I stopped Linklustering about the time he posted them, so it kind of fell through the cracks, but check out Phi’s pictures of southwestern Asia.

How much do you need in investible assets before you’re wealthy? Millionaires who do not believe they are wealthy say $7,500,000. Millionaires who do believe they are wealthy say $1,750,000.

Half Sigma will like this.

It would be Utah, wouldn’t it?

Who is most rational?

Due to the earthquake, Subaru and Toyota are scaling back production in US plants.

Joel Kotkin writes on the Protean future of our cities. This might sound familiar. Even for those that want “walkable neighborhoods” and the like, it’ll actually be easier to master-plan them in the suburbs than try to retrofit the cities.

Over on youtube, there’s a video from a school in Australia, of a kid who fights back against a bully. A website covers it here in a lot of depth. The Daily Mail covers it as well… including what I find outrageous, that the stupid idiots in charge of the school suspended both Casey and the bully for four days.

Why does this piss me off? Because the bully is clearly trying to start a fight. Casey doesn’t throw the first punch… or even the first several. The bully has two of his friends there to “back him up.” Even after the one bully is taken care of, the others are there trying to step in and pull Casey into another fight.

And if you listen to the audio and read some of the other coverage, you find out that the attack was brought on by the fact that Casey had tried to report the ongoing bullying to school officials. They were attacking him specifically to try to make him shut up and not report their behavior. A subtitled version (rechecked) makes it clear:

When I was younger, I went through situations precisely like this. Cornered “out of sight” of the teachers (who didn’t WANT to be involved because it meant paperwork and potential lawsuits for them no matter which kid “won”), then physically attacked. There was no video to show what happened to me. After defending myself against a worthless shit of an F-level student who didn’t care if he went in and out of detention on a revolving door schedule, I found myself in a 3-day suspension from our fuckwit of a vice principal who believed “there’s no such thing as a bully” and who demanded my parents see about “counseling” me for being in a fight rather than “walking away” (where the FUCK was I supposed to get to, being cornered by 3 kids?) or “calling for help” (which I had done, but no teacher responded until I was already physically attacked). I failed a test based on in-class handouts in science class because I wasn’t given the study materials by the science teacher, who said “students who miss class don’t get the handouts so there” (despite the fact that if you were out sick, he’d have it prepared for you when you got back).

I applaud Casey. I agree wholeheartedly with this comic. It takes a lot to stand up to a group of bullies, especially when it’s 3 on 1.

Oh, and to Tina Gale, the crocodile-tear-spewing mother of the bully who got what he deserved: I am sorry you inflicted your genes on the next generation by spawning that reprehensible bully. Now grow the hell up and change the way you’re raising your brat.

I could have told them this for free:

A sample of 477 commercials featuring domestic chores that aired in a week of primetime television programming on all of the broadcast networks was analyzed. Among the key findings: Male characters’ performance of chores was often humorously inept as measured by negative responses from others, lack of success, and unsatisfactory outcomes.

It makes a good point that the result of these ads, other than to elicit a laugh and poke fun at men, is to reinforce stereotypes. I’ve mentioned this before in the past, but there are reasons that women should be wary of this sort of thing as well as men. Men do not like doing things we are not good at. The notion that we will fail, that our wives will roll their eyes at us, and so on, discourages us from trying.

Of course, it works out for me. I score major points with Clancy for my willingness to try to do the household chores. And I told her early on – and she completely understood – that while pointing out how I might do better is welcome, being critical in any sort of harsh way is a good way to get me to give up and stop doing it. And Clancy is great about this. I think that sometimes women forget this.

My friend Wesley sends the following story:

Bob Choate has sold restaurant equipment for years, so he already knew there was no such thing as a free lunch.

Now, much to his chagrin, Choate has found there’s no such thing as a free doughnut, either.

Choate, 56, of Houston last fall won a year’s supply of coupons from Shipley’s Do-Nuts as one of the lucky prize-winners during Astros Fan Appreciation Day at Minute Maid Park.

“I went up to the customer service window, fat, dumb and happy, and signed a form and picked up a fistful of certificates, each good for a free doughnut or a dozen doughnut holes and one free cup of coffee,” he said.

But last month, much like the Grim Reaper, the punch line to his prize landed in Choate’s mailbox: an Internal Revenue Service Form 1099, informing him that he owed taxes on $927.61 in “free” coffee and doughnuts.

Raise your hand if you saw that coming. In fact, I knew what it was about when I saw the title, even though it didn’t mention taxes or the IRS. Many are aware of Oprah Winfrey giving away cars and the lucky studio audience getting stuck with the tax bill on them. There’s actually a raffle going on in Arapaho that involves a free $40k pickup. When I saw it, I didn’t think “free truck!” so much as “truck for 30% of its value!” Given that I am not in the market for a pickup, much less a $40k one, it would be wasted on me. But at least you can sell a vehicle! This guy is paying taxes on donuts that he may never actually get to eat:

Two months into the new year, Choate said he thus far has used eight coupons. He gave about 30 to his son, who gave them as a birthday present to one of his teachers.

That means he still has more than 300 coupons to go – or 72,600 calories, presuming 242 calories per doughnut, and 1,800 ounces of coffee if he’s to get full value for his prize from the Astros.

He can donate the coupons to charity or he can simply hold on to them and use them over the next eight years or so.

I wonder what the ones that won Superbowl tickets for the rest of their life have to pay annually. Even though it’s free, it’s probably kind of expensive.

I’m not sure that there is a really good answer to this. Payments in donuts are income, after all. Perhaps it’s up to the baseball club to pony up the taxes on it, too. Maybe when it comes to non-cash payments, that sort of thing should be required? I’m sure that’s a bad idea for one reason or another.

From the New York Times:

It started out as a “mancession”: Men’s unemployment rates have been higher than women’s for the last three years in the United States, as elsewhere. Now, women may be feeling more fear, if not more pain.

Their overall job prospects are lagging behind those of men, and they are likely to be more sharply affected by proposed cuts in federal, state and local spending.

Heather Boushey, an economist with the Center for American Progress, points out that since the economic recovery officially began in June 2009, private-sector employers have hired a net total of 503,000 men, while jobs held by women have declined by 141,000.

According to a new report by the National Women’s Law Center, women lost about 3 in every 10 jobs cut between December 2007 and June 2009 but filled fewer than 1 in every 10 jobs since job growth picked up in 2010.

Between January and February, unemployment rose slightly among women (to 8 percent from 7.9 percent) even as it declined slightly among men (to 8.7 percent from 8.8 percent).

This goes hand-in hand with Linda Greenhouse’s early musings that the recession, at which time 87% of the layoffs were of men, was going to be worse for women because they were entering the workforce in large numbers. As well as an article a while back about how hard it was on women when their husbands lost their job.

I’m not particularly anxious to get into the public sector union debate going on right now, but the gender make-up of those hit by it is particularly a non-issue. In that vein, the fact that it was men hit hardest by the recession was not paramount among my concerns. It sucks when people lose their jobs (however economically necessary it might be), regardless of gender. But I do find the efforts to take a recession that has brutally targeted men towards and shift the sob-story to women who are more likely to be employed and who have a full point to go before their unemployment numbers match that of men to be aggravating.

My time has been monopolized lately by school. I don’t just mean the substitute teaching gig, but also various debates about education going on over at The League and elsewhere. I don’t generally go on to rants about education policy because (a) this isn’t a policy blog and (b) it’s one of those subjects where people share neither opinions nor the same set of facts (and, since education is something that everybody has some experience in if only as a student, everyone knows that what they think is factual in nature). But there are exceptions to every rule.

A number of folks think that one of the solutions to improving education is “raising teacher standards.*” I have lately begun to wonder the degree to which teacher quality actually matters outside the extremes, but I’m going to let that go for now. Let’s say that it does. The notion that we should raise teacher standards sounds like a no-brainer. Who doesn’t want raised standards? All other things being equal, who doesn’t want teachers that are more qualified rather than less qualified?

The problem comes in when we talk about what we mean by increased standards. And I have to confess, when I hear about calls for raising teacher standards, I inwardly cringe. Because what I figure they mean, more often than not, is a more rigorous certification process requiring an MA in education rather than a BA and to cut back on alternative forms of certification. In other words, take the walls we have now and just build them higher.

I think this view is flawed for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, it assumes that the current barriers are effective. I think that most of the people here know about the reputation that Colleges of Education have in terms of recruiting the worst students at any given university. Now, maybe we could change this if we paid teachers more or whatnot, but I’m not sure how much that would actually drive people into CoE’s. By and large, I actually think that the vocational nature of it is one of the things that keeps a lot of the smarter kids out. Get a degree in education and there’s mainly one thing you can do with it. An often stressful and thankless position at that. But even more than that, it’s a job that you will have no idea if you’re well-suited for until you’ve spent 4 or 5 years and $40k or $50k training for it. And if it turns out that you don’t like doing it, what then?

If you get a degree in computers, you will get a decent idea of whether it’s something you want to do or not well before you graduate. You will be given assignments that will look at least somewhat like future work. Learning how to program and programming are not nearly as different as learning how to teach and actually teaching. Further, if you have an IT degree, there are a lot of things within the field you can do with it. If you don’t like doing one thing, you can try to transition into another. If you’re a teacher, the primary part of the job (standing and directing a class of 20-40 kids) is going to be relatively similar from one place to the next. If it turns out that it was nothing like you had envisioned… again, what then? Even something as specialized as aeronautical engineering, which my brother and father both have degrees in, provide some flexibility (both stopped actually engineering by the time they were 35). The more you specialize teaching, the more you isolate would-be teachers from other career options.

And – this is important – the more you attract people who just want to make a living. People who say to themselves, “Well, I guess I’ll teach.” A lot of people go into teaching because they have a passion for it. A lot of others go into it because it’s perceived to be a relatively safe career choice**. This leaves out a lot of smart and thoughtful people who think that they might want to teach, and might be good at it, but don’t want to bet their entire future on it because they want to get more from their job than a paycheck and no better options. By far, the worst teachers I had growing up were ones that weren’t dumb, but were obviously in the wrong field. A couple that flat-out didn’t like kids (anymore). These are people that needed to move on to something else. But with that education degree, what precisely could they move on to.

Of course, I also look at this from the other side. From the outside looking in. If my experiences substituting are any indication, I think that teaching is something that I would enjoy. Despite having taken the coursework a minor in education, I would have to go back to school for three full years before I could be certified (to teach the subject in which I already have a degree). In the state of Arapaho, I would have to re-take a portion of the classes I’ve already taken because I took “Honors Political Science” rather than “Government in Education”. My father looked into teaching math after he retired. He figured that since he had a degree in engineering and a master’s degree in accounting and economics, that he might be able to do it. The local community college thought so, but the school district said he would need to go back to school for two years.

In Dad’s case, we’re talking about Delosa, which actually has looser standards than many other states. You could, for instance, go with alternative certification. In that case, you start teaching right away (though you still have to go back to school at night). Unless a certified teacher applies for your job, in which case, even if you’ve spent the last year taking night classes, as “emergency personnel” you’re out of the job.

There is a strong counterargument to all of this. Namely, that teachers need not only know their subject, but ought to know a thing or two about educating young people, too. I am sympathetic to this line of argument, but not too sympathetic. While having the educational background helps, I think that a lot of teaching ability is temperamental and innate. Either you’ve got it or you don’t. Going back to school may help you get better at it, but it neither assures competence nor is required for competence. Given the lack of formal training, I think it would be entirely reasonable to give non-certified personnel less in the way of job protections than the average teacher gets. Not so little protection that they are out of the job the minute someone certified applies for it, but serving at the pleasure of the principal.

You can read over the last few paragraphs and say “So we should lower teacher standards?!” Which is why my teeth grit when I hear that we should be raising them. I don’t think we should lower standards at all. I don’t think that requiring that they have a degree in the subject they teach, rather than in education, is a step down.

I am not one of those people arguing that should abolish colleges of education. If nothing else, I think that they would be required for primary school where learning about human development is probably more important than having a degree in a specific subject. I also see use for them in coordinating certification as I would do it, which is to allow people to major in something else but get a minor in education and maybe even another in human development in order to get certified.

I am not unsympathetic to the notion that we want teaching to be viewed as a profession rather than a job, and it would seem that specialized degrees would be an extension of that. However, given the peculiarities of the job, I’m not sure it works in this case. I think that there is more to be gained by allowing people to view it as a professional option rather than to committing to it at 18 or having huge barriers erected to prevent them from trying it later.

-{NOTE: Education, teaching, and teachers have been getting a lot of press lately. This post is not about Wisconsin or teacher’s unions. Let’s also avoid comments derogatory of teachers more generally. Despite what the statistics say about CoE, a lot of very intelligent and capable people become teachers.}-

* – At this point, you may be thinking, “No, the solution to improving education is X.” If you write about it on your blog, I will link to it. But as I mentioned, education is something that everyone has experience in and everyone is cocksure that they have the solution for. I am no different. But I’m limiting my comments to teacher standards and certifications, so I ask that you do the same.

** – By which I mean that there is generally a steady – though sometimes unimpressive depending on your point of view – paycheck involved. There’s usually (at the moment) a good pension plan. And there is the perception that there is a teacher shortage and so finding a job won’t be difficult. That last part isn’t exactly true, but it is the perception.

In Illinois, somebody goofed:

Our local news has recently been covering the story of a substitute school teacher who showed a fourth grade classroom a movie about slavery. The movie, “The Middle Passage,” belonged to the fourth grade classroom’s regular teacher, and the teacher left a note asking the sub to show it while she was out. The movie, not previously screened by any school administrator, was marked, “adult content, violence and nudity,” and depicted the appalling sea voyage of slaves on a trading vessel from Africa. The storyline included suicide, rape, and throwing dead bodies to the sharks.

It’s fair to say that when parents caught wind of the movie, all hell broke loose. The school district’s co-superintendents apologized for the movie, quickly put new media policies in place, and fired the substitute teacher.

I guess I am beginning to think of myself as a “substitute teacher”, because my immediate response was… wait, fired the substitute?! They just did what they were told! Granted, if I were in that situation, there is a good chance that I would stop it and go talk to somebody. But there’s not exactly a protocol for that since you can be fired for leaving the kids alone and I might be too stunned to figure out a way around that (presumably sending a kid to get somebody from the office over there). Maybe that district, unlike Redstone, has training that deals with the issue of depictions of rape on a teacher-approved movie.

Which is the other part. The real culpability here lies with the teachers that assigned the movie. It turned out that there was more than one. Two substitutes showed the movie to their respective classes. A third non-sub started it but stopped it when they realized that it was inappropriate. Anyhow, substitute teachers assume that the regular teachers know what they’re doing. We have to. So if anyone should be fired, it shouldn’t be the person getting $80 a day a couple days a week. It should be the person who decided that this movie was okay without watching it, despite the warning label and despite the fact that it’s HBO. Of course, unless you were a prostitute, there are rules in place to make firing a teacher difficult. Easier to fire the schlub.

Well, apparently they reconsidered and the sub was allowed back into the classroom. I haven’t read anything about whether the teachers were disciplined in any way. And to be honest, I wouldn’t exactly be outraged if they weren’t. Errors in judgment happen. Putting together a district policy is probably the right answer to this. But if they’re not going to fire the teacher, they sure shouldn’t fire the person doing what the teacher told them to. So they got that much right.

A little while back, the New York Times reported that, as Wikipedia contributors, women are grossly underrepresented:

In 10 short years, Wikipedia has accomplished some remarkable goals. More than 3.5 million articles in English? Done. More than 250 languages? Sure.

But another number has proved to be an intractable obstacle for the online encyclopedia: surveys suggest that less than 15 percent of its hundreds of thousands of contributors are women.

About a year ago, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, collaborated on a study of Wikipedia’s contributor base and discovered that it was barely 13 percent women; the average age of a contributor was in the mid-20s, according to the study by a joint center of the United Nations University and Maastricht University.

For Slate, Heather MacDonald rebuts:

For anyone who is actually interested in finding out whether sexism currently shapes participation in public discourse, Wikipedia is a dream come true. Feminists have been complaining for years about the unequal representation of females on op-ed pages and in influential book reviews, magazines, and journals. In 2005, for example, political commentator Susan Estrich prominently accused editor Michael Kinsley of excluding female writers from the Los Angeles Times’ opinion section. Estrich’s only evidence for Kinsley’s alleged animosity to women was the lack of gender proportionality among Times contributors, which a posse of Estrich’s female students at the University of Southern California law school had been tracking. A New York outfit called the OpEd Project performs the same bean-counting more widely, running a regularly updated gender breakdown of opinion pieces at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, and Salon. And last week, Meghan O’Rourke (writing in Slate) and Robin Romm (writing for the Double X blog) reported the results of yet another such tally, this one by the women’s literary group VIDA, which counted bylines at 14 influential magazines, book reviews, and literary journals over the course of 2010. Pointing to VIDA’s findings—namely, that male bylines outnumbered female ones—O’Rourke concluded that “decisions about who and what gets published” must not be “the result of merit alone.” Romm, meanwhile, used the occasion to observe portentously that “the gatekeepers of literary culture—at least at magazines—are still primarily male.” Neither felt the need to determine the underlying ratio of male to female writers before decrying the byline imbalance.

The idea that these gender imbalances represent gatekeeper bias was demonstrably false even before the Wiki reality check. Any female writer or speaker who is not painfully aware of the many instances in which she has been included in a forum because of her sex is self-deluded. Far from being indifferent—much less hostile—to female representation, every remotely mainstream organization today assiduously seeks to include as many females as possible in its ranks. Nevertheless, the idea that someone or something is inhibiting women’s intellectual and political involvement remains robust, which is where Wikipedia comes in. Famously, Wikipedia has no gatekeepers. Anyone can write or edit an entry, either anonymously or under his or her own name. All that is required is a zeal for knowledge and accuracy. (The desire to share knowledge and the drive to correct errors are the top motivations of contributors, the Wikimedia study found.) Wikipedia provides a naturally occurring control group to test the theory that females’ low participation rate in various public forums is the result of exclusion.

It’s not impossible that an atmosphere dominated by men would be inhospitable to women even if there aren’t any formal gatekeepers. Web has commented on Wikipedia in the past as being very clannish (and biased). Given the number of male contributors, this would inevitably have a gender dimension. There are a lot of organizations that don’t formally exclude anyone but that people outside certain demographics would be uncomfortable. However, if the association or non-association is entirely voluntary, is there any damage done?

The answer to that is not necessarily “no.”

Given that Wikipedia doesn’t pay the vast majority of its contributors (if it pays any), that Wikipedia contributions are anonymous and therefore not a launching pad to a writing career, and apparently the contentious atmosphere of the sausage factory (errr, in more ways than one I suppose), it’s arguably the case that women are being done a favor here. It’s not their time being wasted. However, if you read past the first couple sentences of the New York Times article, you get to this:

Her effort is not diversity for diversity’s sake, she says. “This is about wanting to ensure that the encyclopedia is as good as it could be,” Ms. Gardner said in an interview on Thursday. “The difference between Wikipedia and other editorially created products is that Wikipedians are not professionals, they are only asked to bring what they know.”

“Everyone brings their crumb of information to the table,” she said. “If they are not at the table, we don’t benefit from their crumb.”

With so many subjects represented — most everything has an article on Wikipedia — the gender disparity often shows up in terms of emphasis. A topic generally restricted to teenage girls, like friendship bracelets, can seem short at four paragraphs when compared with lengthy articles on something boys might favor, like, toy soldiers or baseball cards, whose voluminous entry includes a detailed chronological history of the subject.

Even the most famous fashion designers — Manolo Blahnik or Jimmy Choo — get but a handful of paragraphs. And consider the disparity between two popular series on HBO: The entry on “Sex and the City” includes only a brief summary of every episode, sometimes two or three sentences; the one on “The Sopranos” includes lengthy, detailed articles on each episode.

These strike me as quite legitimate concerns. MacDonald is so buys knocking down feminist tackle dummies that she doesn’t even address these points. I am not inclined to believe that a lack of diversity is inherently a problem. In the past, I have pushed back against forcing men to take down Incredible Hulk posters cause women might think that they are guilty and choose to work somewhere else. A lot of the time, I ask… “so what if they do? Is the job getting done?”

But a project like Wikipedia is different. It could really stand to be improved with greater diversity. If the contributing population more closely matched that of the reading population, it would put out a product more useful to a larger number of people, which is Wikipedia’s stated purpose.

Unless you’ve been living in a rock, you’ve probably heard that Charlie Sheen has been fired from Two And A Half Men. Most of the focus is on Sheen himself, but I’m more curious about what happens to the show. It’s on my low-priority list and so I’ve only watched a few episodes this season, but it’s still an interesting subject because cast fluidity is something I’ve written about before. Basically, I think that sitcoms would be better served by rotating secondary characters in and out. I even mentioned TAAHM as an example of a show doing this effectively with Rose (and the mother, for that matter) becoming a periodic appearance rather than full-time cast member.

Of course, Charlie Sheen’s is hardly a secondary character. He is the foundation upon which the show is based. You can get away with a lot sometimes even with show’s main stars. For a little while, anyway. 8 Simple Rules survived John Ritter, Valerie survived Valerie Harper, Spin City survived Michael J Fox (with some help from Charlie Sheen, coincidentally enough), and so on. But this show really, really needs the Charlie Harper character. It’s difficult to imagine the show surviving without Charlie Sheen, but impossible to imagine it surviving without Charlie Harper. The crux of the show involves brothers. You can try to bring in a cousin or something, but it would be forcing too much.

So I think I am on board with the Darin Stevens solution. Stevens, for those who might recall, was the husband of Samantha Stevens on Bewitched wherein one Dick (York) was replaced by another (Sargent) and nobody really cared. For secondary cast members, I think that this is something that shows should consider more often. To take another example, The Drew Carey Show dropped Drew’s brother to save a few bucks. Dropping the actor wasn’t a problem, but dropping the character was because he was married to another character on the show and the excuse they gave was inadequate. They would have been better by simply bringing on a new actor to play the part. The same actually goes for Drew’s primary love interest, Kate, who was replaced with another character instead of another actress and a lot was lost along the way. Other than Darin Stevens, the only time I can think of when a TV show replaced an actor was Mad About You, whom at first had an elderly British neighbor by the name Hal and then had a young British neighbor named Hal… but they backtracked when the original actor for Hal came back and explained away that those were two different snobby, British guys named Hal.

Of course, replacing the actor of a member of the cast is one thing. It’s another thing to try that with the star of the show. Perhaps especially when the character is a mirror of the actor who plays them. Even so, I think it’s really the only way to save the show. Someone suggested Ron Livingston for the part and I think that would actually be a phenomenal pick. But no less than Drew Carey points out that there are 100 people that could do it. In Los Angeles, probably thousands. He’s talking about a new role, but I say make it the same one and avoid any messy explanations.

So should they bother? From a financial perspective, absolutely. First, it’s the most popular sitcom on television (more popular in reruns than many shows on first-runs)and you don’t leave something like that on the table. You just don’t. Second, replacing the actor for Charlie would probably gauge a spike of interest on how the new guy does. Particularly if they can get someone that people have heard of. Even Livingston might qualify there. Rob Morrow is also available. It’s a little dicier from an artistic standpoint. I can’t really comment since I don’t know where they left the show. But seriously, this show is not art. People laugh at the characters, but the writers go out of their way to make sure that we don’t care about them. Other than Charlie Sheen, it’s not a show that the creative talent is artistically proud of. Why not? Just cash the checks and keep going.