Ideas Special Report

What Women Want (on TV)

2009-07-27T21:30:14Z

"Fun With Technology"

2009-07-27T15:58:34Z

Tim O'Reilly talks to Bob Cohn about Twitter, transparency, and his delight in seeing "geeks playing with sensors, with robotics, with building things."

This Is The End

2009-07-24T19:36:45Z

Well folks, it's been fun, but this is my last post at Big Thinking, The Atlantic's ideas blog, which is going dark after today. Thanks to everyone who has read and written during my six week tenure -- and for anyone who'd like to reach me, my e-mail address is conor dot friedersdorf at gmail dot com. Should you want to follow my other writing, bookmark The American Scene where I am among the contributors, and my blog at True/Slant.

I'd also encourage anyone who enjoyed The Atlantic's ideas coverage to subscribe to the print magazine. It's one of the best venues for new ideas in American journalism, and like all high quality publications, it requires the support of those who value its work if it is to survive and thrive.

The New York Times Idea of the Day blog and Bloggingheads.tv are also great venues for ideas coverage.

With that -- and one more admonition to subscribe to The Atlantic -- I bid you farewell.

Cheers,

Conor Friedersdorf

"California's Disposable Cities"

2009-07-24T18:34:47Z

Josh Leon writes from Sacramento:

For the past few months I've been writing about what in my view is a global consensus that favors dense, mixed use and public transit centered development over the old anti-urban, suburban-centric model of the last century. These policies, the consensus goes, can grease the wheels of a global economy that relies increasingly on urban connectivity, personal mobility and access to ideas. As capital is mobile, so should people be. My problem is that the consensus relies excessively on market pressures to decide where people should live and migrate, and forces cities to deal with the swift vicissitudes of global capital. This city--hopefully temporarily--is on the losing end of what is euphemistically known as a market correction.

Cars for the Blind

2009-07-24T17:16:33Z

Wired reports:

The same technology that lets cars drive themselves allows the blind to drive, too.
Virginia Tech undergrads packed an all-terrain buggy with technology lifted from the university's DARPA Urban Challenge entry to create a car the blind can drive. The semi-autonomous vehicle uses a laser range finder, voice software and other sensory technology, and it worked flawlessly when blind drivers took the wheel on a closed course. Advocates for the blind joined the lead researcher in calling the vehicle a breakthrough in independent living for the visually impaired.

I am skeptical!

"Conservative INC"

2009-07-24T15:55:16Z

Sean Scallon:

There are several good posts and articles recently written that provide a peek inside the conservative establishment and how it operates, whether its fundraising, or talk radio, and who it consists of and what they are thinking . Many do not like the establishment and posture themselves against it but establishments, like the poor, you will always have with you and they are inevitable because when the centers of government, finance, media and entertainment are concentrated in one place instead of many, it thus requires one to live at or near them to be of some use. When that many people are at the centers of power, then establishments are born. There's no way around this. The ascendancy of the right from 1981-2008 was bound to create a conservative establishment with all those people descending upon Washington D.C. since the mid-1970s and onward whether it was to staff think tanks, foundations or Administrations.
However, what we're dealing with here is an establishment that has split itself in two. In the majority is what I like to call Conservative INC. It has become a money-grubbing scam as the Boston Phoenix article shows and one that is totalitarian in the way it operates and disseminates ideas.

Not Your Father's Marijuana

2009-07-24T15:48:37Z

Anti-drug activist Joseph A. Califano Jr. explains to Scott Stossel why America's substance-abuse problem is more potent--and pervasive--than ever before.

On Losing Gracefully

2009-07-24T15:00:00Z

Josh Levin:

There's a video on YouTube of the world's greatest basketball player getting humiliated at his own basketball camp. He takes the defeat with dignity, explaining that "in your life, in the game, you get dunked on, you get crossed over." The other campers proceed to laugh at him, having been egged on by Damon Wayans.

An Author's Rights

2009-07-24T14:00:00Z

A.E. Hotchner is upset about changes to the latest edition of Ernest Hemingway's "A Movable Feast."

All publishers, Scribner included, are guardians of the books that authors entrust to them. Someone who inherits an author's copyright is not entitled to amend his work. There is always the possibility that the inheritor could write his own book offering his own corrections.
Ernest was very protective of the words he wrote, words that gave the literary world a new style of writing. Surely he has the right to have these words protected against frivolous incursion, like this reworked volume that should be called "A Moveable Book." I hope the Authors Guild is paying attention.

Video of the Day: "On Educating Leaders"

2009-07-24T13:00:00Z

Conor Friedersdorf

Policing with Technology

2009-07-24T12:00:00Z

Edward Tenner on the Gates controversy:

What is sad is that a dispatcher's use of freely available technology, not advanced databases, could have defused the whole event. As of 11:10 on July 23, Gates's name, address, and telephone number were still available on line through Google and probably other means. (You can even get the Harvard housing office brochure about the house with rent information online.) A dispatcher could have searched the address, found occupants' names within seconds, used them to determine Gates's appearance and Harvard connection, and relayed all of this to the officers on their way to the scene. I'd be surprised if they didn't have laptops and/or smartphones with them that could have found the same information. And since Professor Gates said he had entered through the back door and turned off the alarm system, shouldn't the dispatcher also have known about the system's existence -- most cities now require registration to penalize repeat false alarms -- and let the officer know that the owner probably was the person observed at the door?

With the right background information the sergeant could have recognized Gates, addressed him by name, and explained that verifying identification was a formality in clearing the call.

Get Rid of Teacher Licenses

2009-07-24T12:00:00Z

When it comes to hiring teachers, much of what we thought we knew turns out to be wrong. Performance on teacher-certification tests is a poor indicator of success in the classroom, and research shows that teachers who come from traditional schools of education aren't necessarily more effective than those from alternative certification programs, such as Teach for America. It's time we scrapped our outdated and inefficient system for recruiting and training teachers, and allow anyone with a college degree and a background check to teach. As Malcolm Gladwell recently elucidated in The New Yorker, we are terrible at predicting who will turn out to be a great teacher and who will be lousy. The traditional logic has held that people who pass a credentials test, earn a license, and have a degree from a school of education will make the best teachers, and consequently, we should set the bar high for entering the profession. But that isn't the case. Much of what teachers do is unrelated to the kinds of skills that are measured on tests like the Praxis, the standard teacher-licensing exam. A talent for, say, facilitating student interaction, or classroom management, can't always be taught, and may be exhibited only in practice.

A master's degree -- long considered the mark of a qualified educator, and used in many school districts as a criterion for increased pay -- has actually been shown to have little or no effect on student learning. What's more, master's degrees are expensive, both for the teachers and for the districts that pay their raises, without corresponding gains for students. One recent study even concluded that teachers who earn a master's degree after they've started teaching are less effective at their job than teachers who don't have a master's at all. As Education Sector's Kevin Carey puts it, it appears that "master's degrees either reward teachers who were already worse, or they make them worse."

So what do we do? Gladwell suggests an apprenticeship program that trains teachers and evaluates them while they're teaching, not before they begin. This isn't dissimilar to what many alternative certification programs do with their recruits, focusing on character and past accomplishments during selection, and then putting the novices through a grueling summer training program, with instruction and feedback that continues through the school year. Last year, an Urban Institute study found that high-school students taught by Teach for America educators in North Carolina actually performed significantly better on end-of-course assessments than those taught by educators with three or more years of experience. Yet even Teach for America participants are required to attend graduate courses at night and eventually do earn their certifications. By that time -- years into their teaching careers -- isn't a license something of a moot point?

Lowering the entry barriers to the teaching profession would certainly make waves, and could result in controversial shifts in teacher pay and tenure, union agreements, and existing schools of education. However, it's widely acknowledged that public schools are largely underperforming, and with more than a third of America's 2.3 million teachers approaching retirement, it's time to start actively getting bright new teachers into our classrooms. Eliminating the bureaucratic and largely irrelevant teacher-licensing process will make it easier to recruit teachers who majored in or worked in sparsely filled subject areas like math and science and prepare them for teaching, without requiring investment in an expensive master's-degree program or certification course before they can work. We have little to lose and much to gain by broadening the teacher applicant pool. The result will be more talent for the classroom, and more benefits for America's students.

The Creator of Dilbert Speaks

2009-07-23T20:06:40Z

Wired has a fascinating story on his bizarre problem:

The rules changed all the time--sometimes day to day, sometimes hour to hour--and whenever he tried to recite them, people thought, "This guy is nuts."
The rules dictated when and where Scott Adams, the chief engineer of the Dilbert comic empire, was allowed to speak. He could neither control them nor predict exactly when they'd go into effect. All he knew was that he'd woken up one morning and found that his voice had turned against him, imposing a set of bizarre restrictions.
Take the rule about crowds. If Adams was at a party with friends, he'd open his mouth to talk, only to find the words tumbling out in a raspy, imperceptible staccato, chopping off sentences before they had a chance to form. If he tried to say, "Tomorrow is my birthday," for example, it would morph into a weak "Ma robf sss ma birfday." But if he was on the lecture circuit, delivering a prepared speech to a crowd of thousands, he could stand behind the podium and--"Hello!"--his voice would whir back to life, if only for the hour he was onstage.
There was also the rule about being alone. Adams might be sitting at the desk in his Bay Area office, working on a new Dilbert strip, when suddenly he'd be able to form words. He'd call out to others in the house--"I can talk!"--but the moment somebody stepped into the room, his voice evaporated.
Then there was the rule about the rules themselves. For some reason, if Adams were to explain his condition to you, his speech would suddenly become clear and strong. Change the topic, however, and his voice would jumble again.
But if you were to place a video camera in front of him and have him talk into it--well, in that case, he could be relatively lucid about anything.
That one still baffles him.

Read the whole thing.

The Space Age

2009-07-23T20:01:40Z

The New York Times corrects itself.

"Worst Idea Ever"

2009-07-23T20:00:00Z

Elsewhere I write about male pickup artists:

The community of men who study picking up women -- let's call them "players" -- are unified by a belief that dating is a "game," and that utility should guide one's approach to it. The results can be harmless enough. An item I once saw in a men's magazine advised that a good first date might involve walking across a suspension bridge, or standing atop the observation deck of a tall building, because what women feel when they experience vertigo mimics the butterflies that accompanies proximity to a man to whom they're genuinely attracted. I imagined some poor guy bringing his date on a long hike to the bridge over the river only to discover that she isn't confused nearly as easily as he was led to believe.
Of course, the belief that one acts amorally by manipulating women quickly leads to abhorrent behavior. The rogue who is zealous for sexual conquest at least understands that he acts badly if he uses deception to get sex. The cerebral "player," exemplified by the author of the blog Elysium Revisited, doesn't grasp that anything is the matter with his behavior.
As a result, he is quite unabashed as he describes a male behavior that I've observed on many occasions, and that I abhor more than any other mainstream pickup technique. Though I'd never heard it referred to as such, Sebastian Flyte dubs it "the Neg," and calls it "the Swiss army knife of pickup."

More here.