Dual Immersion Enhances Attention.

The benefit of dual immersion in education has come up here before; the Prospero blog on Economist.com is the reason that I again return to the subject.  Earlier studies pointed to the benefit of bilingual education by noting enhanced executive function and delayed mental decline; but new research has special relevance for the screen-time enhanced, short attention span generation we all seem to be raising.

Roberto Filippi led a team that investigated the ability of bilinguals -- not those with a modest ability in a foreign language that is rarely employed, but in those who are required to use the language frequently in daily life -- to avoid distraction when concentrating on speech.  The study assessed listening comprehension while interfering conversations, first in English (understood by all subjects), and then in Greek (understood by none), were played at the same time.  The bilinguals exceeded the controls in both measures, supporting the hypothesis of the researchers that switching languages constantly exercises the mind; Prospero compares it to Crossfit for the brain.

This topic came up for David Brooks in the New York Times about four months ago, in his column "The Art of Focus."  Brooks suggested we're all losing the attention "war," living distracted lives, unable to focus on what we want to or should focus on.  Brooks cited research showing that two-thirds of the subjects in a comprehensive study of white collar professionals reported they do not have the ability to focus on one thing at a time at work. For the concerned parent, this is a strong argument that the impact of a dual immersion education, as our students move through their academic and professional careers, may stretch far beyond the obvious power it grants to communicate in more than one language ...

@sonomanews, a well reasoned and valuable pool editorial -- http://tinyurl.com/mjhxw2e

"How To Save A River," 

David M. Bolling (1993)

online at http://tinyurl.com/nf7qj4c 

via Amazon at http://tinyurl.com/m8yok9m

So, I give the Sonoma Index-Tribune a fair (sometimes, they think, unfair) share of criticism when they take chances on publishing third party pieces on their editorial page. But the editorials they draft themselves are different.  Today, they comment on the plans for Sonoma's pool, and the editorial is well-taken.

There's a specific reason that I want to single out this editorial, and it's because it debunks an idea that's been advanced against the pool that's obviously wrong, but that the community needed someone to do the math on, and to publish widely:

"[W]e have begun hearing timid voices of dissent, arguing that in the midst of the worst drought in modern California history we can ill-afford to waste water on a non-essential facility like a public pool." 

Intuitively, most people sense that there's no way a Valley of 42,296 people has its water use significantly impacted by an aquatic complex, but the argument creates a certain degree of uncertainty. Earlier this year, that kind of uncertainty (in reverse) was used by Roger Hartley to go after the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, which I blogged about here. So the Index-Tribune broke out their reference materials, fired up Excel, and ran the numbers:

"[T]he average, daily per capita water consumption in Sonoma County is 160 gallons ... [t]he figure for Sonoma is closer to 180 gallons. We are also being asked – almost but not quite mandated – to reduce that consumption by 20 percent, a per capita reduction of 32 gallons a day. For the estimated 40,000 residents of the Sonoma Valley, that daily reduction in water use would equal about 1,280,000 gallons. [emphasis added.] 

"The volume of a standard Olympic swimming pool is about 660,000 gallons."

And there it is; a half-day's reduction by the Valley, along the lines requested by the Sonoma County Water Agency, and we've filled the pool.  Water's an important issue, but when you have a newspaper edited by the former executive director of Friends of the River, you should expect water policy's use as a red herring to get shut down, rather hard, quite quickly.

This isn't to say that the City Council meeting on July 21 necessarily epitomized Sonoma's ideal of procedural due process and organizational rationality.  Indeed, the hurried, rushed, and probably not-yet-fully-thought-through planning for the City of Sonoma's contribution to the pool demonstrates all the problems local government has in marshaling initiative. But the great and the good are not enemies, and the efforts (thus far) should be applauded, while knowing that the hard questions on ownership, the funding of construction, operations, and long-term maintenance remain unanswered.

@nytdavidbrooks, today is your best column ever.

David Brooks, writing in the New York Times today, wrote just about the best column I think he's ever come up with.  He starts with a distinction between baseball and soccer as cognitive metaphors for understanding modern life, and comes down decidedly on the side of soccer.

"Baseball is a team sport, but it is basically an accumulation of individual activities ... soccer is not like that ... [soccer] is defined by the context created by all the other players ... [m]ost of us spend our days thinking we are playing baseball, but we are really playing soccer. We think we individually choose what career path to take, whom to socialize with, what views to hold. But, in fact, those decisions are shaped by the networks of people around us more than we dare recognize."

Welcome to the party, sir.

image available at http://tinyurl.com/qh8ww2f

"Once we acknowledge that, in life, we are playing soccer, not baseball, a few things become clear. First, awareness of the landscape of reality is the highest form of wisdom. It’s not raw computational power that matters most; it’s having a sensitive attunement to the widest environment, feeling where the flow of events is going. Genius is in practice perceiving more than the conscious reasoning."

This is legibility via the back-door.  Brooks is arguing that value lies in awareness of the contours of the forest, rather than reshaping it to be "computable" (or presuming that it is legible in the first instance). This is a clarion call for evidence-based evaluation of reality, rather than the computation frame of thinking.  That concept's come up here before (and again here).

"... [s]occer is like a 90-minute anxiety dream — one of those frustrating dreams when you’re trying to get somewhere but something is always in the way. This is yet another way soccer is like life."

"Red on Maroon" (1959)
Mark Rothko (1903‑1970), Tate Modern
available at http://tinyurl.com/ohsovbl

This is Rothko's Red on Maroon -- a gateway through which one may struggle to pass, to a
destination unknown. A blocked portal, through which you're not even sure you want to go, knowing only that you feel little choice, on a path you sense will be fraught with danger, danger that we fear (which came up here).

Sometimes you want to just acknowledge the quality of another's writing, and while Brooks' often doesn't resonate with me like it once did, I think his time spent leading a writing seminar at Yale University may be paying off ...

#rebeccapurple.

Rebecca Alison Meyer
Ahuva Raya bat Kayla
7 June 2008 – 7 June 2014
image available at http://tinyurl.com/mrkb3vw 

On June 7, 2014, Rebecca Alison Meyer, age 6, of Beachwood, Ohio, passed away from complications associated with an anapestic astrocytoma ("brain cancer").  She and her parents, Kathryn and Eric Meyer, endured a multiyear struggle to save her life; Eric, a web technology expert concerning Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) blogged poignantly about the treatment.  The final memorial Eric wrote for Rebecca can be read here; the Economist's Babbage (technology) columnist drew attention to it today here:

"The death of a child is always a tragedy, and people of good will try to make sense of it through whatever means they have."

Eric's friends had one tool at their disposal to memorialize his daughter -- in CSS.  Style sheets control the appearance of certain items on a web page, and they allow colors to be expressed hexadecimally; #000000 is black, #FFFFFF is white. Other colors are combinations in between.  However, there are a certain select group of colors that may be expressed by name. For example, #ADFF2F can also be described as #GreenYellow.

Rebecca was particularly fond of purple -- her parents asked that family and friends at her funeral wear purple in memory of her.  Many who were touched by Eric's relating of Becca's story couldn't attend, for they were all over the world.  But a group of technologists, led by Jeffrey Zeldman, suggested that #663399 in CSS be designated #beccapurple.  As of the nightly Firefox build on June 23, the color has indeed been designated by name, but as #rebeccapurple.  Eric requested the change, saying:

"A couple of weeks before she died, Rebecca informed us that she was about to be a big girl of six years old, and Becca was a baby name. Once she turned six, she wanted everyone (not just me) to call her Rebecca, not Becca." 

"She made it to six. For almost twelve hours, she was six. So Rebecca it is and must be."

One particular passage from Eric's writings especially moved me, because it expressed and captured something so clearly important. In her last days, Eric and Kat made sure that, as long as she was able, Rebecca could go each day to kindergarten.  His explanation of why is one of the most saddening and yet eloquent statements of the nature of education and parenting I've ever read.  And so, as my tribute to Eric and Kat, as well as Rebecca Meyer, I include that passage, from May 1 of this year, from a post Eric entitled "Heroic Measures."

"This morning, I walked Rebecca and her best friend to kindergarten, all of us enjoying the crisp spring sunshine after the long, cold winter. The girls ran ahead of me to see if the playground had been re-flooded by last night’s rains (it hadn’t) and then balance-walked a low retaining wall. Once inside the school doors, I hugged and kissed Rebecca and told her to have a good day, collecting a hug and kiss and a 'Love you, Daddy' in return. I watched as she tromped down the hallway in her sparkly new Bella Ballerina shoes and pajamas (today is a special Pajama Day at school) and rounded the corner out of sight. And then I handed her principal a Do Not Resuscitate order." 

"... [w]e carry DNR cards with us, and have given the school a DNR form sealed into a manila envelope with our names and phone numbers written on the outside, because if she suddenly seizes, our overriding goal is to make her as comfortable as possible while she dies. The EMTs or hospice or we ourselves will give her medication to take away the pain and, if at all possible, the fear. As much as she needs." 

"... [w]e send her to school because she loves it there, however much she may complain about having to get up in the morning and get dressed and put on a coat to walk to school. Try as she may to hide it, she loves to learn. She loves her teacher, her classmates, and her friends, and they love her in return. It would be selfish of us to take that away, despite the risks, despite the hours of separation. It would shift some of our burden onto her shoulders, force her to pay the cost of our sorrow and fear ... we can give her her life, as whole and unbroken as we can manage, and an unspoken promise to fiercely guard it from even ourselves."

"We can give her this."

Who Turns Out?

About six weeks ago, I ran across this story, sort of a typical California pre-election analysis piece. The title of the article (as reprinted in the Petaluma Argus-Courier) made me squint to make sure I was reading it right -- "Bay Area tops state's voter turnout." I started reading, and one paragraph in particular caught my eye, because it mentioned Sonoma. "Poor people from Sonoma are far more likely to cast a ballot than someone living in poverty in Echo Park [Los Angeles]." The article attributed the quote to Paul Mitchell, the vice-president of Political Data Inc.

Paul Mitchell

image available at http://tinyurl.com/mk5hs2k

High voter turnout, expressed as a percentage, is generally seen as evidence of the legitimacy of a political system, while low turnout can lead to unequal representation among various parts of the population. Low turnout tends to be concentrated amongst the young and the poor, leading to significant under-representation in elections, with the potential to lead to improperly skewed policy. If Paul's right, that's pretty good news for Sonoma County.

So I went and took a look at the election results last night and this morning, to see what the data looks like.  California does a very efficient job of reporting election returns from different counties as they come in; the page is here. The Secretary of State conveniently makes the data downloadable as a CSV (thank-you!).  I pulled it this morning and graphed turnout, expressed as a percentage.  The results are on the right; a PDF of them is here (you'll probably need the resolution of the PDF to see the individual county names labeling the data points). 

I plotted the data on the log of the number of voters in each county, because the massive variance in the number of registered voters (Alpine with 766, Los Angeles with 4,857,424) makes a lin-lin comparison nearly impossible.  I did a power law regression on the data, which fits pretty well; as county size scales, voter turnout appears to decline fairly regularly.  

PDF available at http://tinyurl.com/obe7hjm

So, the Bay Area doesn't lead the state in turnout.  That award goes to the northern counties, and those of the Sierra foothills.  Tiny Sierra County turns out more than 60% (Alpine, so small I couldn't even get it on this graph, turns out nearly 70%).  There's a cluster of nine (admittedly, sparsely populated) counties clustered near 40%, all with 50,000 voters or less. Voting's a big deal in a small, perhaps remote community, and it shows.  

A second cluster drew my eye -- on the lower right, seven counties, all with more than 1.4 million citizens.  They are Santa Clara, Alameda, Sacramento, San Bernardino, Riverside, Orange, and San Diego Counties. Between them, they have 6,993,135 registered voters -- two million more voters than Los Angeles County, and a million more voters than the remaining 50 counties combined.  Their turnout is exceptionally low; only two of them managed to clear 20%, Santa Clara and San Diego, and even then, it was by a whisker.  Their location's also interesting; these counties are generally the southern (and to some extent, the eastern) neighbors of the California metropolises that garner an outsized degree of attention, San Francisco and Los Angeles.  

It was the third cluster that really got my attention, though. It's a cluster that's significantly above the trend line.  This group of counties, despite their size, still turn out a relatively high percentage of their voters. From north to south, they are Sonoma, Marin, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Barbara counties.  The number of voters inside these counties is modest. But the number of votes they cast is significant. The four counties were responsible for 219,674 votes on June 3; only Orange, Los Angeles, and San Diego Counties cast more votes than the four put together. The 1,453,951 residents of the quartet cast just 20,000 votes less than the 3.09 million residents of Orange County. 

PDF available at http://tinyurl.com/lb5jsff

The parallel between Santa Barbara and SLO, and Marin and SoCo, strikes me as interesting. While it is Paul's point concerning poverty that got my attention, it is the similarities between the "1-2" northern territories of the great coastal cities, and the fact that they are both amongst the most substantial positive outliers (to the extent we consider higher turnout beneficial) on the graph, that holds my attention.  The unusual motivation of their citizens to participate in their governments makes me wonder what other trends in the data patterns for the two sets of counties may coincide.

But that's a question for another day ...

A Chef For All Seasons.

Michael Ghilarducci, 1989

My father-in-law, Michael Joseph Ghilarducci, 66, of Sonoma, California, passed away at home in his sleep on the morning of Monday, May 5, 2014. The following is his obituary, that will run in the Sonoma Index-Tribune, The Press Democrat, and the Marin Independent Journal on Friday, May 9.

--

Michael was born on October 31, 1947 in San Francisco, California to Francesco Ghilarducci and Mara Jean Ghilarducci (née Baker).  Michael graduated from Woodside High School in 1965, and San Francisco City College’s Hotel and Restaurant Administration program in 1967.  He married Virginia (“Gia”) Ghilarducci (née Wade) on April 12, 1969. 

Michael’s career in the restaurant business spanned fifty-five years, beginning with his work in L’Auberge in Redwood City and his father’s restaurant Villa d’Este in Los Altos.  Michael opened his first restaurant, “Chez Joseph” on Jack London Square in Oakland in 1970, followed by “Columbus Street” in Los Altos, and “Liaison” in Palo Alto. 

On December 9, 1985, Michael and Gia purchased Sonoma’s historic Giacomo Mazza House, taking over a business long known locally as the “Depot Hotel Restaurant.” Michael and Gia converted the upstairs floor of the Mazza House into their family home, where they proceeded to raise their two children, Gianna Ghilarducci Kelly and Antonio Francesco Ghilarducci.

Michael and Gia Ghilarducci

Cooking Class, Depot Hotel Restaurant Kitchen, 2013

In 1987, Michael and Gia began teaching cooking classes in the Depot Hotel Restaurant’s kitchen. The courses proved popular and successful; in 2001, Michael and Gia began leading groups of their students through Europe, teaching classes linked to the locations visited.  The curriculum included stays in Provence, Tuscany, Argentina, and Umbria, and along the coast of the Mediterranean on board Crystal Cruise Lines. In the summer of 2002, one particularly memorable set of classes were taught jointly by Michael and Jacques Pépin in a weeklong series at Château de Villette, in Condécourt north of Paris. 

In December of 2000, Michael and Gia purchased a vineyard property, located north of Kelseyville, California.  The Ghilarduccis began producing Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot under the Wildhurst label in 2003, and after development of an additional portion of the property, in 2007, their own Fumé Blanc.  Production from the vineyards continues today, now under the family’s own label. 

In 2008, after similar training to Michael’s at San Francisco City College, and work at La Folie, the French Laundry, and Sonoma’s El Dorado Kitchen, Michael’s son Antonio joined the family’s restaurant as head chef. Michael thereupon became chef-proprietor, working alongside his son in the kitchen.

Wedding, Gianna Ghilarducci Kelly and John Kelly
Depot Hotel Restaurant
March 24, 2002.

In total, Michael operated the Depot Hotel Restaurant with his family for 1,482 weeks, during which time he typically supervised ordering, menu preparation, and house operations.  A week seldom went by without Michael pounding veal in the kitchen on a Wednesday morning, negotiating with wine salesmen at the bar at midday, or visiting tables and greeting guests at the door.

Michael was welcoming, gentle and affable; possessed of a deep, genuine laugh and a marvelous sense of mirth, yet also a seriousness and gravity as occasions called for. The survivor of the early and unfortunate passings of his own parents, Michael’s response was to develop an irreverent sense of humor, an abiding sympathy for any and all underdogs, and a near comical repartee with his wife Gia that brought tears of laughter to friends, staff, and family alike.  He was an avid amateur sailor and boater, and a lifelong fan of Formula One and the San Francisco 49ers.  He thought most wine should be talked over, not about, that the best deterrent to bad driving would be a sharp metal spike in the center of every steering wheel, and that the speed limit should be waived for those, such as himself, capable of demonstrating superior skill in operating an automobile.  He was a decent shot but a better boxer; a lead blocker for O.J. Simpson on the City College football team; a good bocce player but hopeless with computers. He was fond of caffè lattes in the morning and spumoni at night; could impersonate a rabbit for his grandchildren with nothing more than a napkin; and would, when pressed, demonstrate a remarkable ability to impersonate Donald Duck.

Michael Ghilarducci with first grandchild, Siena Kelly

Depot Hotel Restaurant, January 31, 2008.

Michael is survived by his wife of 45 years, Virginia Wade Ghilarducci; his daughter Gianna Ghilarducci Kelly (John Alexander Kelly), his son Antonio Francesco Ghilarducci (Sarah Duran Ghilarducci), and his four grandchildren, Siena Grace Kelly, Allegra Elizabeth Kelly, Lucca Emerson Ghilarducci, and Zoey Emiliana Ghilarducci;  He is also survived by his four younger brothers, Vincent, Robert, Nicholas and Gregorio, and his two younger sisters, Antoinette Emerick and Victoria Dockstaeder.

The family thanks Duggan’s Mission Chapel in Sonoma for all their assistance. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that a donation instead be made in Michael’s honor to the Wounded Warrior Project, P.O. Box 758517, Topeka, Kansas 66675 (http://tinyurl.com/mikeghilarducci).

The Moral Power of Curiosity.

I point out columns by David Brooks here from time to time, mostly because his column regularly

David Brooks

Photo by Allie Krause

Image available at http://tinyurl.com/loydwna

features in my weekly reading list, and his segment on the NewsHour with Mark Shields on PBS is a Friday night favorite at our house. According to Wikipedia, he's "the sort of conservative pundit that liberals like, someone who is 'sophisticated' and 'engages with' the liberal agenda[.]"

Today is one of the better examples of him doing so. His column is entitled "The Moral Power of Curiosity," which is particularly apt. The illustration in the column is about the discovery of flash trading in stock markets, which is a form of front-running. The specifics of the example are interesting, because Brooks' notes the limitations of the business metaphor for understanding human behavior:

"One lesson of this tale is that capitalism doesn’t really work when it relies on the profit motive alone. If everybody is just chasing material self-interest, the invisible hand won’t lead to well-functioning markets. It will just lead to arrangements in which market insiders take advantage of everybody else. Capitalism requires the full range of motivation, including the intrinsic drive for knowledge and fairness."

I could literally not agree more, and this phenomenon is especially crucial in education.  You can't just rely on individuals pursuing equilibrium strategies -- the effectiveness of democracy turns on motivated individuals driven by a desire for knowledge and fairness -- our government, and our civil society, is a product of the essence of education.