Kevin Ryan in Tokyo

Category: politics

  • Barack Obama’s Inauguration Speech

    Ogawa-sensei remembered that I had brought Obama’s acceptance speech to Cosmos Festival in November. He asked me if I had a good copy (better than the one on YouTube). Ogawa-sensei, I’ll bring it in on Monday.

    Obama’s speeches are legendary now. I’ve been following him since 2004, and he continues to amaze.

    President Barack Obama gives his inaugural address. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty
    President Barack Obama gives his inaugural address. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty

    The text and video of his speech show initially that his Inauguration speech on Tuesday may have had lukewarm reception at first.

    But when you start to look at the speech carefully, his mastery shows. It is a new style of speech, more measured, more exact, and it leads to discussion and interpretation. He is moving the ideas front and center, instead of personalities.

    Stanley Fish, Dean of my university (Uof I , Chicago) when I was there (now former) and widely read columnist for the New York Times, looks closely at Obama’s speech, and shows us the intricacies. He thinks we should use this speech in our English classes, because of its

    Paratactic prose lends itself to leisurely and loving study, and that is what Obama’s speech is already receiving. Penguin Books is getting out a “keepsake” edition of the speech, which will be presented along with writings by Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Emerson. (You can move back and forth among them, annotating similarities and differences.)

    I can’t wait for the new Penguin Edition to come out. After their ground-breaking WeTellStories, I am really looking forward to more experimentation on augmenting regular text. Penguin is really innovative.

    My (younger) daughter will be giving a part of an Obama speech on February 14 at the Jr/Sr high school on campus. She picked it out last September, and hopes to take it to the National Finals of the Hachishibu Speech Contest. I’ll put up a video after.

  • Ministry of Education back tracks

    On the backs of babes.

    backpack200-bbIt seems since the scores are falling in international tests, and Japanese kids aren’t learning stuff you can test as much, there is a panic to find a solution.

    About 10 years ago there was a move to restrict time at school because kids were not very well-rounded. They tend not to play together, or learn about cultural activities. To increase “humanity” among the kids, they were given most Saturdays off (yes, they used to go most Saturdays). The number of school days dropped from about 240 to 210 (the US has about 180).

    The drop in scores on these international tests didn’t start appearing until about 5 years after the change. Of course, the first thought on the cause of the drop was the changed schedule. No solid indication of causation here, but everyone thought something must be done.

    So what did the Ministry of Education come up with? Reinstate Saturdays, and double the page count of the textbooks. You see, the system here in Japan is incredibly centralized. There is a week-to-week curriculum that everyone in K-12 follows. So a kid could move from Hokkaido down to Kyushu over the weekend, and pick up exactly where he left off. (The textbooks might be different, the content is the same.)

    So now the kids will be carrying much heavier backpacks, and the publishers fat and happy. There is a constant outcry when new textbooks are brought out, because of their (non) treatment of WW2 and things like the Rape of Nanjing. Now they will have twice as much room, but we can be fairly certain there won’t be twice as much content.

  • Saving money by treating sewage

    Over at Freakonomics an interview with Rose George, author of The Big Necessity, about treating human waste, shows that for every dollar spent on sewage treatment, seven dollars in health care costs are saved. Truly, the best health care invention of the last 200 years is toilets.

    Rose George
    Rose George

  • Bowling Alone in a Recession

    Reading the news today, a paragraph from David Brooks stands out as a prediction on the social fabric of the US as they (we?) enter into a prolonged recession.

    Finally, they will suffer a drop in social capital. In times of recession, people spend more time at home. But this will be the first steep recession since the revolution in household formation. Nesting amongst an extended family rich in social capital is very different from nesting in a one-person household that is isolated from family and community bonds. People in the lower middle class have much higher divorce rates and many fewer community ties. For them, cocooning is more likely to be a perilous psychological spiral.

    Having seen this first-hand as a consumer in Japan, and as a provider of services (education), I can attest that adjustments are harsh, but usually not swift. If you can start to rebuild your personal infrastructure, and adapt, you will eventually achieve both an adjustment of expectations and possibilities that will leave you with a cleaner outlook on the world.

    The title refers to a book about socialization in the US. Will follow up later.

  • Implicit Knowledge

    Thanks to the guys over at Freaknomics, specifically Ian Ayers editorial in the Los Angeles Times by the Police Commissioner, I have found a new tool.

    Ayers did a study on who gets stopped by the LA PD. Minorities are stopped much more often, searched, frisked and questioned much more than whites, even when violence is controlled for. His study also shows that these minority searches and questionings turn up far fewer results than when questioning and searching whites.

    So the Police Commissioner complained in an editorial about Ayers study. The link above is the response by Ayers to those remarks. Very telling, and very scientific. Clear thinking, as opposed to the blustering of the Police Commissioner.

    In any case, near the end of the post, Ayers suggest that to begin to alleviate the problem, every officer on the force should take the Implicit Association Test, developed at Harvard and free online. These tests measure whether you have a prejudice (prejudging) toward some group of people or ideas. I took the Fat/Thin test as an example. It showed fat people and thin people in pictures. I had to quickly identify by pressing one of two keys on the keyboard (one on the right, the other on the left) as quickly as I could, without thinking. Then I had to match vocabulary to the words GOOD and BAD. Then the pictures and words were combined in different orders. I had to match faces or vocabulary quickly, without thinking.

    It takes about 10 minutes to do a test, and it takes your full concentration. Try it out for a number of possible unconscious (or pre-conscious) leanings. I am going to get my students to do the gender one. They have versions in many different languages.