Class Canceled
Odd thing. My instructor has some sort of ongoing family problem and the college canceled the course. Never had that happen before, I must say. I was just getting into reading ancient philosophy, building the big philosophy mo, but now it is gone. Alas.
Trip to Orlando
Marian and I spent most of the week in Orlando. Well, not Orlando but Lake Mary, just north of Orlando near the national headquarters of AAA. Marian was invited to a Florida technology conference and I tagged along to live in the lap of luxury for a couple of days while she toiled away in a windowless conference room. We stayed at the Marriott Lake Mary
The hotel is in very good shape for a business hotel and is in a planned mixed development community. This is a very attractive community. Of course, the homes and condos are upscale, there is plenty of money for common grounds maintenance, the shops are tony and attractive. Average household income is 50% higher than the national average, no affordable housing, no pesky minority residents.
Of course, E.O. Wilson’s book, Consilience, discusses our natural attraction to managed landscapes, hearkening our distant agrarian past where fields planted and weeded meant survival and not starvation. This wasn’t quite running through my mind as I was wandering around but it seems like the right answer to our attraction to mowed and edged lawns, trimmed hedges, tastefully placed trees.
I spent most of the time while I was there reading. But before I started I would take my morning walk along International Drive in Lake Mary
As you can see in this very helpful picture what a lovely walk I had each morning.
As Marian headed off to her meetings I headed off to the local Panera to drink Diet Pepsi with lemon and read on the outside deck. What a delightful location.
Sitting on the deck and looking back at the building shows a very pleasant variety of angles, shapes, architectural details.
Turn the other way and you see the bike path in front of the outdoor deck and a privately-owned pasture on the other side of the path. The dots are cows and horses peacefully grazing. What a lovely place to read The New York Times and Plato!
I mentioned the bike path next to the outdoor patio. Panera definitely targets thirsty and hungry bikers. Bike stands out front, a place to watch your bike whilst sipping your latte and eating your bearclaw. Mostly older men and women on bikes. Most of them in biking clothes and biking shoes. They take biking seriously, evidently.
Panera is part of a larger group of small shops and restaurants. Behind these buildings is a condo complex. Very attractive condos bordering the bike path and pasture, shaded by huge 100 year-old trees and decorated in earth colors.
You can see how attractive the building is. Checking the Trulia web site condos are selling or have sold for prices in the mid-300,000’s. For 1200 square feet and, sometimes, one space in a parking garage. As I said, median household incomes 50% above the national median.
Odd Conversation Whilst at Panera
Listening to their conversations I mostly heard the typical South Florida accent — New Jersey and New York twangs. One odd conversation cropped up while I was there. A man — a bicycler — was sitting with his two miniature dachshunds sipping coffee and staring off into the middle distance. He has a prosthetic leg although needs no accommodation, getting around just fine and bicycling with no problems.
Someone he knows starts a short conversation with him about his dogs. They exchange harmless pleasantries and then as the other person transitions to a leaving pleasantry he says, “Nice dogs. I think I’ll marry a dog next time.” To the man-with-the-dogs’ credit, he smiles briefly and turns away. An older woman across the patio pipes up, “That’ll be legal soon.” Everyone mercifully ignores this observation.
What does this comment mean? He had a bad marriage? His ex-wife or current wife is not quiet and submissive like this man’s dachshunds? His wife/ex-wife expected conversation or meaningful interactions? What? A very puzzling but disturbing exchange. Not exchange, but rather a pronouncement. His ex-wife (I hope he isn’t still married) must be very pleased to be free again.
Seminole-Wekiva Trail
I found out the bike path is the Seminole Wekiva Trail. A 14-mile paved and marked trail for public use, traversing urban and semi-pastoral landscapes all paid for with tax dollars. Here is government working for public good in the most visible ways. Despite attractive claims, anti-government tax-cutters don’t really support this kind of large public expenditure. Should bikers want such a path they can fund it themselves through voluntary associations, the argument would go.
And they would have to pay directly for this kind of view. These sorts of expenditures go right to the core of the argument over how public tax dollars should be spent. Sure it’s attractive, sure plenty of people use it. But is a 14 mile bike path a core government activity? Can you imagine the maintenance costs of this path?
I was sitting under the umbrella at the far right of the photo.
Movie We Saw
We saw Shoot ‘Em Up while we were in Lake Mary. Clive Owen and Paul Giamatti star in this utterly over-the-top movie about ultra-violent gangsters and ultra-violent wastrels with access to dozens and dozens of automatic weapons filled with thousands and thousands of bullets.
The director, Michael Davis, specializes in movies with short titles. This is his first three-word movie, his previous two-word titles included 100 Girls, Girl Fever, and Monster Man. This movie is at least as good as a movie titled Girl Fever.
But being in the cinema kept us out of the tropical deluge we saw every afternoon while we were in Lake Mary.
Books I’ve Finished
Charter Schools: Hope or Hype? by Jack Buckley and Mark Schneider.
It is difficult to find a book or study of charter schools these days that does not take sides in the raging argument over whether charter schools are the salvation or the scourge of our nation’s schools. But Buckley and Schneider have pulled it off. Their book looks just at D.C. charters but is a useful indicator of what is going on with charters nationwide.
They reach some conclusions that sound like they are on the anti-charter side. They find that although parent satisfaction with D.C. charter schools is at first higher than parent satisfaction with regular D.C. public schools, that level of charter satisfaction declines over time to something close to the regular public school level.
But they also point out that their conclusion is the result of complex extrapolation of their data. They concede there is merit on the other side of the argument, and indicate what further research is necessary. They also reveal that charter schools do a better job than regular schools in promoting citizenship and point out some particular charter schools that, they say, are “doing wonderful things.”
Much of this book, I warn you, is written in a style that only social scientists could love. Here, for instance, is a key sentence in their explanation of the method they use to assess the change of parent satisfaction over time: “the fixed-effects vector-decomposition model . . . involves a first stage in which the outcome measure is regressed on the time-varying covariates using a standard fixed-effects model.”
Aware of the thickness of this verbal undergrowth, they do their best to reconcile the average reader to the jargon by titling the chapter “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” And by the end of the book they have made several significant statements about D.C. charter schools based on their data which are, thankfully, as clear as could be.
They say D.C. charter schools are teaching kids whose backgrounds on average are pretty similar to regular school kids. The charter school students are more likely to come from low-income families, while the regular school students are more likely to come from families where English is not the first language. That produces two groups that are more or less equally ready for a good education.
They say parents in search of good charter schools rarely say that race or economic background of the students at a school are very important to them. But the demographic data for each school was the factor parents looked for most in their initial charter school searches on a guide to charters Web site set up by the authors. The second most important factor was the location of the school, which also gives demographic clues.
In an initial check of parent satisfaction, Buckley and Schneider say, “49 percent of charter parents gave their child’s teachers a grade of A, fully 10 percent more than parents whose children were in DCPS. At the opposite end of the spectrum, 3 percent of DCPS parents gave their child’s school an F, while only 1 percent of charter-school parents gave this failing grade.” But those differences largely disappear over time.
No one has done such a careful study of charter and regular school parents in one of our nation’s most charterized cities. The authors and their research team interviewed about 500 charter parents and 500 regular parents in fall of 2001. They went back to as many of those parents as they could find at the end of each of the next three years. Their last sample in 2004 had 297 parents, both charter and regular. They also interviewed students.
Their efforts to get those parent responses year after year went far beyond anything I have ever done, or even thought of doing, in my 40 years as a newspaper reporter. “Up to 35 callback attempts were made to reach respondents,” the authors say, “and up to three attempts were made to convert all initial refusals of parents.”
That is hard work, a mark of Buckley’s and Schneider’s determination to get at the truth. We will be seeing study after study of charter versus regular schools in the coming years, just as we have in the last several years since this became such a lively issue. But I don’t think we will see another study fairer, deeper or more interesting than this one.
The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson. By the middle of the 19th century, London was the largest city in the world with two and half million people. It was also the foulest, with a woefully inadequate sewage system and 200,000 cesspools, many overflowing. The filth from both sources ended up in the Thames, which reeked of human excrement. One heat wave produced a stench so bad that newspapers dubbed it “The Big Stink,” and said “whoso once inhales the stink can never forget it.”
Cholera, unknown in the city until the 19th century, became a recurring and horrifyingly deadly visitor. One outbreak killed 14,000 Londoners. It was no great leap for residents to put the two together. Bad air caused cholera. To eliminate the disease, almost everyone agreed the city must clean up its air.
The government approach, then as now, was to throw money and manpower at the problem. But the true mechanism of cholera transmission was established not by any of the governmental panels and committees set up to solve the problem. In a story line that hardly seems plausible today with our emphasis on huge multiperson science projects, one man working almost entirely alone finally defeated London’s cholera. His name was Dr. John Snow, a medical man, a loner with a knack for statistics and mapmaking.
If the bacteria causing cholera get into your gut, they will reproduce at a prodigious rate. You will quickly develop watery diarrhea and begin vomiting uncontrollably. Your body is reacting to the cholera’s toxin by expelling water, waste and millions of deadly bacteria. Unless you are one of the lucky ones, you will soon be dead. You wake up healthy in the morning and die of cholera before the sun goes down.
John Snow was one of the few Londoners not sold on the noxious-air theory. The men who worked on the city’s sewage lines (known as flushermen) and those who emptied cesspools breathed far more bad air than the ordinary citizen, yet Snow knew they were robust and healthy. Furthermore, if cholera came from nasty things in the air, why didn’t it attack the lungs rather than the gut? After much study, Snow hypothesized that cholera came from water — not air.
At the time, Londoners got their water from either neighborhood pumps or one of the water-supply companies that serviced the city. Snow found that districts using companies that drew water from the tidal reaches of the Thames where sewage was present had far higher death rates from cholera than those drinking water taken farther upstream. Snow was now convinced that bad water was the culprit, but he knew he would need more evidence to persuade bad-air partisans. He found it in 1854 when cholera again hit London.
The first victim was a little girl living at 40 Broad Street. To keep her clean after bouts of diarrhea, her mother regularly rinsed her diapers in a bucket and tossed the foul water into a cesspool. “That is how it began,” declades Johnson.
Up and down Broad Street, men, women and children contracted cholera. Some survived, most did not. Slogging doggedly through the ravaged neighborhood, Snow located the homes of the dead. Their houses clustered around a local water source — the Broad Street pump.
Snow presented his findings at an emergency meeting of the local Board of Governors. The board was skeptical. But lacking any other ideas, they agreed to remove the Broad Street pump’s handle.
The epidemic began to subside immediately. In another week it was over — along with the lives of 700 people. An engineering survey found that the walls of the cesspool at 40 Broad Street leaked directly into the well, confirming that those drinking from the Broad Street pump were inadvertently consuming bits of waste containing millions of invisible, but deadly, bacteria from the diapers of the unfortunate first victim of the epidemic.
Although Snow had stopped the cholera epidemic, government officials stuck stubbornly to the bad-air theory. “We do not find it established that water was contaminated,” one committee reported. To convince doubters, Snow prepared a map of the area, showing every pump and every house. He added a short black line for every person who died in the house. The ghost map showed a cluster of black lines around the Broad Street pump. It demonstrated clearly and graphically what Snow had been saying over and over again: Cholera came from contaminated water. Few listened. Stopping cholera, government officials still believed, depended on cleaning the air by draining cesspools. So, for the wrong reasons, London began a gargantuan project to build a modern sewage system.
Five years later, as the project neared completion, London was on its way to becoming the healthiest city in the world. Then cholera struck again. Most of the deaths occurred in districts served by a water company that took its water from a tidal river ripe with sewage back flow. The link between the deaths and contaminated water was finally clear to everyone. Bad water, not bad air, was the source of cholera.
When London’s sewage lines were completed, the outlets were placed far downstream of the water companies’ inlet lines. Cholera has not visited the city since. And John Snow’s contribution to London’s public health was finally recognized. An 1866 editorial in Britain’s premier medical journal started with “The researches of Dr. Snow are among the most fruitful in modern medicine.” Unfortunately, Dr. Snow was not around to enjoy the accolades. He had died eight years earlier.
On Saturday we saw Death at a Funeral. This movie has a distinctly English feel to it. The screenwriter is English, most of the cast is English, filming locations were in England, but the director is American. It feels English because the movie focuses on embarrassing behavior at one of those occasions requiring strict observance to ritual protocol — a funeral. Much sibling rivalry and jealousy, devious and self-centered behavior, and a hilarious turn by Alan Tudyk as a straight-laced lawyer who inadvertently takes a hallucinogenic drug before meeting his future father-in-law.
Here I am with one-quarter of all my tools installing that porch light you see above my head. To some such a sight may seem commonplace. However, my skills with tools are primitive and to wire a light and install it is a fairly rare event. Even rarer as a result of my forays into 
We watched 
We saw 
This afternoon we saw the remake of 
