Before I start, I should clarify that I do not see a causal connection between i-genes and a child's first language. To argue that there is such a connection is ludicrous; very obviously, children are not programmed by genetics to speak a given language. We know this based on what we already know about language acquisition: it occurs uniformly in a stage spanning from 12months through 4 years. All humans learn their first language during this period from their home environment. However they do it, they do it at the same time and nearly the same pace without regards as to which language they learn. Local, regional, and global differences in language use only become an issue as the child grows up and demonstrate proficiency to adults who may use a slightly different language.

With that said, while there is no way i-genes can select which language a child speaks, it is plausible if not discoverable that i-genes can show a child's ability to speak any language to be greatly improved. Thus the central claim here is i-genes are directly related to basic cognitive ability.

That much is undoubtedly true. We see children inherit very many traits from their parents, and if we do not question whether height or eye-color is a direct expression of inherited genetic material, then we must accept that some amount of cognitive ability is also inherited. The major questions are how much? and does inheritance explain the existence of racially based student achievement gaps?

How Much Intelligence is Inherited?

The science of genetic inheritance is very old, and we need not learn much of it to understand how parents' intelligence can be passed on to sons and daughters. In the simplest terms, we can imagine four different i-genes: a dominant ("S") and recessive ("s") smart i-gene, and a dominant ("D") and recessive ("d") dumb i-gene.

Let's say Adam is quite average, with the following i-genetic makeup:

sd

Nothing spectacular about Adam; he's got a recessive version of both genes. Now let's consider his partner Eve, who has a different i-gene expression:

SD

Eve is an exact average with a dominant smart gene and a dominant dumb gene. Now we can determine all the possible inheritances of Adam and Eve's children:

Ss, Sd, Ds, Dd

Here we can see, with our oversimplified version of things, that Adam and Eve will have a 50%-50% shot at intelligent children.

Because Adam and Eve's prospects are so simplified, they more or less represent what to expect from the children of very average people. Now let's consider yourself, you very smart person:

SS + SS = SS, SS, SS, SS (100% smart)

SS + SD = SS, SD, SS, SD (50% smart, 50% average)

SS + Ss = SS, Ss, SS, Ss (100% smart)

SS + Sd = SS, Sd, SS, Sd (100% smart)

SS + ss = Ss, Ss, Ss, Ss (100% smart)

SS + DD = SD, SD, SD, SD (100% average)

SS + Dd = SD, Sd, SD, Sd (50% smart, 50% average)

SS + Ds = Sd, Ss, SD, Ss (75% smart, 25% average)

SS + dd = Sd, Sd, Sd, Sd (100% smart)

So it looks like, even if your partner is extremely dumb, the expectation is that your children will be average (assuming the interaction between two different, dominant traits is the exact average). According to our simplified model, you won't have dumb children.

Now, it turns out that the results are analogus in case you are extremely dumb yourself. If your i-gene pair is "DD", then the highest intelligence your children will show is "SD", or the exact average. More than half your partners will give you children as dumb as you; only one special someone is guaranteed to give you the averge child you hope for. Suddenly things look quite a bit less optimistic.

What does all this mean?

At best it means that if i-genes are simply passed down, then a basic intelligence level will be kept in the family until it is bred out *unless* a couple starts at average to begin with (like Adam and Eve). In other words, at face value it looks like the prospects of improving children's intelligence relies on selecting for  "smart", dominant i-genes. That means we are going to have trouble justifying efforts to close any achievement gap between races, if indeed i-genes coding different levels of intelligence are more predominant in one race over another. The pure genetics argument is daunting.

Why Genes Cannot Explain the Achievement Gap

If you are depressed, about to pop the champagne cork, or asking the NAACP to sue me to oblivion--stop. The simple picture I drew above has many holes in it, that upon closer examination, prove the genetics argument to be unsound.

William Dickens of the Brookings Institute has the following to say on the topic:

If researchers were able to identify all the genes that cause individual differences in school readiness, understand the mechanism  by which they affect readiness and the magnitude of those effects, and assess the relative frequency of those genes in the black and white populations, they would know precisely the extent to which genetic differences explain the black-white gap. But only a few genes that influence cognitive ability or other behaviors relevant to school readiness have been tentatively identified, and nothing is known about their frequency in different populations. Nor are such discoveries immanent.

So much for the direct arguments. We don't know any relevant facts about the genetic component of intelligence; therefore if we were to support even the oversimplified genetic argument above, we would have to do so relying on circumstantial and indirect evidence. Traditionally, this evidence has been test scores, including standardized tests and IQ exams. Many have tried arguing backwards from the results of such testin to the genetic root. However, there is ample evidence to suggest that such a backwards supposition would be incorrect.

Dickens writes:

Over the past century, dozens of countries around the world have seen increases in measured cognitive ability over time as large or even larger than the black-white gap... The score gains have been documented even between a large group of fathers and sons taking the same test only decades apart, making it impossible that the gains are due to changes in genes. Clearly environmental changes can cause huge leaps in measured cognitive ability.

The case seems to be shut; genes don't exclusively predict academic achievement. But to say that is only to refute an explanation, not provide one. Genes may exhibit predisposition to cognitive ability, but, given the fact that they do not explain the major differences between the intelligence of two groups, something else must account for the gap between minority and white achievement on exams.

In my next post, I will present Dickens alternate model, which stipulates that "multiplier processes" are available to Whites, and this difference in environment accounts for exaggerated differences in test scoring.

A general rule for us — if there is such a thing — is that the music should be appropriate for the story and not overwhelm the story or gratuitously play on people’s emotions. What constitutes gratuitous use? That good question is hard to answer. Music can be effective at creating a particular mood, or, in more extreme cases, it can also signal whether a particular moment should be construed as happy or sad. Purists might argue that the picture and natural sound alone should be used to establish the emotion of a scene, but is that true?

After considering a few examples, Olsen's lackluster conclusion is that

in the end, it is the characters that count: the setting they are in and the challenges they face. The key is to be judicious and practice restraint, to seriously consider when music is appropriate and when it is not. Music used well will enhance a piece without changing it or detracting from it.

He fails to answer the question he starts with and instead offers an overstatement of the maxim "it depends."

Let's rephrase the question, and in doing so, clarify it: Should music be used to establish the emotion of a film or video scene? Olsen ought have seen the answer in his own statement, "it is the characters that count." If it is true that the characters are the significant element, then it must also be true that the characters should establish the emotion of a scene, likely by being sympathetic or antagonistic. In which case, music must not establish the emotion.

Even so, it is also clear that characters are not exclusively fundamental to the emotional pallet. Following Aristotle, the fundamental piece is the plot or the causal sequence which determines where characters of a certain type end up in certain situations. For example, a story of a lovely woman who is faithful to her husband and does nothing risqué may not arouse much emotion--the story will be dull, for the most part. However a story of a lovely woman who is unfaithful and ruins her husband's life--while maintaining a sympathetic characterization throughout--will cause a great stir in emotions. This latter example is of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, a book which poses many difficulties for a reader who wants Aristotle's categories to sit undisturbed, but also tends to prove the point: characters are interesting only insofar as they serve a discreet purpose in the storytelling.

So what do we make now of the question, "should music establish emotion in video?" Obviously the immediate choice whether to overlay music on a scene does depend on what the editor wants to achieve emotionally and how--but that is more a description of what happens in the editing process than a judgement on how one should construct a scene.

Generally speaking, we should instead look at what Olsen is describing. He is describing the process of montage editing. He is describing taking one finished piece of music and combining it with one finished piece of moving photography. The special status of film and video is that multiple artworks can be recombined to construct a new artwork. That process of combination, or montage, is what will ultimately give a finished scene its emotional quality. Therefore, if the emotion comes from the music used, and not the combination of music with imagery, or the combination of various images, or what happens plot wise or in the performance of the actors--if music establishes the mood then we don't have a very good scene on our hands. What we have is a bad or poorly constructed portion of video or film that has been dressed up with music to look better.

Watch the following, first without sound then with, and judge for yourself whether what you see is emotionally effective. (Full disclaimer: I think this clip is bullshit.)

First some background. The gene is essential in embryonic development; all mammals have it and depend on it for proper formation of the lungs, stomach and brain. As with many genes, there are slight variations between the species. Hence, humans have one version of FOXP2 and mice have a different version. As it happens, a non-fatal mutation in the human version causes specific deficiencies in linguistic ability--a discovery that led biologists to believe that the human gene enables necessary brain developments that allow for speech. So they carefully replaced the version naturally found in mice with the human FOXP2 to see what happens.

The result of this experiment is fascinating, and Nicholas Wade does a superb job in explaining the outcomes:

Despite the mammalian body's dependence on having its two FOXP2 genes work just right, Dr. Wolfgang Enard's team found that the human version of FOXP2 seemed to substitute perfectly for the mouse version in all the mouse's tissues except for the brain.

In a region of the brain called the basal ganglia, known in people to be involved in language, the humanized mice grew nerve cells that had a more complex structure and produced less dopamine...humanized baby mice, when isolated, made whistles that had a slightly lower pitch, among other differences.

That "slightly lower pitch"--though one might be unexcited upon first hearing of it--has enough scientific relevance to show that there are observable differences in the human genome which are by themselves responsible for language.

It's truly mind boggling, especially if you think about it as follows. Imagine we discover all the genes necessary for human speech. Theoretically, we would then be able to trace the activation of those genes to specific tissue development, and from there we could definitively say what structures in the brain are responsible for the production of speech, and how. We could then infer the functional mechanisms of language, and possibly build machines to mimic those functions.

All that is only sci-fi for now; but as of today we know with certainty that FOXP2 is the first of many new bio-linguistic discoveries to come.

Image from: St. Clair, R. et al "The Basal Ganglia and Serial Order of Communicative Signs"

Obama acknowledged one (Breyer) of the two liberal justices appointed to the court during Bill Clinton’s presidency. (The other is Ruth Bader Ginsburg.) In different ways and to different degrees, each of them has championed yet another conception of the judiciary: one in which the courts, in most cases, should play only a “minimalist” role in America’s democracy, generally preferring deferential and narrow rulings to broad ones. This doctrine developed in part as a strategic and defensive response to the fact that conservative activists on the Supreme Court were aggressively striking down progressive legislation. But minimalism is also principled. It urges judges to issue opinions that focus closely on the particular circumstances of the case at hand, steering clear of sweeping pronouncements about liberty, equality or justice. By so doing, the theory goes, the courts can avoid getting too far ahead of the will of the people and their elected representatives, and preserve judicial legitimacy in the process.

But an amateur would think that, because of the very fact a case must be petitioned before the Court in order for a law to be struck down, the will of the people is preserved in citizens' right to sue. It seems perfectly legal and constitutionally sound for the court system to be used as an instrument of direct democracy--a way to bypass the complex legislative procedures of Congress.

The problem, however, is this: why should a single court have the power to veto the represented opinion of the people on behalf of a minority interest? I think the answer is that although only one court--the Supreme Court--is constitutionally recognized as having soverign judicial power, the reality is that our federal system has its own internal checks and balances to ensure that any parties with an interest in a case is heard.

(If you are not familiar with public education in the US, America has a long an complicated history of inequality in the classroom. Long-lasting policies of both societal and statutory segregation during the late 19th and early 20th centuries manufactured the "achievement gap" that affirmative action and NCLB are supposed to bridge.)

But without even thinking about legislation and public funding, we can begin to assess today's disparities in education by considering an enormously unpopular hypothesis: that children who are classified in public documents as ethnic or racial "minorities" have substantially different educational experiences (EE) than their majority or "white" classmates, and that the minority EE is not accounted for in public testing. Hence, while standardized public testing accounts for differing populations, the fact that it is standardized means the test assumes a homogenous EE. Clearly such a homogeneity cannot exist.

Before going on, let's be clear about what I am not claiming. I am not saying that a Hispanic child learns differently than a White child. I am not saying that a Hispanic child has different skills, or aptitudes, or even goals than a White child. What I AM saying is that the content of a Hispanic child's EE is different from a White child. The very classification of "Hispanic" tells us this much: that the child's first language is a dialect of Mexican, Central or South American Spanish.

So then what exactly is an educational experience or EE. I believe a person's EE consists of a variety of the following:

1. Early childhood development, including (a) biological development, (b) first or "native" language(s), (c) family environment, and (d) social environment.
2. pre-school education, including (a) learning social skills, (b) learning language required for elementary education, and (c) learning simple tasks like hygiene, problem solving, etc.
3. Elementary education, including (a) reading skills, (b) math skills, (c) advanced social skills, and (d) intermediate problem solving skills

The way one enters stage one, and advances into stage three will determine the content (and not necessarily the quality) of one's EE.

Hence my comment that a Hispanic child will have a different EE than a White child, because a Hispanic child will typically learn Spanish as a first language. This changes the content of the child's EE, but does not alter the quality of her EE. For instance, she can grow up to be a very good student and enter a successful career; yet she will have had an EE quite different from someone who did not learn Spanish as a first language. In the end, it does not matter what sort of EE a person has had, so long as it was an EE that prepared her for accomplishing her goals.

Or, at least it should not matter. We can easily imagine a person whose EE did not include Vernacular American English. For example, a boy born to Chinese immigrants, for whatever reason, may not have been taught English until he enters pre-school. He may need extra time to learn the vernacular, and he may not be able to practice speaking English at home. Therefore, the child's success later in life might depend on how well he is able to "catch up" to kids who learn English as a first language, and how much public education accounts for his EE.

You can easily see, then, how a standardized test might misconstrue a child's learning development. A test can written for students who have a particular, common EE. However, those students who do not share that EE will have to spend much more time and energy than those that do. Therefore, we should expect their scores on that test to be lower. But we can also expect that these lower scores do not reflect lower intelligence--on the contrary, if African American Vernacular were the baseline for writing standardized tests, then White children would consistently score lower.

So how much of the achievement gap measures actual achievement, as opposed to expected differences in EE? I will leave that as an open question for now. To get your thoughts on this important issue started, you might like to try the NAEP Test yourself.

I was so despairate, I nearly ordered Google TiSP.

But I digress. A reader commented on my translation exercise, saying one must strive for accuracy in translation without losing the meaning of the text. This is by all means true; but the content of the belief spells out a much more complicated process than we may think.

For instance, what does it mean to say that "Yo tengo viente y tres annos" is accurately translated as "I am twenty-three years old"? The answer is plainly that the Spanish sentence conveys, without equivocation, exactly the same thing that the English sentence conveys. Moreover, what is conveyed is merely the meaning of the utterance; namely, that the speaker was born 23 years ago.

So a few things are going on when we translate this Spanish sentence into English. First, there is the conveyance or content of the Spanish. Some might say there is no content per-se, that the speaker merely wishes to communicate so as to have some sort of effect on the listener--informing him, interesting him, stalling or initiating conversation, etc. In any case, it is agreed that at the very least the speaker wishes to have himself understood, by a competent speaker of Spanish, and as a competent speaker of Spanish. If this were not the case, then it is hard to see how a speaker can accomplish anything without first establishing that he is communicating. He would just be making noises if this were not the case. So, there is some sort of intent behind saying, "Yo tengo viente y tres annos."

Second, there must be an equivalent conveyance in English. That is to say, if the Spanish is to be translated at all, then one must be able to establish communication in English as well as Spanish. One must be able to say, "I am twenty-three years old," effectively and intentionally. If not, then one would in effect translate the Spanish into noises that have no point of their own, besides being a receptacle and perhaps vehicle for the Spanish sentence. Think of radio waves; nobody speaks Radio. But we do "translate" regular speech like Spanish or English into radio waves, which then get turned back into the sounds corresponding to the original language. If translating were simply turning Spanish sentences into English ones, then it would seem no different than turning human speech into radio signals. But it is clearly more complex than that.

What's complex is the third point: language is not just effective, it is meaningful. Thinking more about our counterexample, the radio waves do have an effect. They transmit signals that are decoded into corresponding sounds, that are then understood by competent listeners. Yet the listeners do not listen to the radio signals. They listen to the sounds transmitted by the radio, and those transmissions themselves are not meaningful (unless the signals are in a code like Moorse, in which case you are using a language!). Spanish and English are their own languages, they have similar effects and sometimes the same meaning, as in the sentences "Yo tengo viente y tres annos" and "I am twenty-three years old".

But here's the catch. You cannot translate "Yo tengo viente y tres annos" into "I am twenty-three years old" without understanding both sentences separately, prior to the task of translation. In other words, if you don't know how to give your age in English, and you cannot speak any other languages that can serve as a proxy (like the Rosetta stone), then you cannot know how to give your age in Spanish. If you knew one of the two languages, then you could begin to figure out the other with the right effort.

Unfortunately, in my German course, this effort was never achieved. It is impossible to simply transcribe, word by word, from one language into the other and preserve meaning. For instance, transcribing (not translating) "Yo tengo viente y tres annos" into English you get "I have twenty and three years". That is not correct, simply because no native English speaker gives his age in that phrasing with a straight face. We learn to give our age by saying, "I am so-many years old." And, by knowing how to say that in English, and by recognizing that the Spanish speaker is trying to do the same exact thing, we learn the correct translation.

This all should be quite obvious, but the reasons why it is obvious are hard to grasp.

solidarity, n: (1) a bond of unity between individuals, united around a common goal or against a common enemy; (2) willingness to give psychological and/or material support when another person is in a difficult position

The Westboro Baptist Church staged a "protest" in Chicago today, with a supposed appearance on The University of Chicago campus. I did not see them--even though I made a trip to the Quads!-- because their stay was so short lived. Almost as short lived as....

Anyway; what I did see was some great friendship and solidarity on campus. Because UC people are generally intelligent, they knew enough not to get riled. And because it's a special sort of intelligence in Hyde Park, the student community figured out a novel way to respond to WBC "protesting"

In the foreground is a collection of Q&A (Queers and Associates) members and friends; in the background is a contingent of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity acting fabulous. Today's otherwise boring event was made memorable by a loving embrace of diversity, celebrated by people who had far more pressing concerns than a half-dozen fanatics from Kansas.

Petitions were passed around, urging students, faculty, and staff to speak out against Proposition 8 in California, currently being argued in the State Supreme Court. "What will this petition do?" I asked, and the woman pictured gave a good explanation of the Court's hearing process (apparently, because the law is a public referendum, the public gets a prominent argumentative position during the trial). I don't think many other protesters would be so well prepared, so rational.

This is, after all, the general neighborhood of the current US President. They tend to do their homework around here.

But as I was saying, the most striking aspect of the student body today was its solidarity. I don't know what the intention of WBC is in their "protests"; by that, I mean, exactly what do they "bear witness" of? Two things here:

1. A "protest" is generally a public action falling under the rightful and just exercise of free speech. More specifically, the aim of a protest is generally to oppose a practice or state-of-affairs in a meaningful way, so as to change it.
2. To "bear witness" is to make oneself into a vessel for some kind of message or philosophy--usually religious. One who "bears witness" is not only observing God's message and work; one also carries or "bears" the message/philosophy in her public life. In times when the religious are routinely tortured and murdered, this becomes a particularly strenuous mission.

Now, it seems to me that WBC doesn't do well to merge points 1 and 2. Yes, they oppose most of contemporary American culture--but it is fruitless for them to expect their actions to change the country piecemeal. After all, they expect God to punish America. And this is where 2 comes in, albeit obliquely. This isn't even an issue dealing with the difficulties of interpreting the Bible blah blah blah. It's the fact that the one event that WBC claims is an act of oppression-- oppression of the kind a true religious figure might face-- was described by its perpetrator as "an immature and dangerous prank" and has very little record outside WBC's own trumpeting. (The man apparentely threw some kind of explosive at WBC property, causing damages. He pleaded guilty and recieved probation.)

In fact, WBC is funded almost entirely by litigation. The church includes much of founder Fred Phelps' family. Phelps founded a law firm whose principals are all members of the church. Therefore, every time WBC sues someone or their home town of Topeka for infringing on their "protest" rights, WBC wins a small sum of cash. Phelps' firm gains a sizeable sum of legal fees by representing the church its members are a part of, and the families involved with "protests" can sustain their lifestyle.

Back to the UC students, whose lifestyle was supposedly facing God's wrath today.

Students could have easily gotten upset and perhaps disruptive. UC is a raging liberal institution. After all, just look at the Law School, or the Economics department, or Public Policy, or Political Science. They're so liberal they don't even think twice about reading books.

But I digress; WBC may have expected to encounter fiercer resistence, from the squirrels perhaps, but instead they came up against a group of students, so stressed out by their decadent lifestyle, they wanted to have fun.

Shame on them.

Whatever Wesboro Baptist Church did today, it surely brought out some of the best on campus.

Why am I so impressed by a counter-protest to a group I don't otherwise care about and didn't even get to see during their short visit? Because I was bored, cold, disappointed there wasn't a big fracas, and then finally moved by the love and kindness that hate groups have the strange potential to inspire. This might have been one of the most successful protests I have witnessed, despite its brevity and overall low impact.