The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
I posted this on Facebook earlier, but I’m still somewhat in awe of it. When the tsunami hit in Japan, most folks in those areas did the sensible thing and rushed for higher ground. Not so for a man named Hideaki Akaiwa, though. When he realized his wife was unaccounted for, he didn’t rush for higher ground. He rushed for his SCUBA gear.
Chuck Norris ain’t got nothin’ on this guy.
I was in ninth grade, the day the Challenger exploded. I heard the news in the hall, going from one class to the next. Some kid that I thought was kind of a dork pops up and says, “Hey, didja hear about the space shuttle? It blew up.” And he smiled, like it was funny. Or maybe not that it was funny; maybe that was just his goofy 14-year-old-kid way of expressing something along the lines of “Huh. That’s not what was supposed to happen.”
By this time in my high school career, I was well on the way to becoming a music geek and wasn’t nearly as interested in the space program as I had been in my “I’m gonna be an astronaut!” phase four or five years earlier. Therefore, I didn’t know much at all about that particular shuttle mission outside of the publicity because a civilian, a teacher, was going to be on it. What was really weird, though, about that day in my school was that the news didn’t rip through the school; few people were talking about it; none of my classes had teevee’s with the footage. I didn’t see any of the coverage until I got home from school that afternoon, at which point I planted myself in front of CBS.
It seems to me that the Challenger disaster really soured this country on space exploration, or at least it put some punctuation on a souring process that had been going on for a while. There were no goals, no real sense of purpose to the whole thing. We had once built ships to reach the Moon; now we were content to stay in low-Earth orbit. Most news items on teevee relating to shuttle missions were to show the whacky choice of music Houston had chosen for the astronauts’ wake-up call. The shuttle itself was a dull-looking vehicle. The future had arrived, and it was clunky and boring…and then, awfully dangerous as well.
What are we doing in space? I have no idea. That makes me sad. When I was a kid, my conviction was rock solid that I was living in the generation that would walk on other worlds. I didn’t realize that we were basically done walking on other worlds within a year of my birth. Alas.
To wrap this up: I was, as you can probably tell from my personal politics, never a big fan of President Ronald Reagan. But his speech to the nation after the Challenger disaster was masterful.
And then there was Richard Feynman’s tenacity in focusing on the O-ring seals in the booster rockets:
I just learned via a friend on Facebook that today is Whipped Cream Day. I love whipped cream a whole lot — it’s wonderful on coffee drinks and hot chocolate; it’s awesome on sundaes and pumpkin pie and it’s magnificent to dip strawberries into. And of course, whipped cream is the key ingredient in cream pies, whether eating or throwing. So all hail whipped cream!
I found this video absolutely fascinating:
This has apparently been going around the Interweb a bit, so you may have seen it, but for those who haven’t, the Readers Digest Condensed Version is this: a professor of business at the University of Central Florida gave a mid-term exam, graded it, plugged the grades into a spreadsheet, looked at the results, and noticed that the grades on this particular mid-term were ticking noticeably higher than for midterm exams from previous semesters. Then someone anonymously provides him the obvious reason why: some students managed to get a copy of the “test bank” for the course and circulated it amongst a bunch of other students, who used it to prep themselves for the test. In other words: they cheated.
Now, I’ve been outside the realm of academia since I graduated college in 1993, so I had no idea what a “test bank” was. Basically, as I understand it, the companies that publish textbooks also provide, as a service to instructors, things called “test banks” which are nothing more than giant collections of test questions, from which instructors can then pull questions for their exams. My understanding is that in this case, there was a “test bank” of 700 questions from which 50 were drawn, so students using the test bank to prepare themselves had a pretty big job ahead of them. It seems to me that if those numbers are accurate, then maybe their time might have been better served just studying the course material. In fact, it seems to me that maybe a case can be made that when you prep for a test drawn from that many questions, maybe in a way you are studying the course material.
Anyway.
I’ve always found that there’s something of a grey area when it comes to cheating. There are obvious cases of cheating, clearly: a kid who hacks a professor’s computer to steal the test behorehand, or another kid who decides to plagiarize a paper for a course. But then there are things like this, where from certain perspectives, it certainly seems like cheating, while from others it just seems like…well, not really, I guess. It’s cheating, but it’s cheating that seems to me partially aided and abetted by “the system”. It’s not unlike the use of steroids in baseball in the 1990s: cheating, yes, but the system was set up at the time to make it very easy to do, with very little penalty.
The whole process of the way this course seems to operate seems a bit…lazy? Maybe that’s too strong a word; certainly there seems to be an “assembly line” aspect of the teaching enterprise going on here. That prof gives lectures, and the students go off to “labs” to do…more coursework, I guess. There’s not a whole lot of context here to go on, but the structure seems to put a lot of the work of running the course on the heads of the lab instructors, from grading the exams and homework to spending long hours creating a new mid-term exam once the old one has been compromised. But when you have 600 students taking a course, I suppose there really isn’t a great alternative.
Some other things strike me from the video. First, the professor here continually refers to “forensic analysis of the data”, which will presumably reveal all of the cheaters. I am no statistician, so I’d be interested to know how the data can reveal the difference between a student who prepared for the exam by use of the test bank and a student who prepared for the exam by traditional studying of the course material. He implies, a number of times, that the cheaters will soon stand revealed and that at that point, the folks from Academic Affairs — whom he really seems to be going out of his way to make sound like a bunch of relentless Imperial Stormtroopers — will decide their fates, particularly with the ominous statement, “I don’t want to have to explain to your parents why you’re not graduating.” He also says something like “The net is closing around you even now!”
But then he also offers the cheaters a deal: all they have to do is admit that they cheated, and take a four-hour ethics course, and…all is forgotten. They’ll take the same re-written midterm as anyone else and go on from there. Well, that certainly does not seem to me the type of offer one makes to someone when “the net is closing around them”. It doesn’t make sense to offer a deal that carries with it minimal effort and zero long-term consequences for the guilty if you’re already certain of their guilt and are near to proving it. This whole part of the lecture strikes me as the kind of veiled threats of legal action that collection agencies use; for all their harsh language and legal-sounding threatening, it turns out that collection agencies are really pretty toothless.
And frankly, I as a student was present for more than a few instances where the teacher had to dress down the entire class for lack of specific knowledge as to which student did something naughty, and in my experience, the teacher or principal or whomever always pretty much lost the room when he or she uttered the phrase “You know who you are.” (Actually, the prof in the video has an even more laughable line than that: “The days of students figuring out new ways to beat the system are over.” Yeah, dude. Sure they are. As of this day, all future forms of cheating have been rendered impossible! Huzzah!!!)
I didn’t really witness much outright cheating when I was a student. I myself never cheated, although the thought did occur to me a few times, here and there. I was always deterred more by the thought of dolorous consequences than by any good and noble commitment to my own learning, although I did generally think that I’d rather have a bad grade be my own doing than a good grade be artificially achieved. Generally, though, I just didn’t have the confidence that I could pull it off and I certainly didn’t want to get caught. I’m like the guy in Dial M For Murder who says that he only believes in the “perfect murder” on paper: “My murder would be like my bridge-playing — I’d make some stupid mistake and only realize it when I noticed everybody else staring at me.” Plus, since I was a Philosophy major, there really wasn’t much you could do in terms of cheating beyond plagiarism — and on plagiarism, I do have a pretty rigid moral code. But when your exams are all-essays all-the-time, well, you either know your shit or you don’t.
There was one cheating incident that I remember fairly clearly, though, from my grade school years. In seventh grade, several classmates of mine somehow managed to get access to our math teacher’s grade book, and they took that opportunity to take a pencil and adjust their own grades upward. I don’t recall how they managed to score a few minutes of unsupervised time in her room, but they did. And then, afterwards, they bragged about it, so everybody knew. Someone blew them in, and that was that. One fine day we’re gathered for class — it’s toward the end of the year — and in storms the teacher, grade book in hand; she announces that she’s just discovered that the grades in her grade book don’t match the grades she routinely turns in to the Guidance office (a story she made up to cover the fact that someone had reported them, which everybody figured out anyway).
This particular teacher was…well, let’s just say she was not one of my favorite teachers. At all. Never liked her in the slightest, although she was inexplicably beloved by most of the rest of the school. (It’s the same teacher in Item #7 in this old post of mine.) After making her announcement, she proceeded to take malicious glee in tormenting the kids who had cheated, saying things like “Hey, you’re looking a little pale there!” and stuff like that. I always thought that was crappy on her part — you’ve got the kids by the hair, just take ’em down to the principal and be done with it. But that teacher sure enjoyed dealing out public humiliation to her chosen few. I don’t recall what the consequences were for the cheaters in that instance, but it certainly made for an interesting few days in a small school.
Anyway, moral of the story: don’t get the test bank.
Earlier tonight, I was sitting at my desk, sipping a cup of tea, while I used my portable personal computer to watch video that was streaming wirelessly in my home. The video I was watching was live coverage of something happening. The event I was watching was taking place five thousand miles away: a bunch of people rescuing 33 miners from the hole more than 2000 feet below the ground where they’ve been trapped for more than two months.
This event is really, really amazing. I can’t think of any other words for it. First of all, those miners themselves are astounding. They kept their heads and their wits about them for two months, especially at the very beginning when they were likely the most terrified and confused about what was happening. And the rescuers — they didn’t rush things or stab in the dark. They studied the problem, thought about it, and came up with the best possible plan. Which they then executed perfectly.
Watching today’s rescue unfold, I was thinking of the movie Apollo 13, and the true-life events surrounding it. That, too, was a case of people trapped in a life-threatening situation in a place where they could not be easily reached; that, too, was a case of people working together in a staggering display of teamwork to solve the problems to bring them home. Both the tale of the astronauts and the tale of the miners show what humans can accomplish when they’re at their best.
Congratulations to everyone involved. What an amazing story!
(I’ll bet that rescue capsule is very soon the most popular exhibit in whatever the biggest museum is in Santiago, Chile!)
Via Cal, I saw this collection of memos sent from a boss to his employees at an oil company in Houston in 1977 and 1978. The memos paint a pretty, shall we say, surreal picture of what it must have been like to work for Edward Mike Davis.
Here are a couple of quotes, but it’s worth reading them all, especially at the site linked above, because he has scans of the typewritten originals:
This is a business office. All correspondence and other things pertaining to this office will be typewritten.
Handwriting takes much longer than a typewriter — you’re wasting your time, but more importantly, you’re wasting my time. If you don’t know how to type, you’d better learn.
Remember, this was the era of typewriters, not e-mail and texting. You had to load a piece of paper into your typewriter, type your thing, make sure you had no errors, and then take the paper out and do whatever it was you did in that particular office to get the piece of paper you’ve just typed to the person who needs to see it. This requirement would seem to put a damper on intra-office communication.
Idle conversation and gossip in this office among employees will result in immediate termination.
Don’t talk about other people and other things in this office.
I can see wanting to discourage gossip, but I wonder what Davis meant by “idle conversation” — is he actually going to fire Jones in Accounting if he overhears Jones telling Smith that his kid made the honor roll?
I swear, but since I am the owner of this company, that is my privilege, and this privilege is not to be interpreted as the same for any employee. That differentiates me from you, and I want to keep it that way. There will be absolutely no swearing, by any employee, male or female, in this office, ever.
Had I received this memo, I almost certainly would have loudly exclaimed upon reading it, “Well, f*** me!”
We do not pay starvation wages, and there are some people left in this world who want to work. I am not fond of hippies, long-hairs, dope fiends or alcoholics. I suggest each and every person in a supervisory category (from driller up to me) eliminate these people.
…
Anyone who lets their hair grow below their ears to where I can’t see their ears means they don’t wash. If they don’t wash, they stink, and if they stink, I don’t want the son-of-a-bitch around me.
Well, I guess I wouldn’t have received the “No swearing” memo, because this guy would have fired me on sight. Oh well.
These are my favorites:
This memorandum is intended as an addendum to a memo I wrote on January 12, 1978 about people speaking to me. Any supervisor who has anything to say to me, day or night, the fastest way he can say it to me is too slow. The terms about not talking to me meant I do not have time to stop and talk to everyone — saying hello, goodbye, goodnight, etc. — that is what I was talking about. If you have business with me, the fastest way is too slow — day or night.
And:
I do not appreciate people coming into my office and helping themselves to my candy, cigars, medicine, and other personal items.
Unless you have my permission, you are not allowed to remove anything from my office, and particularly, do not remove anything from my desk drawers without my approval. I don’t mind giving, but I would like the privilege of knowing and giving it myself.
Now, these are interesting. To judge by this fellow’s personal history (what little of it is known — there are links at the site), he basically inherited a bunch of money from a very rich woman for whom he had worked as her personal driver. He then used that money to launch his very own oil business in the late 1970s, which to my understanding was not the best time to be launching one’s very own oil business in Texas. His company went belly-up just a few years after these memos were typed.
Davis seems to have been (or maybe still is, I have no idea if he’s alive) a man of some conflicting impulses. He clearly wants to have been a rich and prosperous businessman with his own company and bunch of employees, but he also seems to have a deep discomfort, bordering on distrust, of other people. This is almost never a recipe for business success, unless one is fortunate enough to have invented a product that everybody needs. Davis, however, was just another Houston oil man when all the wells were drying up.
Reading the memos, one forms an impression of a company dominated by Nazi-like terror of the man in the corner office, but I wonder if that’s the case. As I read through the memos, one after the next, I got an increasing sense that this guy was deeply insecure and worried about his image while being possibly without a way of really creating that image, short of mandating that nobody so much as talk to him and firing off one memo after another about some really idiotic stuff (“At lunch, don’t be in the kitchen! I hired a woman who will literally hand you your food!”).
Put it this way: Mr. Davis claims in one memo to be a “known son-of-a-bitch”. But really — if you actually worked for a genuine “known son-of-a-bitch”, do you really think that your SOB boss would have to resort to a memo to tell you not to help yourself to the candy in his office?
Here’s a screengrab of what is, as of this writing, on the NFL section of the FOX Sports website:
The main headline there refers to Chargers tight end Antonio Gates, who may have a big day in today’s playoff game against the Jets. Hence the pun in the headline, “Pearly Gates”.
Except, over there in the sidebar on the left, the lead item is about a Chicago Bears player who died this morning. Seems a bit odd to have the giant headline “Pearly Gates” juxtaposed with the news of a guy who’s just died, doesn’t it?
It reminds me of a time in high school, when during a football game, a player on the opposing team was injured sufficiently for the ambulance to be driven out onto the field. (No idea what came of that, but we never heard that it was truly awful, so I’m guessing he broke something.) During the delay, the fellows running the PA system decided to put on whatever music was on the radio. The song that came on, right on the chorus, was “Don’t Cry Out Loud” by Melissa Manchester. Oops.
When horrible things happen, after we hear the initial news of the event and the enormity starts to sink in, what happens next is the local connection: what people around here are affected directly, either by their actually being there or having relatives there and the like. It’s very natural, and it always illustrates how closely intertwined this world really is. The earthquake in Haiti seems far away at first, but as always, there are a number of local connections.
The one getting the most coverage here in Buffalo is a woman from West Seneca, a Buffalo suburb just across the street from Casa Jaquandor, who was in Haiti when the earthquake struck. She was there to complete the paperwork on adopting a child from that country. She is safe, as is the child; however, she had to return to Buffalo yesterday without her adoptive son, because there is no functioning government in Haiti right now to issue the kid a passport.
The news is possibly worse for another former Buffalonian, a college professor who used to teach here and who was inside a Port-au-Prince hotel when it collapsed in the quake.
The narratives from Haiti are very sad right now. Here’s hoping they turn the corner as quickly as possible…but this is a country that has almost no infrastructure to handle anything even remotely of this magnitude. It’s unimaginable.
