Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Nearly Every Child Left Behind
May 01, 2006

Skippy wrote some of this thoughts on what amounts to No Child Left Behind - our public schools’ proclivity for teaching to the standards set by the government for testing, and not teaching to practical life skills.

I have two thoughts on this topic:

Thought one:
In India, students (as many who are in physical proximity to their schools) are instructed in about 6th grade to decide on their future career, thus educational path. They are taught a minimum of what they need to know to move on to specialized areas of study. When they begin their lessons in their field of choice, they learn nothing outside of that field. For this reason, they excell in their areas of expertise, but can’t answer cross-vocational questions.

A prime example of this behavior was in one of the Indian software development contractors I worked with very briefly (before he ran off from his employer without a green card). He was a decent programmer, but he had to be instructed explicitly what to do. He was unable to make intuitive leaps in his functional coding because the matter of the project was completely outside of his scope of knowledge. My experience with this one contractor has been my general experience with off-shore contracting in India, where their affectation for specifications seems admirable at first, but then you come to realize that without that explicit and thorough direction, they can make no judgement of their own.

You might think waiting for input from the employer to be a virtue at first, but in an organization that stops working entirely when they can’t make an intuitive guess of what their employer might want - to be sorted out later - the half-planet time delay becomes a significant factor. “You did not work today because you could not take a guess as to what we would like for a UI and decided to wait for our input?” Yeah, no.

Without a well-rounded education, like that which American universities provide, schools that provide career directed or core-proficiency directed instruction will result in less proficient workers.

The Many Faces of Ba
April 30, 2006

Yesterday was a trial as we attempted to do some not-so-serious house hunting in the nearly perfect weather. Why? Riley was in “scream continuously” mode.

It’s rare that he does this these days because mostly he has very specific wants and knows how to communicate them. For example, when he wants a bottle (when will he finally accept sippy cups??) he’ll say “Ba?” And when he wants his blanket, he says “Ba?” And when he wants to play with a ball, he says “Ba?” And even “Ba?” when its time for that bath he loves. It’s a very flexible word.

An Odd Social Experiment
April 28, 2006

This is something that I heard about from my Astronomy teacher at West Chester. He was an odd guy, and I’ve always wondered if his ideas would prove out and whether he had actually read this somewhere reliable.

For this experiment you will need a cup and some drinking water. Not too much water. Do not flavor the water - iced tea, for example, will not work. Also, it’s probably better if you use a glass and not a cup, if you have one available. I’m not sure if that will skew the experiment or not, so if you report your results, be sure to include what you used.

There are two steps to the experiment itself. If you’re interested in helping answer the question (which I will pose at the end of the experiment, so as not to taint your results), then commit to the whole experiment right now. I guarantee that it will cause you no harm, and can be successfully completed by any person with a cup of water.

So, stop reading and get yourself a glass of water. We’ll wait. Ok, here we go…

Step one: Spit into the cup of water. I’m not talking about hocking a loogie, just gather some reasonable amount of saliva in your mouth and spit it into the cup of water. Perhaps you can think about a nice meal that you’d enjoy to get the juices flowing.

Ok, that’s the “easy” part. Step two comprises the actual test of the experiment.

Hail Hail
April 27, 2006

A morning or two ago between 5 and 6 am and while everyone was catching their last hour of sleep, there was a strange noise on the roof. A bit like rain at first, but then obviously louder. Suddenly there was lightning, thunder, and the persistent white noise of hail hitting the roof.

Hail isn’t a usual occurrance around here (is it anywhere?), especially in late April. Even when it does hail, it usually only does it a little bit and then stops or turns to rain. By the time you actually get outside to see it, it’s usually quite melted and unimpressive. This time the hail lasted for a while, and even accumulated a bit. It was just cold enough outside that it didn’t all melt suddenly, and there was no follow-up rain to wash it away.

The hail storm was exciting and foreboding all at once. Riley was awakened by one of the noises, probably the hail, and came to lay with us in our bed for safety. Abby didn’t even realize it had happened until afterward. Berta and I were awake partly because of the hail, partly because of the squeaking boy. After a while of listening to the hail hit the roof and windows, I just had to take a look outside to see what was going on.