Today at basketball camp the head coach at camp told a story to the campers about an extremely bright, talented kid from New Jersey. The kid was the valedictorian of his high school class, extremely bright, athletic, tall, good-looking etc. He had his pick of the Ivies, he's going to Yale to study Arabic. But he made one little mistake that cost him a lot; addressing the class at graduation, he told the school how for one assignment, he (K.) and his friend (T.) swapped the names on their papers - his friend (a C student) turned in K's work, with "T." written at the top, and got a C, but K. turned in T's work and got an A. Obviously telling the audience this at graduation was a dumb thing to do (always have at least one person look over your remarks first), and the kid's in a lot of hot water now, not to mention he pissed off all of his fellow students and teachers. But I think the mistake is one that a lot of teachers would make - a writing's "brand" is really important, and when we see the name at the top signaling quality work, we tend to think better of what we're about to read. If we really want to force kids to produce their best work, and give low-performing students a chance, all examined work needs to be evaluated blindly - teachers need to read it without a name attached. There's an argument that teachers should evaluate work while keeping in mind the ability of person who wrote the work, but that argument carries no truck with me - I think the brand/expectations effect far outweighs the latter effect. Furthermore, students should be held to the same standard. I have a lot of trouble talking to kids - I know that in every confrontation with a kid there are times when you need to be tough and times when you need to reassure and encourage, and that there's a correct thing to say, and carry yourself, in every situation, to get the kids to play hard, do what you want and accept your decisions. I am slower to pick up the right way to do things than most. I succeed because whenever I come across a new situation and don't handle it well, I ask someone what they would have done, remember it, and do it the next time the situation arises, building a sort of "response cache." For some people I feel like this skill comes naturally, but maybe I overestimate their skills when they had my level of experience (16 weeks of camp), and underestimate the deference given to adults, vs. 20-year olds. Like most things, the key is to practice, evaluate and improve every week.

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This practice should not really surprise anyone, but should be stopped:

"Congress frequently votes on huge and complex bills that few if any members of the House or Senate has read through. They couldn’t read them even if they wanted to, since it is not unusual for legislation to be put to a vote just hours after the text is made available to lawmakers. Congress passed the gigantic, $787 billion “stimulus’’ bill in February - the largest spending bill in history - after having had only 13 hours to master its 1,100 pages. A 300-page amendment was added to Waxman-Markey, the mammoth cap-and-trade energy bill, at 3 a.m. on the day the bill was to be voted on by the House. And that wasn’t the worst of it, as law professor Jonathan Adler of Case Western Reserve University noted in National Review Online: “When Waxman-Markey finally hit the floor, there was no actual bill. Not one single copy of the full legislation that would, hours later, be subject to a final vote was available to members of the House. The text made available to some members of Congress still had ‘placeholders’ - blank provisions to be filled in by subsequent language.’’

Advantage: lobbyists, obfuscators and special interests. Steny Hoyer's complaining in the article above reminds me of my players in basketball camp, whining. If you and the other members of Congress are going to construct horrifically long bills, then yes, you do have to read them before you vote on them. Most great works are remarkably concise: the Bible, whose books tell full stories, but rarely run longer than 30 pages; the Constitution is only seven or eight pages long; the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence, shorter than that; the Gettysburg Address two paragraphs. Brevity demands excellence; when lawmakers tack on extra pages every time they feel like it, the result is mediocrity and a reaming of the general public. The problem is that the community that benefits from an extra paragraph (extra funding for a specific project, or whatever) is concentrated, and extremely happy to see their lawmaker add the provision whereas the community that suffers (literally, everyone else) is diffuse, and hard to rally.

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My favorite post from today comes from Ezra Klein, a blogger for the Washington Post, speaking about healthcare ("It's Not the Money, It's the Relationships"). The healthcare industry snaps up Senate Finance committee aides as soon as they retire, so that they can lobby for the industry. Because we are social creatures this makes for very effective lobbying, because we can't turn down our friends or refuse their calls.

The graphic is attached to this article, where we learn that the industry is spending $1.4 million a day to lobby Congress and is doing so with the help of a raft of onetime insiders. At times, the efforts at influence peddling border on the comic: One June 10 meeting saw Max Baucus's aides sitting down with two of Max Baucus's former chiefs of staff, who were representing different groupings of health-care industry interests. ... Refusing to return the calls of favored staffers and colleagues goes against every social grain in our bodies. It should be easy to separate professional responsibilities and personal feelings. But it isn't. ... One of the secrets about lobbying in Washington is that money doesn't buy access. It buys people who already have access. And that makes it much more insidious.

Maybe we should subsidize former aides to work in any field but lobbying. A ban on lobbying for a non-trivial period of time (e.g. longer than 2 years) would also be nice.

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The Giants upgraded to a full-color, huge scoreboard two years ago. It's the best scoreboard I've ever seen, in terms of size, clarity, and content. This was the best photo that I could find (by the way, Flickr is much better than Google for finding photos). For the team that's up (the Dodgers) they also have in scorebook notation what happened to each of the batters that inning (double, 5-3, F8 etc). Photo credit:

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Why can I get internet anywhere on my phone but not my laptop? As in, why do phones have Internet built in before laptops do? Laptops are a more expensive, sophisticated product and if they can stick a mobile Internet thingy inside a laptop. Internet dongles for a laptop cost about $60 per month, much more than for phones, which cost about $30 per month for unlimited use. 1) We pay for phones on a monthly basis, but we pay a flat fee for laptops. Mobile internet requires a monthly fee. 10 years of internet service up-front would add about $3100 to the cost of a laptop. 2) We are more likely to use our laptops in areas with a wireless signal, like our house or workplace. We don't use them so much on the go. I expect that just as air conditioning used to be a luxury item in cars and now it's a staple, Internet in phones will do the same, followed by Internet in laptops, as the electronics become cheaper relative to the cost of the device.

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I am not sure why but if you try to go to gethuman.com, it no longer displays useful information about company customer service numbers but instead the homepage for Paul English, who founded the site. Google's cache of the page still works.

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Nearly every public school teacher in the USA belongs to a teachers' union. The unions have big lobbies in Congress, and donate lots of money to legislators, so they are favorable to the union agenda, which happens to be, keeping current members of the union employed. The teachers unions are responsible for laws that make it extremely difficult to fire teachers who receive tenure, and it only takes teachers two years to be granted tenure in most states. They also require that new teachers get certification, increasing the cost of entering the profession, even though education degrees have little effect on teacher performance. They are also responsible for a pay structure which rewards teachers for getting college degrees and for experience, neither of which correlates very well with teaching success. They oppose school choice, which would allow more parents to send their children to private school (or neighboring public schools) and provide competition for the public school system. The end result is that the teaching profession is resistant to any force which would make it better. In part because successful teachers are not rewarded, mediocre teachers are comfortable and there's no incentive to improve performance anywhere. The obvious losers are the kids, especially poor kids, who are receiving a worse education than they could get, and dropping out of high school in large numbers (the nationwide graduation rate in 2006 was 69.2). I'm not saying that we can get students to like school if we encourage better teaching (our brains are not designed for thinking), but we might be able to improve on the percentage of Americans that can accurately summarize data from a table (currently, 11%), compete in the modern workforce, and lift themselves onto a higher income track. The teachers unions will tell you they support "education," but that's wrong - they only support education as much as it helps keeps union teachers in jobs. That's why unions exist. So when the new head of the Education Department, Arne Duncan, gives a speech to one of the largest teachers' unions in the country, making the tiniest hints at positive steps we can make, to improve our nation's education system and give our kids, and other people's kids, a more prosperous future. The LA Times article included these gems:

A group in the California section of the audience booed loudly when Duncan praised Green Dot Public Schools, which independently operates more than a dozen schools within the Los Angeles Unified School District with union contracts.

Green Dot has increased attendance at its schools, made its campuses more safe, boosted graduation and college attendance rates, and standardized test scores. The founder, Steve Barr, "has mobilized thousands of black and Hispanic parents to demand better schools," resulting in Green Dot's takeover, and subsequent improvement of, a horrible Los Angeles high school. Not to mention that Green Dot is one of the only independent school systems that actually uses unionized teachers. But rather than use their success as a model for our own failing schools, let's boo and hiss.

Not that the crowd was won over Thursday. "Quite frankly, merit pay is union-busting," said one educator to loud applause during the question-and-answer period.

I agree that merit pay is union busting. But if you're a good teacher, what is there to be afraid of? And why isn't the half of the teacher union that contains good teachers saying, "Yes let's have merit pay, please! I want to get paid what I'm worth!" Union members are not dumb; it's an easy mistake to accuse people that you disagree with as lacking in general intelligence. They've found excellent ways to protect their members, ensuring they have good benefits, high salaries, and protection against getting fired. It's natural for them to continue to protect their interest, and even to develop rationalizations for why teachers union policies are good for the country, and for education in general. But reading about the reaction to Arne Duncan's speech makes me feel sick to my stomach. He's trying to help, but faces massive opposition from dinosaurs like the teachers unions. Let's hope they go extinct soon. Update: Here is another example of how unions are bad for students; a union in Massachusetts voted to turn down an $860,000 grant, to help students improve their AP scores, because some teachers would have been paid more than others. I cannot believe that we as a country tolerate this sort of behavior.

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Every address on the Internet has an associated IP address, a series of four numbers connected by three periods. For example, Google owns the range of IPs from 74.125.0.0 to 74.125.255.255. Typing the IP address into your user bar works - try it by typing 74.125.1.1 into your address bar, and the Google homepage comes up. We could browse the Internet this way, but it's a really crappy way to browse - it would be harder to remember web addresses if they were all numbers and harder for companies to advertise - they'd have to focus really hard on getting you to remember their IP address. And yet this is something that we do with phone numbers every day. Once upon a time, phone numbers were analog - you had to dial '1' before a non-local call, so the router knew where to send the call - and the second digit of the area code had to be '1' or '0,' while the second digit of the exchange (the middle set of 3 numbers in a 10 digit number) was never '0' or '1' so the phone company could send your call. But now, everyone has mobile phone numbers, and it's just as easy to dial New York from a mobile phone as it is to dial my next door neighbor. I can also send text messages to crazy numbers like 37523, like Verizon wanted me to do to enter some contest at the Oakland A's game on Saturday. My point is, why are we still using the actual numbers? Why can't we use screen names, which everyone agrees stand for a number, like we do with IP addresses? How much easier would it be to, instead of writing down your number at a bar, to say, Call me at "kevinburke"? Or for businesses to say, Dial "Verizon" or "James Sokolove" - a simple message at the end of their ads? We have a small attempt at this by bundling letters together on the keyboard (for example dial 1-800-FLOWERS), but when three letters are bundled together there are way fewer combinations, and the combinations have to be exactly seven characters long. One potential problem is this makes personal phone numbers much easier to remember and dial - your ex girlfriends and enemies would always know your screen name. On a related note, digital cable and satellite companies still make you browse channels in their linear order, and remember that 038 means ESPN and 551 is HBO, with 200 channels in between that I never watch. That's lunacy. I don't watch more than ten channels - let me assign my favorites and arrange them on the screen horizontally as well as vertically, like the new Safari 4 homepage. This would make browsing a snap (although the cable companies may arrange the channels as they do to protect bundling their cable packages instead of offering a la carte channels). Anyway, digital companies should embrace the freedom that new technology gives them.

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