignificant (if you're taking the "bigger picture" approach), yet your opponent has time to extend and impact those drops. So, if you're in front of a flow judge, you might try this: at the end of your 1AR, say something to effect of, "In her next speech the Neg is going to point out that I've dropped several inconsequential subpoints. In my closing, I'll crystallize the round and explain exactly why those drops don't matter." In that way, you've prepared the judge for your approach.

It may be risky, but it's better than leaving the drops for the judge to deal with in the absence of any direction from you--and with plenty of prompting by your opponent!

Let's move on to a couple of questions about evidence.

My second question is regarding the justifications behind a source. I've found that judges in my state often respond much better to studies/statistics over analysis from a professor/expert, but I know that expert analysis is definitely valuable. How do I respond to claims that "just because a professor says it, it isn't true"? Do I just need to better understand my evidence, or is there some argument I can make to save my analytical warrants?

Your opponent may be correct about the potential dubiousness of expert opinion--but if a professor's expertise and analysis are dubious, what about the analysis of a high school student? Ad hominem is a nonstarter. Instead, argue that your opponent hasn't actually addressed the logic of the analysis, which stands or falls on its own. (Decry the "ad hominem" attack and call it out as a fallacy if necessary.) And besides, the so's-your-old-man to the statistical card is "Figures lie and liars figure." Evidence battles, unless there are good reasons to doubt the evidence, are pretty boring and obnoxious to most judges.

I have one more question for you after going over some recent flows. One of my opponents spewed a lot of evidence at me in one of my debates, but they didn't actually READ said evidence...they paraphrased in 1-2 sentences and provided a brief citation at the end. Call I call them out on that, or is that allowed?

This is a gray, foggy area. Academics do this all the time--and it's quite likely that the cards being cited by debaters in rounds are actually footnoted paraphrases themselves! But without a direct source, we have to hold it in faith that our opponent isn't cherry-picking, card-stacking, context-ripping, or improperly summarizing. That's quite a leap, and it's fair in cross-ex to ask for a direct citation for any "evidence" that sounds too good to be true. But only for evidence that sounds unreasonable or dubious. Otherwise you'll sound like a nit-picker, which is the cardinal sin of evidence-challenging.

When writing your own case, use direct quotations whenever feasible.

If your opponent is doing something genuinely abusive, and you're sure you can convince the judge on this point, then make it a voting issue.

Debaters are encouraged to submit their examples, tactics, or questions regarding the above scenarios.

don't fear the radioactive reaper

2011-03-21T15:56:00.000-07:00

Did I use xkcd's awesome radiation dose chart in class today, to anchor a discussion of visual literacy, risk assessment, weather patterns, movie hype, nuclear physics, unreasonable fear, and the awesomeness of nerds?

Yes I did.

And I'd do it again.

why you should learn big words

2011-03-18T07:02:00.000-07:00

Why is your teacher encouraging, exhorting, or even nagging you to learn roots, to study vocab, and to read with an eye and ear for language?

The reasons are manifold. Augment your vocabulary...

To become a better, more engaging writer.
To better comprehend your reading.
To confuse people.
To connect subjects (math --> English --> science).
To define unknown words more easily.
To express yourself more effectively or accurately.
To feel more confident with little words.
To feel sophisticated.
To gain access to power.
To gain knowledge--to not be clueless.
To get good grades.
To get out of a bad situation.
To have deeper, more intelligent conversations.
To have fun.
To have options when choosing a word.
To impress a date.
To know what you're being accused of or charged with.
To know your rights.
To land a better job.
To learn how to say exactly--precisely--what you mean.
To learn the history of language and culture.
To make money.
To master the English language.
To not be afraid of things you don't understand.
To place more emphasis on other words.
To protect yourself from scams or risks.
To read between the lines.
To read more expressively.
To sound intelligent.
To sound professional.
To sound smart.
To succeed in a future career.
To understand difficult subjects.
To understand more knowledgeable people.
To understand ourselves and others.
To understand politics.

And, most important:

To win at Stump Mr. Anderson.

the squishy self

2011-03-16T18:12:00.000-07:00

If V.S. Ramachandran has a new book out, you can bet your sweet occipital lobe I'm going to link to Colin McGinn's review.

Why is neurology so fascinating? It is more fascinating than the physiology of the body--what organs perform what functions and how. I think it is because we feel the brain to be fundamentally alien in relation to the operations of mind--as we do not feel the organs of the body to be alien in relation to the actions of the body. It is precisely because we do not experience ourselves as reducible to our brain that it is so startling to discover that our mind depends so intimately on our brain. It is like finding that cheese depends on chalk--that soul depends on matter. This de facto dependence gives us a vertiginous shiver, a kind of existential spasm: How can the human mind--consciousness, the self, free will, emotion, and all the rest--completely depend on a bulbous and ugly assemblage of squishy wet parts? What has the spiking of neurons got to do with me?

I disagree with McGinn: neurology isn't any more fascinating than physiology, because as Lawrence Rosenblum's See What I'm Saying compellingly argues, neurology and physiology are blissfully codependent. You are the mind your body builds, and the body your mind conceives.

Mind-body problem solved. Wasn't that simple?

nerd is a nerd is a nerd is a nerd

2011-03-14T17:13:00.000-07:00

Me, circa a long time ago.

why are left-handed people evil?

2011-03-14T15:05:00.000-07:00

I started class today by asking, "Why are left-handed people evil?"

It's a loaded question, but it has a purpose: to surprise students into thinking about etymology. In this case, I gave a quick lecture on the history of cultural bias against lefties contained in the word "sinister." (The Wikipedia entry on the linguistic history of left-handedness is a great place to start, although I'm surprised that "gauche" doesn't get a mention. You see, left-handers are also klutzes.)

I asked my 9th grade class to theorize an answer in their journals. The gist of my favorite response: as they write in pencil, lefties smear lead on their skin, and the lead leaches through the epidermis and, eventually, winds its way into the brain. The results speak for themselves.

Oh, and--of course--the lone lefty in my 3rd period class was born on the Ides of March.

Note to the clueless or the scold: graphite isn't plumbum, and southpaws aren't evil.

the suspect sat near the front

2011-03-12T06:28:00.000-08:00

As a teacher, I've seen students of nearly every stripe, but I can say with some confidence that I've never had a suspected ax murderer in the mix.

Ellen Laird's account compels without sensationalizing. Read it.

[via ALDaily]

dude can dunk

2011-03-09T20:36:00.000-08:00

Apropos of nothing: Jacob Tucker.

utilizing force in the postmodern world

2011-03-07T16:23:00.000-08:00

The March / April LD resolution asks us to consider the use of PMFs to pursue U.S. military objectives abroad. How does the changing face of war impact this debate?

Traditional war, Rupert Smith argues in The Utility of Force, is obsolete. In its place arise two distinct and yet related phenomena: the extended police action and state-building project known as the War on Terror, and perpetual peacekeeping and conflict management. These phenomena, which Smith calls "War amongst the people," demand new strategies, in which the ends are obscure or distant. As Smith writes,

The ends for which we fight are changing from the hard objectives that decide a political outcome to those of establishing conditions in which the outcome may be decided.... We fight so as to preserve the force rather than risking all to gain the objective.

This idea of force-preservation is central to every development in the postmodern military landscape.

1. The military must evolve.
As Defense Secretary, following in the footsteps of Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Gates has pushed the U.S. military toward greater flexibility and mobility. Fred Kaplan summarizes:

The Army needs to shift from a garrison peacetime force that's preparing for a possible head-on armored clash against a foe of comparable strength to a mobile force that's fighting actual "asymmetric" wars against rogue states and insurgents. The Air Force needs to pull back from its traditional obsession with high-tech air-to-air combat and focus more on joint operations—surveillance, precise air strikes, cargo transport, and rapid rescue—that help the troops on the ground. The Navy needs to focus less on aircraft carriers and more on vessels that can maneuver in coastal waters.

Now that Gates' tenure is ending, it'll be interesting to see whether this momentum keeps building. Necessity would seem to demand it.

2. So long, Social Contract.
In the absence of industrial war, and with Gates' quick-strike model of military supremacy, notions of a draft are no longer with us. The U.S. military is a professional force, and with that, it's only natural that Americans let the professionals handle it. To put it in other words, when security is the project, we're happy to subcontract.

3. Objectives subject to change.
A year ago, would anyone have predicted that the U.S. would consider military involvement in a Libyan civil war? Of course not. Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and North Korea would have been the "obvious" concerns, with a rising China and perpetually dysfunctional Russia seen as long-term threats. The situation on the ground changes far too rapidly in a postmodern world.

4. Speed is power, and power corrupts.
Eric Wilson's "Speed / pure war / power crime," found in Crime, Law, and Social Change, 2009, is an interesting read for anyone considering a critical perspective. Following Paul Virilio's analysis in Pure War, Wilson argues that the increasing speed of conflict isn't a side effect, but a desired outcome of the postmodern corporation.

Speed reduces transparency by means of an 'optical disappearance,' which so hinders detection that the crime is effectively re-constituted a 'non-event;' that is, invisible....

By favouring the high-velocity corporations that respond with near-instantaneity to fast moving 'market forces,' 'private' structures displace traditional public institutions that are temporally encumbered by low-velocity traditional political deliberation and public accountability; nowhere is this more transparent than with the military procurement process. Pure War is identical with the systemic criminogenic environment, or 'corruption,' the covert privatization of government functions,' that is the conflation of the domestic political economy with speed. Power Crime is an emergent property of the political hegemony of speed. The question now becomes whether pure war can, in itself, affect a fundamental reconfiguration of national and trans-national juridical space.

Corruption doesn't just threaten the function of the State; when the virtual supersedes the actual, the State vanishes.

fresh-mixed metaphor

2011-03-01T18:59:00.000-08:00

Today, while the world teeters on the brink on a very nasty cold, I offer you a spot of cheer, the polyester equivalent of chicken soup.

Which would obviously contain M&Ms.

[originally posted here]

the Seattle Times endorses legalizing marijuana

2011-02-27T10:41:00.000-08:00

The Seattle Times has taken up the cause of legalizing marijuana. First, in its own editorial:

Marijuana should be legalized, regulated and taxed. The push to repeal federal prohibition should come from the states, and it should begin with the state of Washington.

In 1998, Washington was one of the earliest to vote for medical marijuana. It was a leap of faith, and the right decision. In 2003, Seattle was one of the first places in America to vote to make simple marijuana possession the lowest police priority. That, too, was a leap of faith, and the right decision. A year ago, City Attorney Pete Holmes stopped all prosecutions for simple possession: the right decision.

It is time for the next step. It is a leap, yes — but not such a big one, now.

Second, in an op-ed written by Norm Stamper, a former police chief, and the anti-Kerlikowske:

A fundamental change in drug policy seems daunting, but we've done it before with the repeal of alcohol prohibition. Today, you no longer see gangs shooting each other over beer and liquor market share. And both the president and Kerlikowske have compared drug use to cigarettes, pointing to the success of public-education campaigns in reducing the number of smokers.

But have they forgotten that we have not sent one person to jail for smoking Marlboros? If we can successfully manage alcohol and tobacco under a public-health model, we can do the same for all other drugs.

Here in Washington state, talk of legalization has hit the mainstream, and has prohibitionists on the defensive.

And it's about time.

party fouls

2011-02-25T06:41:00.000-08:00

Via the inimitable Dave Weigel, parliamentary procedure gets exciting in Wisconsin.

A few notes:

1. Some Americans are going to consider this the collapse of civilization, but this is pretty tame stuff by international standards.

2. If you're wearing orange shirts in the chamber as a show of solidarity, don't expect the other side to play nice.

3. Liked the guy who shouted "we love you anyways."

4. Never be the last person chanting.

Added: Weigel's diary of the scene inside the Capitol is worth a gander, too.

value and criterion pairs for the Private Military Firms resolution

2011-02-24T15:59:00.000-08:00

The Private Military Firms resolution presents plenty of framework options for the Aff and Neg.

Resolved: The United States is justified in using private military firms abroad to pursue its military objectives.

The following list of Value and Criterion pairs is neither conclusive nor comprehensive. Rather, it's a set of suggestions to spark your thinking. Feel free to share your bright ideas, constructive criticism, and questions in the comments.

A work in progress.

Trending Affirmative

V: National Security
C: Pragmatism / Bolstering defense forces
We ought to value national security because the resolution concerns whether PMFs can reasonably or legitimately be used to attain military objectives. Hence the oft-used "toolbox" metaphor: to maintain security, we have to keep all the necessary tools at our disposal. Limiting our options could be expensive, counterproductive, or disastrous to our military efforts. This position will likely clash with advocacies based on freedom or human rights, since valuing security as paramount tends toward oppression.

V: National Security and/or International Stability
C: Preserving Hegemony
If PMFs help the U.S. maintain military superiority and economic clout--and thus the global balance of power via American hegemony--then they're warranted. The hegemony argument suffers from a couple pitfalls: first, it may not be true (in a multipolar world full of dangerous nonstate actors and nontraditional, asymmetrical conflict, can the U.S. even stake claim to be a hegemon?), and second, even if it's true, whether hegemony is good is another matter entirely--racism, ethnocentrism, or patriarchy, anyone? Benevolence is often solely in the eye of the benefactor.

V: Prudence (defined as carefully weighing political options; see Morgenthau)
C: Political realism
The idea here is that the US must act in its best interests, which are independent of overarching moral considerations. Rather, the U.S.'s goal is to preserve its own power, charting a careful course in a chaotic, Hobbesian world. Realists generally denounce grand state-building / democracy-spreading schemes, however, so there may be a "turn" available: that realism demands a massive scaling-back of American military activity abroad.

V: Justice or Governmental Legitimacy
C: Constitutionalism
The Constitution not only provides a justification for national defense, but seems to permit the use of Private Military Firms. So far, I have yet to see a compelling analysis that PMFs are unconstitutional; if you've found one, pass along word.

V: Societal Welfare or National Security
C: Capitalism / Free Market
PMFs, like any other business, provide jobs to hardworking Americans (and foreign nationals). Further, PMFs are constrained by market forces, which keeps them from acting too recklessly or abominably (lest they lose clients). If you're debating in a progressive region and run this type of argument, expect to face the "Cap K."

Trending Negative

V: Peace
C: Reducing "Warism," Preventing Future Conflict; Pacifism; Isolationism
Duane Cady describes warism as "the uncritical presumption that war is morally justifiable, even morally required." PMFs incentivize conflict, since they have a financial stake in providing security or goods in war zones. When the war ends, PMFs have to move on to the next opportunity. Eisenhower's warning about the "military-industrial complex" anticipated this sort of perpetual conflict machine.

V: Justice or Morality or Governmental Legitimacy
C: Social Contract
The resolution uses the phrase "is justified," which may be defined in moral terms. The moral obligation of the State is based on its contractual duties and limits--and its monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Subcontracting this to PMFs is a dangerous policy, since PMFs are accountable to stakeholders who may not even be U.S. citizens or have the U.S.'s best interests in mind. In contrast, the U.S.'s citizen-soldiers have strong commitments to the U.S's military objectives; it's the focus of their recruitment, their training, their everyday life, and the entire command structure.

V: Justice or Morality
C: Just War Theory
If PMFs don't meet the criteria of jus in bello, we negate.

V: Freedom
C: Reducing the power of the state and/or corporations
The seemingly ever-expanding influence of corporations and states on individuals--and of corporations on states--means that we risk becoming a paternalistic plutocracy that defends its own interests in the guise of national security. Globalization, corporate welfare, financial bailouts... and PMFs, all in an unholy alliance.

V: Justice or Morality or Human Dignity
C: Protecting Human Rights
Thesis: If protecting human rights is essential to justice (or morality), and if PMFs (especially security firms) violate rights with impunity, then we must negate.

Could Go Either Way

V: Societal Welfare (or Morality or Life or National Security)
C: Consequentialism (or Utilitarianism, Act or Rule)
Any case predicated on a body count, a dollar figure, or any other quantifiable metric of success is essentially consequentialist (and perhaps utilitarian). Not that there's anything wrong with that.

snowstradamus

2011-02-23T20:57:00.000-08:00

Snow day good: breakfast anytime.

Snow day bad: the McDonald's parking lot is a skating rink. As much as I love McGriddles, I'm not risking life and limb. (Limb, anyway. I'm sure the saturated fat and syrup-baked crust is killing me softly.)

Snow day good: time to catch up on grading and planning and blogging.

Snow day bad: no Powerful Teaching and Learning session at LP Brown. Sub plans written in vain.

Snow day good: no need to dress up.

Snow day bad: can't show off a brand new tacky tie.

Snow day good: Netflix Instant has Arrested Development in hi def.

Snow day bad: Netflix Instant has Arrested Development in hi def.

And yeah, I'm calling it: tomorrow will be a snow day.

Update: Two-hour late start. Yes, you may thank me for this jinx when we don't have to spend an extra school day in late June.

Update Update: and then, at 7:47, the District reversed itself and canceled school. I wasn't surprised, given that I had already driven across town, including a harrying trek up the Yashiro Bridge, past the poor guy who had spun out and was now calmly smoking a stogie while awaiting help, and up the hill, thankful for front-wheel drive and traction control, and cursing myself for braving the snow and leaving earlier than I should've.

Also, for the reverse jinx: You're welcome.

the kids are outta control

2011-02-15T18:22:00.000-08:00

Stephen Colbert does the reductio ad absurdum.

the necessity of private military firms

2011-02-13T10:23:00.000-08:00

Why might the U.S. be justified in employing Private Military Firms (PMFs) to attain its overseas military objectives? In "Contractors: The New Element of Military Force Structure," found in the Autumn 2008 edition of Parameters (a publication of the U.S. Army War College), Mark Cancian outlines the ways in which PMFs have become not only useful, but entirely necessary.

1. Reconstruction
Cancian dispels the myth that PMFs are mostly mercenaries; in fact, the vast majority of military contractors are unarmed support personnel involved in diverse tasks. The largest group of contractors--nearly half--are involved in reconstruction efforts, with manifold benefits. Not only does it keep troops focused on military missions, but it establishes long-term stability in the occupied territory.

Work removes the bored and unemployed from the streets. Men who might otherwise join the insurgency for ideological or economic reasons now have a stake in maintaining stability. A job also has significance in traditional societies such as Iraq and Afghanistan, a fact that is sometimes difficult for westerners to appreciate. A job means that a man can get married and leave his family's home. Traditionally in these societies, unmarried children do not move out and get apartments on their own. This transition to independent living makes a young man an adult, thereby giving him a stake in the stability of his neighborhood or town.

2. Logistics
The military's own functioning depends heavily on PMFs for logistical support.

Most of the US personnel involved in these functions are blue-collar technicians (truck drivers, electricians, maintenance specialists), the people who keep materiel flowing and bases running. They are unarmed and often highly skilled in their areas of expertise, frequently more so than their counterparts in the military who are often much younger and, in effect, apprentices in their trades. Traditionally, military personnel performed these functions, but the high cost and relative scarcity of experienced uniformed personnel in the all-volunteer force made use of contractors an attractive option. Why use military personnel for a job that a civilian is willing, able, and often better qualified to perform?

For an example, Cancian focuses on food service, an area in which private firms outshine and have largely replaced their military counterparts.

3. Interpretation
Communication makes private support an absolute necessity.

Conflicts overseas, especially counterinsurgencies, require a large number of interpreters so US forces at every level can communicate with the local populace. Although the military is expanding its number of linguists, large-scale operations require thousands of interpreters. The military will never have enough personnel skilled in any particular language (except Spanish) to cover more than a small proportion of its total requirements. Contractors will always provide the bulk of this capability.

4. Security Details and Bodyguards
Admittedly the most problematic PMFs, armed security details and bodyguards draw the most attention, despite their relative smaller scale. Regarding the former,

About three-fourths of these security contractors protect fixed facilities inside major bases and never venture outside the wire.... The main function of these security guards consists of screening personnel entering facilities by checking identity cards. The majority of this group has never fired a shot in anger. They are more akin to the security guards one sees in the United States guarding banks or shopping malls.

Bodyguards, on the other hand, have ignited the most controversy, due to their involvement in violence. Yet according to Cancian, they represent fewer than 1% of all PMF personnel. A lack of coordination with and oversight by military forces, and what Cancian calls the "bodyguard mindset," in which the bodyguard will engage in disproportionate force in order to protect the client at all costs, combined to precipitate the infamous Blackwater incident in 2007. Since then, Cancian argues, necessary changes have been made.

The Department of Defense (DOD) and the State Department finally issued new guidelines that brought contractors under military control, required State Department security officials to accompany every convoy, installed video cameras in contractor vehicles, and clarified the rules on the use of force.

The full impacts of these changes remain to be seen, but it's an exaggeration to argue that PMFs are rogue elements operating entirely outside the control of the government.

5. The Future
The evolution of conflict, which I'll discuss further in a future post, demands an expanding military.

The Army is currently expanding from 482,400 to 547,400 soldiers. This expansion could have reduced dependence on contractors by channeling all the additional personnel into support units. But it has not. Although some of this additional manpower is being integrated into support units, the majority is going to combat units. The purpose is clear-reduce stress on personnel by increasing the number of units in the rotation base. Army leaders have repeatedly cited the need to lengthen the time units spend in the continental United States. In all their testimony related to expanding the force Army leaders have never expressed a desire to reduce dependence on contractors.

The Army is developing a strategy based on a future of "persistent conflict" where every combat unit, active and reserve, deploys on a regular basis. Indeed, the Army's planned force structure does not make strategic sense without the implicit expectation of continuous deployments. As a result, the Army will continue to depend on contractors in support of deployed forces.

6. The Absence of a Realistic Alternative
What of those who would advocate replacing PMFs with military personnel? Cancian dismisses this as impractical, bordering on impossible:

Replacing the 113,000 contractors in the security and logistics arenas (excluding interpreters and all those in reconstruction) would require a minimum of 250,000 additional military personnel, and when the rotation base and training pipeline are considered the number quickly swells to more than 400,000 as a high-end estimate. With the Army struggling to meet the more modest target of its current expansion, an increase of 65,000 active-duty soldiers, such a large expansion would appear impossible without reconstituting the draft. Since a draft is opposed by the military leadership, politicians, and the American people as a whole, reinstituting conscription is infeasible, whatever its attraction for op-ed writers.

Cancian's article, which goes into much more depth regarding the legal status of military contractors, is well worth reading in full, especially for Affirmatives building the case for PMFs.

the greatest television audience that wasn't

2011-02-08T07:13:00.000-08:00

Was Super Bowl XLV the most-watched television event in U.S. history?

Sure.

The Nielsen Co. said Monday that an estimated 111 million people watched the Green Bay Packers outlast the Pittsburgh Steelers in professional football's ultimate game. That tops the 106.5 million who watched the 2010 game between New Orleans and Indianapolis.

The series finale of "M*A*S*H" had held the title of the most-watched TV show in the United States for 27 years. It is now No. 3.

On the other hand, not really.

You see, there's this little thing called "population growth." M*A*S*H's finale had a remarkable 105.9 million viewers in 1983--back when the U.S. held about 233 million residents--meaning that over 45% of the U.S. watched that episode. In contrast, only 36% saw yesterday's surrealist hootenanny.

Now, to be fair, it's possible that the Nielsen ratings system in 1983 lacked today's sophistication and nuance, so the estimate is overgenerous. Furthermore, in today's fragmented media landscape--where we have 500 channels instead of 5, plus an Internet that didn't even exist in 1983--simultaneously capturing a hundred million Americans' attention for longer than 15 seconds is an achievement worth celebrating.

Just not with a Fergie / Slash duet.

how to become a better writer

2011-02-05T15:58:00.000-08:00

1. Care about your writing.
Everything that follows depends on this. Care so hard it hurts. In fact, if you are not in physical pain every time you pick up a pen, you don't care enough. Journalist and all-around savant Gene Fowler describes writing thusly: "All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead." If you think he was exaggerating, you are obviously a no-talent hack.

2. Endlessly revise.
Perfect your work. Keep at it until they have to drag you away from your last draft, clawing at the last adverb that mars your masterpiece. This ensures that you will never publish anything, cementing your reputation as an unsung genius.

3. Find and keep good readers.
Treasure them, by which I mean, stuff them in a box in the back of a closet somewhere. You want them reading only your work, not anyone else's.

4. Read voraciously.
Sir Francis Bacon once said that truly great books were meant to be chewed and digested. Invest in a stomach upgrade and a set of titanium teeth and make this happen.

5. Write in different modes.
You can't just publish a novel first thing. Start small: carve a letter into a tree trunk. ("Z" isn't a bad choice, if your name is Zorro.) Move on to bathroom walls, which not only builds an audience, but develops your rhyming skills. From there, in ascending order of importance, it's Twitter, blogs, advice columns, ad copy, Atlantic short stories, New Yorker cartoons, novellas, Wikipedia updates, manifestos, horoscopes, celebrity obituaries, limericks, novels, trilogies, and ransom notes.

6. On second thought, get a disciple to do it for you.
Do what Jesus, Socrates, and the Buddha did: write nothing down yourself. The downside, of course, is that your ideas may be misunderstood, misappropriated, or pureed beyond recognition. The upside is huge, though: you'll attract groupies while maintaining plausible deniability.

the benefits of private military firms

2011-02-03T19:07:00.000-08:00

Concerning the March/April 2011 resolution, what are some of the tactical and strategic advantages of private military firms? In "Reconsidering Battlefield Contractors," from the Summer 2005 edition of Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Doug Brooks and Jim Shevlin lay out some of the arguments in favor. The gist:

Private firms play an indispensable role in supporting peace and stability operations from Congo to Iraq, but sensationalization and misinformation of "battlespace contractors" has unfortunately skewed public perceptions and is having an adverse impact on policy formulation. Despite frequent claims that private firms are unprecedented, unregulated, inherently unethical and even a threat to American democracy, the private sector actually has a long history supporting U.S. military operations, is regulated by numerous domestic and international laws and statutes, plays a central role in operations critical to speedy state recovery, infrastructure reconstruction and humanitarian security, and is critical to implementing policies of democratic governments and the international community. The private sector provides policymakers, as well as those tasked to carry out the policies, with remarkably cost-effective and flexible tools, and criticisms of the industry too often have more to do with the politics behind the policies than with the performance of the companies engaged in their implementation.

Private military firms come in three main varieties:

1. Nonlethal Service Providers (NSPs)

NSPs provide logistics services, air transport, construction of military bases and refugee camps, and other specialized services such as water purification, unexploded ordinance disposal, and mobile hospitals. While NSPs face many of the same legal issues as the PSCs and PMCs when they operate in CPC regions, most concerns about NSPs focus on appropriate procurement policies, whether their services should be labeled "inherently" governmental, or whether the U.S. military is too reliant on them.

2. Private Security Companies (PSCs)

They provide armed protection for "nouns": people, places, and things. These include politicians, military leaders, buildings, organizations, convoys, etc.... While conceptually there is little difference between security guards in Iraq and in the United States, where private security outnumbers regular police three to one, PSCs in Iraq tend to have military backgrounds, be better armed, and offer a higher level of armed security capable of defending their "nouns" against attacks by heavily armed insurgents and bandits.

3. Private Military Companies (PMCs)

PMCs are firms used to alter the strategic shape of a conflict. PMCs generally work for states, international and regional organizations and provide military and police training, security sector reform, assistance in defense ministry design, and even advice on proper civil-military relations in a democracy. PMC employees are generally unarmed, though in Iraq some carry sidearms for self-defense.

Note that although Private Military Firms are involved in war zones and may tangentially be involved in combat operations, primarily their purpose is supportive and defensive.

According to Brooks and Shevlin, there are five main advantages to private military firms:
* surge capacity and speed - the ability to recruit and train personnel
* force multiplication - the ability to rapidly deploy personnel, equipment, and munitions
* specialized skills - most often in technology, security details, and training
* ease of use - the competitive market ensures that firms are highly responsive to their governmental "customers," and easily discarded if unsuccessful
* cost efficiency - on the whole, private military firms are cheaper than similarly equipped State actors

The article contains much more regarding the legal status of private firms, both in domestic and international law, too complex to summarize here. Overall, Brooks and Shevlin's analysis is well worth reading for LDers looking for affirmative arguments.

Wikipedia is the greatest thing ever

2011-02-02T18:43:00.000-08:00

I totally had students do this.

I had seen the Wikipedia list of misconceptions floating around Twitter, and figured it would be an interesting exercise for my reading classes. We had previously investigated other sites' discussion pages in an activity I call "Wikipedia Behind the Scenes," and this seemed like a logical next step.

I made a preassessment, a true/false "quiz" with 12 misconceptions I thought my students might know. ("T/F: Bats are blind.") They took the quiz, we shared the results ("show of hands... how many thought #1 was true?"), and then I sent them into the computer lab to find out which of the answers were correct. (I was a little mean; all the answers were false.)

After a few minutes, in dismay and excitement, they brought back their findings. We talked about the sources of misinformation--friends, parents, teachers--and tried to figure out how wrong things get to be "common knowledge." I showed them the list, and we looked at the "discussion" page to see the disagreements over what ought to be listed. (Consider this a vote to keep it.)

In sum: Wikipedia is a marvelous teaching tool, and any educator who disagrees is a nincompoop.

definitions for the private military firms resolution

2011-02-02T18:22:00.000-08:00

In this post, I'll look at some definitions and potential resolutional analyses / observations for the March/April 2011 resolution.

Resolved: The United States is justified in using private military firms abroad to pursue its military objectives.

First, some standard dictionary definitions of justified (excluding those that are obviously not applicable):

–verb (used with object)
1. to show (an act, claim, statement, etc.) to be just or right: The end does not always justify the means.

2. to defend or uphold as warranted or well-grounded: Don't try to justify his rudeness.

5a. (Law) to show a satisfactory reason or excuse for something done.

If "justified" means "shown to be just or right," then the Aff must provide a value of justice or morality (or somesuch), with an appropriately moral criterion. (If constitutionality or international law is employed, it's in the context that either is the correct standard for justice via a social contract, prevailing moral norms, or some other moral argument.)

If "justified" means "warranted or well-grounded," the Aff could use a purely pragmatic calculus such as necessity, effectiveness, comparative advantage, or cost/benefit analysis.

However, if "justified" merely means "excused," the bar is set rather low: legality regardless of moral or practical concerns.

All that aside, let's look at other aspects of the resolution.

1. Do "private military firms" include all private contractors operating under the aegis of the U.S. military, or only those that run security details or operations in combat zones? For instance, does it matter so much that private firms help provide logistics--if McDonalds runs the mess hall? PrivateMilitary.org defines private firms as

legally established international firms offering services that involve the potential to exercise force in a systematic way and by military or paramilitary means, as well as the enhancement, the transfer, the facilitation, the deterrence, or the defusing of this potential, or the knowledge required to implement it, to clients.

In my view, this seems to place emphasis on firms directly engaged in combat operations.

2. Is there a difference between "private military firms" and "mercenaries?" (A case built on international law might want to synonymize the terms.)

3. Note the word "pursue," which, for the Aff, might preclude notions of efficacy (or "solvency," to use the word that's been imported from CX debate).

4. How specifically must we define "military objectives?" This is a prickly question: the extent to which the Affirmative must defend the status quo may be a matter of intense debate. If the Aff tries to argue largely in principled or hypothetical terms, then the objectives may not matter so much; the intent, not the effects, would be most salient. However, the Neg may want to entirely reject the U.S.'s contemporary foreign policy (a sort of pacificist, or perhaps anarchist or anti-capitalist kritik), arguing that any U.S. military objectives, privately supported or otherwise, are completely illegitimate.

Resolved:The United States is justified in using private military firms abroad to pursue its military objectives.

2011-02-01T07:03:00.000-08:00

The NFL LD topic for March / April 2011 has been released:

Resolved:The United States is justified in using private military firms abroad to pursue its military objectives.

The United States increasingly depends on private military firms to support its fighting forces around the world. However, that supporting role has become more of a solo act, as firms like Xe (formerly Blackwater) have moved beyond security details or logistics, into combat operations in everything but name--and with problematic results.

This raises several questions. Are private military firms effective, or even necessary? Are they legitimate--whether under U.S.law or under international law? Will their reach and influence continue to expand in a perpetual War on Terror, and, if so, what will be the costs? To whom are private military firms accountable? To whom are they loyal--especially when many of their employees or shareholders aren't U.S. citizens? Is this the "military industrial complex" Eisenhower warned about? Are we seeing the rise of shadowy corporate governance? Is "private security contractor" a mere euphemism for "mercenary?"

Expect security, justice, peace, international law, the social contract, Just War Theory, and corporatism to crop up in discussions. Also, expect huge criterial clash: the word "justified" isn't synonymous with "just."

Analysis and links, as always, are forthcoming--and, as always, your comments and questions are critical.

Added 2/2: A look at some definitions.

Added 2/3: Some initial Aff arguments mostly based on effectiveness considerations.

Added 2/13: More arguments and analysis for the Affirmative, based on military necessity.

Added 2/24: A formative list of value and criterion pairs.

Added 3/7: How postmodern developments change the nature of war.

juveniles and due process rights

2011-01-30T19:59:00.000-08:00

Regarding the juvenile justice resolution, I've seen several successful Aff cases that are based on providing full due process rights for juveniles. The reasoning goes like this:

1. Procedural justice is the best justice any government can promise.
2. Punishment is excluded from the conversation (since methods of punishment aren't inherent in the way that due process rights are).
3. Juveniles deserve the same procedural protections / rights as adults.
4. They don't receive those rights in the juvenile justice system.
5. Affirming the resolution ensures that juveniles get the rights they deserve.

If you'll notice, these arguments include two implicit values: justice as desert or justice as fairness, the moral aims of procedural justice. (If you doubt this, simply ask yourself: why do we care about procedural justice? If your answer is "because we deserve it," or "because it's fair," there you go.)

What process rights are juveniles due?

A 1967 decision by the Supreme Court [In re Gault] affirmed the necessity of requiring juvenile courts to respect the due process of law rights of juveniles during their proceedings.... The Supreme Court decision, delivered by Justice Abe Fortas, emphasized that youth had a right to receive fair treatment under the law and pointed out the following rights of minors:
The right to receive notice of charges
The right to obtain legal counsel
The right to "confrontation and cross-examination"
The "privilege against self-incrimination"
The right to receive a "transcript of the proceedings," and
The right to "appellate review"

Conspicuously absent is the right to a jury trial. This alone could be the basis of an Aff case; the jury is seen as an essential component in a democracy, as a way to ensure that the community is represented, and that the power of the State is kept in check.

Even if sentencing comes into the equation, jury trials are potentially less arbitrary than juvenile procedures, thanks to a unique feature of the system called a dispositional hearing. In Juvenile Justice: A Social, Historical, and Legal Perspective, Preston Elrod and R. Scott Ryder explain:

It is at the disposition hearing that formal plans designed to meet the various needs of the youth, the family, and the community are initiated. It is also at this hearing that the judge or other hearing officer attempts to balance the "best interests" of the youth and the need for community safety. Judges and other quasi-judicial hearing officers often have great latitude and discretion in making dispositional decisions (p. 271).

Furthermore, there's a gap between the guarantees of rights and their implementation in the juvenile justice system. The names you'll hear most often in support of this argument are Feld and Ainsworth.

Feld takes an empirical tack, arguing that the Supreme Court's decisions don't match the reality on the ground.

Ainsworth takes a more philosophical approach, not only discussing the structural deficiencies of juvenile courts, but calling for these courts' abolition, as they are based on outmoded, essentialist views of children. I'd recommend her work for advanced debaters.

checking the democracy barometer

2011-01-27T16:08:00.000-08:00

Wishful--I mean, political--scientists have invented a democracy barometer.

The barometer uses 100 empirical indicators to measure how well a country complies with the three democratic principles of freedom, equality and control as well as the nine basic functions of democracy. The comparison of thirty established democracies between 1995 and 2005 has revealed that Denmark is leading the way, followed by Finland and Belgium.

Theory: it's not just metaphorically about climate. Look at the top nine:

Denmark ... 88.3
Finland ... 87.7
Belgium ... 85.1
Iceland ... 83.5
Sweden ... 82.9
Norway ... 82.1
Canada ... 79.4
Netherlands ... 79.0
Luxembourg ... 75.2

Those are some pretty cold climes, relatively speaking. But one thing is indisputable:

USA ranks 10th, behind Canada at 7th place

Envy on, enviers.

LD mailbag: the turbulent adolescent brain

2011-01-23T11:48:00.000-08:00

The Jan/Feb 2011 juvenile justice resolution has prompted another reader question.

Dear Mr. Anderson/Jim Anderson/Decorabilia,

Bri Castellini suggested in a recent post that one argument for Neg was to argue biology - basically that teenagers were torn between hormones and the lack of buildup in the frontal lobe cortex and fighting "a full fledged biological battle." In the last debate, this argument seemed to kill my Aff, because my opponent basically repeated this argument again and again without a strong response (the only response I had was that the line was arbitrary, and we've seen where that goes). When asking others on the team afterwards, the main response seemed to be "Morality is not the province of people over 18, and they should pay." These kinds of retribution arguments have always seemed to me to be kind of weak, and were anyway inconsistent with my value and criterion.

Which is a roundabout way of asking: How would you respond to this argument on its own logic -- not by advocating retribution, but by showing it be unjust, illogical, or not conducive to societal welfare?

It depends on the the argument being made, but here's my stock response.

There's a leap from "adolescence, cognitively and emotionally, is a turbulent time" to "adolescents shouldn't be treated as adults."

The leap is rather large, for several reasons.

1. "Treated as adults" may just mean given the same due process rights, excluding punishment.

2. The resolution is specifically focused on juveniles charged with violent felonies, which excludes the vast majority of everyday adolescents. Potentially, violent offenders are less cognitively turbulent, because they've "grown up too fast." They're outliers, regardless. Unless the research cited is specific to juveniles charged with violent felonies, it's potentially suspect.

3. Speaking of, who's to say that adults charged with violent felonies aren't equally emotionally turbulent? Is it fair to compare a distressed youngster with a normal (i.e., middle-of-the-bell-curve) adult?

4. As I've argued before, culpability is based on relative judgments. It's one thing to say that, on average, juveniles are less culpable than adults. But that fact in and of itself doesn't necessarily justify treating them differently, if they both meet a particular "baseline of culpability."

For instance, compare a 35-year-old and a 60-year-old. Ostensibly, the person with 25 extra years of life experience--collected wisdom, hopefully--is more responsible and, arguably, more culpable. (60-year-olds are measurably happier, too.) But we don't have different systems for the two, since both met the same basic criterion of moral responsibility.

5. Brain-based differences can be effects as much as causes. If we train adolescents to be irresponsible, their brains will, no doubt, reflect their lack of judgment in the very places where judgment is thought to reside. The reverse is also true: training the brain leads to structural changes. (Years of cab-driving, for instance, or a mere 8 weeks of meditation.)

6. On average, and regardless of the reasons, men are more violent than women--which is one of the reasons men and women are housed in different prisons--but men and women have the same due process rights. The point: there's no straight line between differences (even innate, biological, or brain-based differences!) and different treatment.

emotion, reason, and the law

2011-01-20T20:14:00.000-08:00

David Arkush, in "Situating Emotion: A Critical Realist View of Emotion and Nonconscious Cognitive Processes for Law and Legal Theory," explodes the dichotomy between rationality and emotion in legal decision-making. The implications:

This Article has attempted to say much, but it can be reduced to a single point--law and legal theory treat emotion primarily as an object of reasoned decisions and policy making and as a source of interference in decisions, but empirical evidence suggests that emotion is a behavioral process that is critical to decisions. This shift in viewpoint has widespread implications for law, legal theory, and policy. As a descriptive matter, it suggests that we should reevaluate legal doctrines that rely on the assumption that humans are mostly emotionless actors and reexamine areas of law that concern consent, states of mind, and the causes of behavior. As a normative matter, emotional realism suggests that we have no empirical or even internally consistent definition of welfare on which to base policy. Welfarists should seek a new definition, and they are more likely to find it in processes than in objects. There is much work to be done.

Use this as a launching pad toward...
* Blocks against consequentialism / utilitarianism (which are welfarist, and, as Arkush argues, empirically and internally slippery)
* A way to defend treating juveniles and adults equally--it could be fallacious to presume that juveniles are "more emotional" when making decisions
* A kritik of the legal system

LD mailbag: defending against punishment

2011-01-19T18:08:00.000-08:00

Regarding the juvenile justice resolution for Jan/Feb 2011, a couple readers write,

Hi Jim,

We are wondering if you help us. We have recently debated this resolution in depth at the past tournament, and we came across a couple issues for both sides.

Our first problem that we had was regarding jail rape. The negative side argues that there is a much higher rate of jail rape (and staff beatings, threats by weapons, etc.) of juveniles that were transferred to the adult system than that of the juveniles placed in juvenile system. The argument with its evidentiary backing is quite straight forward, and we had a lot of trouble handling it on the affirmative side effectively. One attempt that we had was to say that since it is against the law to rape in jail, and that we enforce the law; we must evaluate the round in its general symbol and theory to society. Another was to take a similar approach, but rather saying that the affirmative cannot defend jail rape because it is inherently bad, but reforms could be made. Another line of thought was to give a way to reform the system; have separate jail cells. Those arguments, however, were not accepted by the judges. Any thoughts?

The second problem we had was about the lowered recidivism that the negative side can provide. There are many pieces of evidence that say comparatively, the juvenile system provides 30% lower recidivism than the same juveniles that are transferred to the adult system. How would you suggest the affirmative to go about effectively mitigating this point?

The first and perhaps most important thing to do is to place a resolutional analysis at the top of your case, preferably after the definition of "charged," that limits the scope of the resolution to exclude punishment. (This is obviously incompatible with a case based on punishment, in which case you'll have to take the third / fourth option below.) This works well with a "due process" Aff, and takes out the recidivism argument in the second question.

Another way to go is to heavily warrant your argument from principle in your case--take time to establish why we're examining principles rather than specific practices, inherent differences rather than flawed applications.

A third way is to argue that the real problem is the vulnerability of juveniles--most of them are smaller and weaker than adult offenders--so, upon entry, a height/weight-based distinction could be drawn with no regard to age. One way to establish this would be, in cross-ex, to ask the Neg to explain why juvenile offenders are more likely to be abused, beaten, raped, etc. in prison.

I think you can also argue that the flaws in the adult system, including our society's often too-casual dismissal of / joking about prison rape, are the real problem. It's not that the prisons themselves (or the punishment principles) are too harsh, but that society is too tolerant of the abuse. Reform is the solution, not arbitrary age-based distinctions between juveniles and adults.

In other words, one way to affirm the resolution is to argue that adults ought to be treated more like juveniles!

The recidivism argument is potentially taken down by the deterrence argument: we'll have fewer criminals reoffending if we have fewer criminals in the first place. It's also rendered moot by the resolutional analysis described at the top of this post. (I'm also skeptical of the argument, for reasons described here.)

the next evolution of LD debate

2011-01-17T13:40:00.000-08:00

This past Sunday, I was fortunate to be invited to the 2011 Northwest Round Robin. Eight of the region's sharpest LDers dueled in six rounds of high-octane debate. Sonia Vora (Annie Wright School) and Nick Blanchette (Mercer Island) were declared co-champions, and, from what I saw, deservedly so.

I attended not just as a judge, but as a learner, having fallen behind LD's progressive evolution in the past couple years. It was simultaneously exhausting and energizing to watch the debates, and learn from pros like VBI's Becca Traber and Wesley Craven, whose enthusiasm for the activity is infectious. I felt like the dumbest person in the room, and it was--how do I say it?--awesome.

It's got me thinking: where does the event go from here? Policy-influenced speed and argumentation have fully arrived in Washington state, and are apparently here to stay. It's time we figured out how to handle the changes so that LD doesn't discourage involvement by newcomers, including parents and community members. (It's tough enough to get judges; do we really want to limit our options to former LDers and PhDs in rhetoric or political science?) I want LD to be challenging, not forbidding.

At the very least, the Washington State Debate Tournament rules would need to be updated. Right now, not only are plan-based arguments forbidden, but, arguably, so is card-heavy argumentation, and by implication, extreme speed:

In Lincoln-Douglas Debate, only two speakers are involved: One fulfilling the affirmative case responsibilities and the other, the negative case responsibilities. Lincoln-Douglas debating encourages the development of a direct and communicative delivery style. Emphasis is placed upon the issues involved rather than strategy in developing the case. The statement of the topic is a RESOLUTION OF VALUE rather than of policy. This results in emphasizing logic, theory, and philosophy while eliminating "plan" arguments. Because of the time limits, a wealth of evidence cannot be used, but research by good background reading is necessary.

[emphasis added]

Second, we could create a stricter Novice / Open distinction as a way to ensure strong grounding in the foundations of the event. For instance, in Novice Policy debate in Washington, case areas are limited to an agreed-upon list, while counterplans and kritiks are disallowed.

In Novice LD, I'd suggest ruling out...

*Plans / Counterplans / Permutations
*Kritiks (this wouldn't preclude all critical arguments, provided they fit into a standard V/C framework)
* A priori arguments
* Straight Refutation Negs
* Cases without frameworks
* Theory shells

Abusive arguments could be handled as a "point of order" after the conclusion of the debate. (Hopefully the limitations, combined with effective judging, would limit abuse.)

These are half-baked ideas, and I'm curious what you think. LDers and fans of the event, especially among my Washington state readership, how would you go about changing the activity? Or what do you see as the future of LD debate?

full of debate = empty of blogging

2011-01-16T16:18:00.000-08:00

Federal Way High School has no wireless. Eastside Catholic School blocks email, Twitter, and blogs. (Blogs, ECHS? Really?) Hence, I haven't been answering questions in the comments with my usual promptness.

Sorry.

On the plus side, I've seen some fun debates, and will have some new posts coming in the next couple days.

Back soon.

how to be a better parent... judge

2011-01-14T06:45:00.000-08:00

(A work in progress. Suggestions, questions, and criticisms are welcomed in the comments.)

As a debate coach, I spend at least half my job on email and the phone. I'm either wrangling drivers or judges--or both--ensuring that my team can get to the tournament, and when they do, that we can start and finish within spitting distance of "on time."

Like a lot of coaches, I depend on my team's parents to help judge. In December and January, former students come back from college and help out, but when Winter Quarter revs back up, they disappear back into their halcyon world. Hiring judges is sometimes a possibility, but you know how it goes: times are tough all over, and the money's tight.

Parents fill in the gap, and admirably so. But often new parents are intimidated by the activity, with its strange conventions and obscure jargon, with its conceptual and contextual complexity, and, perhaps most important, with its overwhelming nerdiness. Parents, thus, when thrown into their first debate tournament, can be just as nervous about the experience as the greenest novice debater. (Green is sometimes the literal color, sadly.)

I offer training to my judges. But what happens in a pinch, when there's little to no time for preparation? What's a rookie judge to do?

Here's my advice.

If you have time to prepare before the round:

Study the rules of the event. Read a judging guide, if available. (This is a useful resource, with rules overviews, judging guides, and more.)

Ask what the resolution is. If you have time and resources, do a little reading to familiarize yourself with the topic. (If it's an LD resolution, chances are, you'll find this blog via Google. Welcome!) Think about your personal perspective on the issue. What are your biases? Be upfront with yourself: that means you'll have to be extra-cautious about being fair to both sides.

When the round is about to begin, the debaters might ask you what your "paradigm" is. What they often mean:

How experienced are you? (Tell them, so they can adapt.)
Are you more convinced by empirical evidence (facts and statistics), logic / reasons / philosophical arguments, rhetoric / persuasive style, or a balance of the above? (That's for you to consider and decide.)
How comfortable are you with speed? (Tell them to slow down and make eye contact to make sure you're following them.)
Do you understand theoretical arguments? (Unless you know what this means, tell them to keep it straightforward.)

Give time signals (counting down). Make a "C" for 30 seconds left, then count down 5-4-3-2-1 in seconds. When tracking prep time, announce it every 30 seconds ("30 seconds used... 1 minute used...")

If you're in a "let's see if the bus driver can judge Open LD" situation:

Ask if you can watch the first flight instead of judging, which may be possible, and may save everyone a lot of grief.

If it's not, and you're pressed into emergency duty, remain calm. Read over the ballot for instructions. Check for times, including the amount of prep time.

Most important: tell the competitors you're a first-time judge, and so you'll need them to help walk you through the round, and to avoid jargon whenever possible, and to signpost. (Even if you don't know what "signpost" means, they will.)

Take notes, or "flow." I use a two-page system, with the Aff (with rebuttals, etc.) on one sheet and the Neg case (etc.) on the other. I write down any prep time used / remaining on one of the sheets. I don't flow Cross-Examination (or the crossfire), expecting debaters to refer to those discussions in later rebuttals.

When filling out the ballot:

Offer helpful comments about the debaters' speaking skills / style. Be specific and constructive. If you can't suggest an improvement, that's fine; praise what you saw / heard.

Give speaker points when it's expected.

The most important piece, from the debaters' and coach's perspective: write a reason for your decision. Be as specific as you can ("The affirmative had superior evidence about the increasing crime rate due to plea bargaining," rather than "The affirmative had better evidence.")

Fill out the ballot in a timely fashion--usually no more than 15 minutes after the end of the round. Get it back to the ballot table as soon as possible: the tournament's on-time status depends on it!

In the end, don't worry: you're one out of the 6 judges they'll see, so if you mess up, it's not the end of the world. Ultimately, if they're good enough debaters, they should be able to adapt to you, and if you give your best, they'll have no reason to complain.

In fact, they had better thank you for judging. As a coach, I certainly do!

Thanks to the anonymous commentator who prompted this post.

how to deal with judges

2011-01-13T07:08:00.000-08:00

By Guest-Blogger Bri Castellini

most applicable to Public Forum and traditional LD debate

My dad hates watching gymnastics and figure skating during the Olympics because it bothers him that judges make the final call, and at times those calls can seem arbitrary or unfair. But as debaters we’ve had to accept that our judges ultimately hold our fate in their hands, and often have to change the way we debate in order to facilitate these judges. But there are so many different kinds of judges, it’s hard to keep track. So I’ve made you a list of the kinds of judges you’ll likely run into and how to deal.

The Confused but Kindly Parent: This poor specimen is only here as a favor to their student, or a student’s friend. They’re the ultimate novice, and usually have no idea what to expect. So make sure you don’t use jargon (debate-speak like “flow” and “cross-apply”). Other tips: be polite, because this judge is intimidated enough, be painstakingly organized, because this judge won’t have had flow experience, and speak slowly and confidently, because if you’re confident in your arguments, they will be, too.

The CX-er: This judge normally judges policy debate (or CX, as we called it in Colorado), and so they’ll probably start off the round looking extra bored. See, my experience with CX judges, and CX debaters in general, is that they believe their form of debate is the best kind there is. If it’s not spoken at fifteen miles per hour with 80 different sources from the past two weeks, it’s boring. But. This is not an excuse to speed talk. Your cases will not be geared for CX speed. But don’t be afraid to be a little more aggressive if the debate calls for it. CX judges aren’t as sensitive to it. Feel free to use as much jargon as you need, but make sure you can back up every assertion you make with legitimate sources.

Seasoned Veteran: This judge is usually a coach, an ex-coach, or someone who has judged for several years. Don’t BS with this judge. They will know. Again, feel free to use jargon, but don’t overdo it. Also, don’t try to charm them (which often works with the “Confused Parent”, see above), because they won’t fall for it.

Flow Judge- This judge makes decisions almost entirely based on their flow. So the biggest thing to remember is be organized, even more painstakingly organized than for the Confused Parent. When you make an argument, tell this judge exactly where you want it applied on the flow. Example: “My opponent’s 2^nd contention is ____ and I have _____ to say about it.” Also, these judges are extra sensitive to dropped points, or points you miss/ignore. So make sure you have at least something to say about every main point your opponent has

Question-Flow Judge- Apply all tips from the Flow Judge, but add this: During crossfire, keep clarification questions to a minimum. This is your chance to directly confront your opponent, and this judge will be paying specific attention, so don’t waste this opportunity.

The Politician- This judge isn’t actually a politician. They’re the judges that have a very strong political leaning and tend to agree with whichever debater is most closely defending their point of view, regardless of who is making better arguments. So if you find yourself on the opposite of their beliefs, your case had better be rock solid. Spend most of your time attacking you opponent’s case, punching holes in every weak spot. Planting even the slightest inkling of doubt in this judge’s mind may make all the difference.

The Recently Graduated Former Competitor- You might even know this judge personally from previous years, but if not, don’t fret. Knowing what they competed in will be of the utmost importance. If they did PF, they’ll be most sensitive to legitimate sources and logical arguments. If they did LD, they’ll want a solid value/criterion pair. If they did CX, I’m so sorry. Just do your best. And if they did Interp events, they want something fun and exciting. So don’t be afraid to make dramatic statements (if you can back them up even a little), and don’t worry so much about being “professional”. Joke, smile, laugh, and be merry, but don’t forget you’re here to make a point.

The Expert- Often, coaches will know people who are experts in current debate topics and ask them to come judge. If they give oral critiques, their feedback can be priceless. But be very careful the assertions and links you make with the topic. Just like with the Seasoned Veteran, BS will not fly, so don’t even bother.

The Sulk- This judge might also fall under the “CX” judge category, but it might also just be a random community member or teacher that hasn’t seen any good debates so far and isn’t impressed with the turnout. So I only have three tips for you: use voice inflection to keep them from being lulled to sleep by your monotone, ask smart, direct questions during crossfire, and for God’s sake, don’t be stupid.

Other general tips for dealing with any judge:

Talk distinctly and confidently, but don’t rush. You’ve got plenty of time.
Ask your judge for their paradigms (what the judge looks for in the round)
Be polite. I don’t care how frustrating your opponent is. Keeping your cool looks good to any judge. And smile, girls especially. When boys get aggressive, no one cares, but when girls do, we’re immediately labeled as a word that isn’t very nice. As my old coach always says, “kill them with kindness.”
Even if the judge is a novice, don’t patronize them. They don’t have to know you’re dumbing it down for them.
Don’t pull the “my honorable judge” crap. No adjectives. Just call them “judge”, or I will personally hunt you down.
Don’t move around too much. No pen tapping or feet shuffling, and for goodness sake, don’t walk around to the front of the podium and approach the judge’s table during your speech. Also, don’t sit in front of the table for your final constructive. Leave your pompous habits outside.
Don’t talk or make angry noises during your opponent’s speech. You get your own time to respond. It looks unprofessional, and what are you, five?
Clarify time signals (or the lack thereof) before your first speech. I have been screwed over more times than I can count because I forgot this.
Be organized. Otherwise, no one knows what’s going.
Be tactful. My old PF partner lost us a round, at state no less, because of inadvertent racism. (Remind me to tell you that story sometime)

Bri Castellini is a college IPDA debater, blogger, and denizen of Twitter.

the threat of snow

2011-01-11T16:13:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite perpetual headlines around these parts is "School activities canceled due to threat of snow." Today's variation:

The threat of a snowstorm in the South Sound prompted Saint Martin’s University officials to cancel evening classes at the private college’s Joint Base Lewis McChord campus. For more information about school closures in the region, go to schoolreport.org.

Which is to say, not only can snow incapacitate education, but it's also an effective deterrent.

the burden of proof

2011-01-10T06:59:00.000-08:00

By Guest-Blogger Bri Castellini

I debated Public Forum all of my junior year of high school with my best friend and now Marine Corps soldier Bart. (His actual name is Taylor, but that's kind of boring, dontcha think? So I never called him that.) Now, Bart is a smart guy, but lazy, so naturally the partnership didn't end well, although somehow the friendship is still going strong. His biggest complaints about me as a partner were that I never really got out of debate mode, which I admit is true, and that I was too invested in it, which is also true. Now all I have to do is say the words “burden of proof” to warrant an angry scowl.

But I love the burden of proof defense, so much in fact that I use it in day-to-day conversations (which is why Bart hates it so much). I just wish that someone had taught me to use it properly earlier on. This may just be old new to a lot of you seasoned debaters, but maybe not.

For instance:

Person 1: I think we should do -insert plan of action here-

Person 2: Can you prove it will be effective?

Person 1: Can you prove it won't?

If you don't already want to strangle Person 1, I commend you. This is exactly where the burden of proof defense would come in.

Person 2: I don't have to, because it was you that made the claim, so it becomes your burden of proof.

We've all had that one debate round where your opponent is making all sorts of ludicrous claims that the judge is just eating up and you don't have specific evidence to block out. It's a frustrating situation, especially when you just know your opponent doesn't have any evidence to support his claims. So that's when you pull out the good old burden of proof defense. If your opponent can't support his claim, then he's done your job for you and you don't have to ruffle your evidence folder at all.

Be careful, though. For judges, PF or LD debaters often get parents, teachers, and random community members who aren't necessarily familiar with debate jargon. Unless you know your judge is a former competitor or coach, clarify what you mean by “burden of proof” when pulling it out of your arsenal. Make sure there is absolutely no way the judge can misunderstand the exceptional point you're making. Trust me, I've had rounds where the judge didn't understand my -ahem- clearly superior arguments and I lost because of it.

How this post can directly relate to the most recent resolution?

Resolved: In the United States, juveniles charged with violent felonies ought to be treated as adults in the criminal justice system.

On the Aff side, it's possible that people will try to run something regarding how the adult criminal justice system recognizes more individual rights than the juvenile system, but I doubt they'll have a lot to back that up. (I recently practice debated a good friend who made this claim, but because she couldn't give me an example of what rights juveniles are normally not given past a “due process” quote, the argument was shaky).*

On the Neg side, I think you might actually run into some psuedo-counter plans that you can use this defense against. Example: Violent juvenile offenders should be tried in a court separate from both adult and regular juvenile courts, so that the punishment can include the juvenile-favored rehabilitation while also being more severe than a general juvenile sentence (But, obviously, not nearly as severe a punishment as for adults). This is all well and good, and if you can support this with good, clear evidence, awesome. But if you're Aff and having to defend against this kind of a case, try asking them exactly how they know it will be effective. I don't think there is a lot of evidence to support a system like this, so with the burden of proof you'll catch them off guard.

As for defending your own cases, just make sure you can absolutely defend every claim you make. Have at least two pieces of evidence to support each, even if you don't use them in your actual case. Just having them is plenty to keep would-be “burden of proofers” at bay. Also, make sure that you can defend every claim to one of your friends, as a precaution for novice judges. Jargon is only impressive to your coaches and competitors, but you've got to keep in mind that you're not debating for them, you're debating for the judge.

Speaking of judges... I think I'll write a post about how to debate for each kind of judge you're likely to run into at one point or another. But I don't know when that will appear, because as I write this post I'm sitting in an airport on my way back to college for spring semester. Unfortunately, I won't have as much time on my hands anymore.

Good luck!

Bri Castellini is a college IPDA debater, blogger, and denizen of Twitter.

* Jim's note: The lack of a jury trial is probably the most significant rights-based distinction between the juvenile and adult system. Of course, whether a jury trial protects more individual rights is itself debatable.