Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

My exciting project for this semester is high-school geometry. In addition to learning useful everyday terms such as orthocenter, I found out that students in our local public high school can check their grades in real-time via iPASS. In addition to showing grades on recent assignments, the web-based software helpfully forecasts the ultimate grade for the class. This forecast can change after any individual homework assignment is turned in or after any quiz. A student taking five classes, therefore, can log into iPASS almost every night and see a potentially different forecast report card. The software is pitiless. Though declared failure is rare in our snowflake society, after a disastrous quiz taken in September the iPASS system will calmly forecast an F for the semester.

[Back in 1999, we built a module of the ArsDigita Community System to manage the education side of the MIT Sloan School. Demonstrating the awesome creativity that happens when MIT graduates collaborate, we called this the “Education Subsystem”. The software could show the grades students had received on recent assignments, but not provide a forecast of the ultimate semester grade. We never considered the anxiety-producing potential of a system with real-time grades!]

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Here amidst the nearly-all-white Millionaires who Hate Trump there is a small church that, a couple of years ago, decided to burnish its tolerance credentials by hiring an Indian-American pastor. He moved into the parsonage with his husband and their two children, neither of whom share any genetic material (or race) with the two fathers.

As the endowment was drained by this family (total comp, including the real estate value, of about $200,000 per year), some parishioners began grumbling about the minister’s performance. According to these folks, essentially every sermon boiled down to scolding the deplorables among the congregation for insufficient zeal regarding helping undocumented immigrants, fighting for Hillary, etc. They agreed with the minister’s political sentiments, but felt that the sermons were repetitious and boring compared to those offered by his predecessor.

When some of the folks on the congregation’s board raised questions about the minister’s on-the-job performance, he instantly shut them down with “Do you have a problem with brown people?” Game. Set. Match. (on the town’s clay courts, of course!)

Related:

• When can a church take down a Black Lives Matter flag?

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Twenty years ago I posted a question on my site “To whom should I give my 1993 Dodge Grand Caravan?” and got a lot of great suggestions. Interestingly, the destination charity’s web site is still live but Marissa Mayer apparently trashed autos.yahoo.com. The kbb.com value of this fine machine, should it still be in “good” condition, is down to about $2,000.

Some things that amaze me:

• how many answers there are on a private web site in the pre-Facebook age
• how little progress there has been in minivan design and performance
• how there isn’t a single mention of a politician; maybe everyone was happy with Bill Clinton?

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Demand for the $1,000+ iPhone X is so strong that a friend went down to his local AT&T store this morning and, without waiting in line, was able to purchase two. I asked him to take the same indoor photos with his old (iPhone 7 Plus) and new (iPhone X) devices (outdoor images are easy for almost any camera). The full-res files are available via Dropbox links:

• iPhone 7 Plus
• iPhone X

The sequence of perspective selected is normal, wide, wide, normal. (What Apple calls “telephoto” is actually a “normal” perspective lens.) The EXIF data are still attached so you can verify the lens and camera with any desktop software (including clicking right and asking for Details in Microsoft Windows).

Readers: What differences do you observe in the test images? Has anyone seen any sensor size spec for the iPhone X? It is supposed to have a larger sensor than the 8, but smaller than the sensor on the biggest Sony and Samsung phones? (The WSJ said that low light images are better on the Google Pixel 2 XL, suggesting that the X does not have a large-by-market-standards sensor.) Who else got an iPhone X today? What’s the verdict?

Related:

• DxOMark, which rates the iPhone 8 Plus below the Huawei and Google Pixel 2 phones
• “The iPhone X Is the Beginning of the End for Apple” (Fortune)

 

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Plainly Harvey Weinstein is not going to be working in Hollywood again. In any event, at age 65 he has reached normal retirement age. If he stays in the U.S. he risks prosecution for whatever happened during meetings with actresses in California, Connecticut, New York, and perhaps some other states. Even if evidence against him is weak, what prosecutor could resist becoming famous by bringing charges? (See Window into American criminal justice system from the daycare sexual abuse trials of the 1980s for some stuff that influences prosecutors in deciding whether to pursue a case.)

Harvey could probably beat the “beyond a reasonable doubt” rap a few times, given that most of the situations were private encounters and there were no unbiased witnesses. Maybe he can beat the 51-percent rap of all of the civil suits that are likely to be filed? But if he doesn’t he might have to pay in the neighborhood of $32 million per successful plaintiff (see “Bill O’Reilly Settled a Sex Harassment Claim for $32 Million, Report Says” (NBC; Megyn Kelly wrote that this is more than a plaintiff in a wrongful death action would normally be able to obtain, noting in the nytimes that “O. J. Simpson was ordered to pay the Goldman and Brown families $33.5 million for the murders of Ron and Nicole.”).

Why would a 65-year-old with money want to stick around to spend the remaining years of his life as a defendant? As a thought-experiment, if Harvey doesn’t want to stick around, where can he go? What country would ignore any U.S. extradition requests while simultaneously providing Harvey with a reasonable-by-Western-standards lifestyle? And, in case he does want to continue working, what country meets the preceding criteria and also has a competent film industry?

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A Houston-based friend’s Facebook post:

I’m happy for the Astros winning the World Series. Really I am. But HISD’s decision to cancel school so the kiddos can take part in the festivities? Umm, hello, parents have jobs and stuff! Couldn’t the Astros be festive on Saturday?

He’s referring to “HISD schools, offices closed Friday for Astros World Series victory celebration”.

This is interesting to me because he is not upset that children will be denied the opportunity to learn. He is upset because taxpayer-funded daycare won’t be provided.

[In case you’re thinking that he might be anti-education or anti-intellectual… he is employed as a professor by Rice University.]

Related:

• Smartest Kids in the World: American Schools

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Avweb reports that the years-delayed two-seat Icon A5 seaplane will soon be going out the door at $389,000. That’s up from $180,000. At this rate, by 2020 the A5 will cost the same as a good used 10-seat turbine-powered Cessna Caravan on floats. The airplane is already more expensive than this Grumman Albatross on controller.com (the Albatross is about 20 times the size of the Icon A5! See Wikipedia.)

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“Top NPR Editor Accused of Sexual Harassment While at The New York Times” (nytimes) would have been more fun if titled “Who will scold the scolders?” but, even with its boring title, raises some interesting questions, e.g.,

• Can an employer fire someone based on conduct at a previous employer?
• If there are some accusations that must necessarily lead to being shunned from the workforce… can the shunned person claim that this is a disability and thus join the SSDI party?

The story concerns an unfortunate middle-aged guy who was anonymously denounced:

In The Post’s report, the women, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that they had faced unwanted sexual advances from Mr. Oreskes as they talked with him about job opportunities. The episodes, they said, occurred in the late 1990s.

Now he is on leave and presumably will be out of a job soon (how is he going to disprove allegations of what he might have said or done 20 years ago?).

First, if he has a contract with NPR can they terminate it because he was anonymously denounced? Even if somehow it could be proved that he did something improper 20 years ago, can NPR fire him? Most employers ask about criminal convictions, but don’t ask “In the years since you were born, did you ever do anything wrong, that you regret, or that someone might denounce you for?” So he wouldn’t have had to lie to NPR.

NPR does seem to be on the road to firing the guy, so let’s assume the answer to the above question is “yes.” Then let’s consider what happens to this guy. What employer would want to take the risk of hiring him? That seems like a slam-dunk way to lose a lawsuit. Any woman in the U.S. can sue the next employer claiming that she met the guy and he made an “unwanted sexual advance.” Plainly his employer should have known about this propensity as it was reported in the New York Times!

So if he can’t work again, is that a “disability” that would qualify him for SSDI? SSDI generally requires a “medical” disability, so unless he is depressed because he was fired… what does society do with guys like this? Should there be a federal agency that hires them all and puts them to work together? (so they can harass each other, but not anyone else) Do they collect welfare checks on condition that they remove to remote areas where there are no attractive young people to harass?

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Of course there isn’t truly a “pilot shortage” any more than there is a “gold shortage,” but employers offering the same salaries as in 2007, adjusted for the official inflation rate, will find that not enough qualified people apply. Airlines all over the world are hiring and, with some bureaucratic finesse, can fill a job in a foreign country with a U.S. citizen. I recently spoke with the manager of a small air carrier. He recently raised charter prices by more than 10 percent. I asked if he’d done that because demand was so strong. “No,” he responded. “It is because I had to give all of the pilots a 30-percent raise a few months ago and our costs are now higher.” (The raise was necessary to prevent pilots from jumping “ship” to the big airlines.)

At least until autonomous aircraft are certified for carrying passengers, I wonder if we’ll go through a period where Americans have less mobility (automobile traffic jams getting worse every year (also see this multi-city report) plus higher airfares). This ICAO report says that the crew (“pilot wages and benefits”) costs $489 per block hour out of a total of $2,550. So airline ticket prices might go up at roughly 1/5th the rate of pilot wage increases? [Note that this report puts flight attendants, part of the “crew” as far as the FAA is concerned, into a separate bucket of “passenger service”]

Readers: Are we going into a period of less mobility? If so, is it time to invest more in video conferencing software and hardware?

Related:

• “Unions and Airlines”
• Tyler Cowen asks if we can do big projects (Americans moving less)
• those higher pilot salaries might lead to some additional family court litigation in Massachusetts: “I remember one enterprising young lady who worked as a waitress at Boston’s Logan airport. She targeted three airline pilots, had a child by each of them, and back then was collecting $25,000 in tax-free child support from each pilot…” (that was in the 1980s; today it would be $40,000+/year minimum per child)

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A letter, slightly tweaked, from our local public school district, which runs a small K-8 school:

Happy Valley Public Schools become a WorkPlace Lab for Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Doctor of Education Leadership (Ed.L.D.) Program.

… Happy Valley Schools will be the site for fieldwork by 25 graduate students in Harvard’s Doctorate program in Education Leadership (Ed.LD.). This program, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is a three-year, full-time multidisciplinary doctorate that prepares graduates to be transformative, system-level leaders in preK-12 education. Each cohort in the program comprises 25 experienced educators, selected from a large number of applicants, and the intensive training includes hands-on experience in local school districts, translating visionary ideas into real-world success. This fall, those 25 students will be doing their fieldwork in Happy Valley.

This massive infusion of brainpower should be awesome, right? Kids in Singapore had better watch out after these 25 high-achievers pump up our academics!

Or can those Asian kids sleep late? It seems that we were able to tell the Harvard geniuses which problems concerned us the most…

The Happy Valley Public Schools leadership had the rewarding challenge of thinking about how best to use the expertise and energy of the 25 experienced educators who are dedicating several weeks of effort to thinking about how to improve our schools. The leadership identified ‘problems of practice’ to serve as focus for the Ed.L.D. initiative:

Social Emotional Learning

What process could we carry out this year as part of our needs-assessment in order to feel prepared to craft a multi-year plan to support the social emotional development and learning for our students across the district? What social emotional content elements should we be attending to?

Public Relations

How could we better communicate with the larger community so that they know of the good work within our schools? What effective ways of communication and promoting the district would be within our resources (given our small size and capacity of administrators)?

Race and Identity

Help us tell the stories of our students’ experiences within our schools as it pertains to race and identity. What does it feel like to be a student of color or a white student?

Collaborative Practice

How can we support teams across the district as a vehicle for driving continued teacher/staff development? What factors, strategies, or approaches have other districts or organizations taken that have led to successful professional learning communities?

So… it turns out that we didn’t ask the young Harvardites for help with improving academic achievement.

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