Month: August 2013

In the wake of several high-profile suicides, mostly notably Aaron Swartz, the hacker community has become much more attuned to depression within its ranks. But are they any more vulnerable than the average American?

The typical hacker lifestyle doesn’t exactly sound like a breeding ground for good mental health. Erratic sleep patterns and prolonged isolation in front of a computer monitor are common. Prosecution by law enforcement is a constant threat, if not a reality. (Swartz spent the two years before his death under prosecution for downloading more than a million journal articles en masse from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His family believes that the threat of imprisonment contributed to his death.) It’s tempting to infer that the hacker world attracts introverted outcasts, subjects them to pressure from law enforcement or the soul-sucking technology industry, and finally sequesters them behind a screen until they give up hope.

That scenario is pretty far from the truth, however, based on the few studies that have been done on the elusive cohort. …

“I kept looking for everything that would support these myths,” [Bernadette Schell, vice-provost at Laurentian University, who studied hackers for more than a decade] said. “What I found was that the hacker community was a very well-adjusted group of individuals.”

At the time, the perception was that hackers were computer addicted, high-strung type A personalities. But the hackers in Schell’s study turned out to be emotionally balanced, “self-healing” type B personalities. They were a bit more introverted than the average population, but still socially connected. Most were employed and made more than the median income level. Incidence of depression was not higher than in the general population. (In fact, some studies have shown that engineers, a group that has a lot of overlap with hackers, have one of the lowest depression rates compared to other occupations.) The hackers were so resilient that even being sent to jail or charged for hacking crimes did not affect their reported stress levels long term.

Sarah Carr worries that the college-for-all movement, while egalitarian in theory, is “often quite paternalistic” in practice:

In their efforts to set poor children of color on the path to college, the idealistic young educators attempt to inculcate middle-class aspirations in their students through a form of body and mind control: instructing them in everything from how to take notes to how to sit, talk, walk, and move; embracing the goals of “re-acculturating” and “re-calibrating” them; and calling them “scholars,” in honor of the new pursuit. One veteran principal refers to it as “lockstepping.” In a not atypical scene inside a New Orleans charter school, a kindergarten teacher told her young charges, “We have a lot to do this year—a lot if we want to go to the first grade. The first graders already have read this book and moved on to other books. I know all of you want to go to first grade because all of you want to go to college. But you need to show discipline over your bodies to do that.”

Many parents (and even some “scholars”) welcome this structure and the intense focus on college. But some would like to see the new charters incorporate more trade and technical training in addition to their heavy college-prep emphasis. And others see a disconnect between the reformers’ goals and their methods. New Orleans grandfather Ronald McCoy shook his head during a 2010 interview with NPR when he thought about some college-prep charter schools that force their students to walk a straight line—marked out with tape—in the hallway between classes. “This walking the line?” he said. “I have been incarcerated, and that’s where I learned about walking behind those lines and staying on the right-hand side of the wall.” Applying the college-for-all ethos in a top-down fashion in low-income communities of color creates the risk of being more imperialistic than egalitarian.

John McWhorter wants to free “black America from the myth that the only way to have a decent existence and raise a family is to get a B.A.”:

The op-ed pages tell us this week after week. But did your cable technician, ultrasound technician, mechanic, building inspector or bail bondsman go to college? And do you get the feeling those jobs are in any danger of disappearing anytime soon? Community colleges and vocational schools are Black Power too.

Jen Doll learns how dictionaries cull obsolete words from their pages:

Frequent targets for deletion include abbreviations, biographical entries, and geographical names, as well as scientific and medical terms, which are regularly rendered obsolete by new phraseologies. Goodbye, Vitamin K. Hello, riboflavin. “The kinds of entries we’ve removed include ’70s slang—like Panama Red, a type of marijuana—and obsolescent technology terms like cassette memory,” says Steve Kleinedler, the executive editor of The American Heritage Dictionary. Complicating matters, usage can be fickle. In the late 1990s, lexicographers considered chad a serious candidate for deletion—but then came the 2000 presidential election. Which words now hang, chad-like, in the balance? Eath (“easy”) has not been widely used since the 19th century, says Stamper. Poor old landlubberliness (“the state of being like a landlubber”) doesn’t get much love, either.

While defending non-literal uses of the word “literally,” Dick Wisdom looks at how language evolves:

Words change their meanings all the time. Even Buzzfeed readers know that. Angels used to be messengers, awful used to mean “inspiring wonder,” brave used to mean “showy or gaudy,” and so on. Literally ad infinitum. And have you read Shakespeare? That idiot thought calling somebody a “ho” was a way to greet them. Even God can’t get it right: many words in the Bible could be confusing to the contemporary reader.

Pick a word. Any word. Now look up its etymological history. Chances are, it used to mean something quite different. Language changes, at times quite fast.

Alex Seitz-Wald discovers that upper-class Americans are prone to not vaccinating their children:

Public health officials see large clusters of unvaccinated children in latte-drinking enclaves everywhere, like Ashland, Ore., and Boulder, Colo., where close to 30 percent of children are exempted from one vaccine or another. In some schools in Ashland two-thirds of the students have exemptions, according to Mark Largent, a James Madison College professor who wrote a book about the vaccine debate last year.

And new data out this month from the Centers for Disease Control shows what Paul Offit, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, calls a disturbing uptick in the number of children forgoing vaccinations. “For the first time ever, there are a handful of states which now have people who are choosing not to get vaccines at the greater than 5 percent level, which is a problem. That’s where you’re going to start to see some of these diseases coming back. And you’re already seeing it with whooping cough and other diseases,” he told Salon. Indeed, the anti-vaccination movement was blamed for helping cause the worst whooping cough epidemic in 70 years.

Marcotte wonders why the rich are becoming more anti-vaccine:

Seitz-Wald interviews some experts like Nina Shapiro, a professor at UCLA, who notes that anti-vaxx sentiment is “a little bit of a trend.” She describes it as “I’m going to be pure and I want to keep my child pure.” But that doesn’t quite get at why there’s such class differences here, since presumably people of all stripes object to the notion of poisoning their children and therefore are vulnerable to propaganda that paints vaccinations as poisonous. I’d posit that refusing vaccination has become something of a status symbol, a way to distinguish your special snowflake from the herd. It’s in line with other trends of varied inherent value, such as putting your kid in a private school, not allowing him to ever eat trashy “kid” food like hot dogs or macaroni and cheese, or forbidding her from engaging with pop culture.