Greece, Germany, productivity and leisure

Talk to your all-knowing uncle at the family barbecue, and he will tell you the value of austerity, the sort of hardship that he himself will claim to have put in, that builds character in everyone ranging from minorities to single moms. If your uncle’s name is Angela Merkel, which is not unlikely if you happen to be Greek, this bit of statistic might be worth noting (via Charlotte McDonald for the BBC):

Figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) show that the average Greek worker toils away for 2,017 hours per year which is more than any other European country. Out of the 34 members of the OECD, that is just two places behind the board leaders, South Korea.

On the other hand, the average German worker - normally thought of as the very epitome of industriousness - only manages 1,408 hours a year. Germany is 33rd out of 34 on the OECD list (or 24th out of 25 looking at the European countries alone).

The piece goes on to explain the various reasons for this data, and I recommend a full reading; which will introduce you to a table on productivity and hours worked by country, which illustrates the silliness of applying quasi-religious notions of “hard work” to measuring the outcomes of peoples. All ten of the most productive countries also happen to be the ones with the fewest hours spent working.

No doubt the real lesson of the table will be drowned by familiar clichés about “work smart, not hard” or equal rot.

The travesty of teacher evaluation

Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss outlines the impact of new standards of grading teachers through the story of one such teacher:

Carolyn Abbott was, in one respect, a victim of her own success. After a year in her classroom, her seventh-grade students scored at the 98th percentile of New York City students on the 2009 state test. As eighth-graders, they were predicted to score at the 97th percentile on the 2010 state test. However, their actual performance was at the 89th percentile of students across the city. That shortfall — the difference between the 97th percentile and the 89th percentile — placed Abbott near the very bottom of the 1,300 eighth-grade mathematics teachers in New York City.

How could this happen? Anderson is an unusual school, as the students are often several years ahead of their nominal grade level. The material covered on the state eighth-grade math exam is taught in the fifth or sixth grade at Anderson. “I don’t teach the curriculum they’re being tested on,” Abbott explained. “It feels like I’m being graded on somebody else’s work.”

Quantify, reduce, shame, destroy, profit. In that order.

Too Hot for TED: Income Inequality - NationalJournal

Jim Tankersley:

TED organizers invited a multimillionaire Seattle venture capitalist named Nick Hanauer – the first nonfamily investor in Amazon.com – to give a speech on March 1 at their TED University conference. Inequality was the topic – specifically, Hanauer’s contention that the middle class, and not wealthy innovators like himself, are America’s true “job creators.”

“We’ve had it backward for the last 30 years,” he said. “Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs. Rather they are a consequence of an ecosystemic feedback loop animated by middle-class consumers, and when they thrive, businesses grow and hire, and owners profit. That’s why taxing the rich to pay for investments that benefit all is a great deal for both the middle class and the rich.” You can’t find that speech online. TED officials told Hanauer initially they were eager to distribute it. “I want to put this talk out into the world!” one of them wrote him in an e-mail in late April. But early this month they changed course, telling Hanauer that his remarks were too “political” and too controversial for posting.

Video Helps Acquit Student In First Occupy Wall Street Trial : NPR

Irony via Elise Hu at NPR on the acquittal of Alexander Arbuckle during Occupy Wall Street protests last year:

In an ironic twist, Arbuckle was actually working on a New York University photojournalism project aimed at defending police officers working at Occupy protests when he was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.

“I felt the police had been treated unfairly on [sic] the media,” he said to the Village Voice. “All the focus was on the conflict and the worst instances of brutality and aggression, where most of the police I met down there were really professional and restrained.”

No Accountability for Torture - NYRB

David Cole:

We now know much about the brutal mistreatment of prisoners in secret prisons, inflicted according to specific legal guidance from Yoo and others in the Justice Department—although the Obama administration is shamefully still seeking to suppress the details, arguing that Guantanamo detainees should be barred even from discussing the facts in their public trials.

The maddening thing is Obama and his fan base’s conviction that matters of justice and democracy are an issue to be settled by his divining (the mood or desire of the “country”, or any of the various other criteria that they call upon).

Americans Overwhelmingly Support Defense Cuts (via NPR)

Eyder Peralta at NPR:

In a new survey that not only asked for opinion, but also briefed the respondents on the federal budget, Americans came to a bipartisan conclusion: 67 percent of Republicans and 90 percent of Democrats supported cutting the defense budget. And by quite a bit.

For my graphic on how much military spending bleeds the national budget and for what sort of expenses (hint: the money doesn’t go to the soldiers), see my presentation.

Google "data harvesting"

Colour me naive but I had greater expectations from Google. New York Times:

Google’s harvesting of e-mails, passwords and other sensitive personal information from unsuspecting households in the United States and around the world was neither a mistake nor the work of a rogue engineer, as the company long maintained, but a program that supervisors knew about, according to new details from the full text of a regulatory report, reports David Streitfeld.

Senate probe finds little evidence of effective torture | Reuters

Mark Hosenball:

A nearly three-year-long investigation by Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats is expected to find there is little evidence the harsh “enhanced interrogation techniques” the CIA used on high-value prisoners produced counter-terrorism breakthroughs.

People familiar with the inquiry said committee investigators, who have been poring over records from the administration of President George W. Bush, believe they do not substantiate claims by some Bush supporters that the harsh interrogations led to counter-terrorism coups.

The backers of such techniques, which include “water-boarding,” sleep deprivation and other practices critics call torture, maintain they have led to the disruption of major terror plots and the capture of al Qaeda leaders. One official said investigators found “no evidence” such enhanced interrogations played “any significant role” in the years-long intelligence operations which led to the discovery and killing of Osama bin Laden last May by U.S. Navy SEALs.

Not a hopeless clause

Disclaimer: I am not a grammarian. In fact, there are days I have to consult Google to recall the difference between a proper noun and a pronoun. I am also not a particularly good writer, which does weaken my standing to comment on such matters, but I shall anyway.

Any English speaker given to crotchetiness is bound to fret and fume upon encountering American English. It is not just the abuse of words and usage that causes the bile to rise but more so the flippant, nay arrogant, legitimisation of such violence. The original language is now labelled British English. This attitude is called “in your face” in American English!

As subjects of the new Empire, we have learnt to live with the dropped “a“s (pediatrics, but also, at times, orthopaedics) and “u“s (“color”, “valor”), the use of “bring” for “take”, the waterboarding of the word “momentarily”, and much more. Resigning to something does not preclude whining about it, so here goes.

My friend Michael Pollak is a good-natured chap and unsurprisingly is more willing than I am to forgive technically problematic evolution in English words. Take this Chronicle of Higher Education piece on the [mis]use of “hopefully” which he links to approvingly:

The 1960s saw an increase in the frequency of modal-adjunct use for another adverb: hopefully. Alongside They’ll wait hopefully (“They’ll wait with hope in their hearts”), it became increasingly popular to use sentences like Hopefully they’ll wait (“It is to be hoped that they’ll wait”).

The article then goes on to describe the overblown resistance and hostility to this usage (a usage I am guilty of, myself, in spoken English) and the grudging and delayed acceptance of it:

With truly extreme caution, the AP Style Guide nonetheless waited a decent further interval: Its editors let more than a quarter of a century go by before they finally risked accepting what had now been normal Standard English usage for a lifetime. On April 17, 2012, they announced correctly that the modal-adjunct use of hopefully is not a grammatical error.

On this I confess I am of two minds. While it is true that no ambiguity arises in the two usages shown above (usage one: “hopefully, they will wait”, usage two: “they will wait hopefully”), the usage of “hopefully” in this manner (usage one) does conflict with usage of comparable words. The use of “thankfully” in the sentence “thankfully, the language will survive” feels appropriate, while we would be loathe to similarly parse or interpret “mindfully, usage will evolve”.

At any rate, you should follow the link and read the article so you might derive some value from this pointless and rambling post.

Chimp violence, testosterone and that Y chromosome

From a SciAm article by Kate Wong:

What did appear to be a factor was the number of males in a group: the higher the number of males in a group, the higher the number of kills. Ngogo, the community with the highest rate of kills per year, also had the highest number of adult males.

“The number of males is important because the more males there are, the more competition there is for mates in the community,” Wilson explains. The number of males also equals the community’s fighting strength for defending their territory and the food resources in it. Males in communities with more males can afford to be more aggressive because they have backup. The researchers did not identify a particular number of males that triggered killing. Rather, Wilson offers, the key may be the relative numbers of males in neighboring communities—that is, the balance of power.

“This tells us something about human evolution,” Wilson comments. He notes that although scientists do not know whether humans and chimps inherited their capacity for lethal aggression from a common ancestor or whether it arose in both species through convergent evolution, “lethal aggression is related to power asymmetries where members of one group can kill others with low cost.”

As for the bonobos, this study bolsters the claim that they are less aggressive than chimpanzees: there were no clear-cut homicides in any of the bonobo communities. Another presentation given at the meeting provided a possible clue to the apparent absence of male aggression among these apes: Victoria Wobber of Harvard University and her colleagues studied testosterone levels in chimpanzees and bonobos from infancy to adulthood and found that whereas chimpanzee testosterone levels surged during adolescence (particularly among males), bonobo testosterone production remained consistent over the course of development.