Testing My Nerves

The beginning of February is here, and with it an end to the six-month-long experience euphemistically referred to as the college application "process".  It is no mere process: ordeal, perhaps, or crucible.  Perchance baptism by fire.  It is filled with essay after essay demanding to discover, in no more than 150 words, why one particular college is your perfect fit, or how the paper you wrote as a sophomore has radically altered your perspective on education, or what you wish to achieve from college, or a place in which you are perfectly content.  As a person who dislikes writing about myself, spending half a year writing, interview, and collating information -- all about me -- was hardly fun.

Still, in reality it could have been worse, especially when compared to the experiences of other young people.  In Asia, students are groomed for college entrance exams almost from their day of birth.  Chinese parents often move to different cities to better advantage their children in the college process (scores on the Chinese national college test are measured relative to the strength of one's province or municipality).

South Korea's college system is almost entirely based on the results of the College Scholastic Ability Test.  The all-day exam covers English, Korean, science, math, and more at a college level and largely determines the future prospects of students as entrance into a prestigious college is a guaranteed path to advancement in the Korean economic and social system.

On the day of the exam, trading is suspended at stock markets, mass transit authorities add additional capacity, the police force deploys 4,000 motorcycles to ensure late students arrive on time, taxi drivers offer free rides to testing centers, government offices and businesses open late, and the national power utility deploys a team of 4,000 electricians to monitor all power lines leading to every high school in the country.  During the English listening portion of the exam, in order to forestall complaints that outside noise interfered with students' ability to hear the listening tracks, the military ceases all live-fire exercises while Korean air traffic control authorities suspend all airport operations nationwide and order all inbound flights to circle above 10,000 feet.  Concerns about cheating led the Ministry of Education to sequester the test writers in a remote and mountainous region of the country without access to electronic devices.  The writers are not even permitted to tell their families why they have been called away from home.  Even beyond academic preparations, students go to extreme lengths to ready themselves.  One kid swallowed small amounts of cough syrup daily in the week leading up to the exam to prepare his body in the event that he became sick and actually needed to take cough syrup.  Perhaps the Wall Street Journal's anecdote captures the national mood best:

One foggy morning last November, officer Kang Jin-jin heard the distress call on his police radio: An 18-year-old girl about to take the national college-entrance exam had left her admission ticket at home.  Mr. Kang dashed off to the girl's apartment, got the ticket from her father, and raced across town on his motorcycle, arriving at the school just in time for the test.  "I had to ignore traffic signs and turn on the siren," he said. "It was a bit risky, but I tried my best."

Compared to this kind of pressure, our admissions system -- while tough -- is hardly excessive.  What is most gratifying about the US system is that your life does not ride on a single day of testing.  The compromise position of evaluating grades and test scores in addition to teacher (and sometimes peer) recommendations, extracurricular accomplishments, and essays helps provide a fuller picture of the student.  In the end, it may also reduce the amount of work and stress involved as well.  Thus, despite the fact that O'Hare remains as congested as ever on ACT Saturdays and 911 isn't available to test takers who forget to bring their Number 2 pencils, America's universities are tremendously well equipped with a wealth of information on each applicant.  It is a compromise best for both the students and the schools.

The Half-Year in Review

My blog reflection is available here.  As it references other individuals by name to discuss their views and writing, I have made it available as a PDF only to those with a Glenbrook225 Google Apps account.  Should anyone have issues accessing the document, please email me.

The Rumors of The Blog's Demise are Greatly Overdue

This blog is a blog about blogs.  (How postmodern!)  A recent post that has been getting some attention in the blogosphere (a term that itself deserves some discussion, but more on that later) proclaimed "R.I.P. The Blog!"  It argued that long-form blogs have been eclipsed by services like Twitter or Tumblr as main sources of information and commentary.

That might be true, but I don't think it is an issue with the structure and form of blogs themselves.  The rise of 140-character snippets reflects an increasing impatience with reading and writing, unrelated to the notion of the blog.  (A parallel phenomenon is occurring with newspapers, of course.)  Witness the rise of article titles written just to grab links.  Popular web articles are increasingly filled with ads, GIFs, and memes, not interesting analysis and actual text.  One of my favorite web blogs, Daring Fireball, covers technology -- without images.  It is a pure-text blog, so it has to draw its readers solely through its incisive commentary and actually interesting links.

Look at the alternative: Buzzfeed, the world's favorite source of lists like Top Ten Vapid and Cringe-worthy Things I Saw on Buzzfeed Today!  The blog as a form loses out to nonsense like this because the average web surfer glances at a page only momentarily before moving on.  Our collective attention spans are so short that we find reading even a few paragraphs tedious.

Especially with the proliferation of blogs, it is hard to spend time reading each one in depth.  I use feedly, an RSS reader, to keep up with all the different websites, online think tanks, and blogs that I read, but often over 200 articles pop up per day.  It is impossible for me to read each one, so I skim the list of article titles, hoping to find something that catches my attention.  I then skim the articles that I've opened up to see if I'm interested in reading them more closely.  Out of the 200 original articles, I'll probably end up reading ten stories in depth.

Often, what will grab my eye is an article about something circulating on the internet (or the blogosphere).  When something goes "viral," there are invariably the this-is-cool articles that follow, then the this-proves-how-sad-the-internet-is articles that come next, and lastly overly dramatic commentary about the topic of the original to-do.  The blogosphere can often become an echo chamber for its own vacuousness.

That's not to say there aren't real blogs saying real things -- the author of the R.I.P. the Blog story noted that himself -- but they're often overwhelmed by the silliness.  In the words of my sophomore history teacher, "The internet is full of diamonds...but they are buried in tons and tons of POOP."

Compromising Rhetoric

Iran has been in the news frequently over the last weeks due to the breakthrough achieved in Geneva to halt aspects of Iran's nuclear program (in particular, enrichment of fissile material) in exchange for sanctions relief.  Hundreds of pages have been written just over the past half-month about whether the deal is good or bad.  The agreement is a veritable Rorschach test: some see Neville Chamberlain proclaiming "peace in our time"; others see Nixon walking on the Great Wall.

This blog is about compromises, and I wanted to examine how the language of compromise is present in our discussion of the deal.  I recently read this interesting article about how President Obama is playing the expectations game.  By stating that he believes the accord may fail and cause further sanctions, he is able to simultaneously please both hardline hawks and doves demanding diplomacy.  The doves see statements like this as a feint to please hardliners and buy time for the negotiations to work.  The hawks see it as an acknowledgement of what they see as weakness.

I personally see the negotiations as a step forward; after all, threats of military force have failed for the past decade.  Now that the (somewhat) reformer Rowhani is in the ascendency, wasting the chance for rapprochement seems foolish.  I'm glad, however, that the President is not overcommitting himself to diplomacy.  After all, many of his recent public pronouncements have come back to haunt him.  Look no further than his red "line" with Syria and "guarantee" that everyone could keep their insurance if they wanted to.  Those statements became the story instead of real discussions about Syria and healthcare.  I think the President has learned to be more careful with his public statements so that he has more flexibility down the line.  It may seem obvious, but under-promising and over-delivering is always better than the reverse, especially since President Obama has no more elections to win.

So, peace in our time?  Nay, they'd probably write something more like this: the Obama Administration sees the recent announcement of potential diplomatic discussions with the Islamic Republic of Iran as possible and important, while still uncertain, steps forward as part of this Administration's goal of a peaceful future for both the American people and our allies and partners in the Middle East while not permitting Iran to gain a nuclear weapons capability that would be detrimental to the safety and stability of the region, including our good friend Israel.  Somewhere in that decidedly un-quotable and un-sound-byte-able run-on full of legalese and technicalities linked together by excessive, improper, and unnecessary conjunction use was (possibly) something about Iran.

A statement released by Ted Cruz's office would no doubt read, "The best way to stop an Iranian nuclear weapon is to defund Obamacare."

Fitting Facts with Faith

The Texas Board of Education has been creating controversy by considering creationism for the state's biology courses.  It had met to approve a series of textbooks, but some groups inserted last minute changes into the proceedings, causing derailment of the approval process.  For instance, a book by national publisher Pearson has been indefinitely delayed due to objections by Christian conservatives.  However, this is not just a problem for Texas: the article notes that Texas's size (everything is big in Texas!) means that it can determine the content of books that publishers sell nationally.

The root of the problem is the age-old debate between creationism and evolution.  I happened to read about the to-do in Texas right after watching a YouTube video of a debate between Richard Dawkins, famed atheist and Oxford biology professor, and John Lennox, a deeply religious mathematics and science professor also at Oxford University.  What made the debate remarkable was that both men were firm believers in science, the scientific method, and evolution, yet had radically different perspectives on the existence and role of God.  To use the terms of science, the variables of belief in empiricism and rationalism were kept constant, yet the dependent variable, religion, had fluctuated.

To me, Dawkins represented extremism: all science, no God.  Lennox seemed like the other extreme, but in reality he was just compromise: science and God.  Unrepresented in the debate was a third point of view that is being expressed by some in the Texas book controversy: all God, no science.

Two highly educated, well intentioned, and incredibly bright Oxford professors had seemed to demonstrate that there was real clash over the overlap of science and religion.  It seems like often they are portrayed as entirely overlapping and mutually exclusive in the media or public discourse.  Dawkins largely articulated this point of view.  More surprising was Lennox, who opined that the two fields are indeed entirely overlapping, but also mutually consistent.  His argument was that the tenets of science are the ones encouraged by his view of Christianity: proof by reason and argumentation.  He asserted that atheism undermines science by failing to explain randomness that occurs in nature, for instance at the subatomic level.

Personally, I see evolution (or science more broadly) as a mechanism and God as an agent, so nothing about Pearson's new Texan textbook has me up in arms.  Nevertheless, new ways to reconcile my faith with facts always fascinate me.  I certainly do agree with most (but not all) of what Dr. Lennox said, but more significantly I was very glad to see that some middle ground can be carved out at all in this oft contentious debate.

Why Only Finding Half a Worm in the Apple is Best

I've been writing about politics and current events for the past few posts, so I thought I would turn to another passion of mine: technology.

In particular, I love Apple.

What particularly grabs me about them is their drive for their ideal of perfection.  Witness the year-after-year thinning of the iPhone, for example.  For years I've read Daring Fireball, a technology blog that I think is one of the best.  (It is also stylistically terrific and therefore very much informed how I laid out the design for this blog.)  Its author loves to say that Apple rarely innovates as much as it iterates; in other words, the second and the third iPhone or the third and the fourth iPhone have few differences, but the fifth is radically better than the first.

This is ironic, because most people associate Apple with words like "breakthrough" or "innovative."  Rarely would you hear "slow and steady."  Part of Apple's rationale, though, is that good design takes time, and so they must be careful with what they include in their products.

It is a highly ironic concept: compromise is the only route to perfection.  An old article at Daring Fireball that I reread recently made this point very well.  It noted that Microsoft has attempted to shoehorn as many random features as possible into the new Windows 8, with the result being that users found it bloated and inefficient.

Contrast that with Apple: in 2009, then Apple Vice President Bertrand Serlet announced the next version of the Mac operating system would have no new features.  (Technology website Ars Technica quipped, "Read Bertrand's lips: No New Features!")  Instead, Apple said they would be focusing on refining and refreshing the operating system to make it faster and more usable.  The changes were reflected in tasks like booting up and shutting down which were up to 100% faster.  Had they chosen to add dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of new components to the operating system, it is unlikely the Apple programmers would have been able to successfully refine everything else simultaneously.

All of this therefore begs the question of what to compromise on.  The Daring Fireball article touches on this only in the broadest generalities.  I'd like to go a bit further.  Compromise must occur only after the possibility of doing everything well has been exhausted.  (In fact, in the operating system example, I suspect Apple ended up just doing a version of this by sticking their new features into the subsequent operating system release.  They perhaps needed more time, but Cupertino wasn't planning on giving up on its new technologies.)  Once it is determined that some tradeoffs must be made, they must be made in a way that achieves the goal of the project.  This seems simple and obvious, but defining what that "goal" is can be difficult.  I think Apple has made it clear that perfection of the user experience is their corporate mantra.  Other companies (for instance, one very prominent Korean electronics company with an industry-leading ability to copy others) seem to have no clear goal when they make a product other than that they might sell some phones if they copy-and-paste the iPhone and stamp a Samsung decal on the back.

As one final example, look at iPhone-era Apple.  As this New Yorker piece rightly points out, much of Apple's success has come from understanding where it can ease (read: compromise) its grip on the user experience.  For instance, third party apps (ones not developed by Apple itself) are allowed onto the iPhone via the App Store, but they are screened for quality and safety.  Google, by contrast, set up the Play Store, an oddly-named free-for-all replete with viruses, iPhone app ripoffs, and phony applications.

Compromise shouldn't be a bad word.  It is both necessary and sufficient for good design, something Apple has figured out.  We'll see if their competitors realize it too.

Middle Ground in the Middle East

Negotiations are gridlocked, neither side trusts the other, both parties routinely condemn their adversary as evil, and the almost-daily op-eds proclaim a near-existential threat.  No, this is not the shutdown.  I'm talking about Iran.

With the election of the reform-minded President Rowhani, Iran has moved closer to a rapprochement with the United States.  SecState Kerry and the Iranian FM met on the sidelines of the UNGA opening session.  The President has lobbied Congress not to invoke another round of tough sanctions against the regime.  Rowhani has declared his intent to work toward a new understanding with the West.  

It seems like everyone is standing around the old proverbial campfire, holding hands, singing Kumbaya...except no one can find Netanyahu.  Instead, he's on an idiom-doused PR push, giving speech after speech warning that "Ahmadinejad was a wolf in wolf’s clothing.  Rowhani is a wolf in sheep’s clothing."  And, Rowhani is "a wolf who thinks he can pull the wool over the eyes of the international community."  Indeed, in one of the more clever applications of English idiom to nuclear weapons nonproliferation efforts, Mr. Netanyahu declared, "Rowhani thinks he can have his yellowcake and eat it too!"

PM Netanyahu is convinced this is a ploy, designed to distract the West and alleviate the impact of crippling American and European sanctions while maintaining Iran's nuclear program intact.  His reasoning is not without merit: Rowhani tried similar stalling tactics as Iran's head nuclear negotiator a decade ago.  Israel wants the US and its allies to keep the sanctions regimen intact and demand unilateral denuclearization.  Any suggestion of deviating from that brings an almost Pavlovian response from Jerusalem.  

On the other hand, Obama and the EU, feeling foreign policy exhaustion after setbacks and embarrassment on Syria, the NSA scandal, and Egypt, seem willing to do anything to reach a deal with Iran.  The President no doubt realizes that a success on Iran would help substantially burnish his foreign policy legacy.

To me it seems neither side is behaving rationally.  The Israelis can't realistically think Iran will ever unilaterally renounce its nuclear program in the absence of significant sanctions.  Its whole raison d'etre was to provide a check against American or Israeli designs against Iran, and given the historical tension in the region, those won't dissipate overnight.

The flip side is that the Obama administration is having a peace-in-our-time moment.  The reason the Iranians have come to the table (which is good and should be embraced) is the tough sanctions and hardline that Obama is taking right now.  It is almost cliche to say, but Reagan's "trust but verify" should be the M.O. with Iran.  Yes, we should sit down to talk.  Yes, we should be prepared to grant concessions.  Yes, military force and sanctions can't be the end game.  At the same time, the concessions have to be linked to verifiable compliance with international standards regarding nuclear weapons production.  

Part of the reason for focusing on compromises for this blog is that the seemingly rational and common sense solutions like "trust but verify" never seem to win out in Washington.  It is possible that there is an element that I'm missing.  Of course, as a 17-year-old high school student I'm not privy to classified information, state secrets, or NSA intelligence.  (Note to NSA employee reading this post: The Fourth Amendment is overrated, I think Guantanamo is full of nothing but complainers, and everyone agrees the NSA should really have won the Nobel Peace Prize.  Credit here.)  Still, it seems like there has to be a better compromise between pragmatism and appeasement.  I desperately hope Washington finds it.