Dave Badtke’s Blog

I’m a fan of Fareed Zakaria’s GPS on CNN. He’s smart, he’s a good interviewer, and his show’s guests and his approach almost always teach me something. You can see him on CNN on Sundays or you can find him on the web.

This Sunday he interviewed Felipe Calderon, President of Mexico, who states at one point that 80% of the guns, many of them assault weapons, that have been seized during the escalating drug conflicts in Mexico have come from the U.S. But, he adds, even if you don’t believe this study, which was done 1 1/2 years ago, there are 10,000 gun shops in the U.S. along the border with Mexico. I wonder how this compares to the number of food stores and gas stations.

Zakaria then has a segment on a Saudia Arabian woman poet who’s on a poetry show that’s something like our American Idol except that the contestants recite Bedouin poetry. She’s already been praised for her poetry and she’s the first woman to make the finals — and condemned by fatwas for the ideas she expresses in her poems in a country that still does’t allow women to drive.

Finally, there’s an intelligent discussion between Paul Krugman and Robert Samuelson on the recently passed health care bill. Krugman is at his best in this show when he’s being a Princeton economist with a Nobel Prize rather than a NY Times Columnist, which is his other job. Robert Samuelson is a contributing editor at Newsweek.

Check it out: http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/fareed.zakaria.gps/

This is a picture of Luke and Kaori’s home-office in Tokyo. (Luke, our older son, and Kaori, our daughter-in-law, own Knee High Media in Japan.) The mural was painted recently by HITOTZUKI, a collaboration of two of their friends, Kami and Sasu, who have painted murals throughout Japan and also in Europe.

The forms that Kami paints are inspired by his passion for skateboarding. Luke told me that when they were painting his house, Kami, in creating the design, would move his body as he might when skateboarding. It’s intriguing the way the light and dark curved paths, with Sasu’s flower-like designs drawing attention away from the path, soften and enhance the rectangular rigidity of the building, organically changing the structure into a painted sculpture.

While I've labeled this from the point of view of the reader who over time becomes more or less engaged, the POV can be that of a narrator or character. Indeed, once you understand the concept, you may find yourself applying it in the most inappropriate situations.

Key to my approach to teaching reading and writing to my English students, no matter the level or the focus — expository writing, short stories, narrative poetry, drama — is the checkmark story structure that I came across in Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft when I was trying to understand my fiction and MFA creative writing workshops at Mills College. While most English texts and English professors seem to prefer a narrative approach to plot — we English teachers are, after all, comfortable with words — this graph, which has evolved some since Burroway, appealed to my physicist’s need to see everything mathematically — except, of course, true love.

Fundamentally, the graph displays in emotional space-time that if you (or a character) need to get from point A to D, there will be a bump in your road at B that will make you question your ability to get to your destination until you reach C, when all will become clear.

One might say, if one were sitting in one of my classes, reviewing my approach, that I take this checkmark story structure stuff rather seriously. Too seriously, some might say, in that I sometimes apply it in conversation as well, telling someone who just bared his soul that his conflict was in search of a turning point and moral resolution. As you might imagine, this can be a rather abrupt conversation stopper.

Kurt Vonnegut seems to have had a more whimsical view of this versatile structure as evidenced by an article in the Spring 2010 edition of Lapham’s Quarterly. On his abscissa, time starts with the beginning and ends with the end, which seems appropriate. Instead of the ordinate measuring engagement, his axis goes from ill fortune to

good fortune. Indeed, if one shifts the structure to the POV of a character, fortune seems like the right measure. I especially liked his depiction of a boy meeting a girl, which might be true love. And then there’s Kafka’s Metamorphosis, in which a despondent young man turns into a bug. Less understandable is Vonnegut’s take on Hamlet and truth. For this he decides that it’s impossible to know when fortune is ill or good, so the play has nothing about fortune, ill or good. To attempt to understand Vonnegut’s humorous point, you’ll have to read the article.

Alan Tonelson and Kevin Kearns, both of the United States Business and Industry Council, claim in a column in today’s NY Times that we’re miscounting productivity changes when we fail to incorporate the effects of offshoring. (I didn’t know that this had become a verb, here used as a gerund, but now I do.) In other words, it is frequently the case in our modern world that parts of products are made offshore, this a result of “free trade” policies that encourage, or at least don’t discourage, companies from seeking the lowest production costs independent of national boundaries. And this offshoring can lead to an incorrect calculation of productivity. Consider the following example:

Let’s say I make a paper cup in two steps. In the first I make the paper for the cup in large rolls. In the second step I feed the rolls into a machine that stamps the paper with artwork, cuts it, and folds it into its final form. (I’m thinking of paper cups because as I write this I’m sitting at Rrags coffee shop in Benicia where they make the best lattés with extra foam in the world.) To accomplish these two steps I use 100 workers, 50 for the paper part, 50 for the stamping, cutting and folding part.

But then I decide that I can save money by offshoring the paper-making part to a country where production costs are much less than in the US. Since my paper costs are reduced dramatically and since I really don’t care what happens in some far-off corner of the world where my paper rolls are made, I’ve managed to almost double the productivity of my workers since 50 can now produce the same cups that previously required 100, which is only true, of course, if I don’t count the offshore workers, who may be more numerous than my 50. But who cares?

Of course, I laid off 50 US workers who are now still looking for jobs, collecting unemployment pay for a short time, and who, unless they are young, will probably never be able to recover financially.  But, hey, that’s their problem because we’re a capitalist country that really doesn’t believe that family and community values and caring for one another should extend beyond our family rooms with their big, flat-screen TVs, the production of which was offshored long ago, to the places where we work.

Work is about profit, and if profit and people collide, profit wins.

But I digress. Tonelson’s and Kearns’s point is that there’s something wrong with this calculation of productivity when I lay off 50 workers, offshore my paper production, and then claim that my workers’ productivity has increased by almost 100%:

But what if wages lag because productivity itself is being grossly overstated, especially in the nation’s manufacturing sector? Then, suddenly, a cornerstone of American economic policy would begin to crumble.

Productivity measures how many worker hours are needed for a given unit of output during a given time period; when hours fall relative to output, labor productivity increases. In 2009, the data show, Americans needed 40 percent fewer hours to produce the same unit of output as in 1980.

But there’s a problem: labor productivity figures, which are calculated by the Labor Department, count only worker hours in America, even though American-owned factories and labs have been steadily transplanted overseas, and foreign workers have contributed significantly to the final products counted in productivity measures.

The result is an apparent drop in the number of worker hours required to produce goods and thus increased productivity. But actually, the total number of worker hours does not necessarily change.

This oversight is no secret: as Labor Department officials acknowledged at a 2004 conference, their statistical methods deem any reduction in the work that goes into creating a specific unit of output, whatever the cause, to be a productivity gain. (Italics mine!)

This continuing mismeasurement leads economists and all those who rely on them to assume that recorded productivity gains always signify greater efficiency, rather than simple offshoring-generated cost cuts — leaving the rest of us scratching our heads over stagnating wages.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you that when I laid off 50 workers, I scared the s**t out of the remaining workers. They were so afraid that they would lose their jobs because I might offshore the whole business that I was able to decrease their pay and demand more hours from them. So, actually, my plant’s productivity went even higher. It was off the charts. Did I tell you I made executive vice president with more and better stock options?

Now when my mother comes to visit — I tell you this with all humility, you understand — she couldn’t be more proud of what her son has achieved.

While a no-brainer, it’s nice to have quantitative support for this psychological consequence: turn off violent video games and you’ve increased your child’s chances of being empathetic and ethical:

Exposure to violent video games makes kids more aggressive, less caring, regardless of their age, sex, or culture. That’s the conclusion of a study analyzing 130 research reports that included more than 130,000 subjects worldwide.

We can now say with utmost confidence that regardless of research method — that is experimental, correlational, or longitudinal — and regardless of the cultures tested in this study [East and West], you get the same effects, says Craig Anderson, Iowa State University Distinguished Professor of Psychology.

And the effects are that exposure to violent video games increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior in both short-term and long-term contexts. Such exposure also increases aggressive thinking and aggressive affect, and decreases prosocial behavior.

I don’t mean this as a rhetorical question even though I know you know the answer. But, according to this University of Rochester study, maybe we don’t understand how really, really important Mom is if she was stressed out during her pregnancy, and considering yourself — really — how could she not have been:

Published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, the study represents the first direct human evidence that fetuses exposed to elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol may have trouble paying attention or solving problems later on. But what may be more intriguing is the study’s second finding that this negative link disappears almost entirely if the mother forges a secure connection with her baby.

So the good news for babies to be is that Mom can help repair the damage. On the other hand, if you find yourself unable to concentrate and are forever struggling with insoluble problems, maybe Mom’s handy so that you can blame her for not sufficiently connecting with you when you were a baby. I’m sure she’ll appreciate the feedback, especially if you just moved back home to live with her because you lost your job or are trying to save money to pay off your student loans.

In The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life, Alison Gopnik writes that “Children and adults are different forms of Homo Sapiens”, this from a review of the book by Michael Greenberg in the March 11 issue of the New York Review of Books:

For one thing, the prefrontal lobe, which has a major part in blocking out stimuli from other parts of the brain and fostering internally driven attention, is undeveloped in young children, and doesn’t fully form in most people until they are in their twenties. Internally driven attention, cognitive research suggests, isn’t a capacity that children fully acquire until at least the age of five. What arouses them is what is in front of their eyes, the first burst of information about cause and effect in the physical world.”

Because of this rather direct link between the physical world and experience, an infant’s perception may be something like ours when we suspend our disbelief and become emotionally engaged in a movie or play. Certainly this is not surprising on some level, for we know we are acting most childlike when we play imaginatively or when we’re able to drop our defenses, built up through years of adolescent and adult training, and experience something new as a child, who’s seeing so much for the first time, might. Now, it appears, there’s increasing quantitative evidence to support our suspicions. But these data go further by suggesting that morality may be different from what Piaget and others thought:

There is a complicated interplay between rules and morality in young children, a sophisticated sensitivity to intention when rules are broken, and a subtle appreciation that some rules are important, others less so. Moral knowledge, Gopnik argues, is imaginative knowledge, a direct outgrowth of empathy, which babies seem to experience in some form or another from almost the moment they are born.”

While babies certainly have original emotions, they also learn by imitating the joy and sorrow of others. When we smile at a baby, we expect at some point to see that smile mirrored. Perhaps the same is true of sadness though we more often than not try to hide this emotion from children. Gopnik speculates that babies may not see the difference between their emotional reactions and the world’s:

It’s possible that babies literally don’t see a difference between their own pain and the pain of others. Maybe babies want to end all suffering, no matter where it happens to be located. For them, pain is pain and joy is joy. Moral thinkers from Buddha to David Hume to Martin Buber have suggested that erasing the boundaries between yourself and others in this way can underpin morality. We know that children’s conception of a continuous separate self develops slowly in the first five years.

However, because of their ability to empathize, children can also quickly pick up discriminatory behaviors as when they learn to exclude rather than include others because “a tiny, arbitrary distinction becomes a reason for enmity. Children as young as three can refuse to play with another child because of the color of her hair or the clothes that he’s wearing.

While there’s much that I’m skipping in the review, I want to jump to the concluding thought which seems to capture a difference between the Chekhovian concept of description, in which one connects to a narrative along a zoomed path that focuses on details, to the less focused observation often associated with non-narrative poetry and Zen-like ideals:

The Philosophical Baby is both a scientific and romantic book, a result of Gopnik’s charming willingness to imagine herself inside the consciousness of young children. She compares “the lantern consciousness of childhood…to the spotlight consciousness of ordinary adult attention.” With lantern consciousness “you are vividly aware of everything without being focused on any one thing in particular. There is a kind of exaltation and a peculiar kind of happiness that goes with these experiences too.”

Gopnik likens lantern consciousness to Romantic poetry, the uninhibited receptiveness that is the artist’s ideal, and the Zen ideal of “beginner’s mind” where the meditator relinquishes attachment to his inner “I.” “Babies, like Buddhas, are travelers in a little room,” she writes. Lantern consciousness provokes the feeling that “we have lost our sense of self…by becoming part of the world.”

So, it seems, we make it past five years of age, enter first grade, then second. On and on we struggle to organize our identity and our lives, but may only find ourselves most in touch with ourselves and others when we return to a mental state that is similar to a period that we can no longer remember, but that we sense when we’re with a baby who searches our face and smiles.

I hope you had a great winter break and am looking forward to working with each of you.

Look to the right for links to my Solano classes ==>

In my English classes I’m at that point in the semester when we discuss the three fundamental elements necessary to think and write critically about a thesis: description, compare-contrast, and effect-cause. (Until yesterday I would have said cause-effect, but then one of my students pointed out that actually we should say effect-cause since we notice the effect before we look for the cause. Go students!)

To make clear how these three fundamental elements work, consider the current health care debate which has as its thesis something like the following:

Because so many Americans do not have insurance or can’t afford the insurance they have or are surprised to find that the insurance they have doesn’t cover their illnesses or discover when they become ill that they are no longer covered, and because private insurance companies can deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions and because there is too often too little competition between insurers and because medical care has devolved into a profession in which doctors and their patients are no longer the primary focus of health care and because these intolerable conditions obtain right here in these United States of America, the only industrialized nation without universal health care, we, the American people, have decided to reform health care in such a way that all will be covered and that will enable doctors and their patients to focus on staying and getting well.

This is a mouthful I know, which probably, even at this length, has left some important concerns out. It certainly leaves out President Obama’s paramount point in his speech on health care reform that fixing health care is a moral imperative: we need to fix health care because the moral character of our country must extend beyond me to you; each of us is to a degree our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper because we care about others, not just about ourselves.

Ideally, we and our government representatives should critically examine this thesis using the three fundamental elements of critical thinking:

Description: We need to describe in detail each element of the thesis, using evidence as necessary as well as examples and illustrations. We can quote statistics, and certainly we want to hear the horror stories about those who weren’t properly served and about those who died or were injured for life.

Compare-Contrast: We then need to compare and contrast our health care system with others that seem to work better and worse than ours, looking in detail at the moving parts in and design of each.

Effect-Cause: And in each case we need to examine the why of our system as well as of the others. Why does a particular system produce better or worse health care? Why does a particular system cost more or less? (Actually, it seems that there is no system that costs more than ours.) Why do doctors and patients prefer one system over another?

Sadly, much of our “discussion” of health care here in the US is about as far from critical thinking as is possible for a people who have putatively evolved beyond  throwing stones at one another. Shrill cries from some that we are creating death panels, are enabling government to take over medicine, and are constructing a public-option Trojan horse that will lead inevitably to “socialized” medicine in which all will wear gray suits and speak without humor are hardly signs of a rational, critical discussion.

For an antidote to this sad state of affairs and to celebrate critical thinking, see T. R. Reid’s The Healing of America, reviewed by Dr. Abigail Zuger in The New York Times, in which Reid describes health care in the world, compares health care systems, looks carefully at why they work, and examines possible effect-cause solutions to what ails us in the US.

As an English teacher who practiced physics in his previous life, I find the conflict between science and religion odd since a scientist has faith that reason can explain the origin and evolution of the natural world while a theologian reasons that faith in a higher power is a necessary foundation for moral behavior. While the scientist needs to be moral, his science is almost always silent on ethics, and while the theologian constructs his ethics on a reasoned framework of religious beliefs, he does not use faith to engineer a flight from San Francisco to Hawaii nor guide the surgeon’s knife cutting out cancer.

On this controversy I’ve tended to agree with the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould who felt that the argument between science and religion was moot:

But no battle exists between science and religion — the two most separate spheres of human need. A titanic struggle occurs, always has, always will, between questioning and authority, free inquiry and frozen dogma — but the institutions representing these poles are not science and religion. These struggles occur within each field, not primarily across disciplines. The general ethic of science leads to greater openness, but we have our fossils, often in positions of great power. Organized religion, as an arm of state power so frequently in history, has tended to rigidity — but theologies have also spearheaded social revolution. . . . Henry Ward Beecher, America’s premiere pulpiteer during Darwin’s century, defended evolution as God’s way in a striking commercial metaphor: “Design by wholesale is grander than design by retail” — better, that is to ordain general laws of change than to make each species by separate fiat. (From Gould’s essay “Knight takes Bishop”)

Wholesale design, design that reuses fundamental components for economy’s sake while changing external features like the number of eyes and legs and fingers and toes, is the way living creatures have evolved. On the other hand, retail design, for which there is no scientific evidence, would focus considerable and unique effort on creating different species. A  PC and Mac, two significant retail developments, started out completely differently. While they both leveraged computer technology, they used different hardware and ran different software. It’s only over time that the two became more alike than different as efficiencies and competition forced them to become similar rather than different.

Evolution, however, works in the opposite direction. Built from shared DNA blocks, life started out the same and gradually became different as genetic variations and natural selection worked their way to our current time. As a result, there’s no chance now that an ant will become a human even though both share DNA that started on its evolutionary journey some 3.5 billion years ago, about one billion years after Earth formed.

Given the clear scientific evidence for evolution that is as solid as the evidence supporting physics and biology, it was a mystery to me why evolution is such a controversial topic in the US. Certainly there are scientists who approach their field with a theologian’s zeal, claiming that anyone who is religious is a nut job, and there are theologians who feel that faith can explain the natural world, claiming that anyone who denies the guiding hand of God(s) is a nut job, but such extremists should, for the most part, be ignored since they pronounce on rather than participate in the science-religion dialog.

This conflict was a mystery until I came across Robert Wright’s essay in The New York Times in which he references theologian William Paley’s claim, made a few years before Darwin’s birth, that a watch is like a living creature, like an ant. And since a watch is designed, so must be an ant. Here’s an extended quote dealing with the controversy and Paley.

But believers aren’t the only ones who could use some adapting. If there is to be peace between religion and science, some of the more strident atheists will need to make their own concessions to logic.

They could acknowledge, first of all, that any god whose creative role ends with the beginning of natural selection is, strictly speaking, logically compatible with Darwinism. (Darwin himself, though not a believer, said as much.) And they might even grant that natural selection’s intrinsic creative power — something they’ve been known to stress in other contexts — adds at least an iota of plausibility to this remotely creative god.

And, god-talk aside, these atheist biologists could try to appreciate something they still seem not to get: talk of “higher purpose” is not just compatible with science, but engrained in it.

There is an episode in intellectual history that makes the point. It’s familiar to biologists because it is sometimes used — wrongly, I think — to illustrate the opposite point. Indeed, that use is what led Richard Dawkins, one of the most vocal atheist biologists, to allude to it in the title of one of his books: “The Blind Watchmaker.”

The story involves William Paley, a British theologian who, a few years before Darwin was born, tried to use living creatures as evidence for the existence of a designer.

If you’re walking across a field and you find a pocket watch, Paley said, you know it’s in a different category from the rocks lying around it: it’s a product of design, with a complex functionality that doesn’t just happen by accident. Well, he continued, organisms are like pocket watches — too complexly functional to be an accident. So they must have a designer — God.

As Mr. Dawkins pointed out, we can now explain the origin of organisms without positing a god. Yet Mr. Dawkins also conceded something to Paley that gets too little attention: The complex functionality of an organism does demand a special kind of explanation.

The reason is that, unlike a rock, an organism has things that look as if they were designed to do something. Digestive tracts seem to exist in order to digest food. The heart seems to exist in order to pump blood.

And, actually, even once you accept that natural selection, not God, is the “designer” — the blind watchmaker, as Mr. Dawkins put it — there is a sense in which these organs do have purposes, purposes that serve the organism’s larger purpose of surviving and spreading its genes. As Daniel Dennett, the Darwinian (and atheist) philosopher, has put it, an organism’s evolutionarily infused purpose is “as real as purpose could ever be.”

So in a sense Paley was right not just in saying that organisms must come from a different creative process than rocks but also in saying that this creative process imparts a purpose (however mundane) to organisms.

Certainly both an ant and watch are chemically more complex than a rock, so finding either in a field of rocks and dirt gives one pause. If a watch must be designed by humans, doesn’t it follow that an ant must be designed as well?

This gets to the root of cause and effect, certainly, because what science does is follow the effect-cause chain back as far as it can go without adding variables, like a god, over which it has no control. And so the issue for a scientist is the problem of creating a model that can explain both the ant and human. This is evolution’s accomplishment, but this is not to say that nature is not designed. Coming across a watch lying next to an ant colony causes us to ponder both the workings of the watch and the complexity of the ant colony, created by cooperating insects little bigger than a speck of lint on your jacket. The inspired design, however, is the respective intricacy of the ant colony and human watch. Both are marvels of design, but neither requires the hand of an intelligent designer beyond the ant and human. The purpose, however, is another topic on which, it seems, religion has much to say as it helps us, who are not ants, form ever more cooperative, moral colonies.