island94.org

I was pointed to Political Scientist Michael Parenti’s 7 categories of generalizations about the way the news media create anti-union messaging by this article analyzing the media’s portrayal of the Philadelphia public transit strike. I got really steamed about a month ago listening to a local interview/call-in show about Boston charter schools and the Teacher Union that revolved very strongly along these lines:

Portrayal of labors struggles as senseless, avoidable contests created by unions’ unwillingness to negotiate in good faith,

Focus on Company wage “offers” omitting or underplaying reference to takebacks, and employee grievances, making the workers appear irrational, greedy and self-destructive

No coverage given to management salaries, bonuses or compensation and how they are inconsistent with concessions demanded by workers

Emphasis on the impact rather than the causes of strikes, laying the blame for the strike totally on the union and detailing the damage the strike does to the economy and public weal.

Failure to consider the harm caused to the workers’ interests if they were to give up the strike

Unwillingness or inability to cover stories of union solidarity and mutual support

Portrayal of the government (including the courts and police) as a neutral arbiter upholding the public interests when it is rather protecting corporate properties and bodyguarding strike-breakers.

To that, I would add “Failure to recognize Union benefits/protections as an aspiration for all workers, not spoils for the few”. The interview I was listening to (and what got me steamed) kept dismissively coming back to “Why should unions demand protections from arbitrary and capricious management? No one else expects that.” Which made me keep saying back “Well why the fuck not?”

Also, just in general, I get annoyed when the union workers aren’t placed within the context of the community as a whole? What does your child’s education mean in the context of a society where their work will have no value?

Update: A comment by Jen shared in Google Reader:

I would add, the idea that worker protections encourage mediocrity because people are removed from the “competitiveness” (i.e. fear) that easy firing gives. Job security doesn’t cause lack of motivation; bad management does.

Only those who have power, for example, can define what is correct or incorrect. Only those who have power can decide what constitutes intellectualism. Once the intellectual parameters are set, those who want to be considered intellectuals must meet hte requirements of the profile dictated by the elite class. To be intellectual one must do what those with the power to define intellectualism do.

The intellectual activity of those without power is always characterized as nonintellectual.

I am auditing a class this semester on Quantitative Reasoning with Prof. Marilyn Frankenstein offered through the College of Public and Community Service at Umass Boston. The above quote was mentioned in our first class and taken from Literacy: Reading the World & The Word by Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo (who is also on the UMass Boston faculty).

Connect this to the oft criticized communications of today’s youth despite the slowly emerging recognition of a New Literacy:

… young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

A New York Times article on paying kids based on their standardized test scores:

City of Angels dvd
…a seventh-grade English class was asked one morning if there were too many standardized tests. Every hand in the room shot up to answer with a defiant yes. But at the same time, the students all agreed that receiving money for doing well on a test was a good idea, saying it made school more exciting, and made doing well more socially acceptable.

Sounds an awful lot like the standard beef with millenials: entitlement and “everyone gets a trophy”. Of course, 7th graders are too young to be millenials, so maybe millenials are already in school administrative positions. The eldest (born 1981) would be 27.

I’m taking Mathematical Models in Biology and we had an interesting problem in our last class. We were broken up into groups and asked to create a model around malaria infection. We received some information on mosquito behavior and lifecycles, infection rates and patterns, and effects. That was it.

The primary tenet of mathematical modeling is simplification. We quickly realized that when trying to simplify the process, we needed to know what information we wanted to gain from the model. The standard (and incredibly simple) SIR model, for example, answers the question “how many people will be infected at any one time?”, not necessarily, “how many will recover or die?”.

To put it into mathematical terms, if we’re going to reduce the number of dimensions (by simplifying), we want to make sure that the information we’re left with has useful meaning for the situation.

Which also leads me to thinking about reductionism and holism.

One should never be too surprised by what they might find in a restroom. I was impressed though with what I learned from a sign hanging above a urinal at the National Zoo in Washington, DC.
“Spray it, don’t say it!

Urine spraying is ok–if you’re a lobster that is

Lobsters don’t speak, but they do greet–by spraying urine at each other. That’s one one way they communicate…”

There was another person in the restroom washing his hands when I took the picture; I calmly allayed any fears he may have had by telling him, “It’s okay, I’m a photographer.”