Lighter, interesting post for contrast: UT creates device that reads minds, turns thoughts into text.

"It's basically a model that has been trained where it's over 15 hours of data per person to take in their brain activity when they're sitting in an MRI scanner to spit out the story that they're listening to," said UT computer science department Ph.D. student Shailee Jain.

Participants first listen to podcasts for about 16 hours in an fMRI scanner. This trains the AI to learn the person's brain activity.

That's so cool! Have you all read The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the memoir by the locked-in guy who tapped it out by blinking one eye? I can't get over the talent of that guy to tap out something beautifully constructed on his first draft. Like, just the coherence of the whole thing when you have to move at a snail's pace to get your thoughts out. (I'm not sure how much editing it needed.)

Seems appropriate to have a dedicated thread, what with the smallness of the blogging world and the sheer longevity of all our para-social relationships with her.

I'm so sorry for her kids. And sorry that she wasn't able to get lasting relief from her depression.

E. Messily sends along this story of 15 wheelbarrows worth of pasta dumped in a NJ forest. I have no explanation but I'm pretty sure that the NYT did not actually select the funniest joke on the topic:

When photos of the discarded pasta were shared on a Reddit discussion about all things New Jersey, it became fertile ground for puns and dad jokes. Someone commented: "We should send the perpetrators to the state penne tentiary."

(I clicked through and it's mostly just puns, which wear you down after a while and you start chuckling. But you can't really say any of them are any better than the dumb one above.)

Completely unrelated, I laughed at How White Men Fight, According to Tucker Carlson.

My pedagogy friend said this in a group chat the other day:

My favorite book on curriculum history argues American schools don't reward learning; they reward the most creative avoidance of learning while acquiring the most credentials

It has stuck with me. I definitely remember this sensation as a student. (Specifically, I remember short answer questions asking you to digest and analyze some incredibly dull passage. "When in your life have you had a decision like the main character faces? What influences did you use to come to a conclusion?" SHUT UP LEAVE ME ALONE/will this be on the test?)

I asked her what book it was, and she said Someone Has to Fail (which I obviously haven't read).

Here's a review:

Labaree is the first to admit he has no solutions: "I'm not touting the system or trashing it; I'm simply trying to understand ... this convoluted, dynamic, contradictory, and expensive system." That's part of what makes the book valuable. Labaree writes with a historian's eye. He's interested in doing three things: (1) laying bare every feature of the massive elephant of American public schooling, including its genius and its contradictions; (2) explaining why--despite decades of expensive reform efforts--that system is so resistant to change; and (3) claiming that the status quo may be what American society most needs.

More interesting bits from the review under the cut:

Educational progressivists, according to Labaree, fell into two camps: the administrative progressives and the child-centered progressives. 1 Both camps labored--through symposiums, treatises, and reports packed with recommendations--to change the nature of public schools in response to either high ideals (John Dewey's child-centered camp) or practical ideas about social efficiency (Edward Thorndike's administrative camp).

Labaree concludes that the administrative progressives "won" by staking out the characteristic structure of the comprehensive American high school that endures today. He calls the traditional high school "the Grand Compromise" because it offers individual opportunity to advance by opening the doors to a high school diploma to all comers but retains an advantage for elites through tracking.

Dewey's child-centered branch, on the other hand, won the battle in terms of school reform rhetoric while making little true change in schools. In fact, Labaree makes an unusual argument (in Chapter 5) that excellent instruction depends on the individual charismatic personality of each classroom teacher, a fact that makes standardized reform in individual classrooms impossible--and undesirable.

and

In the end, Someone Has to Fail is not pessimistic. Labaree's underlying attitude seems to be that of his very first sentence: "For better or worse, the American system of education is truly a marvel."

For various reasons, we've been able to implement a rule of "no phone until high school" and have gotten surprising little pushback from the kids. (The older kids have little flip phones for emergency purposes.) Anyway, the time has come: Hawaii is finishing 8th grade this month.

We're trying to figure out parameters that are sensible for a kid who is in charge of their own device for the first time, but that aren't so draconian that the kid goes nuts when they go to college. And I am planning for more than just Hawaii (out of a sense of fairness) - obviously things will evolve and morph, but there should be some continuity of fairness over the course of all four kids, so I don't want something that requires too much vigilance from Jammies and I. (Somehow I don't think the Unfogged crowd is too paranoid/vigilant about devices, but certainly some parents have really labor-intensive practices for micromanaging their teen's online behavior.)

Some possibilities that we're entertaining:
- Devices charge overnight outside of your bedroom
- A set number of hours per day, and then something that locks your phone at the end of that many hours.
- It drives Jammies nuts how much kids are on their phones at the high school, so he's inclined towards extra parameters for school hours

I don't know how I feel about moderating content or online situations. Certainly friends' kids have gotten themselves into weird online bullying situations. I can imagine our kids finding p/rn online, and that's mostly not that big a deal to me, but there's certainly a version of it where it becomes a problem. Mostly any content moderation sounds very labor intensive, so my instinct is to skip it and just be responsive if a problem arises.

Side question: sex ed. I went through the UU sex ed, as did Hawaii. But they haven't offered it locally since Covid, and I'm starting to think I'm going to need to figure something else out for the next three, which is a bummer. Can I just trust open and honest conversations that arise spontaneously to cover all the content? Or do I need something that will definitely hit a lot of topics I might not think of?

Anyway: what guard rails did/do/will you all use for your teenagers?

NickS writes: Kids today have no idea how remarkable it is that they can stream whatever music they want rather than having to listen to it on an old X-Ray.

A decade ago , the musician Stephen Coates was in St Petersburg to play a concert with his band. While he was there, some Russian friends took him to a flea market, where he found and bought a strange, unmarked disc. Back in London, he put it on: it was 'Rock around the Clock' by Bill Haley and His Comets. He held up the disc to the light and saw two skeletal hands. It looked like a vinyl record, but it had been etched on an X-ray. Since then, Coates has collaborated on the Bone Music project with photographer Paul Heartfield, creating a website, a documentary, a travelling exhibition (London, Cardiff, Moscow, Trieste) and two books, X-Ray Audio (2015) and now Bone Music.

Al Bowlly singing 'You Oughta Be in Pictures'. Little Richard's 'Tutti Frutti'. 'Perhaps a Tango' by the Russian singer Vadim Kozin. These were rare sounds in the Soviet Union of the late 1940s and 1950s, when the authorities had firm - if not entirely fixed - ideas about what its citizens should be listening to. In the postwar years, a small-scale black market emerged, supplying young music fans with fragile recordings made on old X-rays stolen from hospitals. Each disc was produced individually, scratched onto the black film through which a leg, hand, skull, spine, pelvis still glowed. On the opening page of Bone Music, Coates describes them as 'fragile photographs of the interiors of Soviet citizens layered with the music they secretly loved ... skin-thin slivers of non-conformity'. The discs work a kind of optical illusion, with the convergence of the visual and the aural - the X-rayed body and the forbidden music - suggesting a life of hidden pleasures and small acts of rebellion.

...

Heebie's take: The linked post isn't long, but full of interesting bits:

In his 2007 memoir, the jazz musician Aleksei Kozlov described the deadly boredom of school dances closely supervised by teachers and youth leaders. 'Everything was controlled: clothing and hairstyles, how we behaved, how we danced. It was a strange mix of the prison camp and Natasha Rostova's first ball.'

and

These young stilyagi, or 'style-hunters', spoke their own slang and adapted the jitterbug, the lindy hop, boogie-woogie and the foxtrot, giving them subversive names: the 'Canadian', the 'triple Homburg', the 'atom dance'.

The Canadian!

It's probably not a great idea to romanticize life in a deadly oppressive regime, but these little mid-century spy v. spy details are just so delicious.

May I say, as a committed and inveterate hater of the New York Times, that the profile of Elizabeth Holmes, which everyone is excoriating today, is actually fine? This is not about whether anyone else gets the humanizing treatment, or if fraudsters should be profiled at all. Just as a profile, it's good. It conveys Holmes's weird charisma and intensity, includes the editor telling the writer she's been conned (this is a great moment in the piece!) and ends--in a part that no one seems to have read--with the author deciding to keep her distance, because she recognizes that Holmes (and, weirdly, her husband) are very convincing fraudsters.

This is intended to be our system for checking in on imaginary friends, so that we know whether or not to be concerned if you go offline for a while. There is no way it could function as that sentence implies, but it's still nice to have a thread.

Episode Kobe fifty nine