Oh how times change! I rather doubt that “a piece of 1958 research on how children behave when locked in fridges”:http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/22/4/628 would make it past a modern university ethics committee!

bq. Using a specially designed enclosure, 201 children 2 to 5 years of age took part in tests in which six devices were used, including two developed in the course of this experiment as the result of observation of behavior. Success in escaping was dependent on the device, a child’s age and size and his behavior. It was also influenced by the educational level of the parents, a higher rate of success being associated with fewer years of education attained by mother and father combined. Three major types of behavior were observed: (1) inaction, with no effort or only slight effort to get out (24%); (2) purposeful effort to escape (39%); (3) violent action both directed toward escape and undirected (37%). Some of the children made no outcry (6% of the 2-year-olds and 50% of the 5-year-olds). Not all children pushed. When tested with devices where pushing was appropriate, 61% used this technique. Some children had curious twisting and twining movements of the fingers or clenching of the hands. When presented with a gadget that could be grasped, some (18%) pulled, a few (9%) pushed, but 40% tried to turn it like a doorknob. Time of confinement in the enclosure was short for most children. Three-fourths released themselves or were released in less than 3 minutes; one-fourth in less than 10 seconds. Of those who let themselves out, one-half did so in less than 10 seconds. One-third of the children emerged unruffled, about half were upset but could be comforted easily, and a small group (11%) required some help to become calm.

I’ll bet they did.

H/t Zoe D.

I wrote a short piece on Howard Gardner for the TES this summer. They’ve been running a series on thinkers who have influenced education. I’m not sure why they asked me to do Gardner, but I was glad to oblige (I also volunteered, at my wife’s suggestion, to do Wendy Kopp: coming soon). It was a slightly odd experience, for two reasons. I’ve quite recently gotten to know Gardner, not very well, but well enough to make it a bit awkward if I had a negative assessment of his work (I don’t, far from it). The other is that, whereas I imagine the TES editors assumed that, as an education professor, I would have come across Gardner’s work in the course of my professional life, that’s not true. In fact my dad told me to read his stuff, starting when I was in grad school. My dad is Gardner’s #1 promoter in the UK, so at least I got to know his work the same way many of the TES’s readers did. Here’s the piece (I disavow any responsibility for titles, by the way).

[click to continue…]

I see that David Benatar’s excellent book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence has just come out in paperback. It’s almost enough to make me regret that I am on sabbatical this coming year. In my Contemporary Moral Issues course I always teach abortion as the first topic, because it gets them to read two of my favourite pieces of applied philosophy, Thomson’s A Defence of Abortion, and Marquis’s Why Abortion is Immoral. I also take a bit of time to discuss conceptual space, and used to use the view that abortion is always obligatory as an example of conceptual space that no-one occupies. Now, however, I include chapter 5 of Benatar’s book (Abortion: the ‘Pro-Death’ View) in the course packet. Benatar is a terse, unfussy, and careful writer: the argument is complicated, but the writing is excellent, and it is an easy, and compelling, read. I was annoyed that it first came out in an expensive hardback which I could not, in good conscience, assign, and feared that it would not sell well enough to be paperbacked. So, now I’ll be happy to assign it.

The opening lines give the basic structure of the argument:

Each one of us was harmed by being brought into existence. That harm is not negligible, because the quality of even the best lives is very bad-and considerably worse than most people recognise it to be. Although it is obviously too late to prevent our own existence, it is not too late to prevent the existence of future possible people. Creating new people is thus morally problematic.

[click to continue…]

Obviously, this shouldn’t be taken too, indeed at all, seriously, but I did a little playing around to try to discover which nation did best at the Olympics. I’m told (or at least, I read in the _Times_ the other day) that some US commentators favour an assessment based on total medals won divided by population. Well they would, wouldn’t they? But obviously, some medals are worth more than others and you want to take some account of relative economic development. So here’s what I did: I assigned 7 points for gold, 3 for silver and 1 for bronze and then divided by Gross National Income in $billion (PPP adjusted) as given by the Nationmaster site. GNI is going to vary positively by population and by economic developement, thereby capturing both relevant facts. The GNI figures are probably not completely accurate, and I had to plug in a figure for Cuba. I also discarded all nations that scored less than 50 points (there’s a pretty big an convenient gap below that score). The result is in the table below. So well done Jamaica, and, among the OECD countries, Australia.

On the strength of my mighty “Back to the Futura” post, I got an offer from the Prospect Magazine to review Font. The Sourcebook [amazon]. And so I have. Alas, it is not available to non-subscribers, but you could always run to your local news vendor and clamor for it. Or subscribe. Writing the piece was an amusing sort of pin-the-tail challenge because I wasn’t quite sure what the editor wanted. So I just did my usual la-de-da look-at-me Holbo-style thing. Which, of course, was very sensibly stripped away. No, really. It was for the best. (When you write brief journalism about language in that style, you end up sounding like William Safir.)

The review got entitled “Building A Better Futura”, so I’m maxed-out on Futura-future puns for the rest of the month. I concluded the review by squeezing in a quick note on my ongoing would-Obama’s-poster-have-been-illegal researches. (Executive summary: the Nazis were crazy.) Now I’ll just sweep together a few other bits and scraps that ended up on the cutting room floor. [click to continue…]

Following on from my stock-picking post of a couple of days ago, it appears that the people selling Obama into the convention were right in as much as they didn’t expect a post-convention bounce.

However, the Obama WTA contract was offered around 54 when I wrote the post, and remained at that level all day. CT readers who bought on my advice can now close out at 59.8 and make a quick 10% turn. So at least I haven’t cost you money.

Two points (I realise I’m getting sucked back into a debate I had sworn to give up, but there you go). First, there was no convention bounce in the polls but there was in the IEM numbers. So was there a convention bounce? I think the fact that this question doesn’t obviously have an answer rather underlines the fact that the IEM market prices aren’t giving us very much useful additional information over and above the daily tracking polls (which are themselves not incredibly useful). Second, all the action is in the WTA contract; the vote share contracts have hardly moved at all over the last few days.

Update: I’m now seeing reports of an “8-point convention bounce, which would make the IEM action seem more sensible, albeit at the cost of rather demonstrating how pointless this short-term horse race coverage is.

I’d like to put an empirical claim on the table for discussion. The claim is that people who have never done a significant amount of informal carework, are extremely likely to underestimate the burdens of care. In this claim I include care for small children, severely disabled people, dependent elderly, or any other human being in need of significant amounts of informal caring. And with burdens of care I mean all sorts of burdens – they can be physical, or psychological, or emotional, or another dimension, or (most likely) a mixture of these.

Now, I am not entirely sure where to look for empirical evidence which can confirm, refute or help me to refine or revise this claim. Perhaps in a psychology or sociology of care literature? I have come across plenty of anecdotal evidence, but haven’t come across a study that has investigated this claim in a qualitatively-grounded quantitative way (or a similar claim, perhaps focusing on just one type of care situation). Anyone suggestions for literature? Anyone views on the plausibility of this claim?

From Overheard in New York:

(family stands facing the empire state building)
Tourist son: Mom, which one is the Empire State Building?
Tourist mom: I think it’s the one with the circley top. (points to the Chrysler Building)
Tourist dad: No, honey, it’s the one way out there, on the water.
Tourist son #2: That’s the Statue of Liberty. [To no one in particular:] I can’t believe I’m part of this fucking family.

Interesting choice. My immediate reaction is that it’s a funny old world. We’re guaranteed either an African-American or a woman in the White House next year.

[click to continue…]

Until now, the blogospheric fuss over former TNR diarist Scott Beauchamp has been notable only for the amount of attention paid to disputing utterly trivial anecdotes. But the Beauchamp saga has suddenly and surprisingly collided with the reality of war in Iraq, as Moon of Alabama explains.

I have a suggestion regarding this whole ‘you have to be very careful about criticizing McCain because of the POW thing‘ thing. The next time someone suggests it is inappropriate to say McCain messed up/is confused about X, because this is a man who etc. etc., someone ought to ask whether this will continue to apply in McCain’s Presidency, if he is elected. If he exhibits bad judgment, if we lurch from foreign policy crisis to crisis, if unwise domestic policies are pursued, will there continue to be an unusually high bar against holding McCain responsible for his words and actions? It’s hard to know how to refute a ‘yes, all is excused’ answer, if people really believe he’s got that much credit in the bank, going forward. But if it is ‘yes’, then that seems like a good reason not to vote for McCain. Because we obviously don’t want a President who can’t be held to account for any potential failings or weaknesses.

What this shows up is the rather significant difference between ‘because of what happened to him then, he must be right now’ and ‘because of what happened to him then, we can’t blame him for what’s happening now’. Obviously I’m being all elaborate about it, but it’s the sort of thing that would be easy to implement in sound-bit sized pieces. Just ask Brokaw what he’s actually saying. That McCain must be right? Or that McCain can’t be held responsible for being wrong? If Brokaw responds, as he probably will, that he thinks he’s just commenting on public sentiment – the public will react badly to criticism of McCain – then ask again: does Brokaw think the public thinks McCain must be right? Or that McCain can’t be held responsible?

Over at her own place, Belle suggested McCain ’08 should run with the line, “Let’s Start a Land War in Asia!” But then, in response to comments, she decided on “Let’s Get Involved In Another Land War in Asia!” instead. This is more accurate, but lacks teh snappy. It seems to me that if the canon is “Never Start a Land War in Asia” then McCain really ought to go with “Never Finish a Land War in Asia”.

Well, at least Ponnuru admits he’s not making any counter-argument to the Holbo-Yglesias-Drum line. But if he wants to start saying that people who oppose the Patriot Act must think terrorism is ok, he’s going to need to find some standards of his own. Ours – which he proposes to borrow – are not up to the job.

What can I say to make it clearer? It is possible, I suppose, that McCain opposed Ledbetter because he wanted to see Title VII enforcement enabled in some completely different way. But, absent evidence of this, isn’t it more plausible that McCain – just like some of Ponnuru’s colleagues at the National Review – is ok with least some portions of Title VII being rendered dead letters (the letter ‘k’, at least. As in: “(k) The terms “because of sex” or “on the basis of sex” … ) [click to continue…]

As some of you know, much of my recent work has been funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation through their Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Last week came the announcement about a new competition for projects on participatory learning. Compared to last year’s competition, it’s an expanded initiative thanks to a new Young Innovator’s Award for those ages 18-25 with grants up to $30,000. The Innovation grants will be up to $250,000. The Web site lists last year’s winners, a fascinating mix of projects by academics and non-academics alike. This year, institutions and organizations from some countries other than the U.S. are also eligible (Canada, China, India, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Nigeria, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, UK).

While it is obviously great to get funding for work one wants to pursue, being a MacArthur grantee has come with other benefits. First, the people at the Foundation are very knowledgeable about the areas they fund so they are an important source of information about the substantive questions of interest to one’s work. Additionally, they do a remarkable job of connecting people. Thanks to the folks at MacArthur, I’ve not only made numerous important professional connections, I’ve also developed some wonderful friendships over the years.

Note that MacArthur isn’t administering this competition directly, it’s an initiative of HASTAC. See details here.