Liberals and conservatives alike bemoan the quality of television. Newton Minnow's 'vast wasteland' description for television is as accurate today as it was when he said it 40 years ago. Where I live now, we have over 70 channels. Fortunately, I get it for free as part of my living arrangements because there's no well in heck I'd pay $50 a month for it.
Quite frequently, I flip through all the 70+ channels and the best thing on is an ESPN Classics hockey game from 1993 or a Who's Line Is It Anyway re-run. And the cable company wants customers to spend an extra $15 for digital cable so they can get four different varities of vanilla instead of just one.
So-called reality television, which is nothing more than lame soap operas with non-professional actors, is of course the worst thing on television. Not surprisingly, it gets great ratings. Jerry Springer and professional wrestling (two different versions of the same thing) have long since proven that in TV, there is little correlation between popularity and quality. Conversely, the few times a really good dramatic series comes on, take Freaks and Geeks for example, you're lucky if it lasts two months.
Now, one group is claiming that "reality" TV is actually more harsher and crude than fiction series. The conservative media watchdog, the Parents Television Council, concluded that the amount of crude language and sexual references on unscripted TV shows has increased markedly over the past few years, surpassing the levels on traditional comedies and dramas... The two most offensive shows, according to the PTC, were CBS' "Big Brother 4" and the WB's "The Surreal Life." Both share the same premise: forcing a group of strangers to live together under a camera's eye.
I remember watching MTV's The Real World, probably the first "reality" show, when it came out about 10 years ago. It was interesting for a few months but got boring really quickly. Each successive version was redunant. It was all about gossip and backbiting and who would hook up with whom. I switched off really quickly. It baffles me that this sort of thiing continues to hook in people. I'm not a snob, I just can't conceive how anyone would find that interesting after more than a few weeks.
Of course, if not for soccer and Seinfeld re-runs, I'm not sure I'd watch TV at all.
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Over at The Globalist, Financial Times journalist Martin Wolf concludes that the World Bank, his former employer, is a fatally flawed institution. Supported by his chief economic adviser, the late Hollis Chenery, [then World Bank President Robert McNamara] put into effect a Stalinist vision of development. Faster growth would follow a rise in investment and an increase in availability of foreign exchange. Both would require additional resources from outside — and much of these needed resources would come from the Bank.
Under his management, the World Bank and its lending grew enormously. Every division of the bank found itself under great pressure to lend money, virtually regardless of the quality of the projects on offer or of the development programs of the countries.
Wolf writes that at his own time at the World Bank in the 1970s, every developing country — however limited its intellectual resources — was expected to produce a five-year economic plan in pale imitation of the Stalinist model.
Sophisticated developing countries, such as India, produced sophisticated plans. Less sophisticated countries produced less sophisticated plans. All these plans had one thing in common, however: They were fictions.
But they were not harmless fictions. They inflicted grave damage on the economies and people of these supposedly "planned" societies.
Wolf also notes the World Bank's fundamental weakness: It had to assume that the government represented the interests of the country. And it reinforced an unjustifiably collectivist view of that national interest.
Bank lending made it easier for corrupt — and occasionally vicious — governments to ignore the interests and wishes of their peoples.
In fact, it wasn't until the 1990s, that the World Bank finally admitted the seriousness of bad government as a constraint on development.
He concludes by point out that criticizing the current structure of the world economy shouldn't be reduced into the simplistic label: 'anti-globalization.' To defend a liberal world economy is not to defend the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO or any specific institution. These must be judged — and reformed or discarded — on their merits.
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In yet another embarassment for New York State's Education Department, The Times Union of Albany reported that Students who took the Spanish edition of [mid-June's] Math A Regents exam will have their tests rescored due to a pair of questions that contained errors. "There was a problem on a couple of the questions with the translation," said Education Department spokesman Jonathan Burman. However, one test consultant who has worked for the state said she believed some of the math questions were confusing in the way they were written, regardless of the language.
One of last year's state math exams was a lightning rod for controversy as it was deemed above the level that it should've been. The previous year's physics state test was also an embarassment after it was found to be too long, with insufficient time for students to answer all questions. The questions themselves were said to be harder than necessary. In that case, a score of 47 was re-scaled to 65... perhaps saying that 47=65 set the stage for the next year's math controversy.
All this is another blow to state Education Commissioner Richard Mills, who is a fundamentalist believer in the virtue of high-stakes tests as the main way to achieve the vaunted 'accountability' in education. Except the Board of Regents can't go a year without issuing a screwed up a test. You'd think these problems might temper the commissioner's fetish for high-stakes testing, or at least give him pause for thought.
Instead, a friend of mine told me of how one of her friend's kids had an A- average in English. But when he took the high-stakes test, he didn't poorly. Maybe he was having a bad day. Who knows why? So the school was required to provide him with a tutor. With the tutor, his average in English was... A-. Is this really the best use of limited school resources? On a kid with an A- average who was having no apparent problems except, it seems, on one particular day? But the state law did not give the school any discresion.
If the state wants some artificial 'accountability' for teachers and students, they could start with the testmakers. Or they could start with themselves.
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