Conference Time

I present tonight, unedited for your enjoyment, notes my 12-year-old son, new to LDS Conference priesthood session, and I took tonight. Okay, I put in line breaks, but the rest is unedited. I'll leave it to you to decide who took notes when.

Priesthood session

Bednar

Most distinguishing feature of church?

Priesthood

A boy or man may have the priesthood by laying on of hands, but unless he be righteous, and do his priesthood duties, he cannot have the priesthood.

Some random guy told an informative story.

ATY discovered that the Zoramites were worshipping idols and in synagogues recited the same boring prayer towards heaven.

Guy: Blah Blah Blah Blah and so on and so on.
Some other random guy talked a loooooooong time.

Guy: Blah Blah Blah sacred duty Blah Blah Blah and so on.

Priesthood is a holy gift. So is the holy ghost. And Legos.
Me: Why ees thees guy takeeng forever?

WHEN YOU EXERCISE PRIESTHOOD YOU PREPARE FOR DUTIES IN THe FUTURE.
Put your potential into action.

Uchtdorf
 Seek not only the what of our callings but the why. Eternal reasons behind whet er are commended to do

Eyring witness of priesthood keys
Love your wife nurture family with her
Enlist family to love one another
Correct in the lord's way

Monson

Go and do - not say this is a hard thing

As we fulfill our duties we will find true joy.
When service replaces inaction. The priesthood can act
Do your duty that is best leave to the lord the rest.
James doers of the word not hearers only.

A 9.0 on the Rowling Scale

Matthew Yglesias at Slate.com is rightly excited that author J.K. Rowling has bypassed Amazon and Apple by distributing ebook copies of her Harry Potter books via her Pottermore web site, rather than parceling these things out through various formats fit for various ereaders tailored for various companies.

Even better – Rowling’s publishers are allowing her to offer her books for multiple devices for one purchase price. According to the device FAQ, if you purchase, for example, the Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone ebook, you can download it “for personal use” up to eight times – spreading it out over eight devices if you so choose.

But part of me wonders at his excitement. Certainly J.K. Rowling has the following to do this kind of thing, and the marketing clout behind her name to make it work. For the vast majority of authors? Not so much.

Joshua Gans, writing for Digitopoly on the same subject, nails the toned-down excitement perfectly with his opening words: “JK Rowling blows up the eBookstore Business. Well, at least for her.”

He’s cautiously optimistic, however, as he closes:

The point is that once one author — no matter how powerful — can prove all this possible, there is the potential for floodgates to be opened. It will be interesting to see where this leads.

Gans says there’s no telling right now whether Amazon or Apple are getting any cut of the proceeds from these book sales, though they can be uploaded to these devices via linking, for example, an Amazon.com account to the Pottermore Download Machine of eBookstore Liberation. Apple, in the past, has strictly forbidden such leaping and nose-thumbing of its own profit structure, so it’s not likely that either company are going to sit idly by directing customers to the Pottermore site without diving into the cornucopia of quatloos changing hands.

Therein lies the rub. Rowling can do this – and by this I mean striking some back-door deal with the big boys while making it appear there’s independence out front, or at least exchanging some kind of cut for the independence Rowling is able to offer her audience. Anyone else can try to emulate this, but for the vast majority, success will not come not because the independence isn’t there, but because the clout and name recognition don’t register on the Rowling Scale as much as the author would like. So in that case, the eBookstore universe hasn't changed much at all.

Beware the Author Who Knows

Smug.

That’s the best word for it. And for my reaction to it.

It is Marua Kelly’s call in The Atlantic for what she calls a slow-book movement, in which she urges everyone to turn off the boob tube and read thirty minutes a day. But not just any reading – she wants us to read the classics.

Fair enough. I’ve read two books – what she probably would call literary – so far this year; Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and HG Wells’ The World Set Free. That’s where my smug comes in.

But reading only the classics – and anything classified as “literary,” whatever that means – is a route to smugness, and not much else. Oh, there’s the satisfaction of completing something, as Kelly writes about:

Best of all, perhaps, serious reading will make you feel good about yourself. Surveys show that TV viewing makes people unhappy and remorseful—but when has anyone ever felt anything but satisfied after finishing a classic? Or anything but intellectually stimulated after tearing through a work of modern lit like, say, Mary Gaitskill's Veronica?

And there is the intellectual stimulation, the navel contemplation and everything else we’re supposed to get out of reading “the classics” and something that smacks of “literary.” Re-reading, for example, Swift’s Gullivers Travels this time around made me appreciate how sterile is the land of the Houhynms, where reason is king and emotion is tossed out the window. Lemuel Gulliver’s interactions with these wonderful, intelligent horses so crippled his relationship with humanity that when he got home it took him years to reconcile himself to the fact that he was married to a filthy Yahoo, had had sexual intercourse with a filthy Yahoo and was forced to interact with filthy Yahoos for the rest of his life, when he couldn’t be out in the barn, brooding over his barely-communicative horses, mere shadows of the Houhynms of yore.

So I like me a few classics. But what Kelly needs to be aware of in her manifesto is that with her broad strokes of pushing what is “classical” and what is “literary,” she’s left a lot of room open for interpretation. Max Hastings’ war chronicles, Patrick O’Brian’s sea stories, Richard Rhodes’ tales of the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, are all classic and literary in my mind. But are they “non-literary” as Kelly wants? I don’t know.

And you know what, I’m reading a non-literary book right now that’s opening my eyes and helping me to understand people and to gain more empathy towards them. Should I chuck it in favor of something else? I don’t think so.

And frankly, I shouldn’t even be reading Kelly’s manifesto because it’s non-literary, as she points out:
But Slow Books will have standards about what kinds of reading materials count towards your daily quota. Blog posts won't, of course, but neither will newspaper pieces or even magazine articles.
Here’s what she emphasizes in her manifesto:

By playing with language, plot structure, and images, it challenges us cognitively even as it entertains. It invites us to see the world in a different way, demands that we interpret unusual descriptions, and pushes our memories to recall characters and plot details.

Hell, I can think of a lot of non-literary writings that fit this bill.

So I will read the classics. I will also read the cheap pulp she probably doesn’t want me to read. Because when I read a book – and re-read, and read again – it’s to pick up on the language, the structure, the images, the cognitive challenge, the ability to see the world in a different way and to interpret unusual description, and to push my memories to link what I have read in the long form with current events which I may read about in the short form, thus increasing my depth of understanding of how the then intersects with the now, rather than waiting for the now to become the then, only in longer form.

What good does it do me to read, for example, Ted White’s classic – in my mind – The Making of the President 1968 if I can’t look at current news, read current articles and blog posts, and create those connections from that hurly-burly world of politics when our nation was in turmoil socially and politically? Not much. But creating those connections helps me connect to the world of today, and I can only do that if I’m actively reading all sorts of stuff that comes my way. I’m better off reading current events for fifteen minutes, then refreshing those connections by reading the classics – Wells’ The World Set Free also comes to mind in today’s world – than I am shutting out the world of today completely for the sake of literary reading of the classic form of whatever.

I’ll continue my eclectic reading, thank you very much.

Making FDENG 101 Better?

NOTE: Babblings here for my teaching work group, in which we’re discussing ways to improve the curriculum for the Foundations English course at BYU-Idaho. Potentially. I’m not confident anything will change all that much. But we’ll see.

As I see it, our current FDENG 101 course could benefit from the following changes which would spread the workload out more evenly through the semester and integrate better chances at revision:

Combine Assessments. There are several weeks in which students are required to complete a weekly assessment as well as an assessment on their major assignments. I spend a lot of time chasing down students during and after those weeks, urging them to complete both assessments, with some expressing confusion and frustration, saying, “But I already did that,” when, in fact, they’ve done one or the other, not both. Combining the assessments would eliminate that confusion.

Revision. First thing: Cut the Three Cluttered Pigs. While this is in of itself a good exercise in revision, it is so far removed from their ordinary writing styles that making the application of that assignment move from the assignment itself to their own work just isn’t happening. My students need more practice in reading and re-reading their work, catching errors and considering faults in their research, logic, and assumptions than they need a useless exercise in dewordification.

Second thing: Move the Thinking About Thinking essay to the introductory week, not Week One. Why, you may ask? These are college-age students we’re dealing with. They should have to do more that first week than pop in and introduce themselves. They can do an introduction and that first essay, which is simple enough as it is constructed. That gives them a chance to introduce themselves and to show me as an instructor where they are at as writers.

Third thing: With Week One freed up, insert a week between writing their This I Believe Statement and producing their podcast for a week in which they’re asked to revise their essay. Here’s my logic behind that: My first semester, I jumped into the discussions and offered feedback on every essay before they were supposed to be finalized and submitted. This absolutely killed the classroom discussion, as all I got after that pretty much was an echo chamber – yeah, what Bro. Davidson said. So the next semester I didn’t offer any feedback prior to submission. The discussions went better, but I don’t feel like the students learned as much or considered as much revision as they should have – the vast majority of them simply turned in their essays as written, without taking into consideration the feedback offered by their peers. Inserting a week for revision and requiring the students to make revisions – adding a penalty if they turn in the same essay without changes – would motivate them more into taking revision seriously.

And yes, I did say a finished essay, not a podcast. Of any of the assignments in this course, the podcast causes the most headaches. Contrary to what we believe about these Milennials, about half the class has no idea what a podcast even is. Then, as they move into putting their podcasts together, emphasis on revising and fine-tuning their essay flies out the window as they deal with the myriad technical problems that Jing and other podcast construction software presents. This is a class on writing, not a class on podcast production, so to see them expending more effort in sorting out technical difficulties than on revision is painful. I say we eliminate the podcast in favor of a written essay that has been revised in class.

Fourth Thing: We ought to consider combining Weeks Five and Six in order to insert a week in the Profile Essay block for revision. I know this compresses the time they might have for interviews, but the pattern I see consistently is that the interviews are rushed no matter what time is given to them. I’d like to offer them the suggestion that they interview, write, consider revisions, ask follow-up questions (an inevitable part of the interviewing and profile-writing process, something I know after ten years in journalism) and then re-submit so that as they, their peers, and myself have questions or point out things that need improvement that they actually have the motivation and time to do so – time as they’re actually writing and revising the piece, so they can see the bigger picture of how all of this comes together.

Fifth Thing: Do the same thing with Weeks Eight and Nine, combining the weeks and then offering the students the opportunity to submit a rough draft one week and the final draft the next, after considering feedback from their peers and their instructor. This would have especially been important this semester, as I have had several students who have missed the boat entirely on citing references in their research proposals, as if they didn’t make the connection between the research portion of the assignment and the writing portion of the assignment. Again, I could nip this in the bud during the workshops, but I would rather build an extra week into the course for them to consider revisions, conduct further research (again, the follow-up after the questions and feedback is important) and then resubmit, rather than have this done in a rushed, compressed fashion the week their proposals are due.

Heat that Frogurt

So tomorrow we sign paperwork to have about $17,000 worth of HVAC work done in our new house.

I’m having a fun time wrapping my head around that number. It’s big, but you know, in a way it’s not so big. With a tax refund, some money left from the sale of our house in Sugar City, and some money we have in the bank, we’ll be able to cover the bill without having to get a loan, without having to pay interest at all. That’s good news, like my Frogurt.

But that’s a lot of money. That’s about five years’ worth of saving our pennies in order to put cash away for a rainy day. We’d better not have any rainy days for a few years after tomorrow.

But then there’s this: Our first electric bill – we have electric zone heating in the house – was $128 for three weeks, and that was basically three weeks of everybody wearing sweatshirts and freezing and me sitting on the potty on the main level, watching my breath form clouds in the cold. Why throw money into a pit while being cold the whole time when we can put that same money into replenishing a rainy day account while we’re paying a lot less for heat and staying a lot, lot warmer? I can’t see a reason to go that way any more.

And there’s work to be done: The money we put into the heating system – natural gas, with a 95% efficient furnace – doesn’t include the drywall repair and placement, which I imagine isn’t going to be fun to accomplish, given the unique plastering jobs done throughout the house.

But that’ll mean I can also run wires for speakers and the subwoofer downstairs, in the ceiling rather than on the ceiling as we did in Sugar City, adding also the possibility I can rejigger the electric layout downstairs to put in a few more switches and isolate some of the lights downstairs, which right now all turn on with only one switch. But am I smart enough to do that? I don’t know. I guess I’ll give it a shot. And I’ll be much warmer while doing it. In theory.

Can I go home now?

Making Research Work for You

NOTE: More babbling for my FDENG 101 students.

In the book of Acts, we hear the tale of some “vagabond Jewish exorcists” who decide, seeing the success of Paul, to try to cast out spirits in the name of Jesus Christ: “We adjure you,” they told the evil spirits, “by Jesus whom Paul preacheth.”

But the evil spirit responded: “Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are ye?”

Then we read in verse 16 of Acts, Chapter 19: “And the man in whom the evil spirit was leaped on them, and overcame them, and prevailed against them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded.”

We can laugh a little at the story, which sends the message: If we’re declaring something, we’ve got to have the proper authority. The same goes as we write research papers. We have to show that what we’re saying is backed up by recognizable, credible authority, or those who are critical of what we say are going to prevail against us.

The exorcists through citing authority was enough – and the spirits certainly recognized the authority the exorcists mentioned. You have to do that in your papers. It’s good to say, for example, that lowering the US income tax rate on corporations would make the US more attractive to direct investment, resulting in new jobs primarily in the faltering manufacturing sector. But, your critics will ask, who are you? This example is taken from one of your papers, and is offered just like that: With no more authority than the author of the paper offers.

Now, I’m sure the author found research that supports this theory – but there aren’t any names, any titles, there is no evidence offered to suggest that this statement comes from a credible authority.

Here’s how to fix it. Give me a name and a title:

Ben Stein, professor of economics from the University of Chicago, says that lowering the US income tax rate on corporations would make the US more attractive to direct investment, resulting in new jobs primarily in the faltering manufacturing sector.

Now I know from where the statement comes.

Next, take it to the next level. Like the exorcists, we’ve got the authority. But they still got in trouble. Now you get to step in.

In this instance, this is where more direct research is called for. So Ben Stein says that lowering the income tax rate on corporations would be better for the US. Can researcher and author find evidence of this in action? Certainly, at least on some level.

Look what a Google search titled “California businesses flee taxes” finds:

After 15 years in Monterey Country, Calif., Feel Golf relocated its headquarters to Florida earlier this year after it acquired Pro Line Sports, which was based in the Sunshine State.

"The whole state is a bureaucratic Santa Claus," said Lee Miller, chief executive of the golf equipment company, of his former home. "There's a very high cost of doing business."

In Florida, he found a better work pool, lower operating costs and no personal income taxes.

"Overall, it's just a better environment," he said.

PayPal opened a new customer services and operations center in Chandler, Ariz., in February, bringing 2,000 jobs to the area. The San Jose, Calif.-based tech firm, along with its parent eBay, also added 1,000 jobs in Austin, Texas, and expanded operations in Utah.

"They have business-friendly environments," said Kathy Chui, a spokeswoman for eBay.

Ah-ha! This is you flexing your muscle, using your research strengths and your ability to find correlations to show your own authority, while relying on expert opinion. See what this does:

Ben Stein, professor of economics from the University of Chicago, says that lowering the US income tax rate on corporations would make the US more attractive to direct investment, resulting in new jobs primarily in the faltering manufacturing sector.

Tami Luhy, writing for CNNMoney, finds this true on a smaller scale as businesses flee California, citing high income tax rates as one reason they’re either leaving the state entirely or setting up divisions in more “business-friendly” states.

Luhy found, for example, that PayPal opened a new customer service and operations center in Arizona – bringing in 2,000 jobs – because Arizona is more friendly to business.

But we’re not done yet (and neither was Tami Luhy, though she didn’t continue. Shame on her). How friendly is, say, Arizona compared to California? Another Google search, “Arizona versus california income tax rates” finds this gem.

Add this to the proposal:

Arizona, across the board, has lower taxes than California, adding to its business friendliness. The highest individual income tax rate in Arizona, according to locateinarizona.com, is 4.54 percent, compared to California’s 9.3 percent. Corporate income tax rates are closer together, but still Arizona’s is lower, at 6.97 percent compared to California’s 8.84 percent. For a company like PayPal and eBay, such a small difference is significant. Looking at its net income of $475.9 million in the first quarter of 2011, the companies would have paid $33.1 million in taxes had all that revenue been earned in Arizona, compared to $41.9 million in taxes had all that revenue been earned in California.

If such differences in business-friendly policy works in Arizona’s and PayPal’s favor, imagine what it could do on the scale of a national economy if Prof. Stein’s advice were taken and the nation’s corporate income tax rates were cut.

(So I cheated. I did another Google search on “paypal profits 2011” and found this. I’ve probably figured corporate income taxes wrong – but math is not my long suit. What I’m pushing here isn’t my math ability, but the ability to expand on one thought to show, not tell, how a proposed solution works.)

So now, starting off with Professor Ben Stein’s statement of theory, I, exercising my research skills and cognitive powers, have found concrete evidence to support what Prof. Stein says. And I’ve bolstered by proposed solution in the process.

I’m not focusing on this one economic-centered paper because it’s the worst of the bunch – I’m just offering examples of what can happen when you decide to cite authority, and then use the authority cited to show your research ability and your ability to make connections to bolster your expert’s opinion with fact. This extra work makes for better papers, no matter the topic.

That’s the difference of making a proposal go from this:

To this:

Close to Home

I have walked in this neighborhood. It is mere blocks from the LDS meetinghouse in the city of Toulouse, a city I remember with some fondness. I worked hard there, and found among the difficulty a lot of good people doing good things.

So to see something like this happening in a city I love kills me. Of course, seeing this kind of thing happen in a city I have no connection with whatsoever is also nasty above all that is nasty. Here’s to catching the slimeball that’s doing this. And here’s to the French justice system and the French sense of justice which, despite the stereotypes, is nothing to be sneezed at.

Grammar Nazi Returns (Briefly)

I had retired the Grammar Nazi, having hoisted myself by my own petard a few too many times as I corrected others’ mistakes.

But this, folks, this is just bad.

Here’s the flub:

Queue: A noun meaning a line, or a verb meaning to form a line.

Cue: A noun meaning a signal, or a verb meaning to signal.

Both are pretty much pronounced the same if you’re a phonics-loving honyoch. But they do not mean the same nor should they be used interchangeably.

I think a lot of people are proud they can spell queue correctly, so that’s the default word they use. But nine times out of ten, it seems, they mean to use cue when they’re too anxious to show off their spelling skills, such as from this comment at Consumerist.com:

queue the masses flowing to small claims court(who also get their service cut off by At&t for doing so). Did anyone else read about At&t threatening to cancel this guy's service for suing them?

(Head to 3:38 for the pertinent section. Notice Neal uses “queueing” correctly.)

Fukushima Daiichi was no Chernobyl

Don Higson, a fellow of the Australasian Radiation Protection Society, pens an enlightening article in Sunday’s edition of Slate (a reprint from New Scientist) that everyone concerned about radiation exposure and the nuclear accident at Japan’s Fukishima Daiichi power plant should read.

Higson sums up in one paragraph the telling difference between what happened in Japan in 2011 and Ukraine in 1986:

Chernobyl was the worst that could happen. Safety and protection systems failed and there was a full core meltdown in a reactor that had no containment. In the "defense in depth" of nuclear power plants outside the former USSR, containment is an essential engineered safety feature.

His discussion of casualty figures of both the general public and plant workers from each accident is equally enlightening.

It’s an unfortunate quirk of human behavior that the equation of Fukushima Daiichi and Chernobyl, however, will never be erased in the public’s mind, no matter how many helpful articles like this are published. Higson himself laments that the disaster scale used by the International Atomic Energy Agency (which pegs both accidents at the same level of severity) does not fully tell the tale of the vast difference in scale of the accidents:

The INES was intended to aid public understanding of nuclear safety. In fact, it has caused more confusion. It has also probably added to the mental anguish of the Japanese people.

The accident at Fukushima Daiichi was moved to the top of the scale a month after the tsunami for technical reasons, when the estimate of radioactive material released exceeded the International Atomic Energy Agency's criterion for level 7. However, the amount of iodine-131 escaping from all the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi was less than 10 percent of the amount released at Chernobyl, and the release of caesium [sic]-137, the next most important fission product, was less than 15 percent of the Chernobyl total.

Neither accident was a negligible occurrence, and neither accident – given the lack of future planning in each scenario – should have happened. But comparing one to the other in quantifiable health impacts and to use either as a club to stop the development of nuclear power is as short-sighted as the lack of planning that led to each accident.

The Memes, not the Meaning

Controversy in the comic strips takes two forms (and I'm not talking Doonesbury here):

• Upon the death of an artist, the syndicate (said here in an evil voice meant to conotate money-grubbing, for the lack of a better word, bastards) hires a scab to continue making money, er, drawing the strip.
• Your local newspaper decides to drop Alley Oop or Beetle Bailey in favor of some other strip.

Here's a third. It's not quite a controversy, but it is worth talking about: Having guest artists take on your work while you deal with something else but are in any other respect quite alive.

That's what Richard Thompson is doing right now with his comic strip Cul de Sac. Thompson himself is grappling with the early onset of Parkinsons Disease, which shouldn't be wished upon anyone. For the past few weeks, he's had guest artists -- today's example is from "Big Nate's" Lincoln Pierce -- doing his strip as he deals with what life has handed him.

While I'm grateful to see the art coming, I've got to say that only Thompson has the flair for Thompson's work. And this isn't just because I don't much care for Big Nate.

I've said before that Thompson, like Charles Schulz, has a unique window into the lives of his subject matter: children. He can make Alice and Petey and their parents do and say things that make me think, yeah, this is real. This isn't made up, this is life coming at me through the comics pages. The little annoyances: Petey lamenting that his assorted jellies caddy is sticky before he gets to it, that he has to sit under a Tiki head at the restaurant, that Ernesto is the only guide he can find to get through the maze of portable classrooms to find his own.

The guest artists, try as they might to mimic the form and memes of Thompson's Otterloops, just don't have that same window into their world, and it shows. This doesn't mean their art or story is bad, but it does mean it's all different enough that I know it's not Thompson's work without having to look at the name scribbled in one of the panels.

It's like Johnny Hart's grandson taking over BC. He's grown into to the strip, I'll give him that, but reading Johnny's strips and reading his grandsons, you can tell the one from the other, and that's even after the grandson's art has grown to nearly mirror his prececessor's. Each has a different narrative take on the story and characters, and though the successor/replacement echoes the memes, the same feeling isn't there.

Fare thee well, Mr. Thompson. Come back when you can.