Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood recently revamped its website.  One of the new features includes a fact sheet that provides the following information regarding modern marketing aimed at children (with citations to primary sources):

• Marketing directly to children is a factor in the childhood obesity epidemic.
• Marketing also encourages eating disorders, precocious sexuality, youth violence and family stress and contributes to children’s diminished capability to play creatively.
• As young children are developing their gender identities, they are flooded with ads for products promoting sexualized stereotypes. There are 40,000 Disney Princess items on the market today.
• This generation of children is the most brand-conscious ever. Teens between 13 and 17 have 145 conversations about brands per week, about twice as many as adults.
• Children ages 2-11 see more than 25,000 advertisements a year on TV alone, a figure that does not include product placement. They are also targeted with advertising on the Internet, cell phones, mp3 players, video games, school buses, and in school.
• Almost every major media program for children has a line of licensed merchandise including food, toys, clothing, and accessories.
• Until the age of about 8 children do not understand advertising’s persuasive intent.

I’ve often written about these issues before (see the list of posts here).  The problem is not the enormous amount of money corporations are spending on their commercials.  Rather, it’s about the effect of those commercials on young minds.  In my opinion, modern advertising directed toward children is part of the thorough education the children are receiving in the need to be hyper-acquisitive. Through these incessant messages about the need to buy, modern American children learn that A) they “need” many things they don’t need; B) children who have expensive toys are socially superior to those that don’t; C) “playing” is about having single-purpose toys that stifle creativity; D) they need expensive toys to be happy; E) having the right toy is more important than developing meaningful friendships; F) being sexy in a shallow and glitzy way is important even at a young age.

Truly, children would be much better off to never view any commercial advertising.  There is absolutely nothing good that comes of it, and there are many potential dangers.

It is also my belief that the amount and intensity of these advertising messages are an important part of what is turning children into acquisitive adults with limited creativity.  I suspect that the education that Americans have been getting from advertisers is driving the perceived need of so many Americans to buy things they can’t afford (the average American family now saves a NEGATIVE one percent of its income each year).  I also wonder whether this commercial-driven “need to acquire” is responsible for people buying so much that they work too many hours at high stress jobs, thereby failing to tend to the things that they constantly claim are the “most important” things in their lives (children, marriage, and community-building).

In June, I had the opportunity to interview Josh Golin of CCFC about these issues.  It was a lively interview and Josh is a terrific spokesperson for these viewpoints.  If you haven’t seen this interview yet, I highly recommend it.

For previous DI posts regarding advertising, consumerism and over-acquisitiveness, see the extensive list at the bottom of this post.

Duped from Ethics Gradient.

They’ve started advertising the DVD version of that infernal, mendacious, highly offensive, wilfully ignorant and misleading waste of megabytes known as Expelled. Bay of Fundie has scratched the surface of their advertising and revealed some new information.

Now, given that this is the DVD release of Expelled, it makes me wonder what kind of special features they’ll include. Of course no one can know for sure, but I have something of a wish list:

- a complete timeline of all the steps taken & communication entered into to secure the participation of such people as Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers, including a full explanation for the stark deviation from the premise of the original film: it was originally presented to Myers & Dawkins as a documentary named “Crossroads”, detailing the intersection of religion & science, which it clearly did not turn out to be, either by name or nature

- full, uncut, unedited interviews with the above-named

- a full explanation from the film’s producers of PZ Myer’s own expulsion from a screening of Expelled by security staff before he’d entered the theatre, despite the fact that he’d registered to attend under his own name and hadn’t attempted any kind of subterfuge, as was alleged early on by the producers (as well as an explanation of how Richard Dawkins, arguably more recognisable than PZ Myers, was allowed to enter unmolested)

- behind-the-scenes segments showing such things as exactly who comprised the audience in Ben Stein’s opening, paranoid address to college “students”and a clear explanation of Adolf Hitler’s alleged use Darwin’s theory of evolution to justify his horrific experiments

(more…)

The following is a quote lifted from Charlie Stross’s blog and is pretty much In Full.

We. Are. Not. Going. To. Die. On. Wednesday.

The maximum energy the particles generated by the LHC (7TeV) get up to is many orders of magnitude below the maximum energy of cosmic rays that hit the Earth’s upper atmosphere from space every fricking day. None of them have created black holes and gobbled up the planet, or turned us all into strange matter. Nor have they done ditto to any cosmic bodies we can see, such as planets or stars. Therefore the world isn’t going end when they switch on the LHC on Wednesday. QED.

Joking is all very well, but please, can we not be spreading the FUD and scaring people needlessly? The current climate of superstitious dread with respect to the sciences is bad enough as it is …

As everyone knows we have a presidential election coming up. The two combatants are flinging accusations at one another as to why the other guy isn’t fit to lead. According to McCain, Obama is not only another tax-and-spend Liberal but one with no real experience. McCain is claiming to be an agent of change, despite a record that really doesn’t reflect that. To be fair, he’s been on board with a few bits of legislation that took on some of the more egregious problems in our country, but by and large he’s pretty much just another tax-and-spend Conservative, but one with a lot of experience.

I quoted Charlie’s post for a specific reason. You can search the blogosphere and find many of these sorts of posts, all done in the face of a minor upswelling of panic among those who don’t know any better claiming that the LHC would cause a major event precipitating the End of the World.

My question, simply, is this: why would anyone believe this?

This bears directly on the election. We have many organizations—like FactCheck.com— that take on the rather onerous and often thankless job of vetting statements made by political candidates. Anyone can go look to see which statements are true, false, or exaggerations. There are other sites, like Project For the Old American Century, which have a tally of the abuses of the Bush Administration, with links to sources. The record is there for anyone to go look for themselves and see.

But people don’t. Well, some people do. But I suspect a lot of people rely on the ads and the occasional televised interview to develop their information about the candidates, which is a pretty useless way to do it.

I know a woman in her 40s who does not know that women in this country did not always have the right to vote. When I pointed it out that women didn’t get it till 1920, she was incredulous. She didn’t believe me. I pulled out some history books to show her. Her eyes glazed over.

Next time I spoke to her about it, she had defaulted back to believing that we were the only democracy to guarantee women’s rights from our inception.

The obstinacy of false beliefs baffles me unlike anything else. I recall some friends who supported Ronald Reagan in 1980, said laudatory things about him, but when I bring it up now they look at me as if I’d sprouted a second head. They have rewritten their own history to disclude this embarrassing bit and will not cop to it.

Charlie’s post about the idiocy of people’s fears is very political. Remember the Alar issue over apples? The panic that this substance was on all our apples and that it would kill us spread so fast that and regardless of efforts to provide the truth, there were orchards and packing plants that went out of business because of the resulting boycott of apples that would not have hurt anyone because the substance washed off easily.

People do not understand basic science. Beyond that, there is a lack of understanding of basic logic. Why? Well, for one, it has always been assumed that Common Sense was a natural attribute—and in some small way, a particularly natural attribute of Americans (!) —and needed no assistance from the educational system, when nothing could be further from the truth.

In the introduction to his study of the history of rational thought, Uncommon Knowledge, Alan Cromer states: “I believe that rational civilization, with its science, arts, and human rights, is humankind’s greatest hope for nobility. But like Jericho, it’s but an oasis in the midst of a vast desert of human confusion and irrationality.”

Nancy Reagan regularly consulted an astrologer and often took the predictions offered as grounds for forcing changes of itinerary for her husband while in office. Who knows what else might have been effected as a result?

People like easy answers and quick fixes. The present financial crisis we see engulfing Wall Street is not mysterious. It could be seen coming years ago. Loaning money to people who cannot pay it back obviously will lead to illiquidity of the lender if indulged at too great a level, and that is what has happened. To be fair, many borrowers were openly lied to, the mortgages in question misrepresented. The only thing that might have halted the bleeding would have been if the borrowers, en masse, had had the intellectual tools to see bull shit for what it is. Many did not. Many others did not possess the capacity to differentiate between Need and Want. Of course, that obfuscation is a desired quality in business—many industries make their living on the inability of people to make disciplined distinctions. They would hate it if basic economics were taught in grade school on.

But everyone is acting surprised—and panicked. We are in bail-out mode because big houses, like AIG, are about to go under, and the truth is such institutions, that have been allowed to have tentacles into many areas of the financial garden, are so intertwined with our basic economies that we see it as to our benefit to keep them afloat.

And we do not understand how we got here.

Why not? Do we not understand that all the pseudo-Libertarian talk about Free Markets is nonsense?

No, apparently not.

On the reverse side, people are being driven by panic. The Stock Market lost 500 points. Omigod, that’s a disaster!

500 points out eleven thousand. We have lost our sense of proportion. That is less than five percent of total volume. By contrast, the Crash of 1929 saw the Stock Market lose almost 40% of its value in two months.

Let me quote from the Oxford Companion to United States History:

The crash did not cause the Great Depression of the 1930s. To be sure, the losses sustained by investors and the greater diufficulty firms had in floating new issues depressed the economy. But the Federal Reserve stepped in quickly, lending freely to member banks and thereby confining the crash to the financial system. During the 1930s, congressional investigations uncovered a number of unsavory practices by the essentially private, unregulated stock exchanges. In response, Congress passed the Securities Act of 1933 and the Security and Exchange Act of 1934, inaugurating active federal regulation of the securities market.

Sound familiar? And why did we need regulation? Because stupidity combined with avarice results in collateral damage to those not involved with these matters. Officially, we had 24% unemployment during the Great Depression. It was probably, judging by how the numbers get fudged today, more like 30%. We have 6% now and we feel that we are in a major meltdown.

Granted, for those out of work or on the losing end of investments, the pain is real and not to be scoffed at, but for the rest of us, our overreactions do us little credit. Sound solutions cannot be agreed upon in an atmosphere of panic, and such an atmosphere is fomented by those who have traditionally sought to lead us by the nose for their own benefit.

The regulatory system put in place in the 30s was designed to prevent something like that from ever happening again, and it worked. Why then would we dismantle it?

Because we did. We let Reagan’s cronies undo much of the regulation that had previously protected the country as a whole. We’re paying the price now for Free Market advocates getting their wish. They have turned out to be just as irresponsible as in the 20s and 30s.

But we have been frightened by accusations that regulation somehow equates directly to Socialism, and we have been convinced that Socialism is evil. The arguments which have been used to keep us from being sane and rational about such issues are tissue paper obfuscations, easily seen through by anyone with half a brain, but we as a people buy into them every time. Either we possess profound ignorance or equally profound cupidity. Probably both.

What Reagan began, Bush has all but finished. He has mounted up a debt so high that we must look far down the road to see it reduced to manageable levels, and yet he is lauded as a Conservative by people who ought to know better by virtue of the fact that they are losing their savings and their children’s future to rising costs.

Why would they believe it? It is, simply, the same mentality that leads them to accept the Chicken Little warnings about the Large Hadron Collider without question. It is easy to go find the answers to these questions, but answers are not sought. Because it seems that as a people we are trained not to look or, worse, not to trust a rational explanation. It is easier to live in constant panic-mode and hope the next guy in office will fix it all, so we can go back to our thoughtless lives.

When I was a little kid I remember looking at the exhaust from a factory and asking my dad where all that smoke went. “It just dissipates into the atmosphere.”

“But won’t the atmosphere fill up some day?”

“No, the world is too big for that.”

I was four or five. I accepted the answer, because I trusted my dad. He was an adult, after all, and adults didn’t do stupid things like children did. Now I look on that and see that my innate curiosity and skepticism was at work even then. His answer never satisfied me, but there were other things to do, so I trusted him and let it slide.

Collectively, we tend to be that way. Occasionally we ask “What about that?” and some “adult” pats our head and tells us not to worry, everything will be fine.

I grew up expecting adults to be rational. People did stupid things in the past, but supposedly we had learned not to do those things. I was too young then to realize how stupidity clings to people.

Forgive me if I use words like Stupidity and Moron. I am 53, almost 54, and I have lost all willingness to cut people slack anymore. When I walk into a convention hall filled with dealers in books and movies and jewelry and the fake ephemera of fantasyland (I’m talking about a science fiction convention now) and I see someone purporting to take pictures of your “Aura” (as in Kirlian Aura) with a device that supposedly “spikes” the aura by electricity shunted through one’s body while seated in a chair resembling a bad device from a Frankenstein movie, I get annoyed. When I see people lining up to buy said photos, people who really, I think, ought to know better, I get angry. The charlatan makes a living, the public is gulled, and the one who points out the bull shit is reviled by all.

We have no patience, it seems, for reasoned discourse, for examination of issues, for anything that would prompt us to take responsibility for our own ignorance. I speak collectively now, for I do in fact know many people who do not see the world this way, but it seems they are always and everywhere too few.

If the LHC had been built in this country, I fear that some court injunction would have been placed to prevent it from being turned on by some group convinced that it would result in a hole right through the Earth. We are saved from such silliness because the device is in Europe, where the courts, at least, seem less willing to entertain the hysterias of ignorant people.

So it comes down to which set of lies we will believe. We always end up hoping for the best. So far, the only thing that has buffered us from any truly cataclysmic harm is the sheer size and wealth of this country. But unless we start doing a little rational thinking and start seeing things for what they are, that will not last long.

I beg your pardon for expressing such pessimism.

At DI, we have an extremely conservative fellow visiting the blog these days.  He’s trying to convert all of us to his reactionary world view.  He clings to his Bible as a book of literal truths and he seems to love everything that Sarah Palin ostensibly stands for. I’d like to issue a challenge to this fellow, who goes by the name “Erik.”  To me, he represents many people out there who seem to believe that if you pretend something isn’t important, it isn’t important, even if it IS important.  This includes such critical topics as as Iraq, the cobbled together all-too-human nature of the Bible, Global Warming and, of course, sex education.

Please tell me which of the following sexual education topics you would rather that our children not know anything about.  Please tell me in what specific ways we should keep children, including teenagers, in the dark.

These topics are actually the chapters of a popular book that I have read.  I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to any parent seeking a sex education book for their children:  It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health (2004), by Robie H. Harris (Author), Michael Emberley (Illustrator).  Here are the topics:

Part I – What is Sex
Girl or Boy, Female or Male (sex and gender)
Making Babies (Sexual Reproduction)
Strong Feelings (Sexual Desire)
Making Love (Sexual intercourse)
Straight and Gay (Heterosexuality and homosexuality)

Part II – Our Bodies
The Human Body (All kinds of bodies)
Outside and Inside  (The Female Sex Organs)
Outside and Inside  (The Male Sex Organs)
Words  (Talking about Bodies and Sex)

Part III – Puberty
Changes and Messages (Puberty and Hormones)
The travels of the Egg (Female Puberty)
The Travels of the Sperm (Male Puberty)
Not all at Once! (Growing and Changing Bodies)
More Changes (Taking care of your Body)
Back and Forth: (Up and Down – New and Changing Feelings)
Perfectly Normal:  (Masturbation)

Part IV – Babies and Families
All sorts of Families (Taking care of babies and kids)
Instructions from Mom and Dad (The Cell, genes and chromosomes)
A kind of Sharing:  (Cuddling, kissing, touching and sexual intercourse)
Before Birth: (Pregnancy)
What a Trip! (Birth)
Other Arrivals (More ways to have a baby and family, including adoption)

Part V - Decisions
Planning Ahead (postponement, abstinence and birth control)
Laws and Rulings (abortion)

Part VI – Staying Healthy
Talk about it (sexual abuse)
Checkup (Sexually Transmitted Diseases)
Scientists Working Day and Night (HIV and AIDS)
Staying Healthy (Responsible Choices).

So what is it, Erik?  Should we avoid teaching our children about puberty? Sexual feelings? Masturbation?  Shall we keep our kids from knowing anything about any of these sex-ed topics?  Truly, tell me exactly how ignorant you want to keep America’s children and teenagers.  Should we keep this book out of America’s public libraries?  Should this book even be sold at all?   You are aware, aren’t you, that many parents are so mentally stymied about sex (because their own parents thought it better to keep them ignorant) that they don’t have a clue about how to communicate these sex-ed ideas to their kids.  Shouldn’t those parents have access to a book like this to provide them with clear information about compelling topics?

Here’s a caveat to those people who want to live in ignorance:  you can peek in this book at Amazon–beware that you might learn something.

For a little journey that is pretty amazing, though not unexpected, take a look at the comments regarding this book at Amazon and you’ll be Amazed at the cultural chasm displayed.  This book typically gets either 5 stars (from people who want their kids to be informed about these important topics) or 1 star (by people who want to keep their kids ignorant about sex).  Too bad Bristol Palin didn’t have a book like this a year ago.

Because you might actually learn something important by reading it, It’s Perfectly Normal is one of the top ten challenged books of 2007, according to the Economist.

Over the years, I’ve often thought of the following quote: “The child is father of the man.”  These words often haunt me deeply.  They capture the absurd but true notion that each of us is nurtured and tutored (and sometimes damaged or destroyed) by younger versions of ourselves.

At one time, I thought the meaning of this quote was obvious, but now I see that it isn’t obvious at all. By the way, my interpretation has nothing to do with the fact that the quote is written in a masculine version.  The quote could and should be translated to cover both male and female.  Something like, “The Child is the parent of the Adult.”

The quote appears as part of a poem by Wordsworth:

“MY HEART LEAPS UP WHEN I BEHOLD”

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

What, then, is the meaning of “”The child is father of the man”? Here is my interpretation. Think of the person you are today. Think of the life that you are currently living.  Consider both the predicaments you are now in and the joys you are now experiencing. Much of that (or all of that) has been made possible as a result of decisions (good and bad) made by younger versions of you.  Here’s an obvious example.   I am alive today because a young boy (a younger version of me) repeatedly made safe decisions when crossing streets and when riding a bicycle near traffic.  My fate was in the hands of that young child.

But my intellectual fate was also in the hands of that young boy who was me.  I am currently 52 years old. Numerous key decisions I made when I was 5, 8, 12, 18, 21, 25, 37, 45 and 48 allowed me to become who I am now. I am truly grateful to former versions of me. Thanks to their sacrifices, I currently have many resources and options.  We are all mostly self-taught, right?  And who is doing most of the teaching, other than younger versions of ourselves.  Perhaps it’s not always conscious, but it’s unrelenting and powerful because those younger versions of ourselves serve as strong filters, determining the kinds of information and social contacts that “they” will allow to future versions of themselves.   And you’re doing that right now, deciding what to notice and what to ignore, thereby shaping that future version of you.

I remember being 9-years old and paging through encyclopedias from cover to cover.  This introduced me to many topics of which I knew nothing until that time.  That 9-year-old kid sent me off on an intellectual voyage that I am still taking. If he hadn’t cultivated his curiosity and gotten comfortable with some aspects of the big world around him, I might have lacked a meaningful basis for stretching that understanding further when I was 12, 16, or 42.

Even when I was five years old, I remember hearing things I didn’t believe and reacting to it carefully, strongly and in a way that lingered.  My 5-year old self taught his skepticism to my 6-year old self, and so on.  For instance, my religious father once took me into an empty church when I was about five.  He tried to convince me that Jesus lived in a small golden tabernacle and that Jesus was a piece of bread. I still remember that conversation because it triggered a crisis for me, even at that young age.  I knew that bread was not alive and that people don’t live in shoebox-sized boxes in churches.  Why was my father saying such strange things?  That five-year-old version of me handed the skeptical baton to the six-year version of himself.  The six-year old took that lesson to heart and reformed it a bit, before passing it to the 7-year old version of myself.  Almost 50 years later, I am still benefiting from that lesson first noted by a five-year old.

The six-year-old version of me took an interest in music that I retain to this day.  It reminds me of the children’s game of “Telephone,” though.  Every time the lesson was passed down to a new version, it changed a bit.  By the time it got to that 25-year old version of me, the love of simple children’s songs had turned into a passion for playing jazz.

The 8-year old version of me intuitively appreciated the scientific method.  “He” explored the world in a careful, sensitive and somewhat skeptical way. He heard and saw a lot of things, but rejected some of them as being too far-fetched. It’s like a long line of torch carriers, of which I am only the most recent.

It also amazes me that there is a powerful path-dependence to this succession of earlier versions of me.   If earlier versions of me hadn’t worked hard in various ways, I would not have had many the opportunities that I ended up having. (more…)

There are plenty of innumerate groups who think that the LHC will destroy the world, as they have with each generation of nuclear test device before. Loud groups with mailing lists and placards.

The Large Hadron Collider (in case you were unaware) is the Swiss upgrade to the unfinished Superconducting Super Collider that the U.S. half built in the 1990’s. A Hardon is basically an atomic nucleus. “Large” means up to the size of the lead (Pb) nucleus (mass of 207 amu’s each). The SSC was being built in Texas, but between cutting science funding and groups protesting its danger, Congress cut it.

They fired the LHC up this morning (3:30 EDT) just to spin some protons around at nearly the speed of light. Soon, they will be ready to actually cause a collision between 2 counter-rotating currents of these hadrons. Their best hope is to find the Higgs Boson, presumably the source of mass within quarks.

The detractors worst fear is that they will create a microscopic black hole that will swallow the Earth. Over at the BadAstronomy blog, he details why this is silly. In brief, the LHC isn’t big enough. Anything we can build on the planet wouldn’t be big enough. Note: The total energy density in the core of the Sun obviously isn’t big enough, or it would be a black hole.

But, then there is this bit of silliness: HasTheLargeHadronColliderDestroyedTheWorldYet.com. If you read the code behind the page, you find several programmer in-jokes. But there is also the comment:

if the lhc actually destroys the earth & this page isn’t yet updated
please email mike@frantic.org to receive a full refund

Ya gets what yez pays for, I guess.

Then, there is this (The LHC Rap):

Perhaps Physicists rapping is the sign of the end times.

Since Palin’s from Alaska, I thought it appropriate to post this link from an Anchorage newspaper. This ought to get plenty of circulation in the next couple of months. Even if, as the article indicates, Palin’s questions regarding the censorship of library materials was “rhetorical” it nevertheless is informative that the question would even occur to her.

Compare the toned-down “rhetoric” of Palin’s approach to the more forthright and visceral approach of another grand lady of the Right, Phyllis Schafly, here prescribing a cure for campus mass murder.

So far, Palin’s main success at censorship seems to have been imposed on her future son-in-law, Levi Johnson, whose MySpace page was rendered “Private” after the convention. Among other things the young man asserted there was his disdain for marriage and his love of profanity. In all likelihood, he wasn’t about to marry Bristol, who apparently has benefited from the Abstinence Only education the Republicans have been pushing and, if Mrs. Palin is anything to go by, will continue to push in a McCain presidency.

My point here is very simple. The title of the post is for those remaining Hillary diehards who may still be considering a vote for McCain out of protest over Obama’s winning the Democratic nomination. Ask yourselves if, just to have a woman in the White House, you would vote for Phyllis Schlafly. Because that’s about what a vote for McCain would amount to, especially now. McCain is 72, cancer-prone. Even if he doesn’t die in office, there may be times when he is incapacitated, which would leave the estimable Mrs. Palin in charge.

Her comment about the difference between pit bulls and hockey moms is telling. I know, I know, it was humor. Wasn’t it? I know a lot of women who like being compared to a dog. It was the lipstick punchline that held the main clue, which is to say that Mrs. Palin, in default mode, thinks of women about the same way Phyllis Schlafly does. Those who find themselves in special situations where they can have careers is fine, for those women, but a concerted effort to alter the social landscape to accept the idea that women are more than a facade with a family is unacceptable.

Palin has already egregiously misrepresented her record. This won’t matter to her base, which lives and dies on the proper spin, but each and every instance ought to be held to the same scrutiny Obama has been and is about to receive.

If the media really wanted to know about the kind of education offered by America’s colleges, they could visit any of hundreds of fine colleges hundreds of days each year. It’s a rare day, however, when any corporate media outlet takes interest in education of any sort. Unless, of course, the media itself concocts a fake competition among colleges. That’s what U.S. News & World Report has done. And now that we know who’s number 1, and number 2, we can roll up our sleeves and really start pretending like we care about education. Consider this description of the US News and World Reports college ranking issue found in MSNBC:

Harvard University is the country’s oldest, wealthiest and most selective university. Now it’s back on top of the U.S. News & World Report college rankings, claiming sole possession of the No. 1 spot for the first time in 12 years.

Princeton slips to No. 2, ending eight straight years of at least sharing the top ranking.

Really? Princeton “slips” to number 2? That suggests that Princeton is not nearly as good as Harvard. I’d bet all those people who have degrees from Princeton are upset that they could have learned a whole lot more had they attended Harvard.

These rankings are silly, of course. To numerically rank colleges implies that there is a significant difference between college 1 and college 2, or even between college number 5 and college number 10. I’m not just saying that there is no difference between college number one and college number 1,200. At some point, there is a difference, of course. There is no thoughtful educator, however, who would suggest that looking at the U.S. News & World Report rankings can help one decide which of the top 50 colleges one should attend. That decision depends upon what one is interested in studying, as well as numerous other factors relating to geography, finances and world view.

We love rankings here in the United States, even if we really have no understanding or interest in the underlying thing that’s being ranked. We and our media really don’t care at all about education, as you can see from the lack of in-depth news regarding education, a lack of news occurring about 364 days each year. We can also see the American disinterest in high-level learning by the way we pick politicians. We would rather have a politician with whom we feel comfortable drinking beer than one who has command of the facts and who processes information efficiently and logically (the sorts of abilities one would presumably pick up while attending a good college). And to expand on this point, America’s media is enthralled with another form of conflict, horserace politics, while it constantly ignores reporting on critical issues affecting our country, issues which should be driving campaign coverage.

If they really cared about education, they would start writing about it, but not in terms of rankings. Or if they want to talk about what colleges were “good” colleges, they would write a story about “50 Very Good Colleges” without ranking them.

There’s nothing like a ranking, because rankings bring conflict, and conflict brings readers, and readers sell advertising, and advertising makes money for the media to concoct those rankings.

There was to have been a broadcast debate today between a Creationist and a Biologist. Ray Comfort (of the Banana Proves Creationism fame) against PZ Myers (a.k.a Pharyngula). But the station wimped out, and broadcast Comfort in relative quiet comfort today, and will allow Myers to respond tomorrow morning (Weds. Aug. 6, 2008 10:00 CDT (GMT-5)) on WDAY

Here is Pharyngula’s play-by-play, blogged during the first 40 minutes of the broadcast.

The first response comment was:

A friendly reminder to turn all irony meters and bullshit detectors to the lowest sensitivity, lest they be vaporized.

with a reply at comment #73 that I appreciated

Try our new line of Comfort-standard(TM) industrial grade irony meters. 2-ga. internal wiring, 3×10^6:1 step-down transformers, military-grade ICs, massive dual-blade fast-trip circuit breakers and Safe-Shatter(TM) non-shrapnel-producing casings. Each unit is hand-assembled and burned in on a steady diet of AM radio and Bush administration ‘We’re turning the corner… really now, honest’ press releases. Autoranging, and rated to 30 TeraHaggarts. Don’t browse the web without one!

I’ve blown up electronic panels with inadequately specified parts in the past, with actual noise and smoke. So I “get” each of these units. Except, how many MegaDubyas are there in a TeraHaggert?

There is yet another story going around about dinosaur and human footprints found together in ancient (maybe 4,000 years old!) rock. Here is the local credulous Texas take on the find.

All the previous pictures of contemporaneous dinosaur and human footprints provided by these people showed that humans used to have 19″ long feet with only 3 toes. This new isolated sample, long removed from its secret setting, is available to view in person by true believers. The dinosaur track might be real, but any anatomist or gait specialist could tell you what is wrong with the human footprint, and its intersection with that of the dinosaur. Any paleontologist want to comment on the dino-print?

If they really wanted actual paleontologists to believe the evidence, they would invite them to the site of the find to seek the rest of the footprint trail. As an attempt to gain credulity, they claim that over 800 x-rays were taken of the rock (one CAT scan?) after the human footprint was “revealed”. Um, I guess they need to prove that it is a rock through and through. Actually, the claim is that fossil footprints are made by compressing layers of rock, rather than in a soft single sediment layer where they are usually found. The scans reportedly show that both footprints distorted underlying layers.

The daughter of the discoverer has studied some geology, so she is skeptical of its evidentiary value as proof of a Young Earth. But Dr. Carl Baugh, the founder and director of the Creation Evidence Museum in Texas, hopes to get these pictures into Texas textbooks (and therefore all other states) under the Strengths and Weaknesses doctrine of the Discovery Institute.

If you buy your child an expensive and detailed toy based upon the latest new movie, you’ll end up with a toy that can be used in only one way and your child will quickly get bored with that toy. It’s happened over and over. I’ve seen it with my own children and with many of their friends. The solution of many parents is to replace that new toy with yet another new toy based upon yet another newly released movie, all with the same result.

If you find yourself buying your child all of these new fancy toys, you will also depriving your child of creative play. The importance of creative play is the focus of a new book by Susan Linn, The Case for Make-Believe (2008). Susan Linn is a psychologist and therapist based at Harvard. She is instrumental in running Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood. I’ve previously posted a video of an interview I arranged with Josh Golin of CCFC.

In her book, Susan Linn asks why there is so much interest in promoting expensive toys. The simple answer is that “Society on all levels conspires to keep children from playing; in a market-driven society, creative play is a bust. It just isn’t lucrative.”

Why isn’t creative play lucrative? It’s because satisfaction derived from creative play relies more on the child who’s playing than on the object with which the child is playing.

They can transform a blanket into a tent one day in a cave the next. A stick can be a magic wand, a sword, a light saber or a mast for a schooner. The toys that nurture the imagination–blocks, art supplies, dolls, and stuffed animals free of computer chips and links to media–can be used repeatedly and in a variety of ways. When it comes to make-believe, less really is more. In the United States, this means that nurturing creative play is inherently counter-cultural. It’s a threat to corporate profits.

These new toys aren’t designed for the purpose of being treasured for a lifetime. As Linn explains, “they are designed to sell. If interest wanes, so much the better–another version of the toy will soon be on the market.”

Linn explains that “play is in danger of extinction.” This is not sheer hyperbole. According to Linn, “play is linked to creativity and to mental health.” Creative play allows children to learn how to transport themselves to pretend worlds. Creative play “serves as an essential early experience of self reflection and expression.” In Linn’s experience, she can no longer assume that children even know how to play creatively. In her experience as a therapist, she repeatedly sees children trying to reenact scenes from TV shows and movies, “bringing nothing of their unique experience to their play.” All of this lack of creative play is exacerbated by the way in which parents so often over-schedule their children, leaving little or no time for creative play.

What are the specific benefits of creative play? Susan Lynn explains that creative play:

is inextricably linked to learning and creativity. The ability to play is central to our capacity to take risks, to experiment, to think critically, to act rather than react, to differentiate ourselves from our environment, and to make life meaningful. Children often use pretend play to reflect on their lives the way many adults use journal writing.

Near the end of her book, Lynn suggests that there’s no reason to buy electronic toys are toys based on media characters. She also stresses the importance of giving children lots of opportunities to play on their own. She suggests toys such as giant cardboard boxes or tents made out of sheets strung between two chairs. By strictly limiting a child’s access to television, one can use this newly found time to play games, read aloud, be silly, cook, do crafts, explore nature or dozens of other activities she recommends. She warns that some craft sets promote themselves as enhancing creativity, but some of them do nothing of the sort. Above all, she suggests investing in toys that promote open ended play. She recommends the website of Teachers Resisting Unhealthy Children’s Entertainment (TRUCE) as a place where parents can learn to find age-appropriate toys that to promote open ended play.

Linn has special tips regarding traveling. Many people put DVD players in their cars or they hand children portable video games. Susan Linn warns that these screens seem to make traveling or waiting easier, but they do so at a price. They foster dependence on the screens to get children through the day–the children get a habit of needing to be amused through these gadgets all the time.

Based upon my experience as a parent, I think Susan Lynn really knows her stuff. In my experience, children will push hard to get you to buy them things or to amuse them as their personal entertainer. It’s happened over and over, in my experience, that when children are bored, they will get whiny until they realize that the adults around them are not going to tend to them–It is at that moment, just then their protests are loudest they get to work to amuse themselves. It’s a magic moment when children decide to start creating their own wonderful imaginary worlds devoid of adult input. It is in their own imaginary worlds that children learn how to communicate and engage in creative problem solving. For parents, the trick is to have the discipline to not jump so often to become the official entertainer of your children or to become the constant provider of new toys. The more parents do this, the less children will learn how to create their own play.

Also in my experience, it’s not good, in the long run, for parents to sit around applauding everything their child does. That can result in attention-addicted children who follow adults around to seek applause every minute of the day instead of being self-sufficient and emotionally centered. In my own experience, it is a parent’s job to appreciate rather than applaud. It’s difficult, though, to stay back and watch your child sometimes fail to figure things out. I’m not suggesting that parents should ignore their children. Far from it, parents should often spend extended quality time with their kids. But kids also need that time on their own to figure things out for themselves, without a parent-cheerleader and without a constant stream of expensive new toys to make them experience a false sense of success.  I’m concerned about this issue because it seems that many children are failing to become self-sufficient.  Here’s what Susan Linn has to say on this issue:

About 40 percent of college graduates are now moving back home after graduation.  They aren’t moving home, as would be the case in some cultures, to support their families.  They seem to be moving home to save money and to postpone having to take care of themselves.

The Case For Make Believe is a well written book with lots of common sense and market research buttressed by a good dose of science. I highly recommend it.  Linn’s book includes thoughtful discussions of other pressing issues regarding childhood education, including the ubiquitous violence found in toys and the Disney model of femininity.  What is the Disney model?  The “ultra-thin body types, their clothing and the stories they tell embody a commercialized, stereotypic image of beauty and womanhood.” (p. 175).

I’ll end this post with a presentation by a second thinker who has a somewhat different delivery, but a similar idea. This second thinker is George Carlin, who speaks about various problems concerning childhood. Listen closely to this video from “It’s Bad For Ya!,” his final performance before his sudden death in June. More specifically, in Part III of this seven part performance, go to the one minute mark and listen to his description of the ideal play toy for a child: the stick.

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Tonight I watched “It’s Bad For Ya,” George Carlin’s final nationally televised performance. The entire show is available on YouTube (Below is Part I of VII). The show was broadcast live on March 1, 2008, only a few months prior to Carlin’s death (due to a heart attack, on June 22, 2008).

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Carlin opened the show by announcing that he was 70 years old. In Parts I and II, he speaks bluntly about society’s failure to deal frankly with death. It’s impossible to watch this performance without feeling the irony. At one point, he states:

So don’t be afraid to get old. It’s a great time of life. You get to take advantage of people and you’re not responsible for anything! You can even shit in your pants!

He dissects many other topics, including law, religion, children, education and national pride. He shows no patience for the way our culture handles any of these issues. His performance gets especially dark when he asserts that there is essentially no hope for us, ecologically speaking—he predicts that in 40 or 50 more years, the entire planet will be a massive ball of pollution. At many points in the performance, it’s not easy to tell whether Carlin retains any personal optimism. Is his performance intentionally injected with hyperbole or is this really and truly what Carlin thinks. I suspected the latter, but I don’t really know.

I heard many gems during the performance (meaning that I heard many things with which I agree wholeheartedly). Here’s my favorite, this one delivered during the topic of society’s often-stated goal that “we should teach our children to read.”

It’s not important to get children to read. It’s much more important to teach children to question what they read. They should be taught to question everything. Everything they read and everything they hear. They should be taught to question authority . . .

Amen.

This video of John McCain is truly incredible. The questioner asked whether insurers, who cover Viagra, should also cover birth control pills.

The simple answer should have been that insurance companies should, indeed, cover birth control pills. Any organization that covers Viagra and Prozac (and vasectomies, much less surgery for tennis elbow) should cover the pills and medical care necessary for people to control if and when they will get pregnant. But McCain was incoherent. Here’s the Straight-Talk Express at work:

This is not the first time McCain has shown profound ignorance on birth control and sexuality. And see here for much more. The problem is that he is trying to hold onto the radical right, which wants to outlaw all effective birth control. See also, here, regarding the political positions on birth control pushed by those bastions of misinformation, “Pregnancy Resource Centers,” which dot the land, often well-funded by tax dollars. The Republicans are controlled by those who believe that they should control when and how you feel sexual pleasure. And here’s more proof. And check out the special proms for prepubescent girls. For more proof of this Republican ignorance, check out the statistics demonstrating that abstinence-only education (also well funded by the federal government) is a joke. I should clarify. I think that abstinence can be a substantial part of sex education for adolescents, but not the only part. The phrase “Just say no” doesn’t, on its own, stop kids from unintentionally getting pregnant.

Also check out McCain’s ignorance on the relationship between condom use and HIV.

As you can see, then, even when you set aside the issue of abortion, Republicans are further determined to tell you if, when and how to get pregnant. How can they not see that this should be a decision left to individuals? The answer is that Republicans are pandering to the radical “religious” Right’s wacko view that use of birth control pills constitute a method of causing an “abortion.”

Here’s a thoughtful and well-researched article on the safety of bicycling by Alan Durning of Grist.  Here’s his bottom line:

Biking is safer than it used to be. It’s safer than you might think. It does incur the risk of collision, but its other health benefits massively outweigh these risks. And it can be made much safer. What’s more, making streets truly safe for cyclists may be the best way to reverse Bicycle Neglect: it may be among communities’ best options for countering obesity, climate disruption, rising economic inequality, and oil addiction.

He also concludes, based on ample research, that

if you’re a cautious, law-abiding, risk-averse cyclist, biking is far safer than you’d think from the aggregate statistics, which are inflated by the proliferation of two-wheeling daredevils.

Durning thinks we can do a lot better to protect cyclists.  He advocates better cycling facilities, such as bikeways, bike boulevards, traffic calming, blue lanes, and cycle signals (the use of bike lanes is disputed, however, as you can see in the comments).  He also advocates for better educating drivers and cyclists.  For instance, in Germany, fourth graders are required to demonstrate cycling proficiency.

At this site, we’ve often advocated cycling as a mode of transportation (see here, for example).  I’m linking to Durning’s article because it is a good resource.  The comments continue the good discussion well.

As I read the statistics in Durning’s article, I had to agree with the need for cyclist education, as well need to educate motor vehicle drivers of the existence of bicycles. But back to those cyclists.   I cringe at the way half of them ride.  They violate virtually every traffic law.  They weave all over.  They don’t wear helmets.  Many of them ride much fast than is safe in the traffic.   I would think that U.S. bicycle/car collisions could be cut in half were the cyclists made to feel that the traffic laws pertain to them too.   My concern is a source of optimism, too, because it might be possible to dramatically cut the bicycle collisions without any substantial costs.

About some things, Americans are incredibly stupid. For instance, I’ve kept an eye on science and religion related ignorance for years. 15% of Americans don’t know that the Earth revolves around the sun. Half of the people in the United States (an allegedly “Christian Nation”)  can’t name Genesis as the first book in the Bible.

There are a lot more statistics where those came from. If you’d like to read a few dozen zingers, read Rick Shenkman’s article in Alternet, “Ignorant America: Just How Stupid Are We?” There are some real head-shakers in Shenkman’s article. Several might have you wondering whether we should require citizens to pass rudimentary intelligence tests in order to vote. Shenkman’s compilation of stupidity had me wondering this. I know that this is an extremely controversial idea based on the way it has been misused in the past. It is clear, though that huge numbers of people have no idea how their government is designed to work, who is running their government, the basic characteristics of the scientific method, the basic facts of the religions to which they cling, or rudimentary principles of geography, history or economics. Now really . . . should such a person vote? This question makes me squirm.

I’m not really suggesting that we should take official government action to keep people from voting based on their intelligence levels. On the other hand, reading Shenkman’s article makes me wonder whether our “Get out the vote” campaigns should be focused on getting people to vote only if they know something other than their favorite TV shows and sports stars. Rather than “get out the vote,” perhaps we should have “vote only if you’re informed” campaigns. Here’s one of Shenkman’s many statistics that especially got me thinking in this entirely unacceptable way:

In the election of 2004, one of the hot issues was gay marriage. But gauging public opinion on the subject was difficult. Asked in one national poll whether they supported a constitutional amendment allowing only marriages between a man and a woman, a majority said yes. But three questions later a majority also agreed that “defining marriage was not an important enough issue to be worth changing the Constitution.” The New York Times wryly summed up the results: Americans clearly favor amending the Constitution but not changing it.

What is stupidity? Early in his comprehensive article on the lack of comprehension, Shenkman designates the five types of stupidity:

First, is sheer ignorance: Ignorance of critical facts about important events in the news, and ignorance of how our government functions and who’s in charge. Second, is negligence: The disinclination to seek reliable sources of information about important news events. Third, is wooden-headedness, as the historian Barbara Tuchman defined it: The inclination to believe what we want to believe regardless of the facts. Fourth, is shortsightedness: The support of public policies that are mutually contradictory, or contrary to the country’s long-term interests. Fifth, and finally, is a broad category I call bone-headedness, for want of a better name: The susceptibility to meaningless phrases, stereotypes, irrational biases, and simplistic diagnoses and solutions that play on our hopes and fears.

Although the article at the top of this post, “Ignorant America,” is full of compelling statistics, it (like many articles documenting American stupidity) is also riddled with many questions that confuse trivia for knowledge. How important is it for most Americans to know the name of the Secretary of Defense? Isn’t it possible that someone can be rather up to speed about America’s military policies without actually knowing the name of the Secretary of Defense?

America is obsessed with trivia and it is not unusual for trivia to masquerade as something important for tests that purport to measure intelligence. Knowing lots and lots of facts, though, especially the inert facts common for trivia buffs, is not the same thing as being intelligent. If these two things (knowledge and facts) were equal, we would regularly have great insights and discoveries occurring as a result of Trivia Nights, yet I don’t believe that has yet happened even once.

The problem with many intelligence tests is that they only measure ability to recall bits of information rather than detecting true understanding, much less wisdom. For this reason, many of the questions used to illustrate how “stupid” we are resemble the same problems found in many formal “intelligence tests.” A thorough review of those problems with IQ tests can be found in Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man (1996).

I recognize that we all have our focus when it comes to understanding the world. Someone who is dedicated to one field of study might not know as much about other fields of study. It is also important to remember that all of us have huge gaps in information. If we have dedicated our lives to understanding nanotechnology, how much are we actually going to know about the history of classical music ? If you work as a professional athlete, should we really be expected to know all five of the specific legal rights granted by the First Amendment? (Did you know that one of those rights is the right to petition the government?). Having written this, I think it’s more likely that those who truly excel at a field tend to be rather well-rounded.

There’s probably more than a few people who would insist that the scientific method is the be-all and end-all of intelligence because of its insistence on proof. There is an uneasy truce between belief and proof, however. In the area of religion, belief is often said to be justified even in the absence of proof. But don’t forget that even very smart people find an irresistible urge to believe many things that they cannot prove.

Here’s another caveat for those who walk around wagging their fingers (like I do) at the large number of “stupid” Americans. Howard Gardner has put forth a strong argument that there were actually multiple intelligences. He holds that the concept of “general intelligence” is highly suspect and that there might not be such a thing as GI. There are those who are incredibly talented at reading the moods and motives of other people (he calls this interpersonal intelligence), but who don’t do well at mathematics. There are people who are terrifically talented in musical ways (e.g. Hillary Hahn), but might not be very good at biology (I’m not suggesting that Hillary on is not good at biology– because I am deeply infatuated with Hillary Hahn, I assume that she is excellent at everything she does!). Many of us do know some “absent-minded professors” who can talk for hours on esoterica such as Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative but who seem inept at coping in the real world on a day-to-day basis. In the category of super-intelligent, I would quickly place my plumber (who can talk knowledgeably about almost anything, it seems) and a carpenter who has done work at my house, who has a superhuman grasp of his profession. I can’t imagine being as good as he is at the many arts of transforming a house, even if I trained for 20 years at the foremost “carpenter school.” (more…)

Under a bill to be introduced soon in Utah, sex education teachers would be criminally liable if they “deviate from state law governing sex education, which requires that it focus on physical and emotional development of adolescents, healthy relationships and the threat and prevention of diseases.”

The bill is being prepared in response to a recent allegation of alleged impropriety:

The Jordan School District is investigating allegations that a seventh- and eighth-grade health teacher violated the sex education statute by responding to questions from students about topics beyond the core curriculum, including homosexual sex, oral sex and masturbation.

What are we coming to?? How dare a sex ed teacher talk about homosexual sex, oral sex and masturbation!

It is often observed that girls do not perform as well as boys in mathematics. This difference is often overstated and it’s cause is often highly debated.  Many people have suggested that the basis for this difference is essentially biological.

It is now well established that a society’s attitude toward gender will significantly affect the performance of its girls in mathematics.  That was the result of a study described in the May 30, 2008 edition of Science (available only to subscribers online) in an article called “Culture, Gender and Math.”  That study attempted to analyze the cause of the “gender gap” (the difference between the scores of boys and girls) in mathematics.  The conclusion of this comprehensive study is that “Social conditioning and gender biased environments can have a very large effect on test performance.”

The study examined cultural attitudes regarding women in various countries and compared them to math achievements of girls in those same countries.  It found that the gender gap in math tends to disappear in more gender-equal societies.

The authors of the study commented