According to this IBD story, "Chinese workers are usually represented by government-sponsored unions. "
Now I suspect this may not be all it's cracked up to be since "Many recent labor disturbances were organized outside these communist-backed groups." But still can you just imagine a government advocating on behalf of workers? I suppose if you remember America in the 1930's or 1940's, you might remember, but in my lifetime, government has been 98% a tool of business interests - the capitalists - not labor. I know there was once or twice a raise in the minimum wage (fat chance of that happening again now that Ted Kennedy is dead). And I am well aware that those who rely on FOX News for their worldview think labor and teachers have an undue influence on government, but just that fact that the notion that the government advocates for labor is a foreign idea to most Americans (and anathema to many) shows how tilted the power in this democracy has become. Some say America is now Fascist, who by definition "seek to organize a nation on corporatist perspectives, values, and systems such as the political system and the economy."
Sure there's corruption in China, as there is in the U.S., but at the end of the day, the Communists truly do look out for the workers. This may be idealogical, but is likely just as much a matter of self-preservation - the Chinese government is well aware that without economic growth, the people would revolt and who knows what will happen then. In any case, it will be fascinating to see how the U.S. corporate-oriented government will compete with the Chinese worker-oriented government over the next 50 years.
Monday, July 5, 2010
Pre-Internet Publications
As I was writing a blog post on switching to the Mac, I started discussing my first programming on the Mac. Since it was pre-Internet (or at least pre-browser), I didn't think I'd find any about the articles that come out of my first professional post-B.S. work, but I did come up with the references via David A. Rosenbaum's C.V.:
Rosenbaum, D. A., Engelbrecht, S. E., Bushe, M. M., & Loukopoulos, L. D. (1993). A model for reaching control. Acta Psychologica, 82, 237-250.
Rosenbaum, D. A., Engelbrecht, S. E., Bushe, M. M., & Loukopoulos, L. D. (1993). Knowledge model for selecting and producing reaching movements. Journal of Motor Behavior, 25, 217-227.
Bushe, M. M., Vaughan, J., & Rosenbaum, D. A. (1994). Pascal external functions for Strawberry Tree's "Analog Connection Workbench." Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computer, 26, 461-466.
This was some of the most memorable and fun work I've done. The model for reaching control was a computer model that acted like a baby at the start. This baby would randomly reach in different directions using different combinations of angles of various limbs. Each angle would be given a cost so that moving your torso was more costly than your wrist, and bending at angles that were difficult (like scratching your back) was also costly. After a few thousand trails, the model learned to reach for objects at novel locations using fluid lifelike movements. Lots of hours with Mac programming manuals always handy.
The "Pascal" paper was a different experiment. We were seeing how well someone could mimic tapping out a beep-beep rhythm with varying delaying between the beeps (.1-1.0 seconds or so) when heard aurally or seen visually on a screen. Aural won. The article was about writing Mac software to hook up with a hardware/software package called "Strawberry Tree." It involved some low level z80 processor instructions to pick up analog signals from a external board hooked up to a Mac. Can't say it was all that fun, but doing the dirty work made it publishable.
Ultimately, though I'm always dissatisfied by cognitive psychology experiments. They are too contrived. "Life is a bowl of concurrent schedules," as my behaviorist professor Dr. John Donahoe, liked to say. Looking back, I can honestly say that he was the most influential professor I had. I think I had the best work-study gig on campus as I wrote a neural network simulation for Dr. Donahoe. A harbinger was the nights that I was up until 2AM writing the visuals. Dr. Donahoe didn't think the visuals were that important, he really just wanted the numbers, but I wanted to see the network learning. I still remember how his face lit up when the dark lines lit up yellow as connections were made. An early positive reinforcement that has been reinforced many times since in my UI and visualization work.
Rosenbaum, D. A., Engelbrecht, S. E., Bushe, M. M., & Loukopoulos, L. D. (1993). A model for reaching control. Acta Psychologica, 82, 237-250.
Rosenbaum, D. A., Engelbrecht, S. E., Bushe, M. M., & Loukopoulos, L. D. (1993). Knowledge model for selecting and producing reaching movements. Journal of Motor Behavior, 25, 217-227.
Bushe, M. M., Vaughan, J., & Rosenbaum, D. A. (1994). Pascal external functions for Strawberry Tree's "Analog Connection Workbench." Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computer, 26, 461-466.
This was some of the most memorable and fun work I've done. The model for reaching control was a computer model that acted like a baby at the start. This baby would randomly reach in different directions using different combinations of angles of various limbs. Each angle would be given a cost so that moving your torso was more costly than your wrist, and bending at angles that were difficult (like scratching your back) was also costly. After a few thousand trails, the model learned to reach for objects at novel locations using fluid lifelike movements. Lots of hours with Mac programming manuals always handy.
The "Pascal" paper was a different experiment. We were seeing how well someone could mimic tapping out a beep-beep rhythm with varying delaying between the beeps (.1-1.0 seconds or so) when heard aurally or seen visually on a screen. Aural won. The article was about writing Mac software to hook up with a hardware/software package called "Strawberry Tree." It involved some low level z80 processor instructions to pick up analog signals from a external board hooked up to a Mac. Can't say it was all that fun, but doing the dirty work made it publishable.
Ultimately, though I'm always dissatisfied by cognitive psychology experiments. They are too contrived. "Life is a bowl of concurrent schedules," as my behaviorist professor Dr. John Donahoe, liked to say. Looking back, I can honestly say that he was the most influential professor I had. I think I had the best work-study gig on campus as I wrote a neural network simulation for Dr. Donahoe. A harbinger was the nights that I was up until 2AM writing the visuals. Dr. Donahoe didn't think the visuals were that important, he really just wanted the numbers, but I wanted to see the network learning. I still remember how his face lit up when the dark lines lit up yellow as connections were made. An early positive reinforcement that has been reinforced many times since in my UI and visualization work.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Williams Syndrome
Williams Syndrome, is a genetic condition that causes a lack of social fear - people with Williams Syndrome are really friendly even with people they don't know. Fascinatingly, they also have no or nearly no racial bias, from a recent Discover Magazine article:
Typically, children start overtly gravitating towards their own ethnic groups from the tender age of three. Groups of people from all over the globe and all sorts of cultures show these biases. Even autistic children, who can have severe difficulties with social relationships, show signs of racial stereotypes. But Santos says that the Williams syndrome kids are the first group of humans devoid of such racial bias...
It's very interesting to think about the fact that we are born with a predilection to racial bias. It makes more sense when I think about what I read in Guns, Germs and Steel that said when two tribal people who don't know each other meet each other in Papua New Guinea, they will first start naming off people who are related to each other to see if the other person knows them. If they find a match, they are OK, if they don't find a match, they fight. I guess those conversations could last a very long time.
Serendipitously, I've never heard of Williams Syndrome until this morning. Then Dylan and I visited UMass for an Open House. I talked to Dylan about the story on the drive to UMass (hmmm, is this the kind of conversation that inspired Dylan to want to teach science?). Then not one, but two different speakers mentioned Williams Syndrome in passing during their speeches. Weird. One was talking about the opportunities at UMass and mentioned how he worked with local kids with Williams Syndrome. I forget the context the other speaker mentioned it in. Our tour guide came close to the concept as she was doing her thesis on social contact.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Why Alex Trabek is So Smart
Alex Trabek, the longtime host of Jeopardy! seems like a very smart guy. He knows the answers to so many questions, "Oh, I'm sorry, it was Victor Hugo." (He does get a bit swarmy when the answer is about something French).
Category: Education Level
The answer is : 6
The question: How many DAYS did Alex Trabek spend in college?
Now, of course, not going to college doesn't make you not smart, but could it be that we think Alex Trabek is smarter than he is?
I don't have the reference, but one thing I remember from my psychology (neuroscience) degree was that there were some studies done in the 80's that were in a game show format. Participants either asked trivia questions or gave answers, and they switch roles for different audiences. Audiences were asked to rate how smart they thought the participants were - both the questions givers and the answer givers. The audience thought the people asking the questions were smarter than the ones answering the questions, no matter who was asking. The numbers were quite extraordinary.
We have a strong tendency to think the person asking the questions is smart - which is why the crooks at Enron could convince other that they were the "Smartest Person in Room."
This came up when a friend and collegue, who is wicked smaht - he went to a Ivy League school, he's a genius,and he's very technically proficient - was asked some questions about algorithms in a techie interview and didn't quite have the answers (neither would I, I only minored in math/computers). Most experienced folks know that you can't figure out someone's ability by a few technical questions in an interview. That strategy only assesses the intersection of knowledge of the interviewer and the interviewee, both of which can be vast and non-intersecting. This tactic makes the questioner feel real good about themselves since they knew something the other person doesn't. It deflates the person being interviewed, who is already nervous.
I approach it differently. I look for what I know about what the person claims they know. I then drill down into what they did to see if they had a thought process to intelligently make the decisions they made given the constraints they were under. This gives the person confidence since they are talking about something they know, not something you pulled out of the air. It allows you to have a humane interaction, and assess the person under a situation that would be more normal. Hopefully, you also talk enough tech to realize how knowledgeable the person and if what their resume says holds water.
Category: Education Level
The answer is : 6
The question: How many DAYS did Alex Trabek spend in college?
Now, of course, not going to college doesn't make you not smart, but could it be that we think Alex Trabek is smarter than he is?
I don't have the reference, but one thing I remember from my psychology (neuroscience) degree was that there were some studies done in the 80's that were in a game show format. Participants either asked trivia questions or gave answers, and they switch roles for different audiences. Audiences were asked to rate how smart they thought the participants were - both the questions givers and the answer givers. The audience thought the people asking the questions were smarter than the ones answering the questions, no matter who was asking. The numbers were quite extraordinary.
We have a strong tendency to think the person asking the questions is smart - which is why the crooks at Enron could convince other that they were the "Smartest Person in Room."
This came up when a friend and collegue, who is wicked smaht - he went to a Ivy League school, he's a genius,and he's very technically proficient - was asked some questions about algorithms in a techie interview and didn't quite have the answers (neither would I, I only minored in math/computers). Most experienced folks know that you can't figure out someone's ability by a few technical questions in an interview. That strategy only assesses the intersection of knowledge of the interviewer and the interviewee, both of which can be vast and non-intersecting. This tactic makes the questioner feel real good about themselves since they knew something the other person doesn't. It deflates the person being interviewed, who is already nervous.
I approach it differently. I look for what I know about what the person claims they know. I then drill down into what they did to see if they had a thought process to intelligently make the decisions they made given the constraints they were under. This gives the person confidence since they are talking about something they know, not something you pulled out of the air. It allows you to have a humane interaction, and assess the person under a situation that would be more normal. Hopefully, you also talk enough tech to realize how knowledgeable the person and if what their resume says holds water.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Newspapers may be dying, and that's sometimes a good thing.
I had my first paper route when I was about 10 years old. Third grade, if I remember right. It was a Sunday-only delivery in Leicester, MA. I think I started out with around 50 houses, and grew to around 100 when someone gave up an adjacent route. The papers were so thick, I'd could only stuff about 10 in my bag at once. Yes, this is when American kids actually WALKED - I've since seen parents drive their kids on their routes.
The hills where I grew up are ubiquitous and steep. I've heard the average grade was steeper than the hills in San Francisco, though I think that's not quite true (but close). I'm pretty sure Apricot Street (where this is all happening here, as Arlo Guthrie would say) in Leicester and Worcester is as steep as the famous Lombard Street in San Francisco (a 27% grade), and at least four times longer. I had to stuff my bag, deliver to the first ten houses, walk back down for more, then walk back up to deliver another 10, etc. Later I took up a daily route in Worcester, starting out at 40 houses and growing to over 100 again, which was not so great for my customers, since it was an evening publication and many nice folks received their papers well after dinner.
It was work, but I had no idea how valuable it was, beyond the $20 a week. It certainly kept me in shape, I met a lot of nice people, and my eyes were open to many different types of folks. I can remember the single mother who couldn't afford to pay me and was months behind. She had to ask a 13 year old to spot her the paper so she could look for jobs in it. There was a religious person who needed to tip me with moral stories. There was the 93 year old who kept her home very cold, not out of choice. She loved when I came collecting (yes, cash, credit cards were invented, but not widely used), since I gave her some company, and I enjoyed hers. She knit me a hat and mittens one winter. The letters my wife wrote me the summer when we were 14 are still wrapped in the ribbon that went 'round that gift. Then there was the 50ish man who tricked me into his bedroom and started showing me playboys before I excused myself, suddenly thinking my shorts were a bit to small for my growing body.
But the greatest gift of the newspaper routes were the newspapers themselves - and the writers who made them alive and interesting everyday. Of course I read the sports section first, parsed each baseball boxscore while in season, and waited on the rare "hot stove" article in the winter. (Unfortunately, this was the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, so I didn't discover Peter Gammons until college). These were long routes however, so I wound up reading everything - the front page and every page those articles lead to. I was a teenager and I knew about what was going on in the world more than most adults (and didn't realize it, which may have been better for my ego). Occasionally the business section caught my eye with something interesting, and though I never really was interested in anything a particular business was doing, eventually I realized I loved macroeconomics and watched everything the Federal Reserve did, followed how the markets and interest rates moved and watched the waves of the economy before and during a recession (which paid major returns to me in 2008, when I timed things as well as I could and did not panic). I've continued having wide interests. I also read so much that good writing was drilled into my mind. I'm sure it's weakened, but it's still there.
Don't expect me to say that those were the good ol' days and kids now just don't know how to write or read garbage. Things change. I didn't know how to network with my friends constantly. You can surf for an hour and come across more interesting topics than any paper has in a month. My parents didn't know how to word process.
[Total tangent, but Susan and I were talking about it recently. Language is amazingly dynamic and comes to suit the time as it changes. Think about the word "fair" - how long did it take to get to four letters? According to this:
If it's a good word in common use, it will get simpler and simpler. Read The Mother Tongue if it interests you . Yes, I know it's controversial among experts, but it's Bill Bryson!]
Newspapers themselves though, and journalism in general, do have ethics to uphold, and they aren't. Newspapers have always been, and always should be, there to balance democracy, to shed light on corruption and injustice, to lend a thoughtful eye and hand to the considerations of the day and time. They have failed, and it's unclear if there is any protection left for the people from the backroom deals that now seem to have their hand at the throat of our democracy. Why? Journalism, such a noble pursuit, is no longer an art, a calling, a public trust, at least outside of some brave poor souls who work for websites and publications that are always on the brink of going under. Newspapers now are about the buck, or a buck for a thousand clicks. It's about working the channel while it lasts. Which is why the Boston Globe's price has gone up almost an order of magnitude, they blame production costs, and then deliver the ads (and only the ads) before Thanksgiving, for free.
The death knell? The Boston Herald, which deserved a quick death 20 years ago, has a new slogan in their ads: "Someone's got to say it." "Someone has to say it" just wasn't colloquial enough?
The hills where I grew up are ubiquitous and steep. I've heard the average grade was steeper than the hills in San Francisco, though I think that's not quite true (but close). I'm pretty sure Apricot Street (where this is all happening here, as Arlo Guthrie would say) in Leicester and Worcester is as steep as the famous Lombard Street in San Francisco (a 27% grade), and at least four times longer. I had to stuff my bag, deliver to the first ten houses, walk back down for more, then walk back up to deliver another 10, etc. Later I took up a daily route in Worcester, starting out at 40 houses and growing to over 100 again, which was not so great for my customers, since it was an evening publication and many nice folks received their papers well after dinner.
It was work, but I had no idea how valuable it was, beyond the $20 a week. It certainly kept me in shape, I met a lot of nice people, and my eyes were open to many different types of folks. I can remember the single mother who couldn't afford to pay me and was months behind. She had to ask a 13 year old to spot her the paper so she could look for jobs in it. There was a religious person who needed to tip me with moral stories. There was the 93 year old who kept her home very cold, not out of choice. She loved when I came collecting (yes, cash, credit cards were invented, but not widely used), since I gave her some company, and I enjoyed hers. She knit me a hat and mittens one winter. The letters my wife wrote me the summer when we were 14 are still wrapped in the ribbon that went 'round that gift. Then there was the 50ish man who tricked me into his bedroom and started showing me playboys before I excused myself, suddenly thinking my shorts were a bit to small for my growing body.
But the greatest gift of the newspaper routes were the newspapers themselves - and the writers who made them alive and interesting everyday. Of course I read the sports section first, parsed each baseball boxscore while in season, and waited on the rare "hot stove" article in the winter. (Unfortunately, this was the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, so I didn't discover Peter Gammons until college). These were long routes however, so I wound up reading everything - the front page and every page those articles lead to. I was a teenager and I knew about what was going on in the world more than most adults (and didn't realize it, which may have been better for my ego). Occasionally the business section caught my eye with something interesting, and though I never really was interested in anything a particular business was doing, eventually I realized I loved macroeconomics and watched everything the Federal Reserve did, followed how the markets and interest rates moved and watched the waves of the economy before and during a recession (which paid major returns to me in 2008, when I timed things as well as I could and did not panic). I've continued having wide interests. I also read so much that good writing was drilled into my mind. I'm sure it's weakened, but it's still there.
Don't expect me to say that those were the good ol' days and kids now just don't know how to write or read garbage. Things change. I didn't know how to network with my friends constantly. You can surf for an hour and come across more interesting topics than any paper has in a month. My parents didn't know how to word process.
[Total tangent, but Susan and I were talking about it recently. Language is amazingly dynamic and comes to suit the time as it changes. Think about the word "fair" - how long did it take to get to four letters? According to this:
Origin:
bef. 900; ME; OE fæger; c. OS, OHG fagar, ON fagr, Goth fagrs
bef. 900; ME; OE fæger; c. OS, OHG fagar, ON fagr, Goth fagrs
If it's a good word in common use, it will get simpler and simpler. Read The Mother Tongue if it interests you . Yes, I know it's controversial among experts, but it's Bill Bryson!]
Newspapers themselves though, and journalism in general, do have ethics to uphold, and they aren't. Newspapers have always been, and always should be, there to balance democracy, to shed light on corruption and injustice, to lend a thoughtful eye and hand to the considerations of the day and time. They have failed, and it's unclear if there is any protection left for the people from the backroom deals that now seem to have their hand at the throat of our democracy. Why? Journalism, such a noble pursuit, is no longer an art, a calling, a public trust, at least outside of some brave poor souls who work for websites and publications that are always on the brink of going under. Newspapers now are about the buck, or a buck for a thousand clicks. It's about working the channel while it lasts. Which is why the Boston Globe's price has gone up almost an order of magnitude, they blame production costs, and then deliver the ads (and only the ads) before Thanksgiving, for free.
The death knell? The Boston Herald, which deserved a quick death 20 years ago, has a new slogan in their ads: "Someone's got to say it." "Someone has to say it" just wasn't colloquial enough?
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Techie Blog...
I now have a separate blog for tech stuff at michaelbushe.wordpress.com, so hopefully I'll write more techie and non-techie stuff. I already was able to get a couple of old posts out of the closet.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Humanity's Purpose: A Warning For the Next "Intelligent" Life Form
Truly, it's inevitable, isn't it? The best we can hope for is to leave enough trash around so that, in another 5 million years, some future Bonobo relative realizes that they were not the first forms of life intelligent life, and they could mess it up too.
"No one is useless, anyone can at least be used as a bad example."
"No one is useless, anyone can at least be used as a bad example."
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