A Weblog

This morning, at about 7:30am, just as my train rolled into the the JFK/UMass stop my ears perked up. Across the aisle and to the right of me stood, at least according to my observations, a middle-aged woman, though I’m willing to contend that she was actually much younger than she looked. She was missing her left leg and leaned against a crutches and grasped a bar for support as she pleaded with the man to her left. He was leaving her. In fact, it wasn’t clear that he was ever with her. After all, he had been with eleven or twelve mistresses and girlfriends. Even now he was on his way to meet one of them at South Station.

Why the woman recounted these facts to him, to her, and to the entire car—it was a truly public event—I couldn’t tell. Her voice was both angry and desperate. She wore a cream colored dress plastered over with a bold floral print and bunched up sock and sneaker. It looked like her nice dress, one that she surely prized above herself and brought out only when circumstances were especially proper or dire. “I’m telling you about the past—the past has nothing to do with today,” I heard her say.

Something stirred inside me. I couldn’t tell if I was going to cry or be sick. She clung to her msiguided and unfounded hopes, denying the consequence of her words even as she spoke them. She wouldn’t be happy with him anyway. He maintained his silence throughout her rant. His disinterest was palpable.

The man left at South Station, as planned. The woman continued at him until the very end. “And now you’re going to meet this women who’s had four abortions? You could’ve been with me, and we would’ve conceived right away,” she yelled at him. “And instead you choose this woman who’s had four abortions?” He left without speaking a word.

“Just go around smirking. That’s right, go around smirking,” she launched at one of the passengers once the doors closed and the train resumed its course. I didn’t look up.

She continued past South Station, past Park, past Central, finally leaving at Harvard. But all the while she stared, like the man had before, silently in space.

Yesterday, Michelle, DJ, and I made it to New York in time for last night’s Tool concert despite Mass Pike’s being closed from the 128 Exit all the way through Auburn, at least. I’m not sure why I was there—I didn’t want to see Tool; I didn’t even have a ticket; nor did I intend to get one.—but as I’ve said before, “Danny has no soul, and I have no will.” And that’s probably why I spent from 9-11:30pm alone at the Pig & Whistle on the corner of 58th and 3rd. The Mets were playing the Yankees, but no one seemed to care much. In fact, it was just my luck that I wandered into what may be the city’s only Irish-gay-sports bar. Well, it wasn’t overwhelmingly any of those things. Popular Irish phrases were painted on some of the wooden rafters in Celtic script. And the waitress I chatted up towards the end of the game had come from Northern Ireland. She wasn’t sure of the rules of baseball. I admitted that neither am I. But I did explain that all it takes is one pitch to decide the game. My timing couldn’t've been better. It was the bottom of the ninth with two outs and two strikes. The teams were tied at six runs each. The last pitch let up a double, bumping the Mets up 7-6 to win just as I spoke. Four people cheered. I was one of them. I heard an unemphatic boo. It was time for my new friend to bus a table.

I read that at 11pm the bar was going to host an event which featured “Party Tunes.” I couldn’t guess if this would be worse than the Robbie Williams Millenium they had been quietly pumping during the game. Luckily, the crowd thinned out, giving me hope that I could finally start what I had come to do in the first place: math. All night I had lugged around my backpack, fully stocked with laptop, a few pages from a book on type theory and functional programming, one of my books on general relativity, and the things Michelle thought people might steal from DJ’s car. [Someday I will return her camera and CDs.] All night I had been spying a table by the door. From my view, it was free. When I got there, I saw that the man whom I asked to watch my beer while I stepped outside to talk to Susannah earlier in the night hadn’t quite left yet. It was obvious that I wanted to sit; perhaps it was harder to guess that I wanted to study geometry and not talk to strangers. And so for the next forty minutes we talked about race, the theater, and Harvard. When DJ and Michelle returned, he left immediately. Having only eaten two double cheeseburgers and about three-quarters of a pound of salted cashews all day, I was a little hungry. Not wanting to incur food costs, I forced DJ to dare me to ask for some nachos from the table of girls neighboring us. So I picked out the one who was closest and begged from some food under the pretense of saving my pride over a dare that I had concocted myself. They all thought me very brave and waived to us when we left moments later.

Being from Boston, we had no problem finding free parking on the street. However, in the excitement of the moment, DJ forgot to turn off the fan to the motor in his all-too-custom car. The battery was dead. But ho! I am a platinum-level AAA member. I’m covered for towing up to 150 miles and as many jumps to my battery as I need. The problem is, though, the service isn’t especially prompt. We waived down an unmarked, gypsy cabby who stopped and started us right up. At least we were on our way now.

Perhaps inspired by Harold and Kumar, DJ went out of his way to stop at a White Castle. I knew I would regret it. This morning I was right. Stick to the big three: McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s. There’s no reason to take in local cuisine. Ever. It’ll only make you sick.

Two hours and twenty minutes later, we were back in Boston. By this time the T had started running again, so we dropped Michelle off at a stop convenient for DJ and me and headed home. Rather than spend the following twleve hours on DJ’s couch, I accepted his offer, took his keys and car, and drove home. Now it makes sense to stop a moment to describe DJ’s car a bit more: it’s a 1981 Camaro Z-28 (or something close to that) with T-tops, painted in seven glorious and distinct shades of black, brown, grey, and blue, with a working panel of instruments—even the clock—except for the spedometer, and for some reason it speeds up initially when you put on the brakes. It’s like someone beat up the Batmobile and DJ found the corpse. Not knowing my speed, and without cars in front of me to use as a guage, I tried not to go too fast as I passed a police car waiting at a speed trap in the parking lot of the old golf range. I watched him edge out in my rear view mirror. But he decided against it. Still, DJ drives over two hundred miles averaging about 100 mph and nothing happens; I drive 35 in a 30 mph zone for fourteen seconds and I almost get pulled over. How does he do it?

Today I received an email alerting me to an upcoming, free camp on OPML. Having no idea what in the world OPML might be, I hit up the website and signed up. Now that I’ve poked around a little, I figured out what this new, reputedly hot technology is about: it’s mass RSS! Some of you still might not use the Really Simple Syndication standard yet—by the way, the Berkman Center maintains the RSS standard. Small world.—but if you did, you could check to see if a blog (or podcast or other feed) had been updated without actually having to go there. Microsoft tried doing this sort of thing a long time ago when it first came out with IE 4.0 and its internet channels. Despite the massive amounts of money and time poured into the project, it never really took off with users. [My guess is that bandwidth wasn't up to snuff yet and Microsoft had you download all the pages in the background, resulting in a slow update speed.]

Anyway, OPML lets you make, among other things, neat looking trees that you can fill in with text, RSS feeds, podcasts, and other things I haven’t figured out yet. It’s a general, all-purpose container for stuff you’d find on the internet. OPML, like RSS, is a subset of XML, so all you have to do is match tags. Here’s a sample I made without too much trouble:

Today I am writing because the internet is rife with ways to waste your time and I want to make sure you are abreast of one of the latest from Google: it is Google Trends. View the approximate waxing and waning of a subject’s celebrity by searching Google’s history. This new, meta-search engine will spit back a timeline, label a few of the peaks, and report the geographies where the keywords were most popular, and in which languages. [This feature is normalized, of course.]

Use the comma (,) to compare the popularity of two or more items against one another. For instance, you might want to check out the Yankees versus the Red Sox. Do so by typing “Yankees, Red Sox” into the search box. Use the pipe (|) as a logical “or,” as in “this | that“; and a minus sign (-) to exclude words. Maybe you’re looking for “(-intelligent) design.”

I like to look for obvious spikes jutting out of periods of relative nonactivity. For Susannah, here’s a search for Lawrence Summers. I think ones that are cyclical, unlike the GRE and MCAT themselves, are fun, too.

According to the terms of use, I can’t use any of the Google Trends graphics for commercial use. So please, for my sake, do not buy anything on account of this post.

The dining hall workers at Harvard have, for several decades, been receiving a pretty raw deal. Perhaps in June, when they renegotiate their contracts, things can be improved some. For those of you who aren’t as familar with the situation as you’d like to be, I’ll outline a few of the more greivous details.

• The staff gets paid only six months out of the year. Harvard would tell you they work between nine and nine and a half months each year, and, technically, Harvard would be right. However, whenever the students are on vacation, the College gives the dining hall staff a unpaid vacation. For Christmas, some hall managers force their employees to use up their personal and vacation days over the holiday. Harvard is generous enough to pay wages on Christmas Day, but not for those who work less than 20 hours a week.
• During the summer, Harvard hires out its dining services to about seven hundred contractors. Because their six-month cannot sustain equitable living the entire year, term-time workers have to find another job over the summer in order to survive. Some move cannot afford housing in the summer and must move in with family, sometimes requiring workers to relocate across state lines. Others who are bound to leases must compete with their colleagues for jobs. There is no humane reason for Harvard’s large, summer outsourcing.
• Harvard dining hall worker pay does not respect seniority. After working two years, a worker make the same wages as another who had faithfully served for thirty-five years. And while the cost of living continues to rise, Harvard dining hall workers’ wages have not. Some workers must supplement their full-time jobs at Harvard with one or more part-time jobs even during the school year.

Meetings to organize within the Local 26 and things you can do to help will be announced here in the coming days.

On my way into Town last night, I turned on my favorite NPR affiliate WBUR to hear what was going on in the world. I caught the tail end of After Welfare, a radio documentary by the American RadioWorks on the 1996 federal welfare reform legislation which ceded funding to the states and some of its subsequent effects. The piece closed with a very interesting focus on marriage. Evidently, the bill Clinton signed into law has in it some very specific wording that promotes low-income marriages. The idea runs something like this: two low incomes can provide for a child better than one. In Oklahoma, just over two million dollars pay for one of the more radical programs to result from the shift to the states. It is called the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative.

Aimed at low-income expectant parents, couples volunteer to complete a 12-hour course during which they learn, review, and discuss what it takes to stay in a long-term relationship. I believe much of their time is devoted to ever important communication techniques. It’s hard to know what if any effect OMI and others programs like it will have. And we won’t know for years, but it’s worth trying, I suppose. Studies show that as a group single mothers hold some of the most conservative family values. They believe that being a mother is one of, if not the single most important thing a woman can do. They want a traditional, nuclear family, and the majority [in the study I can't remember below] oppose abortion.

While you may not be suprised to learn that even poorer people don’t want to sabotage their own lives, many critics of the 1996 law were afraid that low income women would have more and more kids in order to up their monthly check from the state at the expense of tax-payers and their hypothetical children. Some ground-breaking research, which I can’t name off the top of my head, in which about 160 single, low-income mothers were interviewed, shows that these women didn’t get married not because they somehow lack morals and values—as others might suggest—but because they revere the institution of marriage as holy. They’re holding out for someone who can provide a stable, healthy environment for them and their kids. The only difference, it seems, between them and their middle- and upper-class counterparts is resources.

Professor Skip Gates of Harvard’s Afro-American studies department recently produced a several part PBS documentary on blacks in America. He found that many boys in impoverished areas grew up to do what their role models did: sell drugs and go to jail. But why? Because they didn’t know what else to do. Why go to school and learn things that might be useful years from now and make no money in the interim when you could sell some drugs and make a few thousand dollars in a few days? The problem of immediate gratification is ruining large portions of society. The sort of education we need here is of the utmost personal kind. It is important that children, as President Bush says, be exposed to as many possibilities as, uh, possible. If a parent tells a child that he can be whatever he wants to be when he grows up, the statement has very little empowering effect if the child can’t think of things to be.

So when I say that these women’s middle-class counterparts have more resources, I intend more than material means; I’m also talking about psychology and education.

If these women believe that motherhood is the highest form of success they can acheive, it’s no wonder that most low-income babies, while perhaps not planned, are purposefully not prevented. Among other things, we need to get more and different kinds role models and mentors to work especially within low-income populations.

Even when presented with alternatives, it’s easy to believe that you’re born into your part in society, that lots are cast. In America, parents reinforce this misconception all the time. When interviewed, American mothers will list innate ability as the single most important factor in determining a person’s long-term success. Chinese and Japanese mothers, on the other hand, choose effort and persistance. As a result, American children can easily believe that those things which come easy to them are the things that are meant for them, and the stuff that’s hard isn’t. Again, pretty unsuprisingly sociologists suspect that one reason kids join gangs is a thirst for immediate gratification. Gangs will get you where you want to be fast.

And that’s why good math education is so crucial. (I could see you waiting for it, so I won’t disappoint.) Math is the sort of subject that requires lots of forethought and whose reward is delayed gratification. Of course good mathematical training won’t cure all of society’s ills, but [because this post is already long I'll keep this brief and end abruptly claiming wildly that] the psychology of mathematics couldn’t hurt.

Today I went shopping for suspenders to wear to a formal event tonight. Macy’s is having a sale, and I have a friends and family coupon good for an additional 20% savings. However, their selection, at least in the one I was at—a newly converted Filene’s—had a limited selection none of which was to my liking. Earlier this week DJ and I had scoured the nearby Filene’s Basement in search of business casual wear for him for his uncle’s retirement party. While there I had spotted a rack of suspenders, the sort that conjure images of staunch bankers lounging in leather arm chairs and top hats centered about a blazing fire in den smoking cigars. Since that’s the sort of horrible old man I’d someday like to be, I went back and found myself a handsome pair of goldenrod silk with black leather fittings.

Now I had assumed, wrongly, that the brass clasps displayed on the front hinted to metal fasteners hiding under the packaging. When I got them home and discovered empty leather loops, I was confused and a little bit anxious. The dance starts in less than an hour, at 9pm. Frantically, I patroled the internet, using Google as my search dog. After looking at more hunting sites than I expected, I discovered that there are at least four types of suspenders: clip, button, hook, and Perry. Button suspenders, like the type I now own, require buttons to be sewn onto the pants. These, I guess, are for those who are confident that they will wear suspenders and wear them frequently.

Now, I’m not sure just how I was supposed to know about the finer interworkings of suspender mechanics. It’s not well documented, not even on the internet. I had to infer the various types based store front pages like this one and this one at Hanks Clothing. [Notice the category "Rugged suspenders."]

Because of the numerous hits to hunting websites in my searches, I called up Michelle, who, being from Maine, may have more experience hunting and therefore more experience with suspenders than I. She was at an art gallery for a wine tasting and didn’t know anything about my mysterious loops.

Not yet thwarted, I left a somewhat urgent message for Susannah. When she called me back, she immediately asked, “They’re not the kind you need to have buttons on your pants, are they?” How could she have known; where does one acquire such knowledge? Susannah explained that when she was young she had a doll of one of the characters from the Little House on the Prairie who wore such suspenders. I, who never had a Prairie doll, could never have known. But women don’t often wear suspenders. They’re a primarily a man’s accessory. I told her that it was unreasonable for women to learn this sort of thing while keeping men in the dark. Women learn about fashion when they are young, she explained, and men don’t. It’s just that simple. I posited a theory: this is how women actually keep the power that they secretly have. They claim society favors men. But much like Israel’s nuclear weapons program, it’s an open secret that they have it.

Susannah seemed unconvinced. I need a seamstress or a tailor.

After writing my last post, where I casually mentioned that probability and statistics are probably the single most important topics left out of the current standard math curriculum, I read the most recent entry at Cognitive Daily. They’re concerned that people don’t know probability, too. For an alarming example, they turn to a recent study on doctor-patient relationships.

In a course on noise and data analysis conducted in the astronomy department, we had to tackle problems like:

One test for a deadly, rare disease is 97% accurate. The disease is genetic and only about 1% of the population has it. The only treatment for this disease is expensive, but effective if you actually have the disease and potentially deadly if not you don’t. What would you do if your test results came back positive?

The correct answer, of course, is to take the test again. Even though the test is pretty accurate, because almost no one has the disease, the inaccuracy of the test will be responsible for most of the postive readings; false positives will far outnumber positives reported because disease is actually present. But because of the high accuracy of the test, the likelihood that you will get several false positives is low. The more times you test positive, the better the chances are you actually have the disease. And with the scenario I’ve presented, it’s worth your time to take the test again.

We also did astronomy in this class, too.

This article from a 1993 edition of the Phi Delta Kappan somehow summarizes hundreds of pages of a digest of hundreds of research studies that wasn’t written until 1999 in only seven pages—and a drawing takes up most of the space of the first one. I agree with almost everything in it, except the bit about math movies at the end. Also, I might take issue with some of the suggestions curriculum reform. For example:

In addition, topics not previously explored in traditional curricula must be added. Changes from an agrarian society to a technical/information society demand the literate citizens be familiar with such concepts as mathematical modeling, discrete mathematics, and data analysis. An example of discrete mathematics would be the decision process whereby a street sweeper is routed through a town so that the fewest number of streets possible will end up being swept twice.

Now, sure, we ought to rethink what we teach our kids. The author is absolutely correct. The standard American math curriculum hasn’t budged much in the past century despite radical changes in American society, culture, and technology. To ignore the passage of time is stupid. But I’m not entirely sure what the author is proposing here. To me, she’s suggesting we load up our kids with graph theory and Fourier analysis. This is great if we want all our kids to go into algorithmic optimization, data compression, and signal processing. Maybe that wouldn’t such a bad thing. In my experience, Fourier analysis can be hard. But such a suggestion presupposes that everyone, everywhere will end up in the high-tech sector. Even then, my friends who do lots of computer science [most of whom actually work in finance] don’t rely on mathematics proper so much as things in computer science, and then, that they picked up in college.

Also it’s worth mentioning that we can’t just continue to add things to the curriculum and expect a change in our students’ abilities or understanding of the subject matter. Right now the curriculum is too broad and lacks substantial depth. As is, kids have to memorize lots of seemingly unrelated, mathematical facts. They’re presented in isolation and learnt in isolation. If you’re going to revamp the curriculum, fine: just don’t tack on more and more things and then look for a miracle. But moving on.

The author cites a statement by the Mathematical Sciences Education Board. Following fold, it’s reproduced for your benefit and my scrutiny in part below:

Almost no time is spent on estimation, probability, interest, histograms, spread sheets or real problem-solving, things which will be commonplace in most of these young people’s later lives.

I agree. We pay little attention to any of those things; it’s a shame, too. Probablility and statistics are perhaps the most important “real-life” mathematics we could be teaching. I’ve always found it funny that calculus has dominated as the capstone math course at many high schools. College freshmen use it as a measure of their peers mathematical prowess. You’re especially frightening if you took a multivariable calculus or linear algebra class. Statistics isn’t as nearly frightening. Too bad, because if it were, maybe more people’d offer and take it. I routinely run into Ivy-league educated people who don’t know “correlation is not causation.” I’m a bit worried and confused by their inclusion of “real problem-solving.” I don’t know what it means, but I can guess.

They want our kids to pretend that they’re the CEO of a juice company, and they need to figure out whether to make more cranberry juice or more grape juice according to a number of contraints. Maybe they’ll do the linear programming themselves, or maybe they’ll plug it into a computer. In any case, these sorts of highly contextualized, so-called real world problems are, in researched fact, a bad, bad, bad idea. Not only do they not interest most children—most children are not, nor do they dream of being the CEO of a juice company—these sorts of problems actually hinder transfer of abstract principles and problem solving structures to other types of problems and disciplines. What does go, however, are abstract relationships.

With a little practice and a lot of thought, it’s not hard to come up with motivating questions that live soley within the realm of mathematics. There’s no need to introduce confusing and distracting details from the physical world.

But, if you must, I could see the addition of more mathematics into the school day. What if we had two math classes, but disguised one of them as “real-world problem solving”? Then we wouldn’t have to compromise learning how to think through problems in an abstracted way that promotes the formation and understanding of relationships, and we’d have a venue for an integrated approach science, math, and technology with applications that is so hot nowadays.

Anyway, I’m meeting with the author sometime next week to talk about these sorts of issues in person. I’ll let you know how it goes.