Author: readingbyeugene

Is Homework in American Schools Getting Harder and Longer?

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In the latest issue of The Atlantic, Karl Greenfield has a lengthy piece titled “My Daughter’s Homework is Killing Me” on attempting to do his 13-year-old daughter’s homework for one week. Comparing to his past, he is overwhelmed by how much homework is assigned to her daughter on a nightly basis.

I don’t remember how much homework was assigned to me in eighth grade. I do know that I didn’t do very much of it and that what little I did, I did badly. My study habits were atrocious. After school I often went to friends’ houses, where I sometimes smoked marijuana, and then I returned home for dinner; after lying to my parents about not having homework that night, I might have caught an hour or two of television. In Southern California in the late ’70s, it was totally plausible that an eighth grader would have no homework at all.

If my daughter came home and said she had no homework, I would know she was lying. It is inconceivable that her teachers wouldn’t assign any.

What has changed? It seems that while there has been widespread panic about American students’ falling behind their peers in Singapore, Shanghai, Helsinki, and everywhere else in science and mathematics, the length of the school day is about the same. The school year hasn’t been extended. Student-teacher ratios don’t seem to have changed much. No, our children are going to catch up with those East Asian kids on their own damn time.

Every parent I know in New York City comments on how much homework their children have. These lamentations are a ritual whenever we are gathered around kitchen islands talking about our kids’ schools.

Is it too much?

Well, imagine if after putting in a full day at the office—and school is pretty much what our children do for a job—you had to come home and do another four or so hours of office work. Monday through Friday. Plus Esmee gets homework every weekend. If your job required that kind of work after work, how long would you last?

This exchange caught my attention (I hadn’t heard of this cross-disciplinary work being popular in schools):

One assignment had her calculating the area and perimeter of a series of shapes so complex that my wife, who trained as an architect in the Netherlands, spent half an hour on it before coming up with the right answers. The problem was not the complexity of the work, it was the amount of calculating required. The measurements included numbers like 78 13/64, and all this multiplying and dividing was to be done without a calculator. Another exercise required Esmee to find the distance from Sacramento—we were living in California—to every other state capital in America, in miles and kilometers. This last one caused me to question the value of the homework.

What possible purpose could this serve?, I asked her teacher in a meeting.

She explained that this sort of cross-disciplinary learning—state capitals in a math class—was now popular. She added that by now, Esmee should know all her state capitals. She went on to say that in class, when the students had been asked to name the capital of Texas, Esmee answered Texas City.

But this is a math class, I said. I don’t even know the state capitals.

The teacher was unmoved, saying that she felt the homework load was reasonable. If Esmee was struggling with the work, then perhaps she should be moved to a remedial class.

Worth the read, especially if you’re a parent with kids in K-12.

David Block, the Baseball Archaeologist

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This is a fascinating story in Grantland about David Block and his quest to find the origins of baseball:

Block was coming to the subject of baseball’s paternity not as a historian but as a book collector. “Historians are driven by story and issue,” said Thorn. “David was driven by artifact.” As he scoured eBay in the late ’90s — back before anyone knew what their junk was worth — it was Block’s brainstorm to bypass books about baseball. He was looking for books that mentioned baseball, books historians might have missed. “I always liked to go where no one else was looking,” Block said. His collection grew big enough that he decided to write a bibliography of early texts. The bibliography became a proper book.

In 2001, Block got ahold of a copy of a 1796 German book with the ungainly title of Spiele zur Uebung und Erholung des Körpers und Geistes für die Jugend, ihre Erzieher und alle Freunde Unschuldiger Jugendfreuden. His copy has green and white marbled boards and brown binder’s tape on the spine. An inside page carries the stamp “D. Schaller,” a previous owner. Block ran his finger down the table of contents when he saw a reference:

                    3. Ball mit Freystäten, das engl. Base-ball

A translation confirmed what Block suspected. Here was a reference to baseball 32 years before the first literary reference to rounders. And the German book, by J.C.F. Gutsmuths, wasn’t the only example. The 1744 A Little Pretty Pocket-Book mentioned baseball. So did a letter of one Lady Hervey of England, from 1748. Even Jane Austen included the word “baseball” in her novel Northanger Abbey, which was published in 1818. If baseball had descended from rounders, Block wondered, then why did baseball keep popping up in the historical record before rounders?

Block began to get a little nervous. The historian Thomas Altherr, who talked to Block during this period, said Block was worried he was imposing on the work of others. For Block had confirmed that both the Doubleday theory was bunk. But he had also discovered that the rounders theory was bunk. Everything we knew about baseball’s parentage was wrong.

A reference to baseball, according to Block, can be traced as early as 1755:

In 2007, Block was on a computer terminal in the British Library in London. He came across a comic novel called The Card, by John Kidgell, which was published in 1755. He found this passage:

… the younger Part of the Family, perceiving Papa not inclined to enlarge upon the Matter, retired to an interrupted Party at Base-Ball, (an infant Game which as it advances in its Teens, improves into Fives, and in its State of Manhood, is called Tennis.)

On English baseball: 

Block offered an alternative proposal for baseball’s paternity. It was both simpler and more complex than any previous theory. First, Block said that baseball had descended from … baseball. What the authors of the BA’SEBALL dictionary entry and John Kidgell and William Bray and Jane Austen were describing was a primitive version of the game played in English fields. Block calls this English baseball.

And how was this English baseball played? Block offers that there were no bats (players used their hands), and that the game was social rather than competitive/athletic:

There were bases of some unknown counting. The pitcher threw to the batter underhanded. The fielders tried to catch the ball on the fly or retrieve the ball and throw it and strike the runner when he was off base.”

Fascinating throughout.

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Note: If this topic piques your interest, Block wrote a book called Baseball Before we Knew It that has stellar reviews on Amazon.

Do Humans Pick Friends Who Have Similar Genetic Makeup?

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Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, in a recent paper titled “Friendship and Natural Selection,” make an interesting hypothesis: that we select friends who have similar genetic makeup as ourselves. The dataset used was the famous Framingham Heart Study. From their abstract:

More than any other species, humans form social ties to individuals who are neither kin nor mates, and these ties tend to be with similar people. Here, we show that this similarity extends to genotypes. Across the whole genome, friends’ genotypes at the SNP level tend to be positively correlated (homophilic); however, certain genotypes are negatively correlated (heterophilic). A focused gene set analysis suggests that some of the overall correlation can be explained by specific systems; for example, an olfactory gene set is homophilic and an immune system gene set is heterophilic. Finally, homophilic genotypes exhibit significantly higher measures of positive selection, suggesting that, on average, they may yield a synergistic fitness advantage that has been helping to drive recent human evolution.

So the interesting question is why would this happen? The arXiv blog goes into possible explanations:

Perhaps the genetic links are simply a reflection of this common background. Not so, say Christakis and Fowler. The correlation they have found exists only between friends but not between strangers. If this was a reflection of their common ancestry, then the genomes of strangers should be correlated just as strongly. “Pairs of (strictly unrelated) friends generally tend to be more genetically homophilic than pairs of strangers from the same population,” they point out.

There are certainly other processes that could lead to friends having similar genomes. One idea that dates back some 30 years is that a person’s genes causes them to seek out circumstances that are compatible with their phenotype. If that’s the case, then people with similar genes should end up in similar environments.

Personally, I don’t buy this:

There may be another mechanism at work. One idea is that humans can somehow identify people with similar genetic make up, perhaps with some kind of pheromone detector. Indeed, Christakis and Fowler say that some of the genes they found in common are related to olfaction, a discovery they describe as “intriguing and supportive”.

While interesting, I’m not entirely convinced of the overall findings and would be curious to see this study expand. What do you think?

On the Dominance of Long in the Age of Short

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We live in the age of the short attention span. In this piece in Esquire, Tom Junod reconciles our appreciation for the long form, and argues that long forms of media (television shows, longreads, books) are not contradictory phenomena but rather connected elements:

It is one of the paradoxes of our age: We complain that we don’t have any time. Our storytellers proceed as if we have nothing but. Our directors seem incapable of making a movie less than two and a half hours long, our novelists of writing a book less than 400 pages. And Stephen King, who was once our Brothers Grimm, is now our Dumas, asking if books 1,000 pages long can still properly be called potboilers. In journalism, what used to be characterized as “narrative” or “literary” or “new” journalism is now described simply as “long form,” as if length were the trait that supersedes all others. The magazine article, always a supremely elastic form, has at once shrunk into the “listicle” and expanded into the “Kindle Single” or the “Byliner Original” or the “interactive” multimedia extravaganza designed not to be read but rather experienced in a variety of ways, depending on how much time we have and how much we are willing to give — with time, indeed, the constraining variable instead of simply length.

There is some inflation here, to be sure — nobody has ever watched a superhero movie wishing it were longer, and rare is the journalist who hasn’t faced the challenge of the digital era by thinking that at least he no longer has to face the challenge of compression. But taken as a trend, the persistence of long form at a time when it’s been declared dead is a hopeful thing, not a trend at all but evidence that humans, as a race, are at last learning how to take our own complexity into account as we stumble into infinity, digital and otherwise. And nowhere is the appreciation of our own complexity better demonstrated than in the vast and vastly ambitious story cycles that have come to dominate television. Breaking Bad, Homeland, Game of Thrones, et al.: These, like the bottom-scraping reality shows that provide their counterpoint, show how the collapse of one business model (network television) and the rise of another (cable) inevitably change the way stories are told, for better and for worse. The plight of a genius driven to fashion a story that not only imitated but also replicated the rhythms of real life made for, in Synecdoche, New York, a terrible movie; but something like the same ambition — or the same opportunity — has made for historically great television… television, indeed, that does what movies no longer deign to do, which is tell us something essential about ourselves.

Excellent.

The Best Hidden Features in iOS 7

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I’ve upgraded to the latest operating system, iOS 7, on my iPad. I have yet to do so on my iPhone as I don’t have enough free storage space (3+ GB). As I was playing around with the new interface, I found The Verge’s post on the best new hidden features in iOS 7 quite handy.

The best feature? You can give Siri an elocution lesson:

If you’ve got an unusual name, or have friends with rare surnames, you’ve probably laughed at Siri’s innate inability to pronounce words that aren’t in the dictionary. Now you can call out when words are mispronounced and train Siri to say them correctly. Just say “that’s not how you pronounce that,” run through a short exercise, and Siri should get things right from then on.

I also like that you can find exactly when a text message was sent:

One of the most infuriating things about Messages in iOS is its lack of regular timestamps. Rather than giving you a time for every message, it’s always periodically defined the beginning of a conversation with a timestamp. In iOS 7, you can check on the exact time every message was sent and received by swiping message bubbles to the left.

 

Auto-Brewery Syndrome: Making Beer in Your Gut

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A 61-year-old man — with a history of home-brewing — stumbled into a Texas emergency room complaining of dizziness. Nurses ran a Breathalyzer test. The man’s blood alcohol concentration was a whopping 0.37 percent, or almost five times the legal limit for driving in Texas. However, the man denied having had any alcoholic beverages that night. So what happened?

Turns out he has a rare condition in which his gut is lined with an over-abundance of brewer’s yeast, which would make alcohol (ethanol) when he consumed carbohydrates. NPR details:

The patient had an infection with Saccharomyces cerevisiae…So when he ate or drank a bunch of starch — a bagel, pasta or even a soda — the yeast fermented the sugars into ethanol, and he would get drunk. Essentially, he was brewing beer in his own gut. Cordell and McCarthy reported the case of “auto-brewery syndrome” a few months ago in theInternational Journal of Clinical Medicine.

Brewer’s yeast is in a whole host of foods, including breads, wine and, of course, beer (hence, the name). The critters usually don’t do any harm. They just flow right through us. Some people even take Saccharomyces as a probiotic supplement.

But it turns out that in rare cases, the yeasty beasts can indeed take up long-term residency in the gut and possibly cause problems, says Dr. Joseph Heitman, a microbiologist at Duke University.

Fascinating!

Calico: Larry Page’s Venture to Extend Human Life

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TIME has a big feature titled “Google vs. Death” on Google’s CEO Larry Page and his quest to extend the human life with a new company he’s launching called Calico.

At the moment Google is preparing an especially uncertain and distant shot. It is planning to launch Calico, a new company that will focus on health and aging in particular. The independent firm will be run by Arthur Levinson, former CEO of biotech pioneer Genentech, who will also be an investor. Levinson, who began his career as a scientist and has a Ph.D. in biochemistry, plans to remain in his current roles as the chairman of the board of directors for both Genentech and Apple, a position he took over after its co-founder Steve Jobs died in 2011. In other words, the company behind YouTube and Google+ is gearing up to seriously attempt to extend human lifespan.

Google isn’t exactly bursting with credibility in this arena. Its personal-medical-record service, Google Health, failed to catch on. But Calico, the company says, is different. It will be making longer-term bets than most health care companies do. “In some industries,” says Page, who spoke exclusively with TIME about the new venture, “it takes 10 or 20 years to go from an idea to something being real. Health care is certainly one of those areas. We should shoot for the things that are really, really important, so 10 or 20 years from now we have those things done.”

It’s worth pointing out that there is no other company in Silicon Valley that could plausibly make such an announcement. Smaller outfits don’t have the money; larger ones don’t have the bones. Apple may have set the standard for surprise unveilings but, excepting a major new product every few years, these mostly qualify as short-term. Google’s modus operandi, in comparison, is gonzo airdrops into deep “Wait, really?” territory. Last week Apple announced a gold iPhone; what did you do this week, Google? Oh, we founded a company that might one day defeat death itself.

The unavoidable question this raises is why a company built on finding information and serving ads next to it is spending untold amounts on a project that flies in the face of the basic fact of the human condition, the existential certainty of aging and death? To which the unavoidable answer is another question: Who the hell else is going to do it?

Here’s Larry himself in a G+ post about Calico:

That’s a lot different from what Google does today.  And you’re right.  But as we explained in our first letter to shareholders, there’s tremendous potential for technology more generally to improve people’s lives.  So don’t be surprised if we invest in projects that seem strange or speculative compared with our existing Internet businesses.  And please remember that new investments like this are very small by comparison to our core business.

Art and I are excited about tackling aging and illness.  These issues affect us all—from the decreased mobility and mental agility that comes with age, to life-threatening diseases that exact a terrible physical and emotional toll on individuals and families.  And while this is clearly a longer-term bet, we believe we can make good progress within reasonable timescales with the right goals and the right people.

I think this is a huge venture and I wish Larry Page and the team success. I’ll be following closely on the development of Calico.

Facebook “Like” Feature Is Protected Speech under the U.S. Constitution

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The case is Bland v. Roberts, 12-1671, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (Richmond), reported by Bloomberg:

Using Facebook Inc. (FB)’s “Like” feature to show support for a candidate in an election is protected speech under the U.S. Constitution, a federal appeals court said.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, issued its ruling today in a lawsuit brought by former employees of a sheriff’s office who said they lost their jobs because they supported their boss’s opponent, including by endorsing a campaign page on Facebook.

The appeals court reversed a lower court judge who said that simply clicking the “Like” button on a Facebook page didn’t amount to “a substantive statement” that warrants constitutional protection.

“Liking a political candidate’s campaign page communicates the user’s approval of the candidate and supports the campaign by associating the user with it,” U.S. Circuit Judge William Traxler said in today’s ruling. “It is the Internet equivalent of displaying a political sign in one’s front yard, which the Supreme Court has held is substantive speech.”

In simple terms: using Facebook’s “Like” is protected under the 1st Amendment.

On The Joys of Becoming a Restaurant Regular

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This is a wonderful piece by Frank Bruni (former restaurant critic for The New York Times) on the joys and pleasures of becoming a regular at your local restaurant:

I’m no monogamist, that’s clear. More of a polygamist, but I dote on my sister wives. I’ve come to see that the broccolini isn’t always greener on the other side of Houston Street, and I’m here to sing what’s too seldom sung: the joys of familiarity. The pleasures of intimacy. The virtues of staying put.

What you have with a restaurant that you visit once or twice is a transaction. What you have with a restaurant that you visit over and over is a relationship.

Great point here about the smiles:

[T]he smiles you get from hosts, hostesses and bartenders who know you are entirely unlike the smiles from ones who are just meeting you. They’re less theatrical, less stilted, warmer by countless degrees.

I love this addendum from Jason Kottke:

This is a totally minor thing but I love it: more than once, I’ve come in early in the evening, had a drink, left without paying to go run an errand or meet someone somewhere else, and then come back later for another drink or dinner and then settle my bill. It’s like having a house account without the house account.

I haven’t yet made any nearby restaurants a regular for me, but now I am really tempted to pick one or two.

Is Vladimir Putin the Richest Man on Earth?

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An interesting report at Bloomberg on the wealth that Vladimir Putin has accumulated via his stakes in Russian companies like Gazprom and Surgutneftegaz:

The media reports, which often cite one another, ultimately tend to rely on one primary source: a November 2007 interview given by a prominent member of Moscow’s chattering classes, Stanislav Belkovsky, to the German daily Die Welt. In the interview, he claimed that Putin “controlled” 37 percent of the oil company Surgutneftegaz and 4.5 percent of natural gas monopoly Gazprom. The $40 billion estimate of Putin’s fortune was simply the 2007 market price of these stakes.

“And these numbers are substantiated?” Die Welt journalist Manfred Quiring asked. “These numbers are correct,” Belkovsky replied, and that was that.

Interviewers regularly ask Belkovsky about the $40 billion number. “That figure could now have changed, I believe at the level of $60-70 billion,” Belkovsky told Maeve McClenaghan of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

There has never been the slightest bit of evidence that Putin actually owns stakes in Surgutneftegaz or Gazprom. The Western journalists using Belkovsky as a source either do not know who he is or print his allegations simply because they are colorful. “What game Mr. Belkovsky is playing — and on whose behalf — is unclear,” the Telegraph of London warned in a story copiously citing Belkovsky’s allegations.

If the upper tier estimates are true, then Vladimir Putin may be as rich (or even richer) than Bill Gates, whose estimated worth is around $70 billion.