Lift Up Your Hearts!

As I said before, I'm not always curmudgeonly.  Here, for your morning's delight, is an inspiring story from the blog, "Et tu?"  What happens when an introverted mother of three children under four, whose only much-needed time for solitude comes when all three kids are napping simultaneously, finds this time interrupted again and again by neighborhood pranksters who repeatedly ring her doorbell and run?  No, this is not a sordid tale of mass murder; I said it was a happy story.

Read the What first, then the How (with further details).

The curmudgeonly protective part of my nature wants to warn her to keep her eyes open, and let the girls help around the house but never leave them alone with her children; I've heard too many horror stories of irreparable damage done to innocent children by street-wise kids from troubled homes.  With that caveat, it's a wonderful story, and a glimpse of what neighborhoods used to be like, back in the day when "that house" was "those houses."

Though it's hardly the main point of the story, I love this paragraph:

A while back I took a Birkman test, a personality inventory renowned for its accuracy, and on a scale of 1 - 100 with 100 being most extroverted, I was a 1. One. Uno. It doesn't mean that I don't like people, but that being around others is exhausting for me. As the test administrator put it, "You need introvert time where you don't have to be 'on' like normal people need air."

I've quoted many times the statement that both extroverts and introverts like people and enjoy their company, but for the latter, interacting with a crowd (even a small one) is usually a net loss of energy, while for the former it is generally a net gain.  We introverts like being with people, but it drains us, and we need time alone to recover.  When challenged on a source for that idea, I couldn't come up with a source, but here's evidence that it wasn't just my own invention.

Here's a scary article for you:  Emily Gould's Exposed, from the May 25, 2008 New York Times Magazine.  Andrew Keen (The Cult of the Amateur) would definitely appreciate this story of one woman's venture into a world of publishing unfettered by editorial oversight and subsequent free-fall into the Dark Side of Blogging.

I slumped to the kitchen floor and lay there in the fetal position. I didn’t want to exist. I had made my existence so public in such a strange way, and I wanted to take it all back, but in order to do that I’d have to destroy the entire Internet. If only I could! Google, YouTube, Gawker, Facebook, WordPress, all gone. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed for an electromagnetic storm that would cancel out every mistake I’d ever made.

Another sad story about a naïve teenaged girl molested by someone she met on MySpace? Not at all. Just an imprudent adult woman seduced by the delights of seeing her thoughts in print.  Scary.

In a previous post, which was primarily about something else so I won't link to it here, I said:

Having experienced the higher-level coinage of Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, and the European Union, I wish the United States had the sense to supplant (not just supplement) the dollar bill with dollar coins.  (And maybe the $2 and $5 bills while we're at it.)  But the mountain of paper used to print dollar bills comes from Massachusetts, where the Crane Paper Company has a stranglehold monopoly on the business.  The $1 bill has a lifespan of under two years and represents about 45% of the U. S. currency production, so it's no surprise that Massachusetts politicians don't like dollar coins.

I've mentioned the idea of getting rid of the lower-denomination bills in favor of coins, and while women generally don't seem to mind, I am likely to get a negative reaction from men.  I think this is because women's wallets almost always have a place for change, but men's wallets rarely do.  Porter carries his change in a small coin purse (something like this) which keeps the coins handy and protects his pocket.  But most men I've talked with tend to keep their change loose in their pockets and then dump them in a jar or on a dresser at the end of the day.  This system works because our coins are worth so little.

(Back when I was little and our coins were worth a lot more, this system was a boon to children, who would comb couches and chairs for change that had fallen out of men's pockets.)

Needless to say, these men are less than happy with the thought of heavy coins jangling in their pockets instead of light, thin bills in their wallets.  I can see their point.  However, I know that Europeans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders (and no doubt people from other countries) manage quite well with higher denomination coinage instead of bills.  So my question is, What's your secret?  How do you handle change?

(I'll admit I only know of one European male who regularly reads this blog and can be counted on to be generous enough to comment, but there are others who occasionally stop by, and I figure the women probably know something about it, too.)

Then again, eveyone else seems to have been able to adjust to the metric system and we still haven't managed that, so maybe I shouldn't hold out too much hope.... 

My feminism tends to be of the on-again-off-again sort.  As a child—thanks to parents who encouraged me—I never considered any good character trait, activity, or occupation to be off limits because of my sex.  I didn't think much about feminism back then; I just acted, becoming the first girl to break the sex barrier in my high school's stage band, and the only or one of just a few girls in some of my science classes.  This sounds tame and silly from a 21st century perspective, but it was a big deal back then.

When Feminism became a movement, however, I soon had to distance myself from it, largely because it distanced itself from me.  I was (and am) all for equality of opportunity—as much as is physically possible; I don't ever want to see men getting pregnant—but when Feminism veered into being anti-man and pro-abortion, when it denigrated the role of homemaker and made the two-income family first common and then in some cases necessary, and when it invoked "political correctness" over the very words we speak and even started calling God "Our Mother," that's when I turned away.  Not from my beliefs, which hadn't changed, but from the movement and the label.  Women were now included, and succeeding, in nearly every possible opportunity; it was time, I believed, to give feminism a rest.

Until I found myself for a few years in the company of some people (mostly men) whose view of women was more oppressive than anything I'd known growing up nearly half a century earlier.  Then I realized that even a necessary correction to the movement's faults and excesses (great though they were and are) could send us back too far.  I actually worry less about those men now than I do about the Princess infatuation that little girls are embracing as they did Barbie dolls.  (And still do? I've been out of the scene for a while.)  We're still encouraging our boys to be smart and strong and our girls to be...pretty.

How does one raise boys to be men and girls to be women and all to be intelligent, strong, and competent people?  The impetus for this post was an article I read yesterday in a church bulletin insert, which included this paragraph.

A godly father has a profoundly positive influence on the life of his son or daughter.  He teaches his son the importance of self-control, respect for women, the value of work, and healthy risk taking.  He affirms his daughter's femininity by expressing his appreciation for her as a woman.  Dads, keep these thoughts in mind as you nurture healthy gender identity in your children.

Excuse me? The best a father can do for his daughter is to appreciate her as a woman?  I thank God my father did a lot more for me than that!  Self-control, respect, the value of work, and healthy risk taking are things we all need to learn—not just half of us.

I do believe boys need to be taught how to be good men, and girls to be good women, and that these roles are not identical.   But could we please find a way to make boys into men without putting down girls?  It must be possible to nurture in boys fatherly and protective characteristics without appealing to pride, which generates worse problems.

Any ideas?

The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture, by Andrew Keen (Doubleday, 2007)

It's past time to get this book back to the library; I actually finished it quite a while ago, but have been putting of this post because I haven't known quite what to say.  It's a complex book, probably an important one, but it covers so much territory I'll never do it justice.  The book is far more than a diatribe against amateurism, but I will skip over the sections on Internet gambling, Internet pornography, privacy concerns, and the demise of an iconic record store.  Except for Tower Records—it's hard to mourn the disappearance of something you never knew existed—I'm aware of the other issues and tend to agree that they are, indeed, serious problems.  Whether or not the proliferation of amateur voices is boon or bane is a bit more complex.

Now that I've finished reading the book, I still stand by what I've already said (here, and here), and will add that Keen is right to fear that truth, accuracy, responsibility, and excellence are in danger of being lost in our society, but wrong in laying the blame solely or even primarily on the Internet.

It's true that many people are no longer giving professionals the unquestioned respect, trust, and even obedience they once did. But it is not so much because the Internet lets amateurs speak as because the professionals have proven themselves untrustworthy.

When an article runs under the banner of a respected newspaper, we know that it has been weighted by a team of seasoned editors with years of training, assigned to a qualified reporter, researched, fact-checked, edited, proofread, and backed by a trusted news organization vouching for its truthfulness and accuracy.  Take those filters away, and we, the general public, are faced with the impossible task of sifting through and evaluating an endless sea of the muddled musings of amateurs. 

Most of us assume that the information we take in can be trusted.  But when the information is created by amateurs, it rarely can be.  And the irony in all this is that democratized media wil eventually force all of us to become amateur critics and editiors ourselves. With more and more of the information online unedited, unverified, and unsubstantiated, we will have no choice but to read everything with a skeptical eye.  The free information really isn't free; we all end up paying for it one way or another with the most valuable resource of all—our time.

Anyone who has ever been part of a story reported in a "respected newspaper," magazine, or television news story probably laughed at that first paragraph.  I don't believe any of the many stories I've known first hand has been reported completely accurately, and often the errors are significant.  The need to read everything with a skeptical eye predates the Internet.

It doesn't take much research into factory farming, modern American childbirth practices, the pharmaceutical industry, the politics of university research, the news media, the educational system, and even the music world to realize that professionals are not necessarily good and wise, and often disastrously wrong.  [Keen does not deal with most of these areas directly, but what he says about the amateur vs. the professional applies equally well.]

[E]very free listing on Craigslist means one less paid listing in a local newspaper.  Every visit to Wikipedia's free information means one less customer for a professionally researched and edited encyclopedia such as Britannica.  Every free music or video upload is one less sale of a CD or DVD, meaning one less royalty for the artist who created it.

I'm not at all sure this is true.  I suspect many things are listed on Craigslist that would never make it into a newspaper's classified section, not just because people sell some really weird things on Craigslist but because I think it, like eBay, inspires people to sell things who otherwise wouldn't have bothered.  I'm certain that if online references such as Wikipedia were not available, it would not drive many people to purchase an encyclopedia; their question would simply go unanswered.  Knowing next to nothing about online music an videos I can't say much about the last thesis, but I do know that the availability of free music samples has helped inform my CD-buying decisions, and that I've bought more CDs than I otherwise would have due to being able to have that data.

I do appreciate the availability of Google News, and free online versions of many newspapers, including our Orlando Sentinel.  But that was not what drove us to cancel our subscription of nearly 20 years.  Rather, it was because the Sentinel itself had become unreliable, with more and more opinion being inserted into the news stories instead of confined to the editorial pages, and with factual, informative articles being cut in favor of insubstantial fluff and large pictures.

Becoming a doctor, a lawyer, a musician, a journalist, or an engineer requires a significant investment of one's life in education and training, countless auditions or entrance and certifying exams, and commitment to a career of hard work and long hours....Can the cult of the noble amateur really expect to bypass all this and do a better job?

There's the rub.  Because Keen is right here:  we need the professionals, the ones who will invest their lives and resources in becoming experts in specialized fields, and if the proliferation of amateur works makes it no longer possible for them to earn a reasonable return on their investment, we may very well lose the infrastructure that makes the expertise possible. 

The amateurs are, however, performing an important function.  In my own field of (amateur) genealogy, I subscribe to the Ancestry.com service.  Some people shun commercial sites and believe all information should be freely shared, but I am happy to pay for the work that their professionals have done to gather and make available a tremendous amount of genealogical data.  There is also a section of the site that has been created by amateurs:  a large database of people's own family trees.  This data is not subject to any editorial supervision, is rarely sourced, and is for the most part highly unreliable. I never cite it as a source in my own work, except in a few cases where I have contacted the author and have reason to trust his or her data.  I treat the personal family trees in a much different fashion from other Ancestry information, such as their images of census transcriptions, old newspapers, and books.  Nonetheless, the amateur data has proven many times to be extremely valuable, giving important clues and sometimes great breakthroughs.  Yes, I always need to verify the information, bur without the "collective wisdom" of all those amateurs my search would have been much harder, if not impossible.

I think Wikipedia, amateur news blogs, and the other non-professional works that Keen decries should be approached in much the same way.  Schools are right not to allow Wikipedia citations for research papers, but that doesn't mean Wikipedia isn't a great resource for getting started.  You'll never get a clear view of the news by reading only a right-wing blog, but it can be a useful balance to your local left-wing newspaper, and vice versa.

But he's right: we do need the experts, and we do need to recognize that some reports are more truthful than others, and some opinions more valuable.  What he doesn't say, but what I believe to be the most effective approach to a solution, is that we all need to be better educated, and better trained in logic and discernment.  Give a man a professional opinion and you'll feed his mind for a day; teach him to discern truth from error and you'll feed his mind for a lifetime.

I like academia. I love college campuses, chem labs, and the smell of libraries with old books. Places and institutions dedicated to the advancement of knowledge, to study, investigation, and discussion. In an odd way, I feel more at home on a college campus than in most places. They feel exciting, challenging, and yet as comfortable as a pair of well-worn shoes. That my own college experience differed significantly from my theoretical ideal did not do much to diminish my belief that a college professor had a near-perfect job in a near-perfect setting.

Pausing to let my professor friends recover from their choking fits....

Thirty plus years away from the university experience—if you don't count paying tuition bills—along with a fair amount of reading, and discussions with friends who are college professors themselves, have revealed not only that an academic job is not the halcyon experience I had imagined, but that my view of academia as the ideal of intellectual inquiry is also seriously flawed. A recent article at Inside Higher Ed, entitled Does Academe Hinder Parenthood?, confirms both illusion-shattering discoveries. (Thanks to GroshLink for alerting me to this.)

The comments following the article are as revealing as the article itself, which notes that an academic career significantly reduces one's (statistical) chances of having children.

Controlling for such factors as age, weekly hours worked, and race or ethnicity, male faculty members are 21 percent less likely than male physicians to have recently had a birth in their households. Controlling the same factors for women, those who are academics are 41 percent less likely than physicians to have recently had children.

I was pleased to note that the comments were for the most part several steps more civilized than the usual playground taunts I see in comments to online news articles. However, I also noted a disturbing tendency—which may in itself reveal something about academia's view of children. "I was 36 when I felt free to start procreating," "Not once in non-academic circles have I ever heard mothers referred to as 'breeders'—but I hear it from academics all the time," "fulfilling a biological function," "women have family caretaking pressures IN ADDITION TO reproduction," "the male/female binary couple"—perhaps the writers are merely being academic and precise, but terms like "procreating," "breeders," "biological function," "reproduction," and the redundant "binary couple" all sound cold in this context, and distant from the reality of children and families. When doctors talk about an unborn baby at a certain stage of development as a "fetus," they are being technically correct, but an abortion-rights advocate uses the same term to put distance between that being and the idea of a living, human child. I find it quite likely that the very language with which those in academia are speaking about having children would have a negative effect on their own childbearing decisions.

So too, would the attitude of the commenter who calls himself "ScienceProf."

Of course academia hinders parenthood — it’s hard to be a parent when you work 80-100 hours a week. The question, however, is not whether it hinders parenthood, but whether anything should be done about it.

My answer is a flat out No! We cannot and should not coddle to those who make the decision to have children. When a woman has a child it is her problem, and no one else’s. Why should her colleagues pay the cost of her decision with their time? Why should the department be dragged down by having a member is not producing research? Why should a university be expected lower its standards of excellence?

When I serve on a hiring committee or select graduate students to work in my lab, I don’t want any with children. I know that they will be unable to commit the 80-100 hour weeks that is the standard workload of my department. As a supervisor for tenure-track faculty and graduate students, I refuse to accept lesser productivity due to someone’s choice to have a child. Anyone who has a child must accept the responsibility for their actions.

For those who do choose to have children, it is wholly unfair to expect your colleagues and department to share the burden of your personal decision. Their child is their problem, not mine, nor the department’s.

Even with my less-idealized view of the academy, I trust that attitude is not widespread—though I fear it might be. If it is, the problem goes far beyond whether or not college professors must jeopardize their careers to have families. Such a system would require them to jeopardize their careers to have a life. Even the medical establishment is beginning to learn that one cannot require that kind of work load for any more than a short time period and expect decent, let alone creative, work.

I still love libraries, old books, research, and college campuses, and know that there are schools that come much closer to my ideal than most. I'd love to hear about them!

I recently finished reading a book called The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom.  That's not what this post is about, because while the author, David Kupelian, does have some important insights into how our culture got to be the way it is, his tone is too strident to allow me to recommend the book with particular enthusiasm.  However, he cites his sources well, and thus I am able to give full credit for what is perhaps my favorite part of the whole book, the following great quote from G. K. Chesterton.

Sex is an instinct that produces an institution; and it is positive and not negative, noble and not base, creative and not destructive, because it produces this institution.  That institution is the family; a small state or commonwealth which has hundreds of aspects, when it is once started, that are not sexual at all.  It includes worship, justice, festivity, decoration, instruction, comradeship, repose.  Sex is the gate of that house; and romantic and imaginative people naturally like looking through a gateway.  But the house is very much larger than the gate.  There are indeed a certain number of people who like to hang about the gate and never get any further.

— G.K.'s Weekly, January 29, 1928

It is a great tragedy of our day that we have been all but convinced that the gate is all there is, that the house and fields beyond it are, and have always been, no more than a romantic, imaginative dream—at best.  Perhaps we need a Puddleglum to stamp on the enchanted fire and clear our heads.

Perhaps the strident tone of Kupelian's book is, after all, just the un-enchanting smell of burnt marsh-wiggle.

Don't take my word for it; read about Our Big News in Janet's own words (and pictures).  For the really curious, you can find a link to Stephan's blog there.  Hmmm, her webmaster is going to have to make a change, and move thduggie up from Friends to Family on the sidebar.  And while I'm at it, will IrishOboe change to SwissHarp, or maybe SwissFiddle?  Stay tuned!

In the meantime, I'm contemplating the complexities of having an international family.

Such as figuring out how to type umlauts.  In Word, it's easy—CTRL/SHIFT/colon key followed by the letter, in this case "u"—easy to remember because the colon looks like an umlaut turned 90°.  In HTML, ü translates to ü, and in LifeType one can insert it via the "custom character" button.  (Technically, in LifeType it's called "u diaeresis," but while that may matter to people like Peter, it's a distinction without a difference to me.)  There's also an easy out:  one can write "ue" instead.

Oh, I know there are a few other difficulties, such as no matter where they live, at least one half of the couple is going to be too far away from family.  But I'm not thinking about that (much) now; instead I concentrate on the delightful side, such as having in-family tutors in another culture and several other languages.  It's not all bad to have an excuse to visit Europe.  :)

And have I mentioned that Stephan is a nice guy, that he and Janet seem to complement each other very well, and that he makes her very happy?

I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me.  It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.

— Frodo to Sam, at the end of The Return of the King (J.R.R. Tolkien)

Thanks to Janet reminding me (she'll have to write her own post as to why), I was able to watch NASA TV live coverage of the landing of Phoenix on Mars (and at a much more reasonable hour than she did).  For obvious reasons (the view out our front door) I pay more attention to Shuttle launches than other NASA activity these days, but watching this excitement took me 'way back.  Back to 1969 and the Apollo 11 moon landing...stories from my cousin who worked in the space program...some of the first pictures of the Earth from the moon that were treasured trophies from a Boy Scout (Explorer) program I participated in with General Electric...and even 'way, 'way back to standing on the porch with my father, watching Echo I pass overhead.

Thanks for the memories, Janet and Stephan!

I actually enjoy airplane food, perhaps because I don't eat it all that often.  It's part of the adventure of flying, and something to break up the monotony of a long flight.  But maybe next time I should wave away the attendent with the tempting tray.  Recent research has shown that fasting for about 16 hours can reset the circadian rhythms and speed adjustment to a new time zone.

At least if you're a mouse.

I don't enjoy reporting bad news, really.  It makes me sound old and curmudgeonly.  Okay, so I am old and curmudgeonly, but that's beside the point.  So today I feature an exciting story from the Philadelphia Inquirer:  Midwife Diane Goslin has emerged victorious from a court case in which the State of Pennsylvania accused her of practicing medicine without a license by assisting at home births.  (See my previous post.)  The author of the article, Angela Couloumbis, and the headline writer who created the title, Birthing Women Win Legal Decision understand that this victory is not about one person's profession, but about one of our most basic freedoms:  choosing where and with whom we will give birth to our children.

I could point out that some of the rejoicing may be premature: the State is considering appealing the decision, and the court only dealt with the charge of practicing medicine, not with the problem that Pennsylvania is not among the 22 states in this country that recognize the Certified Professional Midwife license.  There is cause for joy, to be sure, but not for letting down our guard.  But we'll take our victories one at a time, and be thankful for daily bread even if we're not certain of next week's provision.

Anything less would be curmudgeonly.

I don't yet know how I'm voting in the upcoming presidential election, though I do know it will be a matter of the least objectionable candidate rather than some ringing endorsement. Frankly, I find them all objectionable; the question is, Who will do the least harm? So I'm not endorsing any candidate at this point, but as I've said before, Barack Obama scares me because he's so charismatic he might very well succeed in implementing some very dangerous policies.

Tim at Random Observations once again has a thoughtful post, this time on why Obama scares him. Check it out.

I'm chronically bad at making decisions.  Not that I usually make bad ones; actually, most of them end up being pretty good.  But whether the decision is big or small, buying a house or choosing from a restaurant menu, I agonize over each decision and often experience second thoughts as soon as it is made.  Porter tells an old joke about a man ordering dessert:  The waitress informs him that they are offering apple pie and cherry pie, and after considering the matter for a while, he chooses the apple.  A few minutes later she returns to his table and say, "I'm sorry, sir, I forgot to tell you we also have coconut cream pie."  "Oh!" the diner exclaims, "In that case I'll have the cherry."

The point of the joke is the man's irrational behavior in changing his mind after the addition of irrelevant information, but I understand him completely. Coconut cream pie has nothing to do with it.  He couldn't decide between apple and cherry, and when he finally closed the door on the cherry pie, it suddenly seemed the more attractive.  The waitress's return gave him a chance to change his decision.

With that in mind, you can see why I was attracted by the headline of a New York Times article by John Tierney called The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors. It seems I'm not the only one who likes to keep her options open:  In a series of experiments, MIT students playing a game chose to take what amounted to a 15% penalty in their earnings (cold, hard cash) in order to keep unnecessary doors from closing.

The researcher, Dan Ariely, is a professor of behavioral economics at MIT, and at his website, Predictably Irrational, you can find not only this game but others, and much more on the subject of how we often act contrary to our own best interests.  I'm sure some of his experiments violate a research code of ethics somewhere, such as the experiment in which male college students were asked questions about sexual behavior before and after viewing Internet porn sites.  Nonetheless, even that research revealed some unexpected and frightening results.   Ariely has a book by the same name, which I would order from the library if I didn't already have a backlog of five library books pining away in the not-ready-to-be-returned state.

The proper answer, at least as taught in elementary school, is "nothing."  Get yourself out as fast as you can; don't waste time taking anything with you.  Once past that simplistic answer, there are obviously exceptions:  adults, at least, are allowed to take their children with them.  People will take time to look for pets, and I know I would try to grab a few things, such as important papers, laptops, and family photos, even though I'm sure that's officially frowned upon.

Once out, with firefighters on the scene, one can pretty much count on not being allowed back in for anything, even children, as the professionals prefer to do the work themselves without adding another potential victim in need of rescue.

Unless one lives in Germany, where firefighters are currently battling a fire at the home of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.  This is Europe, where classical music and musicians are respected and understood more than in the United States.

Bassoonist Stefan Schweigert said the fire brigade had allowed musicians into the building to remove instruments that had been left in lockers overnight....