Month: August 2013

Joshua Kendell views obsessive-compulsive behavior as a productive trait held by many of America’s iconic innovators:

Many people will say, “Oh, I have to clean up my kitchen now because I have a little OCD.” But by “obsessive,” I don’t mean people who have obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). OCD can be incapacitating, and those who suffer from this disorder are unlikely to start Apple or fly across the Atlantic on a piece of wood like Charles Lindbergh. These people are haunted by thoughts that just won’t go away; someone with OCD might be constantly worried that the house will burn down; as a result, he or she might be afraid to go out even after checking a thousand times that the burner on the stove is off.

The icons covered in my book are saddled (or blessed) with a related condition called obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD). While the obsessions and compulsions in both disorders can revolve around the same things—such as cleanliness or order—OCD is an anxiety disorder and OCPD is a character disorder. Rather being impaired by their intrusive thoughts, those with OCPD celebrate them. Like Steve Jobs, Henry Heinz prided himself on his company’s clean factory; for decades, his plant in Pittsburgh was a must-see destination for tourists. My icons were productive obsessives; they found a way to channel that which they couldn’t stop thinking about into some spectacular achievement. As a boy, Ted Williams thought of nothing else but hitting. As he once said, “When I wasn’t eating or sleeping, I was practicing my swing.”

Indiana’s recent school-grading controversy has led some to question the wisdom of ranking public schools on an A-to-F scale. Fifteen states do so, and several, including Indiana, use those grades to make decisions about school funding. Charter school advocate Nina Rees defends the A-to-F system:

In this era where we can go online and get rankings of hotels, restaurants, doctors and dog walkers, offering some sort of easy-to-understand metric for a school’s performance shouldn’t be counter-intuitive. Wouldn’t most parents rather have state education officials offer this information and explain its meaning than to have to rely on a real estate agent or next door neighbor to figure out whether a school is good or bad? … And giving parents an easy way to understand how schools are doing is critical; an A-to-F grading scale is something we are all familiar with and understand.

But edublogger RiShawn Biddle thinks the framework isn’t helpful:

It’s seductively simple. … But it doesn’t provide families the information they need to be able to make decisions. If you’re a parent, you want to know growth over time. Are they providing AP courses? How are they doing in algebra? If you’ve got young black sons, you want to know: Can this school serve your son well? You can’t get that from a letter grade.

Diane Ravitch agrees:

No state has gotten it right because it is too simplistic to label a complex institution with a single letter grade. There are too many variables, too many moving parts, too many different components that make up a school to say that it can be rated like a tomato or a pumpkin.

Meanwhile, accountability advocate Michael Petrilli says reformers are open to new ideas:

When you get results back and they don’t match up with reality, you’ve got a problem. I think there’s going to be a good conversation about whether boiling it all down to a single grade makes sense.

But Education Week‘s Andrew Ujifusa says changes won’t come overnight, if at all:

[L]awmakers might be able to confine the story in their minds to one misguided (or worse) individual. In that case, they may not be willing to roll back what they’ve done in their states because of the publicized actions of one man in one state. Organizations like the Foundation for Excellence in Education, which lobbies for states to adopt A-F accountability and had close links with Bennett, might at least in theory be just as willing to defend existing A-F systems in states, if they come under serious political attack. The subsequent question is, just how effective would such lobbying be?

More Dish on the grading scandal here, here, and here.

A reader writes:

If you haven’t had a chance to yet, I highly recommend you watch a new HBO documentary, The Crash Reel.  It’s the story of former professional snowboarder, Kevin Pearce, who suffered a traumatic brain injury after crashing in the half-pipe during a training run.  The movie does an amazing job showing exactly why we need to demand that if the people in charge of running the Olympics, the X-Games, the NFL, etc, won’t implement safety measures to protect these athletes from themselves, then we’re going to need the government to step in.

The specific issue for snowboarding competition is the ever increasing height of the half-pipe walls.

They allow for crowd-pleasing amplitude but has turned bumps, bruises, and the occasional broken bones into paralyzations, traumatic brain injuries, and deaths.  It took Kevin Pearce over two years to recover enough from his injury to realize that he could never snowboard professionally again, but if he hadn’t had the support of a truly amazing family, he would have been back on the slopes and had a very high chance of re-injuring his still-damaged brain.  His father draws the perfect analogy when he says something along the lines of, “NASCAR had to step in and limit the size of the engines in the race cars because, if they hadn’t, more and more drivers would be smashing into the walls.”

These athletes are conditioned to go bigger and it is up to us, as a society, to make sure rules are in place so they know they don’t need to maim or kill themselves to entertain us.

A related, long-running Dish thread: Is Football The Next Big Tobacco?

Lily Kuo relays new developments:

China’s national health and family planning commission is considering allowing any couple where one parent is an only child to have two children. This would effectively suspend the one-child rule for many more urban couples, the largest group affected by the policy. Some anticipate the reform will be announced in the fall at the National People’s Congress, when key economic reforms are often unveiled. Chinese media report (link in Chinese) that authorities are also considering allowing all couples to have two children after 2015. If that happens, China’s population would increase by an estimated 9.5 million more babies (link in Chinese) each year over the first five years, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch in a note over the weekend.

But it may already be too late to fix the economic damage:

China’s approximately 930-million-person labor force shrank last year for the first time in decades, and will decline further as a population bulge of people now in their 40s and 50s pass into retirement. Here’s how that looks:

A baby boom would help compensate, and increase the number of people who can support that aging population. However, it may be too little too late, given that the labor force is estimated to begin declining by as much as 10 million a year starting in 2025, and it will take at least 16 years for the effects of a baby boom that starts today to be felt in the workforce. The authorities may be unable to avoid unpopular measures like raising the country’s retirement age—55 for women and 60 for men.

Previous Dish on China’s demographic woes here and here.

Brian Thill contemplates the role of CGI birds in cinema:

Their first function seems to be in the service of some fairly straightforward notion of verisimilitude. After all, the world is filled with birds, so it shouldn’t be surprising that films would incorporate them. But it would be easy enough to have a sufficient measure of verisimilitude in your film about hobbits or zombies or supermen without needing birds. No theatergoer ever said of such a film, “It was okay, I guess, but it just wasn’t believable. I mean, where were the birds?”

When you scrutinize the shots that contain them, you begin to discover that they aren’t just there to make the unreal scenes feel a bit more real. These are instrumental birds.

Part of what they are there for is to indicate, by way of comparison, the scale and grandeur of the sweeping landscapes and vistas that are so central to establishing the proper atmosphere of awe and beauty in film. This has been a familiar tactic in painting for centuries. To take just one example: in the lower right corner of Frederic Edwin Church’s gigantic painting Cotopaxi (1862), which depicts an enormous volcanic eruption clouding the skies and the blazing sun, we find a tiny group of birds in flight in the bottom right corner, well beneath the vault of the high rugged cliffs in the foreground, minuscule against the backdrop of the sublime scale and power of the geologic world. If you didn’t look closely at the tumult of the enormous painting, those deliberately placed birds would be so easy to miss. …

Fake birds are important for their collective energy and motion, as objects meant to possess a vague kind of dynamic, living, animal presence, but they’re entirely unimportant in any close-up or individualized sense. It’s not the individual creature that has any standing or value, but the notion of the flock, of “Nature,” as set-dressing in cackling, aggregate form: philosophically unimportant as fellow living things, but cinematically (aesthetically) essential in the frame, functioning in much the same way that filmed images of clouds and rolling waves are supposed to. They’re shorthand for an emaciated natural world, a minor nature, beautifully and even lovingly rendered, but always subordinated to the comings and goings of man, the living object who matters.

Recent Dish on the role of birds in art here.