Robert Switzer

Somewhere, Keith Olbermann is sticking pins in a Bill O’Reilly voodoo doll: Fox News’ ratings, TVNewser reports, are down since August of last year. Like, way down. Like down 28 percent in primetime among all viewers, and down 7 percent in daytime viewership overall.

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As is always the case, sooner or later almost everyone starts to get it. It happened with Vietnam and Watergate. Sometimes it takes longer than we’d like, but by and by most people start to figure things out on their own. Seeing the Bush team deal with Katrina live and in real time opened a lot of eyes, I’m sure.

Fox News is a joke. It’s non-news for stupid people. I changed dentists because I didn’t appreciate paying for the privilege of being forced to listen to Fox News at top volume while having my teeth cleaned.

But the design of Fox News is far from funny. I don’t watch it voluntarily, but I’ve seen it enough in public places to recognize some of the structural elements. Ever notice how they manage to find whacked-out, space-case “Liberals” to serve as straw men to be blown down by the mighty intellect of Bill O’Reilly? Of course, the New York Times may be doing the same thing in reverse with David Brooks.

And then, there’s Bill O’Reilly himself. Columnist Matt Taibbi used a phrase to refer to a former congressman from Texas that works for Mr. Bill, too. And I still wonder how he managed to quelch that sexual harassment issue he was embroiled in.

What amazes me is how Fox News and other organs of the idiot-authoritarian right have been able to harness class-envy — which used to be the province of Marxists and militant organized labor — and redirect it back at intellectuals, artists, and people who support a progressive, liberal agenda. I remember reading somewhere about Bill O’Reilly getting into a snit because he was snubbed by another journalist, a journalist O’Reilly described as liberal and upper-middle class. O’Reilly described himself in the same article as ‘working-class’.

In reality, O’Reilly’s Dad was an accountant, and O’Reilly grew up in Levittown, or someplace like that. So it does make sense, if you think about it. A cheap-suit, low-ball accountant would have reason to envy both his betters at the office and the highly-paid union men down the street. The union men probably made as much or more money, yet had fewer demeaning political hoops to jump through than the delta dog in some office park pack.

The other Fox News personalities, none of whom I can name, also seem like a mixed-bag of loons. And many of them are downright strange-looking. I’m thinking of the guy whose eyes are too close together, and another guy whose forehead is unusually and strangely low — his hairline starts about 1.5 inches above his eyebrows. I guess these dudes were recruited because they were easy for the Fox viewer to identify with.

Who hasn’t envied someone more gracious, refined, attractive and intelligent than themselves? I know I’m not immune from this kind of thing. Fox News has taken this envy and given it a voice. And a debate strategy. Even office water-cooler political discussions seem to be getting nastier. Minions of the authoritarian right — the small-fry, me-too ditto-heads — have learned the same strategy that Hitler used with regular Army Generals, and that Lee Atwater recommended for liberals — just yell at ‘em.

So now, if the Fox viewer is confronted with someone smarter, better-looking, or more gracious than themselves, they don’t have to answer any of those tough, nauseating questions that they might come up with about themselves. All they have to do is yell at ‘em and tell them they don’t love America.

From the von Mises Institute, check it out. Highly recommended in these strange times of free market rhetoric coming from the biggest purveyors of big-government spending ever.

A week or so back I wrote a post about scoring trends on the ACT, one of the two major aptitude tests used in the post-secondary school admissions process.

This morning I read a story in Time Magazine online via reddit.com about a couple of books, The Homework Myth (Da Capo Press; 243 pages), by Alfie Kohn and The Case Against Homework (Crown; 290 pages), by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish.

These authors are saying that children in schools are being increasingly overloaded with homework, and the sad thing is that all of this homework is doing little good. Experimental evidence shows that a moderate amount of homework can have a positive effect on standardized test scores for secondary school students. But excessive homework — more than 10 minutes per day per grade level — is counter-productive and correlates with lower scores on these same tests.

The authors also point out that much of the homework assigned is rote, pointless, and boring.

So what else is new? As a public school student, I avoided homework like the plague. I found that the penalty for not doing the work was a lesser annoyance than the drudgery of doing it.

Did blowing off homework hurt me academically? Probably, though I always did a lot of reading through school, and most of it was far more interesting and engaging than what was going on in class.

Some subjects simply require rote learning and drill to get over the initial hump and build the momentum you need to get to the next level, where the real fun is. Languages and math are like this. You have to do the drill, unless you’re stone-cold exceptional or a savant.

But other subjects, History and English for instance, suffer from an excessive rote fixation. If an instructor fixates too much on names and dates or rules and mechanics, students lose sight of the forest for the trees. I remember reading both ‘Silas Marner’ and ‘Great Expectations’ in high school English classes led by teachers who had no idea of what either was about.

But hey, this is the USA, and measurement is what we’re all about, right? I can’t count the number of times lately that I’ve heard ‘work-ethic’ used as a personal noun, as in “Jasper’s work-ethic is exceptional”. Usually I hear this coming out of the mouths of illiterate middle-managers who make Ricky Gervais’ character on the BBC version of ‘The Office’ look like fucking Einstein.

My dictionary doesn’t have an entry for work-ethic, just work and ethic seperately. I think of the term work ethic in the context of ‘the protestant work ethic’. If Wikipedia is to be believed on this, the term originated with Max Weber and refers to a Calvinist value emphasizing the necessity of constant labor in one’s calling as a sign of personal salvation. Protestants beginning with Martin Luther had reconceptualized work as a duty in the world for the benefit of the individual and society as a whole. The Catholic idea of good “works” was transformed into an obligation to work diligently as a sign of grace.

I think the operative phrase here is ‘work diligently as a sign of grace’. The key word is sign, as in something seen, something visible.

The cube-jockeying half-wits who blather about work-ethic are almost always talking about some visible manifestation of industry, real or perceived. Examples would be a willingness to stay late even if nothing is accomplished thereby, or going on endless rounds of travel to attend unproductive meetings. In the lower-level call-center scheme of things work-ethic is often short-hand for punctual, pliable, and appropriately dressed.

Almost always the term refers to something visible and measurable.

Most people are quantity-driven. Mo’bigger is better. McMansions and hypertrophied sport utility vehicles are the current markers of suburban success.

Quality is a much trickier concept to get a handle on, and often it is ambiguous and resistant to measurement and consensus.

Thus, more homework, much of it drill. It’s just too damn hard for a public school administrator to really impart, demand and enforce quality education. But it’s really fucking easy to demand X-number of pages of X-type of problem at a specified grade level. And it’s also really fucking easy for the teachers involved to count up all the right and wrong answers and boil all this down as a quantifiably correct measure of some sort of educational ‘progress’.

Carefully designed rote drill is also one of the best tools available to prep for and game standardized tests.

The driver of much of this counter-productive homework is, aside from standard Anglo-American success mythology, ‘No Child Left Behind’. And, as with many other ill-conceived initiatives by the incompetent and corrupt Bush Administration, it seems destined to produce precisely the opposite outcome to what was intended.

An A-Z Index of the Linux BASH command line, very helpful.

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BASH, the Bourne Again SHell, is the default command-line environment in most Linux distros and from time-to-time, everyone needs a handy reference, so here you go ….

President Bush was in the midst of explaining how the attacks of 9/11 inspired his “freedom agenda” and the attacks on Iraq until a reporter, Ken Herman of Cox News, interrupted to ask what Iraq had to do with 9/11. “Nothing,” Bush defiantly answered.

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So there it is, straight from the horse’s mouth. It’s about time.

You want to install Linux or other UniXes on your laptop or notebook? Here are links to installation reports about Linux (BSD, Solaris,..) on almost any laptop or notebook model. Includes overviews of Linux with different laptop CPUs, other UniXes on laptops and notebooks, Linux on widescreen laptops and more.

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I’ve been putting Linux on laptops for at least ten years. I started with Slackware and used Redhat and Debian for the most part after that. I could almost always get some kind of Linux system working on almost anything. But the key to a satisfying Linux laptop is whether or not all of the bells and whistles work. It’s the small stuff that counts, like whether the distribution has the software to make your display look good, whether all the peripherals are automatically recognized, etc.

This article provides a good overview of how various Linux distributions work on various laptop models from various vendors. I highly recommend it as a resource.

“You would have thought, in view of the week’s events, that Michael Dell would show up at a greet-the-folks gathering here Friday looking like some whiter shade of pale.”

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Dell’s troubles are not short-term setbacks. They are systemic, and are the result of a broken corporate culture. As Michael Dell says, we’ll see where they are five years from now. Where do I think Dell will be five years from now? Gone.

Almost four-fifths of U.S. high school graduates failed to pass this year’s standard examinations designed to show their readiness for college, test designer ACT Inc. reported.

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After reading through this, what I get is that while the average scores are rising more quickly than at any time in the history of the test, a declining percentage of the total people taking the test are earning acceptable total scores.

My guess is that a very small percentage of the test-takers are earning very high scores. After adjusting for this, I think one would find that the average scores are declining. If a quant reading this disputes it, please speak up.

The single most important predictor of performance on standardized tests is family income, and within that, socio-economic status. Work-ethic has little to do with it.

Thirty years ago the fiction was that you couldn’t really prepare for standardized tests like the ACT and the SAT. Everybody now knows that this is bullshit. The tests can be prepped for and even gamed, if you know how.

The competition today among upper-middle class teenagers for slots at very selective universities is quite intense, and it’s common knowledge that many are willing to do whatever is necessary and within their means to get accepted at a top-tier school.

Students even see sympathetic doctors to get an Attention Deficit Disorder diagnosis, with their parent’s blessings, so they’ll get more time to take the SAT.

That cheating and other types of fraud play a larger role in standardized testing today goes without saying. So let’s factor that out and look at the people who more or less play the game by the rules.

Over the last 30 years, income disparity has also increased dramatically. People at the top of the income pyramid are earning much more than they were 30 years ago, while income at the middle and lower levels has remained level or even decreased.

Family income has a direct impact on standardized test scores because people with higher family incomes can afford to dedicate more resources to preparing for the test, both directly and indirectly.

Upper income families have the resources for high-quality classroom-based test preparation courses, private tutors, and even ‘life coaches’ who work with rich kids on every angle of the selective college admissions process.

Indirect resources include the general sense of safety, stability and mastery that comes from growing up in a very stable environment that is largely insulated from the vagaries of economic uncertainty. Upper middle class parents are far more likely to have family friends and acquaintances in high-status professions and thus a broader and much more fertile social network.

And then there’s the obvious stuff, like the fact that rich kids live in bigger houses, have more privacy and quiet for studying, a better diet, and better medical care.

All of these resources, direct and indirect, come together to create social capital, and the kids at the top have far more of this than the kids at the middle or near the bottom.

A kid from a home with $100,000 in per capita income and 2000 square feet with 1 bathroom per person is going to be much better equipped to excel on a standardized test than a kid from a home with $10000 per capita income and 200 square feet with .25 bathrooms per person.

So the fact that a few are doing a lot better on standardized test preparation while the majority do about the same or worse simply mirrors the current distribution of other resources. A lot of money is being spent at the top of the pyramid to beat these tests, while at the middle and lower range of the pyramid, life in general is getting harder all the time and dedicating resources to beating a standardized test becomes a lower priority, or impossible.

The relationship standardized test scores bear to education is fuzzy anyway, but more on that later. Let’s assume for now that the tests are a proxy for the quality of education in the country right now.

Holding teachers and school districts accountable for measurable results isn’t the answer. Bush’s ‘No Child Left Behind’ simply punishes school districts with poorer students and fewer resources. And metrics were made to be gamed. Ask any middle manager, or better yet an accountant for the details, if you don’t want to take my word for it.

Spending more money on education isn’t really the answer either. If we spend more on education, I can guarantee that the increase will find it’s way to the people who need it least.

What we really need to do is improve the underlying conditions that support education, and just about everything else. We need to see to it that people have adequate food, clothing, housing, and health care. Then we need to address income inequality with a more progressive tax system. And after that, perhaps we can begin to think about improving education.

“Imagine a world without movie theaters. No multiplexes. No arthouses. No way to communally experience a film. That day may be coming sooner than you think.”

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The complete LA Times story is here. Use this link rather than the Digg link above to read the full text of the story.

I don’t think movie theaters are going to go away. In a post I wrote a while back, I reiterated an observation someone made about how obsolete technologies become art. Examples would include black and white photography and motion pictures, the use of antiquated analog sound recording technology for it’s ‘warmth’ and ‘character’, and in the near-future, a preference for books and newspapers over their electronic equivalent.

And right now music-on-vinyl is back. Many independent musicians are cutting through the clutter of CD jewel-cases and mp3 downloads by presenting their music on old-fashioned vinyl records. And, according to a friend of mine, some artists are packaging vinyl records designed as high-concept fetish-pieces for collectors with cards containing a URL and unlock code for an encrypted download. That way you never have to play/degrade the record. You look at the record but you listen to the download. Talk about having your cake and eating it too.

So even though I believe the movie theater will survive, I’m not all that confident about the suburban cinema multiplex as it exists today.

Who hasn’t had a bad experience in one of these? I remember watching a local premier of The Matrix in a packed cineplex. Theater management started the film and ran it with the overhead lights on. The full house lights were up for the first 15 minutes of the film. And then there are rude and noisy patrons. People make noise eating, talking to their friends, or talking back to the screen. I’ve even had people arrive to the movie late, then have the audacity to ask me to move so that they could enjoy the film from a better seat!

And I’m not even going to talk about all the over-priced, unhealthy snacks on offer.

Overall, I think we’ve lost social consensus on what constitutes appropriate behavior in a movie theater and at public events and performances of all kinds. Television is to blame, probably. Many people tend to treat a movie theater, or any kind of performance, for that matter, as if they’re watching it on TV in their own living room.

I’m not a complete tight-ass about this though. When I was younger, I lived in the city and enjoyed going to martial arts films screened in downtown theaters. Clever audience participation actually enhanced most of these films.

But overall, I like a movie theater to be quiet, comfortable, and to have a good sight-line. I resent noisy, inconsiderate patrons, bad environmental conditions that make the theater too hot, too cold, or too bright. And even as a former rock musician, I find many cineplex sound systems to be too loud, or too distorted.

And I have no time at all for intrusive advertising in the movie theater.

Everyone has a personal threshold for adopting new technology. For me, VHS tapes were a great way screen films I didn’t get to see in a theater. But the quality wasn’t good enough to keep me from going to the movies on a regular basis.

But progressive-scan digital satellite television with surround-sound was good enough in terms of picture and sound to make staying home a viable alternative to the movies, at least for me.

Movies as high-resolution mpeg4 files played on high-resolution computer monitors are even better.

So I have no interest in the mall cineplex these days. It’s not worth the effort, especially when you know you can wait a scant six months and see the film on pay-per-view or rent it from Netflix. Most of the high-budget studio stuff sucks anyway. Even a high percentage of the art-house stuff turns up on Sundance or IFC in six months or so. A couple of years ago, my wife and I attended a pretty good regional film festival and were pleasantly surprised a year or so later when a lot of the most notable fare turned up on premium satellite TV.

On the other hand, even out here in the rural Pennsylvania countryside, specialized boutique theaters are opening all over the place. Many are vaudeville theaters built in the early 20th century and renovated. These theaters serve as regional arts centers and host live performances as well as films. I recently saw Richard Linklater’s ‘A Scanner Darkly’ in one of these theaters.

The experience there was a step up from the mall cineplex. The theater had a cafe with real food and coffee. The patrons were more subdued and polite. The theater itself, because it is beautiful and unique, is a destination, an attraction in it’s own right.

These boutique theaters are probably the future of going to the movies. Mall cineplexes were over-built after the movie boom of the 1990’s. What will happen to all these spaces when the bottom falls out?

A lot of talk is going around about a new discipline called ‘Performance Cinema’ that mixes live performance with projected images. Maybe all the abandoned cineplex theaters will become Performance Cinema venues.

Telecoms can breathe a sigh of relief…at least for now: “Even as it rolls out a local wireless Internet service in the city where it is based, Google says it has no plans to position itself as a national provider of such services.”

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That’s too bad. I was hoping for a smarter, faster alternative to the slow, stupid telcos and cable tv companies. Wireless technologies always trump wired technologies in speed and adaptability. Though the gap is narrowing, and TV cable is gaining back some losses to satellite TV, the unwired in general start with a fresh infrastructure and culture, and win on adaptability and customer service.

If Google doesn’t step up with a nationwide wireless broadband alternative, I’m sure someone else will. It’s very do-able from a technology standpoint and it’s too big an opportunity for someone with the money and the know-how to miss.