Sorry, I just have to get this off my chest.

A Facebook friend was singing the virtues of the iPhone 4’s new OS. Including…

Multitasking, screen rotation lock, 3-D Style dock bar, background (Home Screen) backgrounds, Folders for multiple apps, Option to turn off vibration when in ringing mode, multiple email accounts under one inbox.

With the exception of the 3D-Style dockbar, Windows Mobile has been able to do each of these things since Windows Mobile 2003 (okay, that last one may have only come around for WM6, released in 2007). I wish I could go back in time six months or a year so that I can brag about WinMo on that basis so that I could get some Applytes on record as saying that none of those things matter.

Maria has a really good post on the subject:

The soccer scolds don’t understand that American football is something that grew up organically, out of a specific culture, at a specific time and place. That doesn’t make it either superior or inferior to soccer, it just makes it our game. Those hundred-year-old chants and ancient rivalries serve the same purpose as all other cultural traditions: they build valuable social capital.

I think the importance of this is hard to underestimate. In some ways, football is successful simply because it is successful and thus has significant social capital built behind it. By most standards, indoor football is a tweaked version of regular football that is in many ways more entertaining. But it’s not football. It doesn’t have the hundred years of tradition. It’s hard for any sport, even a superior one (which I don’t believe soccer to be) to break in.

On a sidenote, one of the things that is the death knell of soccer in this country is Title IX. Kind of ironic since many of the most ardent supporters of soccer are also ardent supporters of Title IX. But Title IX lead to a contraction of male sports in college and men’s soccer was decimated (the SEC has only a couple schools that support it!). If soccer were to become a major sport, the most likely way it would do so is through coverage of college sports. With the conferences setting up their own networks, minor sports like volleyball and women’s soccer are likely to start getting some actual airtime. But men’s soccer is almost nowhere to be found. I doubt women’s soccer will take off for a variety of reasons but mostly because women’s basketball has been given so many chances to succeed and never has. This isn’t a knock against Title IX, which I largely support, but just an observation.

Her story about learning the rules of football is fascinating. I had no interest in football (despite, or because of, my obsession with baseball) until around the sixth grade. I learned about the game through Madden Football for the Apple ][e. A very, very different game than its counterparts. The thing that was hardest for me to wrap my head around was the fact that a season only consisted of 16 games. Baseball had 162. What kind of season was only 16 games?! The teams only play each other twice?! Though since being introduced to college football, I discovered that was actually one time too many.

In addition to what I learned from computer games, my friend Clint and I would start playing imaginary games outside. We would rotate quarterback and receiver, though we always did better when I threw and he caught. I had played imaginary football with my friend Frank before, so I knew the basics about four downs and all that pretty early on. But there’s a world of difference between pass-catch and contemplating 22 players on the field with different rules as to what they could and could not do, learning different plays, and so on.

Anyway, what I discovered from a video game perspective was that football was way more fun. Not just in terms of playing the little red and blue sprites on the field of green pixels, but there was also a cerebral world to it that was mostly lacking in baseball. The great thing about baseball was the statistics. I’m a statistics guy (hence my recent endeavor to create a statistical model for comparing the NCAA football conferences against one another). But football was strategic. Play-counterplay. What is the defense thinking? What is the offense thinking? So much time thinking for slices of action. It was the perfect sport for me.

The biggest knock against football is the fact that there is so little actual gametime and so much time in between. It’s a matter of taste. You can reduce a football game to under 15 minutes if you tried, but have you ever tried? It takes a lot away from the game. To me, the difference between football and basketball is the difference between a suspense thriller and an Jean-Claude Van Damme flick. I almost always prefer suspense. Half of football is about “What happens next?” That’s part of the enjoyment. Some people don’t get that enjoyment. Such is life.

I try to catch Southern Tech Packers athletics every time I go back to Colosse. I catch an average of a couple of football games and a couple basketball games and a single baseball game a year. They all have their plusses and minuses, but I mostly watch the others due to the connection with my alma mater while football I will watch whether I have a stake in the game or not.

Here’s a promo for the new video game. Looks pretty sweet, though since they did what they did to Kano, it’s hard for me to get into the game anymore. Plus, no video applicable video game system.

Here’s a pitch for a new TV series. How much better would this have been than the movies we got? So much better.

A goofy video on the exploits within the game.

Mortal Kombat vs. Oregon Trail. What more can I say?

As the World Cup gears up, Jonathan Last points to a column he wrote a eight years ago with a title and subtitle that says it all: The Ritual Attack of the Soccer Scolds – Every four years a cadre of self-righteous soccer fans appears to chastise and convert the non-believers.

This time he makes a point he kind of neglected to really get into in his original piece: it’s not like soccer hasn’t been given a chance in this country. To harken back to a quote from the original article:

“That’s something none of our professional leagues can attest to. . . . Most people that don’t like soccer have never played the sport, aren’t coordinated enough to play the sport, and don’t have the athleticism to play it.”

Are you kidding me? When you grow up, there are three main little league sports and soccer is one of them. It’s kind of a placeholder for football because the young bodies aren’t ready for it yet. The term soccer mom does not exist because people don’t play soccer! You can say “Oh, well they play it at kids but they forget or they are too unhealthy to play it now.” Except that most people don’t play any sports after they grow up. And the biggest sport, football, is one that far more people go their entire lives without playing. And yet football thrives while soccer doesn’t.

NPR recently argued racism as a cause, but the claim is really pretty weak. None of the major sports in the US is dominated by white people unless you count hockey, the least popular of the big four (or perhaps more accurately, the half of the big three-and-a-half). Some have argued that NASCAR ascendancy is due to the fact that it is dominated by white people, but at this point I think NASCAR is more of a cultural curiosity than a big time sport. The “American arrogance” argument is a little stronger in that Americans tend to like things that prove our superiority, but it doesn’t stop us from embracing soccer for youngsters.

None of this is to say that soccer isn’t a worthwhile sport. One of the reasons it is so popular across the world is that it is the sport that anyone can play. You just need two approximate goals and a ball. And I confess some sympathy for soccer-philes who love the fact that it’s something that kids all across the world play. That’s really kind of neat.

But that doesn’t make it entertaining to watch. And it’s not like the sports industry hasn’t tried. They’ve tried and tried. League after league. No sport besides women’s basketball has been given more and better chances. And it hasn’t taken. Efforts to turn it into something that people will watch, as indoor soccer does, often just alienates the faithful.

All of it is a matter of taste, of course. I get what Otherwill is saying at TLoOG
. I think the big draw of football for me is the strategy and counterstrategy and the main reason I’ve kind of soured on baseball and football is that there is so much less of it involved. In baseball you have lineups, substitutions, and the occasional intentional walk. Basketball has a little more, though with so many scores you don’t get games that are made and broken by a handful of plays. If there is one thing I do appreciate about soccer, it’s the low scores. That almost takes it to an extreme, though.

Soccer’s ho-hum aside, I do find the notion of World Cups extremely neat. Back when I was living in Deseret all of the former missionaries seemed to be rooting for the country they did their mission in. I’d imagine if I was working at Mindstorm now, with its excess of folks on H1-B visas, you’d get something similar. It actually brings me to something I appreciate about college football: no matter where in the country you’re from, chances are you’ve got a stake. No matter where in the world you are, you’ve got a stake.

Does how popular you were in high school affect how much money you make later in life?

The answer is an affirmative. Causality is hard to determine for sure. The initial response of skeptics is that it has to do with extroversion, but they found no effect on the basis of gregariousness. That makes sense. Nerds and introverts make too much of the role of introversion in popularity. Some people are very extroverted and very annoying. Some people that are unpopular that people think are introverted really just won’t shut up when they’re in a position where everything they say will be used against them.

I think that it comes down to social confidence and charisma. People that are used to getting what they want from other people ask for more and in turn get more. The charisma that comes with popularity is always a career-helper. There is also the matter that some of the things that make one popular can also help one make good grades, which can have a cascading effect on future earnings. Sorta.

One doesn’t get to say this often, but the USC Trojans are getting absolutely demolished. Due to various infractions, they are set to lose 30 scholarships over three seasons, a two year bowl suspension, and 14 vacated wins.

Nobody will ever accuse me of being a Trojan fan, but that last one bugs me a little. And it actually has little to do with the Trojans in particular. I felt the same way when Memphis was forced to vacate 38 of its basketball wins and Florida State 12 of their football wins. It’s not that I think these punishments are harsh. It’s mostly that they’re stupid.

These wins are vacated on the idea that kids were playing that shouldn’t. And when that happens, teams forfeit. This is retroactively that. The problem is that losses don’t occur two years after the games were played. They are lost on the spot. Minute by aching minute. And the victories are won on the spot. You can’t take away the euphoria of winning. You just can’t.

For some reason I’m more on the fence when it comes to championships. Unlike regular wins, championship cups are something that a university points to two years later that still has some significance. Taking that away does actually mean something. Once upon a time, they were going to win three championships in a row. They even alter-coined “threepeat” into “three-Pete” in honor of their coach, Pete Carroll. The problem with this then was that their first championship was contested and, well, they lost that third one. If they lose 2004, they will have, despite fielding an amazing team, not have any BCS championship trophies sitting on their shelf. That is significant. Reversing the outcome of their 49-0 victory over the Colorado State Rams? Not so much. It’s not worth the asterisk.

When I was a kid, the Muscogea State Wildcats got into some similar trouble and were forced to forfeit two games the following season. The problem? Nobody recognized the losses. When the networks were covering the game, they would put an asterisk by their actual record. Went kinda like MSU Wildcats, 5-1* (* – official record 3-3 due to two forfeits). It didn’t affect their rankings. Didn’t really mattered. Everyone knew who won. And those victories were earned.

So what do I propose as an alternative? Go after future wins. Not in the lame way they got MSU. I mean make it darn hard for them to win. The scholarships are a start. The lack of bowl games are too, because they make recruiting more difficult. I say take more scholarships. And more importantly, let any kid going there transfer out. Any kid at all. As it stands, they’re letting upper-classmen do so but saddling the poor kids that just signed on with USC with a mediocre team. Some of them may deserve it because they accepted things they shouldn’t, but that shouldn’t be the assumption. Let all the kids go. That will hurt USC far more than taking away 14 wins ever would.

It’s also more proportional and appropriate. The Trojans weren’t paying off refs. They won the games they played. But they won them (at least in part – probably little part) on recruiting shenanigans. So go after recruiting. Make it impossible to recruit. The most effective sanctions ever were done to SMU, who was deprived of playing football for two years. Their program never recovered. So effective was this punishment that the league more-or-less decided never to do it again. But hit them where it hurts.

A couple of sidenotes.

First, one of the frustrating aspects about all of these suspensions is that they so often don’t get the people responsible. There isn’t much they can do to Pete Carroll because he’s a coach now in a league where paying players is okay, but Memphis Coach John Calipari became Kentucky Coach John Calipari and left the mess he made behind. All you can do in coaches is strip them of their wins, which unlike with programs actually is effective because winning percentages are their bread and butter.

Second, it’s hard not to notice that these things always come to light after a program has fallen from its peak. I suppose it makes sense to a degree because a season like the Trojans’ in 2004 attracts attention and it takes a while for everything to fall into place. But sometimes I think it’s a little like the NCAA banning bible verses on eye-black only after Tim Tebow graduated. It makes me wonder if they hold on to this stuff while the teams are attracting attention for the league and then, only once their ride is over, they get slammed with it.

The following is a dashboard video taken on my courier route. I actually get paid to drive this area and listen to music or audiobooks. Unbelievably awesome.

The video is put to music from one of my favorite driving CDs.

There was recently some news about unemployment numbers that looked good at first glance. 430k new jobs! Woohoo! This qualifies for good news these days! Then, of course, we find out that 410k of those jobs are temporary Census Bureau positions like the one that I hold. But that’s still a lot of jobs and maybe we shouldn’t be so picky!! They’re being put to work doing something important!! But maybe not:

The inspector general’s memo said that the Census Bureau had “overestimated” the staff needed for the program to enumerate people at transitory locations. “During the ETL operation,” said the memo, “crew leaders overestimated the number of Census staff needed to enumerate transitory locations, thus increasing the cost of operations.”

The memo also said that there were so many people hired for the “service-based enumeration” that there turned out to be one Census enumerator for every seven homeless people counted, and that the inspector general’s office “observed significant periods of enumerator inactivity at certain locations.”

Okay, well at least people are getting paid just a little to take on a fraction of a job. That’s not all bad, right?

Then you start hearing that even that is skewed because the Census is hiring people just to lay them off and in some cases rehire them.

As you all know, I work for the Census Bureau as a courier. My job is to drive in a big loop of 150 miles or so. I can’t complain about how much I am being paid to do so. Beats sitting around the house for free. I’ve driven my route maybe two dozen times. Want to know how many times I actually delivered something? Well, 20 or so of that 24 times. Okay, want to know how many times I delivered (or received) something other than my pay sheet from the previous day? Two. And in one of those two cases, it turned out that the person I was supposed to deliver them to quit and so it went straight back to Alexandria.

So in essence, I have been getting paid to deliver my own pay sheets. I figure it to be a part of that front-loading that the article above mentioned. I also thought that, “Well, if they’re willing to pay me to do this, business is surely going to pick up at some point, right?” Eventually I resigned myself to “Well, I could quit, but they’d just hire somebody else to do it.”

I’ve also heard rumors of cases as is being discussed here. Specifically, they separate out the census-taking in waves. So the same person gets laid off after one wave and then replaced by a newhire a week later. Makes the job numbers look good at any rate.

We’ve been talking a lot lately about ridiculous blank slate policies that drag down bright kids and steer slower kids in the wrong direction. But this is the worst I’ve heard yet. A middle school in San Diego, that sounds like it’s full of poor Hispanic kids, eliminated most of its tracking.

The headline was The End of ‘The Stupid Class.’

Correia put almost all students into the same classes this year, ending the controversial practice of splitting children into classes based on ability, also known as tracking.

“We wanted to debunk the whole thing and try something new,” said Principal Patricia Ladd. Her hope was that doing so could raise the bar for all kids at Correia. “So we detracked.”

That’s all the explanation we get. We are comforted with one gifted Hispanic student’s statement that she’s become more tolerant since they lumped her in with the average and slow kids.

“I was upset because I felt slowed down,” said Elizabeth Modesto, an eighth grader. “But now I like it. I’ve gotten better at working with others.”

She was surprised to see that some of her new classmates were great writers, that the boy she knew as a class clown could wow her with a cogent point. And Modesto said she kept learning, too.

This isn’t a fact-laden article. It seems the writer is bending over backward to be optimistic, and/or taking the school official’s word for how things are going:

“But so far the Correia experiment has shown promising results. School district tests show more students scoring well. Fights have dwindled and misbehavior is less common in class. And because gifted classes tend to have fewer children of color and poor kids, the move also helped to integrate the school by color and class.”

More students scoring well. We aren’t given any specifics. Later in the story, we find out scores for the gifted students have dropped in math. Anyhow, I wouldn’t expect a single year of any bad strategy to have a huge measurable effect.

Of course, there’s not one word about how splitting up the bright kids and making them minorities in every class might socially affect them. That would mean admitting slow kids tend to hassle bright kids and act worse in general. And we don’t hear from any kids without Hispanic surnames, even though we’re told that there were a lot more white kids in the top track. Based upon my experience as a white kid in a mostly Hispanic and Filipino school, I would predict the problem Hispanic kids will bother the gifted white kids before the gifted Hispanic kids. So as long as there are some white nerdy kids around, Elizabeth Modesto will probably slip under the radar.

I wonder how the reporter chose the student sources. Some schools allow reporters full access, but others restrict their contact. For example, sometimes they will allow you to interview only hand-picked student sources on school property. Small media outlets have to pick their battles carefully, so it’s often easier just to give in on small stories like this. Or, the reporter might even have given the principal control over who got interviewed by asking her to provide the sources.

To teach all kids at once, teachers let students show their knowledge through more flexible and open-ended assignments that allow children to make them as tough as they want, instead of asking all kids to do the same fixed task. For example, one history class asked students to pose and answer their own questions in writing about “big ideas” — one hallmark of gifted classes now used across Correia.

One student posed the question, “Was the war with Mexico good or bad?” and answered simply that it was good because the United States got more land but bad because people died. Another asked what factors caused the Texan rebellion and answered, “The Americans started disrespecting the Mexicans’ ways of life. On the other hand, the Mexican government enforced certain laws too harshly.”

Wow, so a kid can choose to make his assignment harder for himself as he works alongside his slower peers. How generous. What exactly would be the incentive for a student to do that?

The reporter interviewed a couple teachers, who not so surprisingly declined to speak negatively of either their bosses or of having to teach the slow students. Also not surprisingly, teachers who had all slow students before consider the mixed classes an improvement.

“I’ve never had a class like this,” said Lisa Young, who was used to teaching struggling students in a separate class. “The kids see someone else having success and they think, ‘I want that.'”

Bianca Penuelas is one of them. Slackers won’t make it in her classes this year, she says, so she’s trying harder, thinking bigger, proud to be working and chatting with the “smart kids” she once saw from afar.

“I feel smarter,” she said, her braces glinting in a smile. “I felt like I made it up to their level.”

——————————————

Here’s an on-point article from John Derbyshire at The National Review Online (via Half Sigma). And we discussed a study about tracking here, and L.A. Unified’s new approach to gifted education.

A little tidbit about the freshly minted Prime Minister of Japan:

Just five years later, Kan was forced to resign from his leadership of the DPJ over another failure to pay [into the national pension fund]. This time, Kan made formal penance: He shaved his head, put on a Buddhist monk’s robes, and traveled to the traditional pilgrimage destination of Shikoku island and its 88 temples. It worked. Japan’s comeback kid, he remained a senior figure inside the DPJ and served as deputy prime minister and finance minister in the Hatoyama cabinet.

Kan will be the fifth prime minister since Junichiro Koizumi resigned in September of 2006. That’s a turnover more rapid than usual, but Japan tends to run through prime ministerships pretty quickly. It’s pretty rare for one to last more than a couple years. Especially when they’re not members of the traditionally leading party, the LDP, as Kan and his predecessor are not.