Greg Woodhouse
– Posted from my iPhone

Now, compare that to your current health insurance premium, and the numbers don’t seem that far-fetched.

Greg Woodhouse
– Posted from my iPhone

Now, it did not escape my attention that this baloon appeared to be designed to resemble a flying saucer, nor am I unaware of the emails that have recently come to light indicating that the family was planning a publicity stunt, presumably to land a role on another reality series. (Recall that they had previously appeared on a reality series entitled “Wife Swap”.) But how about some common sense here? A little boy being carried away in a baloon is hardly the type of event that anyone would expect to serve as the basis of a reality series. It is even less plausible to think lying about such an event could lead to a reality series. On the other hand, the baloon appears designed to resemble a UFO, and UFO sightings certainly sound like grist for reality TV. It is entirely plausible that a basket could have been attached to the baloon for holding tools and such (and, in fact, this came up on at least one of the networks’ coverage of the event. If this is all true, it is at least possible that a 6 year old boy could have become entangled in whatever was attached to the baloon and carried away by accident.

And that’s really the point. I don’t know if this baloon was to be used for a publicity stunt – quite possibly it was. I have no reason to doubt that any such plans were illegal. Granting all of that, isn’t it possible that an accident occurred, that the family thought Falcon (the boy) was in imminent danger, and that there was at least a reasonal possibility that the 911 call was neither deceptive nor fraudulent?

Now, we’ve heard a lot about how the family was eccentric, with the parents, at least, doing things we shouldn’t approve of. But that’s not the point! I recall that at an early press conference, a woman representing the sheriff’s department answered a question saying that they didn’t want people to be afraid to call 911 because they weren’t sure there was still an emergency. When did that change?

Now, note what I am not saying: I am not saying that it’s okay to knowingly report an emergency when none exists. In particular it is not okay to tie up emegemcy personnel as part of a prank, or something more nefarious. But what the family may have intended to do is not relevant to whether they thought the emergency was real. Now, it’s possible that there is evidence that shows that the 911 call was fraudulent, I don’t know. But from what I’ve heard reported, it seems that a lot of people are jumping to conclusions.

In recent years, a new procedural rule, known as cloture, has been introduced to streamline this process. The idea is that if 60 senators (that’s 60 out of 100, by the way) vote to cut off debate, then the measure can be put to a vote. A vote for cloture is not the same thing as a “yes” vote on the measure itself. In theory, a senator could essentially say, “I don’t support this, but we’ve debated long enough: it’s time for a vote.” But in today’s divisive environment, it is effectively necessary to get a 60% vote to pass anything, and that’s not right.

But what can be done? One option is to go back to the old way of doing things, but that is likely to lead to lengthy (and unproductive) filibusters. I suggest to take a cue from the National Football League (NFL) and institute something like a “challenge” rule. In the NFL, a coach has the option of “challenging” a call that was particularly close, or where they disagree with the ruling on the field. In such cases, the officials will use videotape (or recordings of some type!) to look more closely and make a ruling based on them. But each team only gets 3 challenges (though they are not charged a challenge if the ruling is overruled), so a coach cannot simply challenge every call he (or she) doesn’t like. Now, why not give the minority party a limited number of opportunities to insist on a 60 vote cloture? That way, legislation would not always be stalled by fights over comparatively minor issues, but the cloture rule would be preserved. After all, it is entirely reasonable to have a mechanism in place that serves as a damper discouraging imprudent changes. But when everything is slowed down and it’s difficult to get any work done, that’s a problem.

But it doesn’t just stop there. There was a time when we (in the US, anyway) would watch the evening news on NBC, ABC or CBS, and quite possibly read our local paper. But in the era of cable television (and, later, sattelite) networks like CNN began to appear. Today, in fact, we have three major news networks: CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. The “traditional” networks have their morning shows, too: “Today” on NBC and “Good Morning America” on ABC, for instance. So, there was competition with the upstart news networks, and there continues to be today.

I could continue, but a multiplicity of news outlets is not inherently a problem. If the market will support 10 types of laundry detergent or 100, that’s not necessarily a problem, and the same is true of news outlets. Or is it? Let’s think about news as a product for a moment. If you have a product to sell, and there are already a number of similar products on the market, you obviously need to distinguish your product somehow. I remember when GMA (Good Morning America) came on the air, although I was just a kid at the time. What really stood out to me was the bright colors of the set (this was 1975), and generally “lighter” feel. These morning shows involved a lot of “talk” between the members of a team of hosts (typically 2 or 3) and, potentially, guests. Interestingly, this is the model that news networks like CNN or MSNBC follow today.

But, apparently, these “atmospherics” weren’t really enough. News outlets needed to offer something more, but what? Both the New York Times (implicitly) and CNN (explicitly) offer trustworthiness to their readers or viewers. Oh, and in this age of multimedia that line is breaking down. How often do we watch video on a web site? An interesting question here is: What is to be trusted? One answer is the competence of the news organization. We want to know whether the news will be timely, accurate and complete. That is, will they miss important stories? But there is more to it than that. There is an awful lot of information out there, and we are looking for people to help us digest it all and put it in perspective. That’s a tall order because we want accurate, unbiased, information and not opinion (unless it is labeled as such). Whether that is even possible is an interesting question, and a topic for another time.

The problem is that people have demanded more and more analysis and perspective. But apparently, there is something more. To be blunt, they want to hear from like minded commentators. This is not, in and of itself, bad. If I pick up a book on linguistics and I favor the Chomskian approach, I’m more likely to look for a book by someone writing from that perspective. One thing we generally expect from scholars is intellectual honesty. We do not necessarily expect them to agree, or even be free of biases, but we do expect them to be honest in how they deal with evidence and counterarguments. I believe this is also true of what we expect from journalists.

But this is where human nature gets in the way. Perhaps due to the sheer volume of news out there, people are not going to be able to examine it all critically (and it is entirely reasonable to argue that this isn’t their job), and so they will choose their news sources and largely stick to them. The trouble is that the world is full of blogs (such as this one) and other web sites that have clear ideological biases or specific political agendas and people read them. That’s the point: these independent blogs and alternate news sources are competing in the same marketplace. The result was all but inevitable.

Now, I’ll be honest here. There is a network I rarely watch, and when I do, it’s often because I wonder how they will cover a given story. I do think there are good journalists working for it, but there is no denying that the network caters to the political right, and much of its content seems to be driven by a political agenda. In short, it plays by the same rules as many blogs. It might be objected that there are many other news outlets that could be criticized along the same lines. But that’s not the point. When I hear a news story that is surprising, disturbing, or even something I’d really like to be true, my reaction is often “Is that really true?” This is not just true of blogs, but of television news networks, including those I prefer to watch myself. And that brings me to my final point: the sense of information overload we all experience is only accentuated by the need to evaluate what we’re hearing, perhaps even checking multiple sources ourselves. This is what I do. I have multiple news applications on my iPhone, including two wire services.

And that’s a lot of work, more than a lot of us have time or energy to do. An entirely reasonable reaction is to give up. Many people just choose a preferred outlet because it is comfortable. This leads to a kind of feedback mechanism. People who have strong political views may limit their attention to news sources that cater to that point of view. This will lead them to be more confirmed in that particular point of view. But then they become more selective in what they choose to read (and believe), and increasingly dismissive of other points of view and of programs or periodicals offering them.

Perhaps this explains a bit of why we have grown so divided as a nation, with increasingly radical views becoming commonplace. Why “tea parties”, extreme, even threatening,  rhetoric has become so common, why people persist in believing patent absurdities (such as the idea that Obama wasn’t born in the US, or that the healthcare reform proposals include “death panels”, and so forth).

We vastly overestimate the extent to which our thought or, more properly, cognitive process is based on logic. By logic, I mean the traditional concept of syllogistic or propositional logic. It is a useful analytic tool, something I use every day – as do we all. But it is a tool we use to help us understand the world, or to formalize and, perhaps more importantly, express our own thoughts. But, by no means is formal logic an accurate description of our thought. Science has actually grown quite sophisticated in its understanding of the the basic processes that underlie brain function, at least on the micro level. Thought is more challenging because it is fundamentally emergent phenomenon. It is global in nature, with well-understood processes occurring across billions of synapses in the brain somehow coming together into something we grasp as a logical inference. But the important thing is that those processes have little to do propositions, implicature or modus ponens. Instead, they have to do with much more pedestrian things such as the famous Hebbian rule, “neurons that fire together wire together”.

Now, there are areas of the brain that deal with logic in the traditional sense (the prefrontal cortex), but a vastly greater number of circuits in the brain deal with such things as feelings, impulses or mood – and that’s if we limit ourselves to conscious thought. Our brains aren’t thinking machines, they are feeling machines. There are supervisory parts of the brain that act as a check on emotions or inappropriate behavior, and we can see this is so by observing the behavior of people suffering from prefrontal injuries. In computer science, this is known as a pruning function, a mechanism that eliminates unproductive possibilities in a search problem. It is my view that human thought can best be understood as search in state space, a process having little to do with logic, but one where emotion has a very plausible role. You see, search problems depend on a weight, or a preference function that can be evaluated locally. Perhaps these preference functions are what we refer to as feelings, impulses, or even emotion. Local preferences do not provide us with solutions to problems, but they give us away of moving from one possibility to another through a process known to computer scientists and neuroscientists as “spreading activation”.

So, the premise here is really backwards. Emotion is more basic, and logic is a emergent phenomenon. An abstraction and, really, a simplification of thought processes. Even the most intelligent and careful of us are basically feelers, not thinkers.

Mr. Scarborough argues that for 20 years, there has been a growing partisanship in the United States that is really unprecedented, noting that on “Morning Joe” (an MSNBC program he hosts), Tom Brokaw commented that the partisan divide is deeper now than it was in the midst of the Watergate crisis! That is really unbelievable.

Scarborough’s comments are not only directed to conservatives and Republicans. He notes that during the Clinton administration, there was an intensive Republican campaign to delegitimize the Clinton presidency, but goes on to add that during the administration of George W. Bush, Democrats sought to deligitimize his presidency, and now that Barack Obama is president, the roles are reversed yet again.

Now, I don’t like to admit it, but he’s right. When George W. Bush became president after losing the popular vote and the outcome of a recount was essentially decided by the Supreme Court (not that they ruled on who actually won, of course, but on a matter having to do with how the recount was conducted). But he did win the election, according to US law. I wish he hadn’t, and I wish the court had ruled differently, but that is a different question.

Now, there are significant points of disagreement with respect to the policies of these three administrations, and that’s not, in and of itself a bad thing. I make no apologies for saying that I think many of the policies of the Bush administration were, frankly, disasterous, and I don’t think my conservative friends need feel embarrassed for disagreeing with traditionally liberal positions.

And that’s really the point. There is nothing wrong with disagreement. In fact, it is healthy and necessary. Scarborough referred to this as creative tension. Unfortunately reached a point where winning at all costs has become many people’s goal. It has become more important than the welfare of people, of the welfare of the nation, and even the most basic moral and ethical principles.

We cannot go on like this.

Now, in today’s world of planned obsolescence, that’s a long time. It’s usual to replace computers every two years (at least it is where I work!) And whether the issue is aging equipment, technological advances or, as is far too common, increasing demands placed on hardware by newer applications, this is usually necessary. Now, people ask me why I like OS X. One factor is certainly familiarity: I wrote papers and did homework assignments using Unix when I was in college. But quality and service are also very important. I think the longevity of that poor computer, which I would, at times, treat as a server, speaks for itself. The service, I’ve received from Apple has always been excellent. Unfortunately, I can’t say much about technical support because, well, I haven’t needed it! That’s right. I did call technical support on Friday when I was having trouble connecting to a wireless network but, to the best of my recollection, that was the first time I’ve had occasion to call technical support, certainly for a hardware issue.

But my point here isn’t just to gush over Apple. What seems particularly remarkable to me about my experience here is how unusual it is. With business focusing so much on concepts like just in time delivery (I did, in fact buy the new computer in store, as I did the one it is now replacing), e-commerce and outsourcing, we’ve come to downplay the role of service, or even disparage it as antiquated or, at the very least, quaint. We assume that customer expectations have changed, and the only way to compete is by jettisoning the model, and sacrificing quality for volume. Certainly there are winners here (such as Wal-Mart), but let’s be honest: our economy is a mess, businesses are suffering, people are out of work in record numbers, and when paying for housing basic utilities is a struggle, people are not going to be buying cars and computers unless there is no choice.

Now, some will argue that OS X is a luxury item. It’s much cheaper to buy a PC. Well, maybe it is – in the short run. I don’t think it’s lost on consumers that buying a car or computer that will last twice as long, or which requires relatively little unplanned maintenance is a win. I don’t feel bad about the (modest) extra amount I had to pay for this computer, because I know what I’m getting, I don’t have to compromise, and I expect it to save me money in the long run.

I thought it was hilarious, but like all humor, this was funny because it was, well, true. Too many people find themselves without health insurance through no fault of their own, and can only hope they don’t get sick. We are generally silent on their options if they do get sick because there are no options (except, as Eric Cantor famously noted, charity). If you can’t find it within yourself to accept that the approach to health coverage in the US is morally wrong, perhaps you can accept that it is unsustainable.

Addendum: In subsequent interviews, Rep. Grayson did say two things I find particularly objectionable. One is the use of the word holocaust to describe the current situation with healthcare in America. This word now has another connotation, one so horrible that it means the word shouldn’t be used in other contexts except with the utmost care and trepidation.  On the Rachel Maddow Show last night, Rachel three times gave Rep. Grayson on opportunity to back off from using the word holocaust, and he finally did, but only in a very limited and inadequate way.

In a separate context, Grayson used the word neanderthal to refer to those in congress that are obstructing healthcare reform. That’s a bit much for me. I understand his anger and frustration, but I don’t think this was appropriate, and I don’t think it brings us any closer to a solution.

Second Addendum: According to MSNBC, Alan Grayson, who is Jewish, did apologize, specifically to the Anti-Defamation League, for the use of the word holocaust in this context. Mr. Grayson, I applaud you for doing this, and take back anything negative I had to say about your subsequent comments.

A little reflection suggests that the essential problem is not actually that not everyone attends college, but that a high school education is generally not adequate preparation for entering the workforce. There is a simple reason why most jobs require advanced training (or experience in positions that do): a person with only a high school education will not posess the skills necessary to do the job..

Now, the answer is not simply to introduce new skills like computer programming into the high school curriculum. Many people have proposes this, and the idea does have its merits. But preparation for entry to the workforce really isn’t one of them. I remember that when I was a freshman at UC Santa Cruz, many of my friends were computer science students, and I picked up the textbooks for the courses they were taking and read them on the side. I well rembember one day that I was sitting in the computer lab asking a friend of mine about a program he wrote for a homework assignment. “How long is it?” I asked. “About a hundred lines” was his answer. I didn’t say so, but I thought that sounded kind of long (and complicated). Little did I know that I would one day work as a computer programmer (I still do, in fact) and that these school exercises would be tiny by comparison to real world applications, both in scope and complexity. I was hired, in part, because I had earned a masters degree in mathematics and had demonstrated both creativity and an ability to learn.

You see, that’s the big secret. Technology is a moving target, and the rate at which it changes is only going to accelerate over time. There is no way that a high school education, or a college education, for that matter, is going to be adequate preparation for most jobs. What students need to learn are not individual “bits of information” but how to be good learners. And, of course, as a society, we need a workforce prepared to deal with the challenges the future brings.