Ray Woodcock’s Current Thoughts

I want to get some paint to fix a scratch on my car, or on my wall.  I want to go to the store and not buy a quart or even a pint:  I just want a half-ounce.  I’ll take it home and try it out.  If it’s not right, I’ll go back to the store and put another 50 cents in the automated paint mixing machine, type in the code for the exact shade (out of 16.2 million colors) that I tried last time, and then follow the software instructions, one step at a time, to (1) Lighten (2) Darken (3) Add more Red, (4) Add more Green, etc.

The basic idea with wind chimes is that you have something that sounds nice when the wind blows.  It could be helpful to choose the weights of the different chimes so that they ring on regular windspeed intervals.  When the wind is blowing 1 MPH, one little chime rings.  2 MPH, two chimes.  And so on up to 5 MPH.  Then a heavier chime rings at 10 MPH, an even heavier one at 15 MPH, and so on to 25 or 30 MPH.  Then graduated by intervals of 10 to 20 MPH.  When you hit hurricane speed, you get a gong.

There ought to be a law, or an accreditation requirement, or an FCC regulation, or something that would require universities to spend as much time and money promoting their specific academic achievements (i.e., not their vague reputations) as they spend promoting their sports teams.  For every billboard on the highway, every highway sign, every radio commercial that talks about the sports team, and for every minute of interviews granted to a college athlete or coach, there should be an equivalent billboard, sign, commercial, or minute of interviewing granted to — or, if necessary, purchased by — the university on behalf of its scholars, undergraduate and graduate programs, faculty members, and libraries.

Certainly sports have a place at universities.  As a parks & recreation graduate student, I feel recreation has an important place.  But so do academics, for heaven’s sake.  Sports provides a huge amount of money and attention for colleges.  To some extent, that continues to send the wrong message to young people, on the question of what they should aspire to achieve.

Students from other countries come to the U.S. to study and earn undergraduate or graduate degrees.  Those who come from relatively familiar (e.g., European) cultures may benefit from this experience.  Those who come from relatively unfamiliar (e.g., Asian) cultures are at greater risk of having an experience that is counterproductive in some regards for them and for the U.S.

These students often study hard, excel, and in many cases go on to fill important positions in the U.S  They may stay here many years, or they may return to their homelands after a few years in the U.S.

Those who return home after school, immediately or after a few years, can easily go back with negative attitudes toward American people, values, and policies.  This has been especially likely during the Bush years, when there have indeed been many American college students and professors who would share their distaste for seemingly foolish, wasteful, and destructive American behaviors.  But even during those years, a different approach to international students from relatively unfamiliar cultures could have achieved better results in some cases.

The Bush Administration is not, in itself, solely responsible for some international students’ failure to become engaged with American life.  It is entirely possible for an Asian (or, perhaps, a Middle Eastern or African) student to come to the U.S., live on campus, hang out almost exclusively with other students from his/her homeland, maintain virtually no friendships with Americans, speak his/her native language in most of his/her daily contacts, watch TV from back home rather than American TV, improve his/her English only marginally over a span of two or more years, and go back where s/he came from with an enhanced knowledge of bad rather than good examples of American people and life.

A student of that sort can easily be a net loss for America, for American students, and for American universities.  They may return home with hostility toward and/or disappointment in America, in place of the admiration that brought them here.  In classrooms, they may sit silently, unable to follow the rapid give-and-take between students and professors, or they may pipe up with observations that demonstrate that they largely do not understand the discussion.  They may supply tuition dollars that help pay universities’ expenses, but in exchange they can easily be a drain on the level of energy, camaraderie, and interaction in the classroom.  Certainly they are not providing the international interaction that educators may hope American students would experience.  Such international students may also be unlikely to support the university in extracurriculars (e.g., sports, campus events).  And they, themselves, may not be having such a great time.  They are human beings too, obviously, and they can get lonely and feel excluded when they are so far out of the loop.

Of course, such observations vary from one situation to another.  Many international students do become intensively involved in school and classroom, interact extensively with their classmates and with other American people, media, and businesses, and generally participate as well as anyone could hope.  Many classrooms do facilitate active involvement by international students of any level of language ability and cultural orientation.  It would be unfair and inaccurate to say that any of the foregoing concerns apply to international students across the board.

Such caveats notwithstanding, it remains true that many American universities now make it possible for international students to keep themselves fairly isolated from Americans, and that that is in no one’s interest.

An alternative arrangement would admit students to the university only after demonstrating that they are capable of participating in meaningful discussion at the university level.  This demonstration might include some revised form of standardized test; the tests presently used are plainly not insuring sufficient language ability in international students.  It might also include interaction with, say, American tourists who visit their homelands.  One example of the latter could feature ten-minute conversations involving two would-be students and one tourist, where the tourist would be asked to state which of the two students spoke better.  A student who came out worst in each of three such pairings (with different American visitors) would hardly seem a likely candidate, while one who came out best in all three might merit some presumption of language and cultural competence, sufficient to understand and, hopefully, to become engaged in university life.

A different approach would be to allow or require would-be college students to begin with an American high school experience.  Much of what international students fail to understand, in typical banter, is of a cultural rather than merely linguistic nature.  There is so much slang in our speech, and there are so many obscure references in many classroom discussions (though of course these observations, too, vary greatly from one academic discipline to another), that it can take years before an Asian student begins to understand what we are talking about.  A response in that case would be to send them to high school before letting them into college, if necessary, so that they can have a fair shot at having a good and well-rounded college experience.

Some numbers seem to recur in people’s lives at times.  For example, a person might coincidentally live at two different houses numbered 1012 (e.g., 1012 Main St. and then, years later, 1012 Green St.).  It’s probably just coincidence.  Still, it could be interesting to see which numbers appear most frequently in one’s daily materials.  A program running in the background on one’s computer could process all of one’s electronic letters, e-mails, and other data sources, capture all of the numbers appearing in those sources, and map them in terms of (a) their frequency and (b) the statistical likelihood that those particular numbers would recur at that frequency.  Of course, there may need to be some adjustments (for e.g., one’s present home address, or for numbers in frequently-used spreadsheets).  Some such adjustments might consist of a simple weighting according to the number of seconds during which such numbers are visible on the computer screen during a given month.  At any rate, the idea would be to create an appropriately weighted map that would highlight the most frequently used numbers, perhaps for comparison with similar number charts generated by other persons whose numbers might interest the person, for whatever reason (e.g., one’s spouse, a celebrity, someone of the same astrological sign).

There should be a website that provides a link to each known global database.  One example of a global database would be a global listing of parts available for purchase.  Another would be a universal basic biography website.  A Google search (for e.g., “global database”) could work, if it wouldn’t also turn up so many other pages that are not global databases in this sense.  The basic purpose would be to provide a quick start into a search for anything that should be listed in a global database.

They have noise-cancellation headphones.  They need the same thing throughout cities.  Noise polluters should be obliged to install appropriate technologies, as soon as they become available, sufficient to counteract the noise they generate.  The idea that you can burden your neighbors with your noise — whether you are a music lover or a factory — should be as intolerable as the proposal to burden them with any other form of pollution you might generate.  People should not have to erect walls that block everyone’s view in order to protect themselves from overwhelming noise (e.g., along freeways).

Everybody’s worried about gas prices, about the cost of commuting and relying on cars.  People are going to be talking about improved mass transit.

Which we need — desperately.  We have needed it for decades, since the 1970s and before.  I remember writing a letter, as a schoolboy, to a state governmental transportation authority in Indiana in the 1960s.  I said that what we needed was an individualized rail-based system of transportation.  I suggested that rails could lead into people’s garages, just as driveways do.  It seemed to me that it would be cheaper and easier to run one or two rails than to cover the nation with hardened concrete platforms, wide as a barn and endless thousands of miles long.

The rail guy was kind enough to respond in all seriousness to my childish letter.  He said that a rail system limits mobility.  I remember thinking — Yeah, and a highway system doesn’t?  I still wonder what he was thinking.  Those were not the days of four-wheel drive vehicles and off-roading.

At the time, my concept was that each family could have a pod-like car that would run on rails, and when a bunch of them wanted to drive across the country on vacation, they could connect their cars together into individualized passenger trains and run them on express rails.  Later, when computers became popular, it occurred to me that computers could do that too.

I guess I still don’t get it.  Why perpetuate a system that kills so many thousands of people each year, when you could do something else instead — something that would move everyone along at maximum feasible speed, without slowdowns for accidents, without these tremendous road construction projects, without the unbelievable tab for maintenance that we now don’t know how we will afford?

Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if rail transportation will experience a comeback.  My suggestion now is that it do so incrementally, in tandem with developments in preferences.  An alienated nation created suburbs in which people wouldn’t have to know their neighbors and wouldn’t have (or be able) to walk to the market.  That may not be the shape of the next generation’s America.

What’s needed is some relatively small, rapidly planned, highly publicized efforts that combine incremental mass transit development with higher-density residential areas.  Run an existing subway or light rail line one stop further, as quickly as possible, to a neighborhood that is being developed as an old-fashioned smallish town (of, say, 5,000 to 15,000 people), complete with its own city center including courthouse, grocery, and so forth, but perhaps with higher population density within walking distance of the train station.

Knowledge from that sort of project could advise as to whether the country is going to be intensively urbanizing or is, instead, in the market for a revival of the old Interurban lines, rolling along, trolley-like, from one freestanding small town to the next.

It would be entertaining and instructive to attend a jam session of highly skilled tech types.  The ambiance would be that of a karaoke bar, but the equipment onstage would be a set of fearsome multimedia computer systems.  The concept would be that you wait your turn to get up there and do something with the huge display, the audio synthesizer, the 3D sculpting printer, and whatever other toys they have.  No doubt the best acts would feature some audience participation.  (Has anyone yet actually invented Aldous Huxley’s “feelies” movies?)  Example:  instant group therapy, with volunteers from the audience wired for galvanic skin response, heartrate, etc., complete with therapeutically trained group leader and audio and visual feedback indicating how each group member is responding up on the big display.

1.  I do a Google search.  It gives too many results.  I refine it.  It gives fewer.  I want to see the cascading list of what I had before, and what I have now, and what I get when I refine it further.  Color-coding would be good, to show me (in e.g., blue) which ones dropped out in the first round, and (in e.g., green) which ones dropped out in the refined search, etc.

2.  Having refined my Google search, I begin to look at individual articles.  I want to annotate what I have found.  Under each Google hit, I want a space where I can write notes to myself about what this website contains.  I want it to happen within the Google format, so my notes will come up again if I do a similar study in the future.  Having annotated various webpages in the Google search results, I want a check box that allows me to hide the less relevant results, or perhaps display them in greyed or smaller print.

3.  I want to be able to design categories, and to click all categories that apply to each website Google finds (e.g., “informational site,” “product sale site,” “too good to lose”), and save my clicks, and do future searches (for e.g., “great vacations”) just within webpages I have already marked with checkboxes (as being “too good to lose”).