Solvation

Differentiating Spiritual from Social

Begin reading at the bottom.

When you finished (or read it the first time), did you feel pain?

Many do. That pain is evidence that we're connected. We imagine these two young men; we imagine or remember our own losses. That's Spiritual. Even those of us who do not know these people nevertheless feel their pain.

I need to pause here. I do also want to say how heartbreaking it was to hear, and express my condolences to those who knew Vijay personally, his family and Mike in particular.

I'm drawing connections into the financial world after the jump.

SoCap08 - Financial Return Maximization is Absurd

Last week, I was SoCapO8, a conference that was oversubscribed nearly 3-fold, where most people have signed up in the past few weeks, post-financial catastrophe.

There is a lot going on in the social investment space, but I want to address, specifically, one item, since my for-pay job at the groupery is a bit hectic due to a major upgrade (...and if you run volunteer organizations, you should check it out! It's a powerful product and a great team!).

Back on-topic: on Tuesday evening was The Economist Debate Series:

Motion: This house believes you can maximize social returns by maximizing financial returns. Two voices for, two voices against.

    * Moderator: Matthew Bishop, The Economist
    * Shari Berenbach, Calvert Foundation
    * Elizabeth Funk, Unitus
    * Steve Zuckerman, Self Help
    * Alvaro Rodriguez-Arregui, Ignia Partners LLC

When Variance is High

I was talking to a friend this weekend. He mentioned how broadly distributed intellectual potential is among the population, and it got me thinking....

When I was a kid, I played games at recess and ran around. I swam butterfly for a year in high school.  I played some tennis. A few coaches commented that I have decent hand/eye coordination and was reasonably quick. I was nothing special, either way... unless what I needed to do required both my feet to leave and then to return to the ground! In that case, failure was (and is) a reasonable expectation, and an injury, quite possible. Unless I'm going to be landing in water at the end, this whole "leaving the earth's surface" thing is clearly something my brain doesn't process well at all.

I was lucky, since I was a girl - the fact I was eager to play sports successfully offset my comparative lack of height as well as my leaping challenges. But for many boys, Physical Education class was a nightmare of humiliation, where coaches had achievement expectations that the boys just didn't have the inclination to train for and in many cases lacked the physical talent to meet.

Those same boys grew up in many cases to be academically successful men; fathers, who could determine funding priorities and administer school districts. I'm not sure this is related, but my son's academically excellent public school has a Physical Education department whose grading requirements for an A- in 9th and 10th grades are apparently "successfully changes into PE clothes."  There is no required physical education at all for 11th and 12th grades. The coaches do care a lot about the teams, but not at all about educating anyone of even average physical talent.

In other words, I suspect that since PE was difficult for people who weren't talented athletically, it was curtailed and then turned into an utterly useless program.  Imagine what would happen if we taught math that way? If you're not "math team" caliber, you show up for class, play math-based games if you want to -- hang out and talk to your friends if not -- and then you get an "A-" so long as you don't cause any problems.

I believe we need to create "learning environments" for physical learning in the schools. Teachers ridiculing kids who can't make the quota of pushups isn't okay; but neither is saying "voila! no need for push-ups!" I think understanding how to deal with the wide distribution of physical talent will help academics find innovative new approaches for managing the wide distribution of intellectual talent.

So back to the conversation with my friend, because there's another part to this, centered around the wide disparity in IQ that schools have to deal with, and how that affects the way people approach their lives, particularly how they approach conflict.

I don't actually have any answers to the questions he raised. But I have been thinking a lot about, specifically, the role of public education beyond the education of specific intellectual skills.

I have seen bright children become so competitive that they lose all sense of empathy. I have seen average children become so insecure and anxious they get sick. I have seen children (and adults) become violently angry and destructively frustrated when they just can't "get it," particularly when the pressure's on and the stakes are high.

I believe the future of education has to be team-based, because we can't afford, as a society, to exacerbate impulsive anger in children who aren't succeeding at the moment, whether they're just not smart enough or they're just generally prone to anger or impulsivity, or they are having short term personal crises.  Having social support helps people feel calmer, and gives them confidence they'll weather whatever they need to face.

We need to know a lot more about how to integrate people who are experiencing failure, anger, and obsession. We have an idea of how to create an intellectual learning environment: it's okay to try, mistakes are tolerated, unpacked, and knowledge is gained. Now we need to learn how to create learning environments that accommodate emotional learning.

And we have to expand those domains to encompass a way to differentiate the curriculum for a very wide disparity in natural talent.

Response to apophenia: does work/life balance exist?

Danah Boyd asks: does work/life balance exist?

I replied in her blog, but I want to reiterate it here, because it's such an important issue.

How do you achieve work-in-one-area / work-in-another-area balance? What if you like to think about social networks but also play the bass in a band? What if you are a programmer who also writes comic strips?

The answer is this: the work-centric peer group has no problem at all with work/work balance or work/play balance.  There are plenty of successful models for that.

What we have is a taboo in this society: Childrearing, householding, and community work are all intellectually relevant topics, but unfortunately remedies for barfing 3 year olds is not considered as sexy as how to balance the demands of your band with your work.

The underlying conflict, I believe, has to do with a rigid sense of control. I can control my band schedule, my art and cooking classes, my off-grid-mountaineering-travel schedule. If it's too onerous, I can always just walk out, after all.  But I can't control my child suddenly having trouble at school. We have a problem in this society not with work/life balance, but with allowing ambiguity and chaos of life to upset our rigid pursuit of whatever we're after.

When we're in our 20's, we're driven by our own interests and the thrill of our freedom. But as we take on long term responsibility for others, we increase in our skills at mediation, motivation, inspiration... but at the expense of always being able to pursue our own schedule.

That's what this is.

It's not work/life balance. It's how to handle responsibilities beyond ourselves as we age; how to enjoy that this makes us stronger and how to mitigate the risks that it can exhaust us.

What is "New"?

I recently had the shocker that many of my son's High School Freshman friends and their (well-educated and fluent) parents interpreted "New Student" to be... gosh, I still don't really know.  New to this District? Anyway, they felt "new student orientation" wasn't for them. Some argued, some were just confused by the term. A friend on the School Board relayed having the same conversations. 

So, here's the story on the word "new":

School Selection

The paper examines how it is that conscientious parents make school choices.  She uses a sample set that is deliberately constructed in a high-choice city, and the subjects all are "choosers," i.e. people relatively actively involved with their kids' education. 

Funny in Farsi

Just finished Funny in Farsi.  It's on the sidebar.  If you grew up elsewhere but your kids are growing up in the US, you'll enjoy it, I'm sure.

Good choice for High School kids' biography selection if they need one.  Some younger kids may like it too, but she spends a considerable amount of time talking from enough of an adult perspective that some kids might not be able to relate to it until they're older.

Sophisticated and Anticipatory Demand? Or two nations, under God?

Let's have a little reality check.

Nielsen published broadband penetration data (thanks to SmartMobs, btw).

So, as usual in these things, you can't really quite manage to reconcile the terms they use since they're never clearly defined. 

The original press release of the report says, "95.5 million users from home of active broadband," 68% of people who have internet have broadband, and "internet penetration in the US" is 74%.  Now, first note that it's very ambiguous whether they mean households, users, or home+office; but let's assume they mean users at home, since the data that they specify indicates this.  Let's also assume that they say the word "active" meaningfully, which is to say that there's also a non-active segment.

So, given this, that means there are 220.5 million internet users, of which 150 million are broadband internet users.  Of those 150 million, 95.5 million are "active" broadband internet users.  Keep in mind there are 298 million people in the US.

Now what does that mean?

That means that 54.4 million users have internet but not broadband and 29.5 have broadband but are not active!  And that's in addition to the 77.5 million who don't have internet connectivity at home at all.

If you know that the top 10 states in the US have over half the population (55% - California alone has 12%), and you think that "almost everyone I know in online a lot -- and pretty much everyone has broadband" you should realize that you're way on one end of the "active user" continuum!

The other thing they mention in their report is that the average "active" user is now at 30.5 hours per month (an hour a day) of home use online.  This means for every 4 hour per day, and 8 hours on the weekend news junkie (or porno surfer or everquest fiend) there are a lot of people who are counted as "active" users who occasionally go online to check email or whatever but who certainly don't live there.

Most tellingly, they point out that internet penetration has stabilized at around 74%.