Greg Sanders

What are the obstacles to education reform in the Harry Potter universe?

Kalinara over at Pretty, Fizzy Paradise raises a point I’ve seen before:

But they take the traits MOST likely to result in evil wizardry (ambition and cunning) and shove ALL of those people together into one House. Doesn't that seem like a recipe for disaster?…

It's like...prison really. In which some poor kid gets thrown in for drug possession or something and comes out with all this knowledge and ability to commit much bigger crimes. Only, you know. The wizard equivalent. You go in a little brat, and come out a Nazi.

And really, isolating most of the really ambitious people together in a system that promotes solidarity-in-ones-group and competition-with-others over anything else, just makes for another mess.

I quite agree.  However, I wouldn’t necessarily just trace this idiocy to bad writing.  This sort of phenomenon can happen in real life, see the prisons example.  The question is, why is it allowed to persist?

Here’s some causes I could see:

1. Follow the money: Certain influential people find it desirable.  The schools are run by the Ministry of Magic, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have endowed chairs or powerful parent associations.  It could well be that either Salazar Slytherin himself, parents, or alumni  based their financial support (in gold or in magic items) on the maintenance of Slytherin in its present form.  Given the close affiliation of the Houses to sporting events, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if much of the fundraising came in through the houses and not to the school directly.  Slytherin grads seem to be the richest of the bunch and the first Voldemort uprising wouldn’t have automatically broken this system as many supporters made it through with their fortunes intact.
2. Slytherin students as a public goods problem: Perhaps the other houses prefer to not deal with Slytherin students.  Some of them are ambitious and clever but a good number of others seem to be toady material.  Abolishing or reformulating Slytherin would mean other houses taking students they might otherwise prefer to avoid.  Any one house wouldn’t want to take the bulk of the more questionable students thus shaking up the system would require coordination of multiple actors and not just one brave reformer.
3. Legacy systems: The sorting hat apparently includes blood purity as a factor in placing students.  If you think upgrading a bureaucracies IT systems is hard, imagine what it would be like if that system really was created by an arcane ritual that was likely only known to its creator.  I’d also say that the methods of education at Hogwarts are on the whole terrible, a good cross-house team building class would go a long way to remedying the problem but given that the school doesn’t even have a computer lab I doubt we’ll be seeing that sort of thing any time soon.

On the whole, I tend to think following the money is the most logical explanation.  Real reform seems unlikely because the wizarding world is in many ways a larger reflection of Slytherin house.  The Prime Minister seems to have less power than the Minister of Magic who seems unaccountable to the wizarding population, let alone the public at large. 

The “mudbloods,” those without wizarding parents, are not, as they may appear at first glance, a stand in for the middle class or the population at large.  Instead they’re the nouveau riche, all too easily integrating into the system by marrying them into a down-on-their luck old magic family (e.g. Ron and Hermoine.  Voldemort’s attempts at revolution are battles within a ruling class and not indicative of a wider societal struggle.

How could reform come to the wizarding world?  Spoiling Harry Potter 7 a bit, a goblin ripped off by our heroes would need to realize that the fact that goblins haven’t developed a system of presently [permanently] transferable property rights hasn’t stopped anyone else from implementing such at their expense.  Thus, the solution is not fighting old battles to regain lost artifacts but instead the introduction of planned obsolesce. 

Mass produce lower grade magical items, the sort that will not be around generations down the line, which in means that it’s no great loss to goblin-kind when they aren’t returned upon the death of a wizard.  This mass production could in turn lead to the rise of a wizarding middle class, those who lack magical talent but who could achieve great productivity benefits via clever uses of weak magical items.  Until such a class developed, there’s no popular basis for reform and as the epilogue of Harry Potter 7 showed we certainly can’t count on the heroic elite.

Review: Where the Wild Things Are

I remember the pictures from the book more than I remember the story, so obviously I’m not a purist.  In event, I thought the adaptation was great but at the same time is certainly not for all kids.  That said, I know little about child development, so find some other reviewer if you need specific tips on if this is right for your kid.

There are rather scary bits as well as a heavy dose of psychological realism combined with troubled personality types.  The sugar that helps the dark parts go down is first and foremost appropriate absurdities of childhood combined with Max’s storytelling ability, Jim Henson studios created monsters, and to a lesser extent the neat backdrops.

My one sentence summary would be to take the comic strip Peanuts but merge the real life adults personality-types with the fantasies of the Snoopy oriented strips.  Thus, the joy of childhood oriented trailer is fairly deceptive though cool in its own right.

I’d say catching it in theaters is probably most important for muppet monsters/Dark Crystal fans.  If you care less about that sort of thing, it’s probably okay to catch it on DVD.

Up from comments: Persona in 4e

My friend Todd Harper had raised an interesting point in comments a bit back, one that was reinforced when I listened to an old Brainy Gamer podcast that discussed Persona 3.  Michael Abbott was a big fan of Persona 3, I haven’t played it but I quite like the sequel, and mentioned how it’s choice to eschew realism was refreshing.  This makes me wonder if I’m showing a poverty of imagination to want to implement guns in 4e.  I still think it’s a worthwhile project to put a light amount of work into, but in some ways Todd’s idea is more interesting.  As a bit of background, in Persona 3 and 4 (and probably earlier games) each character has a “persona” that is attached to them and has a combat powers set.  The main character multiple personas, can get more from combat, and can fuse them to make more powerful personas.  That out of the way, here’s the comment:

Random thing that may or may not be to your taste: I know an idea I bounced around for a bit, and which other friends I know took and developed quite a bit more for their own use, was a modern game with a Persona theme. You simply used the basic classes and for the most part, your powers and class features were a function of the Persona you were using.

If you're fighting monsters instead of primarily other people, I think the MODERN = GUNS AKIMBO thing is a little less necessary; you can run in and swing your short sword at whatever all day if it's a shambling monstrosity with six legs and a face that's nothing but a set of giant Angelina Jolie lips.

Plus if you want to have someone like Jin from P3 (who used grenades), you can adapt alchemic items from stuff like Adventurer's Vault and either up the damage or tweak the effects.

You know, now that I think about it, there's another advantage here: in the current 4e game I was in, I started as a sorcerer but switched characters midway through (because with two other meleers, as a Dragonsorc all my powers were useless since they were constantly in the way). But if you have a character switch a Persona, they can effectively try a new class or build with a relatively plausible in-game explanation.

This makes sense to me.  I’d earlier commented to some friends that in some ways a main character in the Persona games was a meta-rpger with a stable of characters.  The question raised by such a proposal is how to handle skills.  In Persona the protagonists skills/attributes completely distinct from the combat power-sets.  Social links are used to build more powerful combat options, but that link also goes one way.  Some sort of dual-world system, a la Persona, may work well to both play off the combat strengths of DnD while at the same time having a less violence driven storyline.  The DnD approach would necessarily be different than the Persona console RPG approach, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t good ideas worth stealing.

I seem to be missing notification on the occasional comment on the blog

I just made a flurry of comments, so if I missed you, check back.  Oddly enough some are getting emails others aren’t.  I think I’ll just make sure I also monitor the comments thread rather than relying on email notification.

Late to the party realization: Avatar: The Last Airbender is pretty dang cool

I’ve been hearing for a bit about Avatar and most recently heard of the film (and complaints about the underrepresentation of Asians in the live action casting for a series with an eastern setting).  In any event, I got it for Kate for her birthday and we’re now seeing why the Nick cartoon got such a good buzz.

The basic setup, long promised savior with lots of powers, is about as well-established as they come.  What sells the series is good and funny writing, a likable set of main characters, and a varied and skillfully depicted setting.  The storytelling is quite episodic, but there is a sense of larger arcs and the episodic nature hasn’t precluded inclusion of neat supporting characters.  Of course, that’s relatively easy to pull off at the start of an episodic series, time will tell if they can keep it up.  But at episode 6, I’m hooked.

I can’t recommend it yet if you need something fundamentally new or different; or a series that couldn’t rightly be described as young adult.  However, if you’ve got no objections to a good story, well told, that so far has values that are worth sharing with said young adults (aside from the cruelty towards cabbage merchants), I’d say it’s worth watching. 

Quick review: Wii Fit Plus, 2 steps forward, 1 back

Wii Fit Plus is priced as an expansion pack to Wii Fit.  It includes a few new yoga and strength building exercises plus a fair number of balance games, some of which provide some aerobic benefit.

In terms of unalloyed goods, here’s what you get:

1. Estimated calorie tracking.  They aren’t tracking your pulse, so this is really a guess, but it’s still good to know the comparative burn rates of various exercises.  
2. Good new exercises and games.  I’m oddly enamored with the one where you flap your arms to fly a giant chicken avatar.  The handling is very tricky, but there’s just a cool level of immersion there.
3. A night owl option under user options, so that if you weigh in at 12:01 am you aren’t chided for missing a day.
4. A quick test button, for when you want to weigh in and get going.

So what about the one step back?  I had high hopes for “My Wii Fit Plus,” which is basically designed for the power users.  First and foremost, it allows things to go faster by cutting out a lot of the end of exercise commentary and allowing for swift transitions between exercises. You can work off existing routines, create your own, work with a more in depth favorites list that also tracks what you’ve done most recently and what you do most rarely.

So what are the problems:

1. You can’t set the number of reps for strength building exercises, it will always be the minimum possible.  You can select the same exercise twice or three times in a row, which helps, but it would have been fairly trivial to offer some options there.  I’d be content with just setting a switch somewhere for “minimum reps” vs. “maximum reps.
2. While the standard routines mix in aerobic and balance games the custom does not allow for it.  Also the standard routines mostly seem kind of on the easy side.
3. There’s only one custom routine, which is just a bad idea as I’m told there’s minimal benefit for strength building on the same muscle group for two days in a row.

I still am glad to have it, but I’ll probably also check out some of the competitors.  I doubt they’ll match the polish on Wii Fit Plus, but I hope they’ll be more focused on giving power-users options to help them get an efficient work out.

Senate Finance Committee votes 14-9 for universal health care

This healthy margin was more than was required and reflects the support of Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe.  While I’m still a bit dubious of some of Sen. Baucus’ choices, I think he’s earned a pat on the back today.  We haven’t guaranteed Sen. Snowe’s vote for the main bill, but this is a very good symbol and it changes the incentives for voting decisions substantially.  With 60 Democrats plus one Republican that means we can afford to lose a single vote.  If we only had 60 votes than any single Democrat could be a spoiler.  As is, the leadership only has to meet the demands of the second biggest pain in the but, which means there can be a real penalty if you get too greedy.

Increasing productivity in the kitchen

Matt Yglesias made an argument on food that seems to have ticked off many of his commenters (Hat tip, Chicago David Chen)”

If over time people were getting poorer, but the number of hours in the day was getting longer, and gender norms were shifting toward the idea that women should get married young and drop out of the workforce in order to do unpaid domestic work, then obviously people would start cooking more. But that’s not what’s happening. Compared to people in 1959, people in 2009 have more money, less time, and less ability to call on socially sanctioned unpaid domestic labor. So obviously they’re going to cook less. Or to look at it another way, there are lots of things you can do in 2009 that you couldn’t do in 1959—read a blog, download an MP3, get a movie from Netflix on Demand. There are also a lot of things you can do in 2009 that were prohibitively expensively in 1959—fly cross-country, make a long-distance phone call to your sister. But there’s no more time in the day. Which implies that people need to spend less time doing the things that you could do in 1959. Sometimes we can get out of this box by finding technological innovations that let us do things more quickly, but you can’t really speed up cooking from scratch… [emphasis mine]

And maybe someone could do it. The world’s purveyors of processed foods have noted a real market demand for healthier products. Consequently, they’re poured a lot of time and energy into creating things that at least seem healthier. And so we really have a lot of healthy-seeming options. But they’ve never, as best I can tell, poured all that much effort into trying to create things that are actually healthier. But someone could. Jamie Oliver could do it. Mark Bittman could do it. Michael Pollan could do it. And it would be more likely to succeed than an endless procession of NYT Magazine articles hectoring people about how they should cook more.

Apparently Oliver did work to improve school lunches, so good on him for that.  In any event, given some recent disappointing results from NYC food labeling, I’m going to focus more on the home production side.  Yglesias is correct that you can’t really speed up cooking from scratch, but that is quite different than saying you can’t speed up cooking in the home.  There’s a reason microwaves are everywhere, they’re fast, cheap, and make things hot.  There’s downsides to this of course, I think first and foremost the weakness is that they dehydrate the food, but I could be wrong on the cooking science there.

Anyhow, I’ll be doing a home cooked meal for my wife’s birthday today.  Which is cool, I enjoy cooking and since I follow the federal holiday schedule I’ve got the day off.  However, most days if I’m cooking something it has to be within 30 minutes.  Happily, my Mark Bittman cookbook does have a 30 minute index which I find very helpful, although I often don’t have the necessary ingredients on hand.  What I could really use is not a cookbook so much as a home economics book.  Lay out weeks worth of recipes at a time, tell what you need to buy, what you need to cook ahead on the weekend, and estimate the time and price investment.  Also, perhaps put the maximum efficiency recipe in with all the shortcuts and then layout where time can be added and what the benefits are.  E.g. go with fresh veggies rather than canned to improve nutrition and taste; do pure oven baking rather than a mix of oven and microwave for juicier chicken but at the cost of 15 minutes.  That sort of thing.  This does seem like an area where software could help, particularly in combination with grocery delivery services like peapod.  However, the software solution might not be useful for the people who most need to have productive kitchen options.

I think a lot of the trouble here is that the tradeoffs of restaurant cooking are rather different than the tradeoffs of home cooking.  Cooking does scale nicely, but learning to exploit those economics of scale is not an easy task, particularly in a small household.  In any event, how do we get to more home economics books?  Perhaps by marketing it to men.  While I was no Don Juan in my single days, I did find even low level cooking skill consistently drew positive comments from women and similarly enabled parties.  I won’t rehash the whole ‘nice guy’ discussion here, but generally speaking there’s no real reason to believe that being ‘nice’ or even just being genuinely kind is a particularly efficient signaling mechanism for your fitness as a romantic partner.  The ability to cook seems to be, and it also has the advantage of being a skill that raises your general fitness rather than just tries to invest a lot of effort in a single relationship with a person that isn’t interested in you.  I would love to see the foodie coaches capture the marketshare of the pickup lunches coaches.

Review: Evil Dead, the Musical at the Landless in D.C.

The Evil Dead musical was an amusing little parody of the Sam Remi/Bruce Campbell horror films of that name.  There were also some references to Army of Darkness thrown in, but by and large no scenes from that film.

I hadn’t seen the Evil Dead movies although I am a real Army of Darkness fan.  Seeing them certainly wasn’t necessary, but interest in horror parody is.  So if you haven’t seen Army of Darkness, see that first really.

In any event, there was a good dozen songs or so with original tunes, the tunes sometimes showed up  more than once, but as far as I know they were all original to the musical.  The show had some different people than the original Broadway cast, but from what I’ve listened to on the Amazon page above, I think the singers compared well.  My favorite pieces were all in the second half: All the Men in My Life Keep Getting Killed By Candarian Demons, and the whole Necronomicon dance sequence.  That said, as the title of the last song attests, it’s worth noting that this song parodies the misogyny of some horror flicks more than it subverts it.

Beyond the singing, which to my pleasure was consistently easy to understand, the acting well suited the material and the lead did a good Ash.  The technical direction was definitely limited by the size of the tiny DCAC stage and I’m guessing a lower budget than the Broadway show, but on the whole it was successfully evocative and fun.  On the whole, at $25 and with the inconvenient but pleasant trek to Adams Morgan from Woodly Park Metro I’d recommend this for those excited by the idea of an Evil Dead musical. 

One practical note: there is some samurai film style blood fountains that splash the audience.  If you want to play it safe, you may wish to bring your own tarp.  They sell garbage bags with appropriate holes in them for $1, but if you’re my size those want cover your legs at all.  I used a newspaper for that purpose.

Image take by Laura Darby who had been kind enough to invite me

Ironic that the lunar bombing happens on the day our President gets a Nobel peace prize

I am actually pretty excited about the moon thing.  I hope we do find some good water sources.  The best take I’ve read so far is from Dan Drezner who I don’t always agree with but I think manages to be the funniest top-tier international relations analyst.  Here’s the start:

CHAIR:  Guys?  Guys!!  It's 2 AM and we've got an award to give later today!  What are we gonna do?    We can't use Jimmy Carter again -- he was our emergency winner the last time we were stumped!  If we don't do this right, we'll have less cedibility than the Grammys!!

MEMBER A (clearly drunk):  Hey, why not Neil Patrick Harris?  For bringing peace to.... umm.....  Hollywood awards shows?! 

Neil Patrick Harris does in fact do excellent work.  I’m also left wondering who Kanye West thinks should have gotten the Nobel.

More seriously, I do tend to agree with Ackerman that he’s got to accept it as a commitment to the destination.  Just be real humble in the speech and donate the money somewhere.

Thinking about how to do DnD 4e in a more modern setting

I’ve been pondering how DnD 4e could work in settings like steampunk, westerns, modern, or sci-fi.  I tend to find those genres more interesting and have rather been liking our current pirate themed campaign.

I think a lot is doable with a few small addition, some hybrid classes, and a lot of changing flavor.

First off, most of these settings have guns.  To get them right, particularly as you get to modern and sci-fi, it probably makes sense to have them usable as both ranged weapons and implements.  However, I’d still probably want to keep the damage comparable to other weapons.

Second, giving defenders ranged options is tricky.  Sword mages have it, but the rest, even when hybrids, take a bit more thinking.  Melee characters are fine in more modern settings, but I think ranged options do make sense.  Part of the solution might be more powers that use ranged basics.  For flavor purpose, I’d call ranged marking “covering fire.”

Third, in part to allow for mixed ranged and melee combat, some modern settings involve being less tied to a particular weapon.  Going all out with a light sabre is fine in space opera, but with modern and sci-fi it probably makes sense to use the variant rules where you get extra hit and damage bonuses when leveling rather than from equipment.

Anyways, something to think about, if anyone has any ideas they want to share or critiques, please let me know.

There are nearly 200,000 contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan but most aren't toting guns

There are presently more U.S. contractors than troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. James Glanz of the NY Times reported on this parity back in September citing data from March 2009 in a Congressional Research Service report by Moshe Schwartz.

I've seen the latest data and in June of 2009 the trend still held: there were 194,000 contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan and only 190,000 troops. This high ration had first occurred during the U.S. mission in Bosnia where concerns about the size and duration of the U.S. peacekeeping mission made sending large numbers of troops politically costly. Waging two wars at the same time further strained the personnel side of the U.S. military and contractors handling support functions proved easier than a massive increase in recruiting, let alone restoring the draft.

The key word in that last sentence is support. While armed private security contractors spawn many news stories but as of June 2009 only represent 11% of the contractors in Iraq and 7% of the contractors in Afghanistan. Thus the typical face of contracting in Iraq may well be an employee at a base Cinnabon and not a Blackwater security guard.

This post is also available at ameasureofsecurity.org.

PRC’s 60th Anniversary

Via James Fallows here’s a four minute video version of the celebratory parade from Dang CHung and Xiaoli Wang of the Guardian.  The first half is largely military while the latter is less regimentalized pageantry.

China's 60th Anniversary national day - timelapse and slow motion - 7D and 5DmkII from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

On a similar note, Dan Drezner has an article on China’s resemblance to late 19th century America.  Not in government type obviously, but in being a rising economic and global power with definite sources of internal fragility and some reluctance to provide global public goods.  I think it’s a useful quick summary and one worth reading.  In terms of defense implications, we were fairly aggressive in that period, although we were primarily focused on weaker powers like Spain.  I don’t think this supports the China threat camp at all, but does suggest we should be working to resolve those disputed island chains.