As the parent of a kindergartner, my most important goal is to see that she fully develops her enormous potential.

Although I suspect that most positive outcomes in parenting can be attributed to a handful of factors - among them, simply being intentional - I believe that we must go even farther to equip kids for stark realities in the economy that exist now and will intensify as they eventually enter the job market.

A recent editorial in The New York Times^[1], points out the causes and effects of wage stagnation in the US. Although a bachelor’s degree was historically a ticket to a relatively high-paying job, the editorial notes that: “having a B.A. is less about obtaining access to high paying managerial and technology jobs and more about beating out less-educated workers for the barista or clerical job.” While Americans stress the importance of doing what you love and loving what you do, the reality for today’s students is that competition will play a larger role in ensuring their success than ever before. You may be doing what you love; but you need to be better than the next guy.

Professor Quanyu Huang in his new book “The Hybrid Tiger” looks carefully at the factors that shape the success of Chinese-American students, a group that is almost always best positioned in the academic competition. He stresses the importance of viewing education as a competition because it heightens ambition among children. American children, it seems, are increasingly shielded from competition in an attempt to protect their self-esteem. Instead of promoting self-esteem, though, it robs them of the drive for personal betterment and it gives them a distorted view of the way the world actually works. There are, after all, only a handful of spots in the freshmen class at each of the Ivy League schools.

Although there are strident opinions, both positive and negative about the effects of competition on performance, there is evidence that the context of competition makes a significant difference. Competition often improves performance when done to win (rather than to avoid loss), when the stakes are low, and when the reason for competition is to increase the level of mastery over a discipline. It seems that the benefit (or harm) of competition is in the framing.

Dr. David Shields, Professor of Educational Psychology at St.Louis Community College, has written about the framing effects on competition. He distinguishes authentic competition from decompetition wherein the latter is the typical “contest is war” embodiment of the term. In Dr. Shields’ framework, the looks at the role of metaphors in shaping the frame in which one can begin to think about competition.

Table adapted from David Shields, PhD, Harvard Business Review ^[2]

To synthesize the ideas of both Huang and Shields, competition is important. It creates a vital striving for excellence. It sets up a gap between where one is today and where she would like to be in the future. The gap is the “potential energy” that gets converted into work toward a goal. But it’s also the parents’ responsibility to frame competition this way. We know from our understanding of current events and the economy that the job market is highly competitive; but children lack an understanding of what this means for the future. In framing competition as an opportunity to push personal limits we can create the necessary conditions for ambitious striving without exposing kids to stakes so high that defeatism is the likely response.

But for the love of all that is good in the world, don’t give kids medals just for participation. Remember: participation is an expectation.

My relationship with the iPhone is coming to an end.

I love the iPhone. Rather, I love what it was before it became indispensable. But when a piece of technology becomes indispensable, I think we need to pause for a moment to evaluate whether we can’t truly live without it or whether it has insinuated itself in our lives in ways that make it seem like we can’t live without it. In other words, has the smartphone affect us in ways that have come to make us depend on it?

Expense

Smart phones are expensive. They are expensive to acquire and even more expensive to operate. In the last month, I paid over $94 for cellular voice and data services for 47 minutes of voice and 266 MB of data. For voice, this amounts to over $1 per minutes, which is ridiculously expensive.

Instead, I could purchase a prepaid phone for $20 or less, and a basic plan for $0.10 per minute. If I talk for 47 minutes, this would cost $4.70 per month without text messages.

Distraction can feel a lot like productivity

The problem with smartphones is that they can make the user feel like he’s accomplishing something, even when the “something” in this case, is just checking the email, reading vapid tweets, or updating Facebook status. But it’s a mental trick that the iPhone has played on us. All of these things involve the same motions - staring into the screen and gesturing with the fingertips, as doing something productive; so from a purely motor basis, we feel like we actually done something.

People? What people?

A UK study from 2011 showed that 50% of smartphone owners use their devices when they are in the company of others. The same study showed that 25% of users use their devices during mealtimes. Three years after these data were published, the situation is almost certainly even less favorable.

It takes practice to communicate with another person in an open way. It takes eye contact, attention, and reflective listening - all skills that are eroded by constant interaction with smartphones.

The decision

In the end, I’ve made the decision based on many converging factors. I enjoy being able to navigate in unfamiliar places using my phone; but I could buy a map ahead of time, or gasp, actually ask for directions. And my spatial reasoning skills would probably improve as a result.

I enjoy being able to take a photograph whenever the moment arises; but it’s not really necessary.

And email? Do really need to check it that often?

Pro patria, pro pueris.^[1]

As I’ve written before I’m increasingly worried about how our society in the US has come to view itself. We are full of claims about American exceptionalism but can’t rationally back them up.

The unquestioned philosophy of US exceptionalism has the unintended consequence of causing us to fail to strive. Societies perform best when striving for a collective goal. WWII. Sputnik. These were moments in US history when we engaged collective action. People took their mutual responsibilities seriously. Today, it seems, we lack a reason to strive. In a sense we are unwitting victims of our own success; and the threats to our economic and social security are subtle and slow-acting. It’s not to nuclear holocaust that we’ll succumb, but to the slowly decaying competitiveness and irrelevance. As T.S Eliot wrote: “Not with a bang, but a whimper.”

Our collective ambition is in decay. We’ve been etherized by countless distractions - social technology, pro sports, Dancing with the Stars, and stupid cat videos. Our attention has been stolen from us by the unethical purveyors of “entertainment.” Succinctly, we’re not serious about the sorts of things that will ensure our country’s success.

Kids and a window to the future

If we wish to glimpse the future we need only to contemplate our young. Are our kids driven to distraction by SMS, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat? Then we will all soon live in a society that is so distracted that we can’t look each other in the eye.

Are our kids falling behind in our international education rankings? Then we had better resign ourselves to a second class status on the international stage.

None of this is irreversible, of course; but we need to analyze cause and effect to create a world in which we prefer to live.

###Restoring the formulas of success###

Success and hard work are inextricably linked. Contemporary media over-emphasizes serendipity in the path to financial success; but for the majority of us, the only way to get there is by hard work, orientation toward goals, and academic preparedness. We need to begin to draw the connection between striving and eventual success - however defined - in children from their earliest moments. Parents must praise kids for authentic hard work and reserve praise for what’s truly praiseworthy.

###Where there’s scarcity, competition will follow###

The worldwide economic upheavals and the political strife over healthcare, Social Security, and other social support points out the serious scarcity of opportunity. Whether our kids - and the adults they become - seek it or not, they will participate in a society that is increasingly competitive. Nothing can be gained by shielding children from this reality. Instead, we should be equipping them for competition in academics, music, sports and other pursuits.

###Inattention###

Nothing that is unattended-to develops in a positive way. Just as a closed system tends toward chaos, inattentive parenting yields disordered kids. Children need direction, gentle nudges in the right direction, discipline, consistency, and help with goal-setting. Trusting schools and recreational soccer clubs to do the long-term work of child development is misplaced. Parents must simply make development of their children their top priority. Are you reading about child psychology? Are you doing thier homework with them? Are you reading books yourself; or are you playing with your iPad? Are you looking out keenly for their strengths? Are you modeling for them the behaviors that will equip them for success?

What’s good for kids is good for our country.

As a progressive, I lament that fellow liberals have granted US conservatives near exclusive ownership over the symbols of patriotism. After all, why does the flag have to mean: “Insufficiently low marginal tax rates.”? Or “Health care is a privilege, not a right”? Or “We believe in limiting the rights of gay people”?

Yet these symbols have clearly been co-opted. A Harvard Kennedy School of Government Study in 2011 concluded that participation in Fourth of July events - parades, fireworks displays - all full of patriotic symbolism - increase potential voters’ identification with Repulican candidates and increases their likelihood of voting for Republican candidates. Furthermore, US Republican voters are more likely than liberals to claim their pride as a US citizen.^[1]

What is “the best”?

In my experience, one of the most striking empirical differences between liberals and conservatives on the subject of patriotism, is the unwillingness of the latter to openly question the idea of American exceptionalism. Ask a conservative: “Is the US the greatest country in the world?” and the answer is almost always an emphatic affirmative. Ask a liberal; and the response is more nuanced. “Yes, but the NSA spies on our own citizens. And we’re still unlawfully detaining people at Guantánamo Bay.”

What does it mean to be “the best”?

Best at education? Hardly. On a widely applied, validated examination, US students were well below average.^[2]

Best at health care? Wrong again. Our infant mortality rates are higher than in most developed countries. Even among adults, the improvement in mortality rates year-over-year shows signs of a plateau. This plateau is not evident in similar data from Sweden and Australia.^[3]

But we have our freedom, right? Sure, like every country in Europe - most of whom outperform us in education and healthcare. And most of those countries don’t feel the need to spy on their own citizens.

OK, well, we’re the happiest. Wrong again. We ranked 17th in the UN World Happiness Report 2013.^[4]

###The unexamined life###

Socrates said that “the unexamined life isn’t worth living” meaning that there’s no instrinsic value in living an existence without the introspection that yields personal growth and development. In the same way, unquestioned American exceptionalism does no one any good. We need to let go of our Cold War beliefs and look critically at where we find ourselves now in history. Other countries are passing us by in productivity, education, health care, happiness, and environmental sensitivity.

Preference for symbols

There is a particular disorder in the preference for the symbol over the thing that it represents. No less sad is the preference for an obsolete meaning of a symbol. If flags, fireworks, parades, and lapel pins once meant American exceptionalism, it is objectively wrong to make that association today.

Data, rationalism, and a way forward

Only awareness of objective data about our international standings and rational evaluation of their causes can drive us out of the doldrums of confused patriotic symbology. We must ask ourselves critically what it means to be the best. What strongly-held opinions are slowing our progress? What have other countries figured out that we’re missing?

Every assumption must be questioned.

Authority cannot be asserted; it must be earned.

In nearly every discipline, traditional hierarchies of authority are dissolving. Although this is supported by evidence in some cases - aviation and its crew-resource management (CRM) philosophy, for example - the leveling of authority in all cases is by no means universally beneficial.

We want students to develop critical reasoning skills by questioning received wisdom. But breaking down the gradient of authority impairs kids’ ability to receive well-vetted, widely-held knowledge. The transition from student to teacher is exemplary. One becomes an expert by working under the guidance of an expert. To prematurely flatten the hierarchy short-circuits the intellectual development of the nascent expert.

Even in the parenting relationship, authority must be earned. For some, authority is a punitive, prejudicial word when used in the context of child development. It conjures up ideas of a restricted range of expression, meanness, and even corporal punishment. But this confuses an authoritarian style with an authoritative one. In the former, parents assert authority by over-controlling, giving few options, punishing without explanation, and providing no warmth or nurturing. Parents who exhibit an authoritative style provide limits on what is acceptable and what is not while giving some latitude on how to live within those limits. The authoritative style balances nurturing and warmth with consistent limit-setting. Of course, there is a third style, common among U.S. parents, that places feeble and inconsistent limits on children while indulging their whims and desires. This laissez-faire style muddles nurturing with indulgence; and no authority is possible. Only good luck can salvage that style.

But authority cannot be taken for granted. Children need to sense that authority comes from a consistent place of wanting them to be successful, responsible, and ethical in the world. They do this by evaluating the tacit curriculum of the household. In other words, if parents model the behaviors and attributes they intend for their children to adopt, they must exhibit the same. Do you want your children to take learning seriously? Then you must show them the ways that you are constantly learning something new as an adult. Do you want your children to be able to delay gratification? Then put first things first yourself. The old adage: “Do as I say, not as I do.” sadly ignores the power of modeling.

The right of children to exert unconstrained choice is not appropriate. Instead, we should be thinking about how to help them progress from from dependent to independent in a stepwise fashion over years of development. When adults and kids do this, there is a symmetrical development of authority.

When kids live within a framework of earned authority and respect, not only do they progressively claim their own authority, but they learn and exercise the willpower that comes with deferring gratification.

For the last several years, after leaving my medical practice, I’ve been a full-time iOS and Mac developer.

Increasingly, I feel an uneasiness about my work, especially on mobile devices. I’m proud of the professionalism and rigor that I bring to my work; but I fret about the consequences of our ubiquitous use of smartphones. In short, I feel as if I’m part of the problem.

Every time I see a parent “anesthetizing” their child with an iPhone or iPad. Every time I seem someone texting while driving. When I see teenagers glued to their phones while tuning out the real world. When I see parents surfing and not paying attention to their children.

I don’t doubt that mobile technology has helped us in many ways. But I question the net effect.

After blogging on Octopress for a couple years, I got tired of its “heaviness.” Octopress has been a great way to blog; and deployment to Amazon S3 couldn’t be easier. But after playing around with the styling a bit, I still felt like trying to radically change and simplify the design required too much dealing with the internals. In short, I was looking for a static blogging system that offered more simplicity and flexibility than Octopress. That’s how I wandered into Hakyll.

At its core, Hakyll is a Haskell library on which bloggers can build a system for generating static sites. Because at its core, Hakyll is just a library, it means that the blogger can develop his own systm for parsing posts, generating pages, linking the blog together, and even deploying. I admit that I know nothing about Haskell; but it looks interesting. And I like the way Hakyll works; so I’m willing to give it a try.

##Installation##

####Installing Haskell on OS X 10.9####

I chose to install haskell-platform using homebrew^[1], simply as:

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$ brew search haskell
haskell-platform

$ brew install haskell-platform

There were a handful of issues involving the Xcode command line tools and the PATH variable; but none were difficult. And I failed to record what they were. Sorry.

####Installing Hakyll####

Install Hakyll using cabal^[2] as:

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$ cabal install hakyll

One of the things that the cabal package for hakyll gives you is an executable called hakyll-init that when run, creates an example site. Ideally, you should just be able to:

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$ hakyll-init my-great-site

but for me, hakyll-init is not found. You’ll have to make sure that ~/.cabal/bin is in you PATH for that to work.

####Configuring the example site####

Once you’ve built a sample site with hakyll-init you need to use the use ghc to build the site configuration program site.hs:

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$ cd my-site
$ ghc --make site.hs
$ ./site build

Now you can preview your site with ./site watch on localhost:8000.

####Deployment####

My site is hosted on Amazon S3 and I use Transmit to synchronize my local directory with the bucket that serves the site. This works well, except for the fact that CSS is poorly handled by Amazon web services when you serve a static site from an S3 bucket. The problem is the Content-Type of the css files is provided as binary/octet-stream. This is not right. You can change in the management console; but it gets reset every time you upload the file. Clearly not a good solution.

If you use Transmit, though, you can set the Content-Type for cloud uploads on a per-file extension basis. The relevant details are described in a blog post by Adam Wilcox. Basically, you just go Transmit preferences, Cloud tab, and set the Custom S3 Upload Headers for css files:

After making those changes, static blogs hosted on S3 will return css files with the correct type header.

Since Transmit is scriptable, you can write an Applescript to connect to your S3 bucket and sync. The most straightforward way to make this work is to create favorite in Transmit as show in the screenshot. If you use a named favorite that specifies both the remote and local paths, you should be able to adapt the following script to perform the sync.

Finally, you’ll want to link that script into the deploy command in your blog configuration. There you’ll want to modify your site.hs file and recompile it.

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config :: Configuration
config = defaultConfiguration
        {   deployCommand = "osascript /Users/alan/Documents/dev/scripts+tools/applescript/scripts/active/sync-blog-s3.scpt" }

Now from the command line, I can just:

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$ ./site deploy

to execute my deployment Applescript.

####Post migration####
Your post source is written in Markdown; so you’ll probably want to write rules into your site.hs file that specify how you want to parse the metadata in those files. If I knew more Haskell, I’d describe that in more detail for you. I had a small number of posts to migrate; so I changed the metadata format manually. Essentially I changed the formatting of the tags (they’re called categories in Octopress) and removed quote marks from the post titles.

Many adults remember music lessons - some fondly, some not-so-much. But there’s an enormous amount of evidence about the beneficial effects of music training in kids. Some lines of evidence point to how the benefits of musical education can spill over into other areas of life, improving how one’s brain functions, the ability to learn languages, math abilities, and so on. As a musician, I feel conflicted about this sort of reason for starting music lessons. Music isn’t solely important to kids because it might get them to behave better, get a better SAT score, or get them into Harvard. Music is its own reward. It possesses a beauty and value that can’t be reduced to utilitarian terms. Perhaps parents start kids in music for practical reasons; but it’s best to treat music as just music and let whatever other magic can happen just unfold with time. With that caveat, here are three reasons why music education is critical for kids.

Brain development

The brain undergoes massive development in early childhood.^[1] Kids are born with very capable brains; but most of the brain capacity in infants is channeled into its ability to form its own “wiring.” Although the brain weighs about 25% of the average adult weight at birth, by age 3 it has already grown to about 88% of its eventual size. By age 10, the brain is 99% of its eventual maximal weight. The enormous growth in the brain reflects billions of connections being formed between neurons.

A study^[2] by Nina Kraus and colleagues at the Northwestern University Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory showed that the beneficial effects of music lessons in childhood were sustained well into adulthood even among adults who hadn’t played their instruments in years. Kraus measured the timing of brain responses to speech in three groups of adults, some with no music training in childhood, some with just a little training, and some with a moderate amount of training. What she showed was that the brains of adults who had experienced musical training in childhood responded faster to speech stimuli than those without. And there appeared to be a dose-response relationship between the amount of musical training and the effect size.

A counterpoint to instant gratification

Everything about contemporary culture is designed for speed. There internet has transformed life in millions of ways, some good, some bad; but we’re all moving faster and faster. Don’t want to wait for a book? Download it on your iPad. Don’t want to wait for your fast food? Order on your phone ahead of time.

But music disobeys the contemporary heuristic that anything can be accomplished faster. Sure, there are more efficient ways to practice.^[3] But training the mind, the muscles, the ears, and eyes to work in flawless coordination cannot be hurried. Music teaches us to slow down, accept our imperfections, and to be patient. It situates us in history by linking us to the past and forward to the future.

Shinichi Suzuki, the father of the modern concept of talent education, reframed talent as little more than persistent work. Suzuki observed the effortlessness with which young children acquire their native tongue. With persistence, subtle feedback, and a lot of nurturing, children tacitly master complex sounds and grammars. He began to wonder whether music, another auditory pursuit, could be similarly acquired. Time has proven Suzuki right, of course. But while the concept is enormously empowering, its implications for the size of the task are equally large. It’s really about slow, progressive acquisition of ability.

Above all music training is an adventure in willpower. Although willpower seems like an old-fashioned virtue, there is considerable evidence that willpower - a purposeful exercise of delayed gratification - can predict positive social and intellectual outcomes.^[4] Furthermore, we know that developing willpower in one area of life can have benefits in other areas of life.^[5]

A point of focus

Americans obsess about self-esteem in children often to their detriment. There is practically no evidence that interventions designed to deliberately boost self-esteem through unearned positive messaging and rewards actually work. Yet they are commonplace. For example, our local community soccer organization gives out medals for participation, presumably to bolster the self-esteem in children who didn’t score any goals or spent a lot of time on the bench. Showing up is not a rewardable event. If you sign-up for something, participation is an expectation. Furthermore, efforts to artificially boost self-esteem in this way have been shown to actually reduce performance.

The problem with trying to manipulate self-esteem is that it is a symptom of something, not a primary entity. If you want people to feel better, then they need to be better and do better.^[6] Without attaching an intervention to what really matters, you’re working against strong psychological countercurrents. Instead, I like to think of self-esteem as the byproduct of two orthogonal factors: differentiation and accomplishment. Accomplishment boosts self-esteem by increasing a person’s sense of self-efficacy in the world. Differentiation, on the other hand, allows us to distinguish ourselves from others and adding to our own sense of unique value. The latter is particularly important in teens who struggle with the dichotomy between wanting to belong and wanting to be a unique individual.

What does this have to do with music? We know from Suzuki’s work that talent is just another word for hard work. But I think even that stops a little short of what’s really going on in kids. Instead, talent is found at the intersection of hard work and focus. Without focus, hard work can mean just doing a lot of “stuff.” Since music requires so much of both, the sense of accomplishment can be enormous. The more accomplished the kids become, the more they begin to differentiate themselves from others. This becomes the source of their self-esteem.

Of course, all of these principles operate with other pursuits. But why not music?

Every year around the time of the Super Bowl, I wonder if I’m ever going to bother to learn the rules of American football. I suspect not, since at age 48 I’ve never made it through an entire game start-to-finish.

Mostly, I don’t really care for the game because it conjures up bad memories from school days.

Passive consumption

Now, as an adult, what really bothers me about football, is that the only real way to enjoy the game is by passively consuming it. No one except for professionals actually plays the game. Instead, we sit on the sofa, watch the game on the television, analyze the plays and the outcomes, and buy team colors and paraphernalia. All without actually do anything of value.

The world and individuals progress by doing something. Watching isn’t doing.

Spectacle as commercial vehicle. Buying fans

The phenomenon of the Super Bowl commercial has elevated the event to near holiday status. Many people who would not otherwise watch football, tune in to the Super Bowl solely to see the clever, creative commercials.^[1] That companies collectively spend over $220 million^[2] on television ads suggests that the association between the game and the marketing of products and services unrelated to the game is no accident. But this alliance benefits no one but the companies themselves. In a sense, the football game itself, which should be a celebration and test of athletic accomplishment, is merely a vehicle for delivering something more potent. Like the cigarette which exists only to deliver nicotine, the Super Bowl exists mostly to deliver marketing.

Opportunity costs

The saddest thing about the Super Bowl is the number of lost opportunities when money could be better spent. Americans spend about $1 billion each year on Super Bowl snacks. About 4 million Americans plan to buy a new television set before the Super Bowl game to enhance their viewing experience. Hint, it won’t be a smaller one; and the one it replaces will undoubtedly end up in a landfill somewhere.

With the $1 billion that we spend on Super Bowl snacks each year, we could provide foor to over 3 million starving children for nearly a year.

Or, we could provide safe, clean drinking water to 50 million people in impoverished countries.

We’re fond of wringing our hands about constrained resources and that we can’t pay for universal health care or take care of our public infrastructure. But we can come together for a day and spend a billion dollars on crappy food, $220 million on ads, pay millions in salaries for football players, etc.? Something’s wrong with this picture.

Safari on OS X 10.9 Mavericks breaks the ability to use WEBrick to preview your Octopress blog. Max Melzer has the fix^[1] and it works.

Basically you just need to switch to using thin as the local server.

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cd your/octopress/root/directory/
echo gem \"thin\" >> Gemfile

and

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bundle install