Torture by Any Other Name Still Stinks
A Harvard student paper (via Harper’s) documents the way the NY Times, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today talk about waterboarding – do they call it torture, or do they use “softer” language, like “enhanced interrogation techniques”?
The headline finding is that before 2002, the NY Times and LA Times almost always called waterboarding torture; after 2002, they almost never use the word “torture” to describe the practice… except if the people doing the waterboarding are not American.
Pernicious. It relates to the bru-ha-ha over the Rolling Stone article that effectively ended Stanley McChrystal’s career – worth a read if you have not yet. (On page 1: “Who’s he going to dinner with?” I ask one of his aides. “Some French minister,” the aide tells me. “It’s fucking gay.” [N - Classy.]) It appears that other journalists are lining up to criticize the Hastings piece as unfair or unprofessional, or something along those lines. Matt Taibbi, also writing for the Stone, responded:
If I’m hearing Logan correctly, what Hastings is supposed to have done in that situation is interrupt these drunken assholes and say, “Excuse me, fellas, I know we’re all having fun and all, but you’re saying things that may not be in your best interest! As a reporter, it is my duty to inform you that you may end up looking like insubordinate douche bags in front of two million Rolling Stone readers if you don’t shut your mouths this very instant!” I mean, where did Logan go to journalism school – the Burson-Marsteller agency?
But Logan goes even further that that. See, according to Logan, not only are reporters not supposed to disclose their agendas to sources at all times, but in the case of covering the military, one isn’t even supposed to have an agenda that might upset the brass! Why? Because there is an “element of trust” that you’re supposed to have when you hang around the likes of a McChrystal. You cover a war commander, he’s got to be able to trust that you’re not going to embarrass him. Otherwise, how can he possibly feel confident that the right message will get out?
Taibbi goes on to point out that the Pentagon has 27,000 employees in their PR department – almost the size of the entire State Department. They don’t need any help getting their message out.
This is the kind of thing we can’t legislate or dictate. It’s cultural, I suppose. And I’m just speculating here, but I can’t help think that people respond to this kind of subtle manipulation. Newspapers need to fix more than their distribution mechanisms and business models if they want to survive; they also need to think long and hard about their purpose and mission.
Found Writing 2: Confined to the Road Ahead
Another piece of found writing from my hard disk archives, this one from April 2006, a time of money and career and personal stress. I can’t say I still feel this way… in many ways my life is simpler and quieter than it was then. Anyway, there are some nice turns of phrase worth publishing.
The so-called crawl space beneath my ground-level apartment floods with water following each of Berkeley’s frequent rain showers. Other than when said flood douses the pilot light for my weird and scary floor-mounted heater, I don’t really care. Left alone, however, the building’s foundation is at risk of erosion.
The prospect of the building’s collapse concerns my landlord precisely to the extent that it is profitable for him to be concerned. Thus, instead of digging up the ground and installing the proper drainage system, he decides to employ the services of a much less expensive, yet mammoth, water pump. This machine is separated from my bedroom by not more than a few inches of wood and insulation.
“It is loud. It disturbs me,” I tell him. “How surprising! It emits only a ‘low whir’,” he replies. Actually, that “low whir” is a low B-natural hum starting and stopping at roughly hourly intervals, but randomly, like the drones of a Casio-keyboard bagpipe in an audio version of water torture.
It made me realize: what I really want in my life is some peace and quiet. No alarms and no surprises, as someone once sang (but not in the vaguely suicidal way they sang it). I want to sit and read books and then walk somewhere quietly and drink coffee and then go to sleep when my eyelids droop. I am tired of the noise of modernity, the steady beats of war drums and market tickers and engine pistons. Their rhythm chokes me. They are loud. They disturb me.
As free as I am supposed to be (Americans have so much excess freedom that we have even begun to export it), it is often difficult to turn off or shut up or slow down. I am a captive to the cycles of bills and debts and budgets, confined to the road ahead. Beyond the cycles, there are errands to run and papers to sign and meetings to attend. Freedom means having options, but the toughest one to come by is the one to choose less over more.
Nominally, I have this freedom. It’s called being a bum. But I don’t want to be a bum. I want to have means without responsibility.
On the other hand, real freedom is internal. The trick is to not worry about things outside of one’s control. Like god, for instance, or the weather, or shifts in tectonic plates, or the rate of decay of take-out pad thai.
Internal or external, the freedom I crave is to simplify, to quiet, to do or not do as I please, to turn down the volume, to breathe deeply, to sleep. I want freedom from the low whir.
Found Writing 1: On a National Language
I’m sitting in my living room this afternoon, enjoying a perfect Berkeley afternoon, sad that Bruce and Dawn could only stay one night, and organizing my messy hard disk full of files. Here’s something I wrote in May 2006, but never published or sent to anyone, probably in response to something I saw in the news. I only vaguely recall writing it, but I think I still had law school on the brain at the time.
National identity and cultural identity are no longer congruent. There is no doubt that they were in centuries past, and that they are still in many places, but only coincidentally and usually at the expense of a minority population. This is a central consequence of the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution: that government (nation) must protect the rights of free assembly, speech, and religion (components of culture).
As such, the notion of a “national language” is only useful to the extent that it facilitates the efficient functioning of government (a famously insufficient condition, unfortunately). Note that commerce is exempt from this stipulation except where commerce and government intersect, that is, in the enforcement of contracts. Contracts themselves, however, are culturally neutral by design; a merchant need not speak english to expect that I pay him for his wares.
But what of the social contract that citizens of a nation undertake in their collective effort to coexist? I believe that it should not be subject to the imposition of a national language. Nations should make every reasonable effort to make the governing of their people independent of culture.
To that end, president bush should not insist that the national anthem be sung only in english.
Spring HTML Cleaning
I finally decided to spend a bit of time putting something in the main http://www.aruguladesigns.com/ page — just a link to this blog and my Linkedin profile, but so much more tasteful than the placeholder page that the web-hosting company posts there by default.
I fly to New York next week for a few days, a day in Boston, then a day or so over the weekend tacked on to spend time with my old college friends in Brooklyn. I also plan to see a production of Richard II on trapeze. My friend Nathan Cohen is doing the music, so in the worst case scenario I get to hear him play for a while. I am optimistic, however.
Outsourcing, the “IT” sector, and education in India
During my recent visit to India, I was struck by the number of “institutes.” Brand new, under construction, or carved out of a random space in a bustling small-town main street, these schools were almost unanimously technical colleges – post-high school institutions offering courses in computer science, “systems management,” or other similar-sounding disciplines. It was as if they couldn’t build them fast enough. The reason I know what programs were available is that they all used English-language signage and many even went so far as to raise enormous road-side billboards advertising happy and beautiful young backpack-toting Indians taking classes at the “Institution of IT and Management Group of Institutions” or some such convoluted name. (They all sounded alike after a while.) With all of the schools come the school buses – literally clogging the highway between Delhi and Agra.
Seeing the “outsourcing” debate from the US side of the media equation, the complaint is usually: outsourcing costs US jobs and lowers US wages and is therefore bad. I also see some of the inner workings of “outsourcing” in my capacity at a large multi-national firm: we hire more freely in “low cost centers” and think really hard before approving hires in places like the US, where wages are much higher. (The good news is that we are busily hiring on all continents, including North America.) This just makes sense, and has nothing to do with morality or ethics, nor does it involve “sweat shops” or shady practices of that nature. We want smart people, we want to make them happy (by paying and treating them well), and we want to minimize costs. So we are pleased to hire from a pool of very smart people in, among other places, India.
What is often overlooked is the transformative effect these circumstances have on the country where the workers are hired. What I’ll call the “Nike narrative” goes something like this: “Not only are Americans suffering because they lose the outsourced jobs, but the recipients of the jobs are likewise miserable. The only winner is the corporation.” This is certainly true in many cases. Based on my experience with practices in the non-manufacturing industries, however – the service and “knowledge” sectors like software, media, and customer support – employees are very well-paid relative to their peers, and the jobs are very competitive. Oster and Millet (2010) of the University of Chicago report that starting salaries at what they call “IT enabled services” firms is about twice the average per capita income. Think about that. “You can get a 100% raise if you study X instead of Y.” In the US, starting salaries twice the per capita income – about $95,000 per year – are generally available only to people who spend many years in school: doctors or lawyers, for example. (Wall Street professionals are an anomaly, in my opinion: they make out-sized salaries for no apparent reason.)
What Oster and Millet find is that the explosion in these sectors in India – from 56,000 in 1991 to 2.3 million in 2010 – is causing localized effects in the demand for education, specifically English-language education. Every time a new “ITES” firm opens, the nearby English-language schools see a spike in enrollment the next year. Though the paper does not investigate it specifically, the demand for education in India is not only localized around these IT firms: nationwide, the percentage of the population completing primary school has increased from 64% to about 86% over the past two decades. If you believe human progress is not an illusion, I think this would count as a dramatic victory.
India photos
I present: an on-line internet-based album of digital photographs of our trip to India last month.
This set is a mix of photos from Greg’s Nikon D90 and my (hand-me-down from Greg) Nikon D60. Photographers varied.
Pictures of Thailand! From last year!
It’s taken me a little more than a year to finally get these photos somewhere online for people to see them. It strikes me as unlikely that anyone will see them even now. In any case, here is the photo set on Flickr from our trip to Thailand last April. You’ll see pictures in Bangkok Grand Palace, dinner at the Bed Supper Club, various temples, a train station, and Chiang Dao.
India pictures soon.
Greg Clinton may also be in the photos below
No pictures from India yet, sorry. Working on it. I went to the Apple store today to get a new iMac – a little enormous birthday present to myself. The 27″ monitor is bigger than my field of vision. Anyway, this machine comes with a photo collection tool called “iPhoto” which has the nifty ability to recognize faces in photographs. Nifty, except that it seems to have trouble telling the difference between twins.
iPhoto can't tell the difference between identical-ish twins?
IB diploma points vs SAT composite averages at international schools
I ran across these interesting data today showing a range of metrics for a few dozen of the most prominent American/International schools around the world. Most of these schools are private and non-profit. A commenter hypothesized that IB diploma scores and SAT composite averages were uncorrelated. It turns out that (s)he is maybe right — the two series have a weak positive correlation, but the standard error is high, and the relationship is only significant at the 80% level.
Here’s a chart showing the relationship. This tells you that for every 1-point increase in the IB diploma scores, a school will tend to have a 21-point better SAT composite average. The standard error on that estimate is 15 (t-stat ~ 1.4; p-value ~ 0.18).
The number of data points is low, but you might interpret this weak relationship as evidence that these two programs — standardized test vs holistic multi-year curriculum — measure different sets of skills, and that colleges are wise to consider them separately.
IB vs SAT scores at international schools
Kwedit Crisis
A new service has appeared, called Kwedit, which allows the borrower to buy (usually virtual) goods now and pay for them by printing a barcode and paying cash at a 7-Eleven store.
The service has been adopted by a small handful of online games with target audiences in the 12-14 age group. The idea is to bypass parents, aka the keepers of the credit cards. These children can thus purchase items for their virtual pets, for example.
Now an eighth grader, on her own, can use a Kwedit Promise to buy a virtual 40-pound bag of Purina Puppy Chow. The chow exists only as a photograph of a Purina package, but FooPets instructs its users that the care and feeding of the digital pets they’ve adopted should be regarded as a serious matter. “Your FooPet is a real creature that lives online,” the company’s Web site says. It’s ontological nonsense, but the money that is paid for the pixels is certainly real.
On the one hand, kids need to learn lessons about money and credit. Perhaps if they get in over their heads, they will learn a valuable early lesson in effective money management. Better now, when there are no real consequences, than later, when they default on their mortgage. Right?
But something stinks about this, beyond the fact that 12-year-olds shouldn’t be frequenting 7-Elevens. Kids are vulnerable — they are powerfully swayed by “ontological nonsense.” (But aren’t we all?) We can’t expect them to make reasonable choices, nor can we even expect them to learn the right lesson from their errors when they make unreasonable choices.
Should corporate interests really be allowed to so directly engage minors in this way? Yes, teens can buy candy at the store on their own. But they can’t buy candy on credit. I suppose it’s legal, but there’s something wrong here I can’t put my finger on.
