The Curmudgeon Speaks

It is informative and scary to pay attention to how our personal models of the world inform and sometimes bias our cognition. This morning I see this image on my walk to the coffee company and my mind immediately labels this image – adult mower teaches its young. You probably don’t get this until you take a second look. Yes, the mowers are not actually interacting, but the cluster of little mowers around a much larger mower fits with some general model I must have. Part of human intelligence is driven by pattern recognition. An important part of human intelligence (metacognition) is also recognizing that situations we place in a category have not been accurately located. Humor sometimes depends on the recognition of these interesting misplacements. There is a lesson here. Some assignment of situations to concepts are not appropriate and the more general model needs to be refined. Be aware that your experiences and background influence how you interpret new inputs. Not all Muslims and women who cover their heads are terrorists.

We picked strawberries today. Each of us filled two gallon pails. As I crawled down the row, I was thinking about how long I could do this and what I might make if the farmer was paying me. When we finished, I did some online research. It looks like I would not have been able to make $15 which nows seems a bare minimum wage.

There are lots of folks and kids who face this kind of labor to try to make ends meet. Hard to imagine. Hard also to understand those who think those who take on this kind of work are taking their jobs. BTW – Lindy’s Berries and many other farms hire ag workers.

California Farm Workers

Kid farm work is unregulated

Rate for farm labor

Too many folks take to social media to complain and I don’t want to be known as one of these people. I would like to offer this as a personal suggestion.

I frequently walk through one of the parks in Richfield on my way to write at a nearby coffee shop. Minneapolis/St. Paul has spectacular parks and ours is no exception. However, in recent years the grounds keepers of our park have decided to stop mowing the hillside I walk past. I am a big fan of natural grasses and forbs, but not overgrown lawn grass. Take the opportunity to convert this hillside to native prairie.

We attended the parade for the 4th in Siren, WI. Here are some images from a small town celebration.

The local veterans group presented the colors. This is an older group and the guy carrying the U.S. flag was struggling at the end.

The local band made an appearance.

There were few military vehicles and those that made an appearance were being used for other purposes.

Most parade entries throw things for kids. There were a couple of unusual offerings. I am guessing that cheese curds are unique to Wisconsin. The fire department and the local water purification service offered water. You had to run if you were not interested.

Tractors are standard entries in midwestern parades. The bigger the better.

What would be a parade without clowns.

Enjoy your 4th. It is a great country – tanks or not.

I encountered this idea this morning and admit it is likely more valuable than trying to get something out of the Democratic candidate debates. This group in Iowa has organized to read the books put out by the candidates. As I understand the approach, the group intends to allocate three weeks to each book. Yes, the sound clips on television and the brief exposure on the debate stage is not sufficient, but even as much of a political junkie I have become, this is way over the topic.

I did read Obama’s “Audacity of Hope” but one book is different from the dozen or more that are now available. As a more modest proposal, I would recommend the Pod Save America series one-hour interviews with the candidates willing to participate. This seems more reasonable. I do commend the book study groups willing to take a more ambitious approach.

The potential problems of big tech have come to the attention of the public, but this has mostly been because the public has become concerned that their personal information is being collected and exploited. Without the politics of the 2016 Russian election meddling scandal would anyone know or care?

There are other issues that everyone should concern us all and these have to do with the virtual (I admit this is a word with multiple meanings) monopolies of a few tech companies and the implications of what the money and power of these monopolies represent. The argument that these companies are just examples of successful capitalism based on innovation and the government should not interfere with success need to be examined. The case for regulation applies when monopolies retard innovation and exercise power outside of what would be the normal range of service a company provides.

Technologists making the monopoly argument explain how what the end user presently experiences lacks the innovation that unknown already offer. Big companies accomplish this end by buying up small innovators who lack the capital for their services to gain recognition and by purposefully or practically limiting the opportunity of users to take their attention elsewhere. This latter problem is frequently called the network effect implying that the influence of a service is not so much due to the quality of that service but from the user base the service has developed. Translated – it is just too difficult to get your friends and those you may want to influence to move to a better service with you.

Facebook may make the best example. Facebook is not just Facebook, but now includes other services such as Instagram. Offering these related services affords an advantage. There are multiple options to both service. For example, I use Pixelfed as an option to Instagram and I would challenge Instragram users to identify a disadvantage of Pixelfed beyond the reality that their friends expect them to post to Instagram. I would suggest that the advantage of Pixelfed is the federated approach taken by this service preventing power from being accumulated by a single provider. I assume this difference would appeal to many concerned about centralization. How many users know that this alternative exists or what federation means?

Me calling grocery store: Do you have tiny shrimp in a can?

Grocery store manager: Kid, you have the joke wrong. It is “Do you have Prince Albert in a can? Let him out.”

So, Cindy and I are on one of those “this is your new life” diets. It is mostly very low carbs and little sugar. Only some proteins are allowed in the short term. Beef is bad. We are to focus on chicken and sea food. I am spending a few days by myself at the cabin and am not much of a cook. Salads with a protein source are one of my specialties. Ideally, the protein would come from something I do not have to fix on a stove. For some reason, shrimp in a can appeared in my mind so I stopped on the way home from the coffee shop.

No, I did not actually call the store, but that old joke did pop into my head.

I need to begin upgrading my physical conditioning in preparation for a trip to South Africa in mid-August. At my age, the demands of walking several miles over uneven ground is challenging. I like to walk in the city my trekking to and from a nearby coffee shop. This is about 1.3 miles each direction. I decided to push it a bit today and put in 3.4 miles.

This is the Gandy Dancer trail in northern Wisconsin. During the summer it is a bike and walking trail that goes on for miles. Yes, it is straight and it may not look like it would offer many photo opportunities, but I did find some things to capture.

This final image is kind of interesting. There are lots of backwoods bars in Wisconsin. Some are located close to what are snow mobile trails in winter. There is a path here to the bar. I am not certain what purpose the golf cart serves, but perhaps the bar owners are offering rides for those who don’t want to walk the path.

After being prepared to teach high school biology, I ended up as a college prof working with preservice and inservice teachers. There is an expression “when the tool you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail” (my version) and I admit to leaning in this direction when it comes to education. To be fair, I think the public often takes the same position. Educators are expected to solve an ever increasing number of problems. What about the various forms of inequality citizens of this country face? Sure, we sometimes think we can and are expected to fix those issues. We can develop tolerance and cultural sensitivity. Sure we can feed those kids who didn’t have breakfast this morning and provide a safe place to be for a couple of extra hours after instruction is finished. We can take students no matter their background and prepare them to make decent income. etc. If we can’t do it, then specialized charter schools can. By the way, a little extra money for resources, salaries, and specialized personnel would be very helpful.

Government has been reluctant to contribute the extra resources, but some of the rich have been willing to provide assistance especially when they have ideas about how existing educational approaches have been doing it wrong. While these folks might have headed off some of the problems by sharing some of the wealth their corporations generated, there is another expression that may apply here = “better late than never”.

Now, some of these benefactors have started to admit that things are not getting better and perhaps to even conclude that education is not the answer. A recent position taken by Nick Hanauer (my summary of the original post) has brought this realization into the main stream. Hanauer’s conclusion is that income inequality must be attacked directly (pay workers more) rather than assuming education will eventually fix things.

I think educators kind of always knew this. With the exception of parents, educators probably spend more time with kids than anyone else. Educators also spend time with everyone’s kids. At least this is true of educators collectively and in some locations pretty much in any given classroom. This breadth of exposure provides a perspective even parents don’t have.

My conclusion has become that while educators cannot remedy the multiple equity issues that are seriously disrupting the progress of this country, they have a perspective that needs to be heard. Part of their job should be to speak out. Dismissing and even demanding silence of educator voice limits public awareness of the reality of inequity. Many may not want to hear what educators have to say, but like any citizen and more so than most, their perspectives need to be considered.

Let me begin this post by providing an important data point. I am 70 years old and I retired from my position as a college professor when I was 65. Many college profs retire later than this, but I decided at age 65 it was time to move on. Academia is highly competitive, but you can pretty much stay around as long as you can function if you are tenured. I believed there were many young folks of high ability trying to get a tenure-track job and it was their time to have a chance. No regrets.

This article in the Atlantic entitled “Your professional decline is coming (Much) sooner than you think” is going to receive a lot of attention. As the title suggests, the author organizes and integrates evidence to explain that productivity declines more quickly than most are willing to admit and in many professions is well underway in the 40s and 50s. The result in many people who enjoyed early career success is depression and I am guessing a sense of being a fraud.

This argument was not a surprise to me. My career was in educational psychology and I was aware of work in Cattell’s work in proposing fluid and crystallized intelligence.

Cattell defined fluid intelligence as the ability to reason, analyze, and solve novel problems – what we commonly think of as raw intellectual horsepower.

Crystallized intelligence, in contrast, is the ability to use knowledge gained in the past. Think of it as processing a vast library and understanding how to use it. [these explanations as provided by Atlantic contributor Luci Gutierrez]

When I taught this topic I used to use the example of the difference in the achievements of mathematicians and historians. I tend to think about the circumstances of my career based on other variables, but I have to admit that I published my most significant research papers early and I published books later in my career.

When it comes to careers, we all may share more with the reality of being a professional athlete than we assumed.

There is always the opportunity to blog.