A Minneapolis photographer generated a pandemic project photographing families posed on the front steps of their homes. I have no idea what the original plan was, but the photographer has now published his collection as a photo book. The Kickstarter description is available here.
I have no connection with the project except our daughter’s family was selected for the cover photo.
So, if schools must open, the data reported [NYTimes article] here would argue you use school space to accommodate elementary students and bring back middle and high school students in small groups periodically expecting them to learn more remotely using online techniques.
The data come from a study in South Korea indicating that kids 10 and under are far less likely to transmit COVID than adults, but children over 10 approach the transmission rate among adults. This difference conveniently matches differences in independence and the social need for adult oversight. Adequate social distancing is not possible in many schools so it would be possible to take advantage of this age difference to use existing space more effectively.
As the researchers tend to say, more research is necessary. While the researchers do say this, educators, parents, and politicians are running out of time to make decisions so these data may help those seeking guidance.
The White House has offered very little when it comes to setting standards for dealing with the pandemic. This lack of an immediate response and failure to strongly push guidelines have resulted in the terrible situation we now experience. There seems one recent exception to this lack of taking a strong position and that concerns the recent pronouncement that schools will be open for face to face instruction in the Fall.
There are multiple issues about opening schools that trouble me. I am concerned that the resources needed to deliver quality instructions are not being made available. Schools have been cutting back at a time when more personnel (teachers, mental health workers, school nurses, maintenance workers, technology support personnel) are needed. Government expectations influence community expectations and at a minimum should come with the resources necessary for implementation.
The pronouncement from Trump, DeVoss that schools must open bothers me in two other important ways. First, there are the threats that financial pressure will be brought to bear to assure local and state compliance. Aside from this lack of ethics in this tactic, it is difficult to argue that you value the importance of education if your remedy when education experts disagree with you is to take actions that reduce educational effectiveness. My second annoyance is that to address the incompatibility between the pressure to open schools and the guidelines of the CDC, the WH is now pressuring the CDC to change their guidelines. This expectation has resulted in the CDC claiming that their recommendations are based in science and they will not change. Now what – do those with political power trump (haha) those with scientific expertise.
Why some in the public would accept that expectations based on the best science can simply be changed is troubling. This is not the way science works. However, the resistance it expertise has been part of the Trump approach from the beginning. The reasons this is accepted by some is an important issue and the notion that any idea advanced has equal value is a troubling development in public thinking.
I am a big fan of Andrew Zimmern and his recent series on Feeding America. For those averse to political positions, you might want to stay away. In this video. Zimmern highlights the legal and illegal immigrants harvesting and preparing our food.
Like so many, the pandemic has kept us close to home and involved in home-related activities. Cindy and I are gardening. I do the veggies and Cindy raises flowers. Cindy’s efforts have resulted in a very colorful deck. For a while, we visited multiple greenhouses making certain that they would not be negatively impacted by the economic downturn. I can’t get a good shot of our entire deck, but this photo should give you the general idea.
Our yard has eleven raised beds. I garden every year. This year I started my own plants indoors. I started looking for stay at home projects early. The beds looked great with the exception of the peppers which just sat there until the last week or so. The zucchini and squash plants were big and beautiful, but didn’t seem to be setting fruit (or whatever you call baby squash). Do you know there are male and female flowers on these plants and under certain conditions you take a paintbrush and help nature along? I tried, but couldn’t find a receptive female. I also read that earlier in the season there are many more male flowers and you have to be patient waiting for the plant to even things up. Patience is a virtue, but when the garden and MSNBC are the total of your entertainment you make several trips a day to check on the viny plants to see if the females have started to show up.
I had high hopes for my tomatoes. Some years I have more tomatoes than we and our kids can eat. We make hot sauce to use up the extras. Some years the plants look great, but are mostly beautiful leaves and few fruits (I do know that the tomato is a fruit). Too much nitrogen. I fertilize to try to be helpful and being helpful is not always a good idea. Plants are used to taking care of themselves.
For the last couple of years, the tomatoes start off great, start to set fruit, and then the leaves dry up. This is wilt. It has started again. I search online to see what can be done. You can mulch to try to even out the moisture level. However, in investigating various wilts I discover something called Walnut Wilt. We have a huge black walnut in our backyard and it is a truly magnificent specimen. According to my research, black walnut trees (roots, leaves, walnuts) produce a substance called juglone which basically clears the area of competing plants to reduce competition for the tree. Tomatoes and peppers are particularly susceptible. The danger area is three times the width of the branches which is pretty much my entire yard. To make matters worse, I rake leaves in the fall, put them on top of my raised beds, and then cover with some branches to keep the leaves in place. In the Spring, I dig the rotted leaves into the beds. This ends up being pretty much the worst thing you can do if you want to raise tomatoes in that area. Sometimes, the harder you try the worse you make things.
When the tomato crops begin to mature you usually can purchase them at a farmer’s market cheaper than you can grow them. Still, growing your own is the fun part.
Fox claimed the Tulsa Trump speech generated a HUGE audience. Republicans seem really hard up for something to ponder. I don’t do Fox so I only caught bits and pieces. Evidently mail ballots for old people leads to voter fraud and slowing down testing reduces the spread of the virus. There also seemed to be a lot of off-topic content. There was a long explanation of the physics of steep ramps, rubber and leather soled shoes, and the inertia of over weight people once set in motion. I should of had my notebook handy. That demo of one-handed water chugging was also impressive. I assume the attendees were capable of the feat, but it was thoughtful to throw it in. I used to add similar life skill demos to kind of break things up during my lectures. I didn’t think the drinking water demo was necessary, but I did explain how to remove that pesky plastic wrapper from textbooks.
Commentary on Martin Gurri – Revolt of the public and the crisis of authority in the new millennium
“What we have here is a failure of the relationship between the public and the elites” would be my alternate title for this book. Gurri offers an explanation of the present state of our world (without the pandemic) mostly focused on politics because he claims that this is his personal interest but also relevant to other areas such as science and education. The book was first published a few years ago, but now updated shortly after the 2016 election because I assume the author thought his analysis would offer insights into the rise of Trumpsters, the decline in the acceptance of science, dissatisfaction with education, and related examples of relationships between the public and traditional sources of authority.
Gurri defines a human hierarchy of a type consisting of the elites, the public, and the people. The public is defined as those individuals interested in a topic (e.g., government). Gurri argues that online social media has created a great change in the relationship among these groups in what used to be a hierarchy. Social media has offered the public multiple sources of information and a platform for discussion and comment such that on any topic there is far too much information to process. I would add cable television and talk radio to this argument as a way to focus on a perspective on an issue. What the overabundance of information encourages is a focus on consumption that makes careful analysis impossible. Gone are the days of everyone reading an authoritative newspaper or a given news program as a common basis for conversation.
Elites (government officials, academics, economists, etc.) deal with complex issues and probably know the difficulty of using their knowledge to produce change within this complexity. As an academic, I would explain this to others by noting that nearly every research study published ends with some variant of a request for additional research. To note this is a kind of joke to some, but also a reflection of the limits of carefully controlled research in suggesting generalities that work in other environments. I am making the assumption that other “elites” working in other domains face the same reality. What happens with a public addressing recommendations to what might be described as “informed” trial and error is that it is very easy to find fault when informed recommendations don’t work out. A little knowledge makes criticism quite easy and the mass of criticism when passed on to the general population makes it appear that the qualifications of the elites are useless. Why listen to expertise when everyone has an opinion and it might seem that one opinion is no different from any other?
Gurri speculates that politicians are in this situation and over promise even when they know their insights are only good guesses. This creates a higher level of dissatisfaction because of the higher failure rate and what you get are elections bouncing control back and forth between one party and the other.
Gurri proposes that the public is far better at destruction than the generation of proposals that are legitimate alternatives. The danger is that a country sink into a nihilistic state focused on pessimism and rejection of any form of expertise.
A couple of other arguments from the book – Gurri had far more to say about Obama than Trump due to the times (the most recent version is after about a year into the Trump Presidency). Gurri claimed that Obama’s expertise was as an organizer and as such was better prepared to criticize the lack of solutions to obvious problems. When his expertise as a leader was shown inadequate (Gurri focuses on the failure of the bailout following the financial crisis Obama inherited), his reaction was to resort to his expertise as a critic. What I think Gurri misses in his analysis is the impossible situation Obama found himself in with the leader of the Senate openly claiming that Obama would be prevented from getting anything done. In this situation, about all you can do is complain.
So much of the support for Trump struck me as illogical. To me (not necessarily Gurri), the support of a public for someone who would seem not to be working in their best interest (health care, increasing income disparity) can only be explained by a burn it all down sentiment (nihilism).
Gurri does make some attempt to offer suggestions for improvement, but to me they require a willingness to change on the part of the elites (be more honest about the limits of experience/expertise in addressing great complexity) and the public (understand that improvement requires a certain amount of informed trial and error). How do you create such circumstances? No actual recommendations from Gurri. I would suggest this is part of what education is for.
Another review [https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2019/02/book-review-revolt-of-public-by-martin.html]
Wouldn’t it be nice if political conversations could focus on issues facing the country. Why can’t issues of health care, income inequality, policing, the role of the United States in the world, environmental decline, and even net neutrality be the focus of our discussions. I know attention to these important issues must be deferred. Until the rule of a racist, misogynist, egotist who is unable to appreciate the facts of science and a Senate leader manipulating the political process by unilaterally blocking votes on bills brought forward for consideration can be removed, we have fundamental flaws in leadership degrading our country. First things first.
Having the freedom and resources to travel have been the great advantage of retirement and I suppose to a lesser extent most of our lives. I think you learn so much from escaping your own circumstances and exploring other places and people. I started documenting our experiences in a travel blog beginning in 2016, but I was including posts since I began writing online on these experiences in other blogs. Lately, there just haven’t been the opportunities to write on travel because of the pandemic and related health vulnerabilities. It was our 50th anniversary a week or so ago and we had planned to celebrate with one of those European river tours and also visit a friend at her home. All of this has been shut down for the time being. At our age, it feels like we are losing opportunities.
We bought a pig. Cindy read the Facebook story of a Minnesota hog farmer who was not able to send his pigs to market because of the closing of processing plants. He was going to have to euthanize his animals and just bury the carcasses. He decided to use his Facebook account to sell his animals for $150 and help those purchasing find somewhere to process the animal. After thinking about the situation for a while and seeing if our kids and their families would take some of the meat, we added our name to those wanting to make a purchase. The delay put us well down the list and the farmer had to scour the area for small operations able to butcher his animals and prepare the meat. We finally were able to pick up the 150 pounds of pork yesterday.
I realized that the 130 mile drive to Cadott, WI, was the longest trip we had taken in months and I decided this might be the best opportunity for a Grabe Travels post for some time to come. It had all of the elements of an adventure – unfamiliar territory, uncertainty of circumstances, unique learning opportunities, and pictures of food.
We spend quite a bit of time in Wisconsin and are familiar with local meat and cheese shops. Cadott was in a different area and the countryside of Wisconsin is beautiful. Nearly wiped out a white tail deer who decided to dart across the road. My finely tuned reflexes and keen ability to spot wildlife saved both the deer and our car. Some of the trip took us through Amish country and we would normally have stopped to have something to eat in another time. Interesting people.
The meat shop was impressive even given our experience with such establishments. One-hundred fifty pounds of pork is a lot. We would not have had the storage capacity and offloading some of the haul to the freezers of our kids. When you purchase an entire animal, you acquire delicacies you tend not purchase in the grocery store. We passed on the heart and the tongue so I am not certain what happened to these sources of protein. Perhaps they were ground into the sausage or brats or were sold to customers interested in these delicacies. Here is a recipe for ham hocks just in case you wonder how you might consume pig knuckles. The ham hock and collard greens slow cooker dish sounds great and I think I may have eaten something like this before. It sounds like the type of thing I now enjoy.
We used three coolers of this size and a couple of smaller coolers to get everything home.
I did promise a food picture. We had bacon and eggs for breakfast.
Online social media providers (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter) have come under free speech and appropriateness scrutiny recently and have responded in different ways. At issue is the transmission of factually inaccurate content by prominent individuals (e.g., President Trump). Twitter has tagged a few tweets as factually inaccurately setting off a firestorm regarding free speech. Twitter does not block the false claims, it just attaches a label. Facebook has decided not to get involved in the accuracy issue.
I understand that these platforms are in a very difficult situation and could not possibly fact check all posts. The platforms protect themselves by claiming that those adding content must be responsible for the legitimacy of what is posted. This is the platform argument. The publishing argument acknowledges some responsibility for what appears.
Here is an issue I think is important and not acknowledged by Facebook. What I as an individual experience is not what has been posted by those I follow. The algorithms Facebook employs make decisions about what I see and the algorithms are designed to encourage greater attention to Facebook content. By definition, this negates the argument Facebook makes that it is a neutral party. It is suspected that a way to encourage greater attention (more time spent on the site increasing ad views) is through the display of more content intended to generate an emotional response.
In a way, Twitter is more neutral than either YouTube or Facebook because it does not control or recommend what you should see.
