Month: May 2013

When Zero Tolerance Makes Zero Sense

Sixteen-year-old Kiera Wilmot, “known among staff for her exemplary record at Bartow High School and her status as a good student,” has been expelled from her high school:

The teen is accused of mixing household chemicals in a tiny 8-ounce water bottle, causing the top to pop off, followed by billowing smoke in an small explosion. Wilmot’s friends and classmates said it was “a science project gone bad, that she never meant to hurt anyone.”

Jesse Walker summarizes the rest of the story:

So: No one was hurt. There’s no sign that Wilmot was up to something malevolent. The kid’s own principal thinks this wasn’t anything more than an experiment, and he says she didn’t try to cover up what she had done. What punishment did you think she received? A stern talking-to? A day or two of after-school detention? Maybe she’ll have to help clean up the lab for a week?

Nope. The budding chemist has been kicked out of school and charged with a couple of felonies.

Update from a dissenting reader and teacher:

The police say the student was trying to create what’s known as a “Works Bomb”.  The chemicals aren’t stuff she got from the chem lab, and the “experiment” was not part of class or even an extrapolation from a different assignment.  This was chemicals she brought from home with the purpose of blowing something up.

Basically, they mix drain cleaner with aluminum foil and seal the bottle.  Chemical reactions occur, pressure builds and, eventually, an explosion happens. In this case, she used the wrong bottle and the pop top released the pressure before it exploded.  Still, the fumes and chemicals are dangerous in and of themselves.

The videos on YouTube of works bombs include warnings like:

***CAUTION*** Works Bombs can and are highly dangerous to both your outsides and your insides!!! Do NOT stand anywhere near one of these explosives as it goes off as you will suffer from serious injuries or worse… and most definitely do NOT approach the works bomb afterwards while it is still fuming without a proper mask AND gloves … as the chemicals in this mix can lead to BLINDNESS, LUNG IRRITATION AND BURNING, SKIN IRRITATION AND BURNING, and if you breath in enough of this chemical it will KILL YOU!

While I don’t know her and can’t gauge her motives or level of understanding, as a teacher I can tell you there’s no way we can allow kids to create explosions on school grounds.  Ignoring the moral problems with allowing students to place others in danger, the legal liabilities if someone were to get hurt would cut deep into already woefully inadequate school funding.

You can talk to the police about whether two felony charges is an overreaction. But from a school perspective, there isn’t a school punishment too large for a student who does this type of stuff on campus.

Cool Ad Watch

IBM created a stop-motion video by manipulating and filming individual atoms:

Alex Knapp explains the significance of this technology:

Okay, so scientists can animate atoms. While that’s intrinsically cool, why does it matter? Well, it matters because these techniques can be applied to practical technologies. For example, use of a scanning, tunnelling electron microscope enabled scientists to store a bit of computer data into only 12 atoms last year. On your computer, it takes about 1 million atoms to store that data.

The Strange Hush Of Freezing To Death, Ctd

A reader writes:

About 25 years ago, my great-uncle Bill, age 98, still driving in his small town in northwestern Ohio, caring for his half-blind, half-deaf wife, still living in their two-story house plus basement – about 25 years ago, he went out rather late one cold January night to take out the kitchen trash.  His wife of 70-some years had already gone to bed.  He made it down the several steps from their back porch to the back sidewalk that led to their garage and slipped on the icy sidewalk.  He broke his hip.  No one could hear his cries for help (if there were any), as of course windows were closed.  He could not get up.  He froze to death.  He was a really nice man, and his death was devastating for his wife.  But I hope he did not suffer any and merely “slipped the bonds of earth.”

Craig Medred, an Alaskan native, pounces on Brian Phillips’s essay narrating his trip above the Iditarod Trail:

Ohmygawd, a whole week and a half in the dangerous, bone-deep cold as he flew from warm checkpoint to warm checkpoint in an airplane.

And the blizzards and baneful travel conditions that are irrelevant because when the weather gets bad, the planes that carry reporters like Phillips don’t fly. And yes, the total isolation when you’re in the air in the airplane between the warm checkpoints which are pretty well wired to the tubes these days.

You can find an Internet connection in every village out there to check your email, update your Facebook page, and do all the things those who worry about their connectivity need to do. Rohn, a lone U.S. Bureau of Land Management cabin in the heart of the Alaska Range, lacks an Internet connection, as do the deserted mining communities of Ophir and Iditarod, but it doesn’t appear Phillips spent much, if any, time at those comparatively remote checkpoints.

Surprise, surprise, surprise.

But then you have to wonder what Phillips did visit, because it certainly wasn’t the modern Iditarod Trail.

Corporate Inequality

Derek Thompson charts “the five companies with the highest CEO/worker pay ratio compared with the S&P average and the 1965 average among the 350 largest companies”:

CEO Pay

Why the ratio is growing:

First, it’s important to see how the ratio is being stretched on both ends. At the bottom, you have the slowing growth in market wages for middle- and lower-class work (like JC Penney salesperson or Starbucks barista). At the top, you have the acceleration of stock returns for public companies the 1990s and 2000s, which has fattened up executive compensation.

Second, a famous 2005 paper “The Growth of Executive Pay” suggests other reasons to explain why boards of directors are paying CEOs so much. (“Pay has grown much beyond the increase that could be explained by changes in firm size, performance, and industry classification,” they write.) Their most compelling idea is that bull markets don’t merely encourage more equity-based compensation; they also make shareholders less likely to kick and shout when executives pull down one-year pay packages many hundreds of times more than their average workers. In other words, bull markets make CEOs fabulously wealthy, and they make shareholders indifferent to their fabulous wealth.

The Appeal Of “Progressive Libertarianism”

Edward Glaeser notes that “almost 59 percent of air travel is done by those in households earning more than $100,000 a year” and that “these wealthier Americans fly 10 times more than people in households earning about $50,000 annually.” He therefore sees no reason for taxpayer revenue to fund air-travel:

Sometimes we can make society fairer if the public sector spends less, a policy of progressive libertarianism. Making the FAA and TSA independent entities responsible for funding themselves by charging air passengers would reduce the overall deficit and economic inequality simultaneously. Moreover, as last week’s delays suggest, a shift to independent funding could help the passengers themselves, even if they pay higher costs. User fees could be used to reduce congestion in airport lines and to improve the overall flying experience.

The Daily Wrap

heartshoodies

Today on the Dish, Andrew praised Rhode Island’s marriage equality bill for its solid balance of religious and civil liberty, puzzled over the GOP’s ongoing impotence on climate change, and cautiously noted a new report on the Tsarnaev story in the Mail (with good reason). Later on, he scrutinized the racy SEO strategies of digital media, tipped his hat to the NYT in light of their latest numbers, recoiled at Target’s fluorescent dystopia, and went shopping for hockey beards.

In political news and views, Nate Silver illustrated the GOP’s demographic transformation into a regional party while Douthat summed up their beef on healthcare and Sean Trende downplayed the effect of the civil rights era on the South’s Republican turn. Tim Murphy rounded up the local effects of sequestration across the nation, we followed up on the Obama administration’s conflicted stance on Gitmo, and Radley Balko sent a dispatch from a town in Arizona allowing civil unions. We revisited the road not taken on Bush v. Gore, took note of gun adverts geared toward kids, and readers asked Josh Fox if we may need fracking after all.

Elsewhere, Alix Spiegel explored the influence big brothers like Tamerlan Tsarnaev can have on their younger siblings, Mac McClelland examined the state of mental illness treatment in America, and we attempted in vain to untangle contradictory conspiracy theories. We surveyed the Arab world’s feelings on Mideast media and squared Vietnam’s strong record on gay rights with its poor human rights record overall as Charles Kennedy searched for a global income floor. Meanwhile, IBM harnessed cell phone data for a better public transport system and readers sounded off on small town drug addiction.

In assorted coverage, Paul Miller stepped back into the web after a year of self-deportation, we workshopped sex in Palestine, and readers offered their own tips on the subject of condoms and their discontents. We browsed galleries of more Wal-Mart and Target art, picked up on the little quirks of literary greats and spotlighted a barnyard Kickstarter worth your time. Patrick West pined for the album art of old, novelist Ben Greenman praised the paintings of Amy Bennett and Hugo Macdonald wrote in favor of small living space. We questioned the value of keeping cursive, writhed around to some hot, hot hathos and gazed out at a snowy Yankton, South Dakota in the VFYW.

–B.J.

Losing The Language For Sex

An illuminating anecdote from Shereen El Feki, author of Sex and The Citadel:

Safa Tamish, a sex educator who works with Palestinians in Israel, told me that when she runs workshops, participants will use min orali (Hebrew for “oral sex”) and orgazma instead of the respective Arabic terms, jins fammii and nashwa jinsiyya. Even more-basic terminology is problematic; until attending these courses, some participants are unaware that there are, indeed, Arabic words for female genitalia, having been taught to consider such subjects shameful beyond discussion.

This is a far cry from the golden age of Arabic writing on sex. One medieval book, The Language of Fucking, mentions more than 1,000 verbs for having sex.

Previous discussion of the book here.

Vietnam’s Gay Movement

It’s become wildly successful:

Marginalized only a few years ago, the LGBT community is not only finding support in the legal sphere but has been winning broad acceptance in the media and in public life. From Vietnam’s first gay parade last August in Hanoi to an openly transgender contestant on last season’s Vietnam Idol (an American Idol franchise), it’s as if the closet door has exploded off its hinges. International attention grew in February of this year when Vietnamese photographer Maika Elan won a World Press Photo Award for her series The Pink Choice, documenting the lives of Vietnamese gay couples. … Perhaps the best example of the mainstreaming of the LGBT community is the Youtube-based sitcom My Best Gay Friends, which has become a legitimate viral hit in Vietnam, often garnering more than one million views per episode.

Sample of the show seen above. However, the progress for gays in Vietnam is not seeing corresponding progress for human rights in the country:

[I]t’s slightly ironic that a country with an “abysmal human rights record,” according to Human Rights Watch, is simultaneously a leader in the region in advancing gay rights. HRW’s 2013 World Report singles Vietnam out for repression of political dissent, curtailing freedom of expression and religion, and lack of an independent judiciary. It’s a bit like coming home with four Fs and one A+ on your report card. Clearly, gay rights are not seen as a serious threat to anyone in power. Whether the issue remains compartmentalized or if there will be some kind of spillover into other areas of human rights will be interesting to watch. But for now, the march towards LGBT equality is starting to feel inevitable.

Previous Dish coverage of gay rights in Vietnam here.

 

The Influence Of Culture

Marc Bellamare thinks economists take an overly simplistic view of it:

Economists are generally suspicious of explanations for behavior relying on culture. This likely stems from the fact that individual rationality, whose twin assumptions of completeness and transitivity constitute the cornerstone of economics and of much of modern social science, are not context-dependent. The typical economist’s skepticism regarding culture as an explanation for behavior also stems from the fact that most economists fundamentally believe a human being is a human being the world over, and only economic circumstances change to provide a different set of incentives, which themselves explain variations in behavior.

He disagrees, pointing to a study on UN diplomats and parking violations as evidence:

[B]efore 2002, when UN diplomats did not have to pay their parking tickets, a Bangladeshi diplomat, … acting like a textbook homo economicus, would almost never pay her parking tickets. But surprisingly, a Finnish diplomat, acting completely unlike homo economicus, would almost always pay his parking tickets. In other words, diplomats would “import” their cultural norms vis-à-vis corruption.