76 thoughts on “October 21, 2013: Dolby Digital”

  2. so, mrsS' uncle died last night, the culmination of a long, difficult time. He suffered from a particularly nasty form of Parkinson's (more properly, Lewy Body Dementia). May he rest in peace, and his family find some as well.

    Jerry was a big jazz fan. I'll be listening to extra jazz all week in his honor, while mrsS travels for the funeral and some family time.

    1. It seems like no matter how much you think you're ready for something like this, you never really are. The family is in our prayers.

    2. I think that's what EAR's grandfather JJS died from as well.
      He regularly had conversations with his mother and brother (both long deceased). EAR and I bought the house from him and his wife after he attacked his sister-in-law with a coffee cup, hallucinating that she was a burglar. He and his wife then moved to about a block from my in-laws' in Glenwood, and JJS had to go to the Alzheimer's unit of the local hospital within a year or so and died barely two years after they moved, on Christmas, after his wife and all of his kids had seen him and wished him a Merry Christmas and left for a Christmas Dinner together at the Holiday Inn in Alexandria.

      1. The uncle suffered from tremors and hallucinations, but also had lucid periods, so he knew what was happening to him. That's a special kind of hell to be trapped in.

        He went into hospice care ~two weeks ago and was getting morphine to ease symptoms.

        I have two aunts (my mom's sisters) heading down similar paths. One has pretty advanced Parkinson's, the other with pretty advanced Alzheimers. Both are in their 80s and got pretty close to 80 before being debilitated, so they didn't exactly get cheated. Still, it is tough to see.

        1. Sorry for your loss bS.
          My paternal grandfather left this world confused and angry (Alzheimer's) and my uncle lived with ALS for about 15 years, the last 8-10 in a wheelchair.

          That's a special kind of hell to be trapped in.

          We're "anonymous" here, so I'll share that my best friend's uncle (his mom's BiL) took his own life last week after dealing with Alzheimer's for the past 3 or 4 years. Said uncle was early-70's and a very intelligent guy; watched both of his parents go down that road and, best they can tell, figure he 'decided' to end it. It was his second marriage so he had children ranging in age from early-30's to 12...

          1. wow.

            I am in the "this is all there is" camp, so making that choice would be very, very difficult. My condolences back at your friend's family.

              1. No doubt. But if one really believes there is an eternal existence on the other side of the discontinuity, I'd have to venture that said belief would affect the calculus.

        2. JJS was very hard of hearing most of his life (which is how he was able to play baseball during WWII). Even before he showed any symptoms, I had a hard time communicating with him. When conversations have to be held loudly and slowly and with simpler words so that he can catch what you mean, it's was hard for me to understand that he wasn't mentally handicapped. (I knew it, but in dealing with him, I'd forget.) And then he was mentally handicapped. The hallucinations were the first sign, and at first people thought he was just telling us old stories or making things up (he was a fantastic fibber), so the communications barrier might have made detection later.

          Grandma GRR has had Alzheimers for a while and that has been easier to understand.
          Or is it because I knew her when she was much younger and had all of her faculties?

      2. ::crosses fingers::
        Please sign with the White Sox, please sign with the White Sox, please sign with the White Sox!

  4. Spare the rod, spare the child. New study in Pediatrics.

    A total of 57 percent of mothers and 40 percent of fathers said they spanked children when they were three years old. That fell slightly to 52 percent of mothers and 33 percent of fathers who spanked at age five.

    Children acted out more and were more aggressive when they had been spanked by their mothers as five-year-olds, whether regularly or occasionally.

    Spanking by mothers at least twice a week was tied to a two-point increase on a 70-point scale of problem behavior. That was after the researchers took into account children's behavior at younger ages and other family characteristics.

    ...

    When it comes to disciplining children, she said there's more evidence on what doesn't work long-term than what does.

    "We know that spanking doesn't work, we know that yelling doesn't work," Gershoff said. "Timeout is kind of a mixed bag. We know that reasoning does work."

    MacKenzie said spanking continues to seem effective to parents in the short term, which makes it hard to change their minds about it.

    "It's strongly associated with immediate compliance," he told Reuters Health. "Children will change their behavior in the moment."

    1. I was never spanked and I became a social worker 🙂

      I was yelled at some. It mostly just made me withdrawn and afraid. Funny thing is, my dad flipped when I was 17, and he stopped yelling. He has since become an amazing father, and grandfather. Just took him awhile. Considering he grew up in a monstrously abusive home, he's done pretty spectacular.

      1. I got the occasional spanking as a child, and earned a Ph.D. Read from that what you will. 🙂

        We've never spanked our kids. mrsS was adamant about that. The flip side is that we never found a disciplinary strategy that was very effective with the Girl. The Boy was a rule follower and figured out how to work with us; the Girl, not so much. Frequent power struggles, in which I'm generally the loser, because I remain invested in expecting her to be appropriately responsive when I issue imperatives.

        And yet, she has some self awareness. mrsS had a fascinating discussion with her last week, which went something like this:

        mrsS: You know what I'm not going to miss when you go away to college?
        the Girl: My messy room? The drama every morning getting me off to school?
        mrsS: ...

        1. No spanking of our daughter. For about a year and a half, she was frighteningly openly defiant. She and I had long, ongoing battles, fueled in part by my wife's tendency to jump in the middle and take my daughter's side. Ugh.

          Now, though, she's much, much better. What changed? School.

          My daughter is a perfect angel at school. We have been told repeatedly that she is a model student in terms of behavior. She doesn't want to be on the bad side of her teachers. We also hear that she's very, very shy at school, which we find hard to believe, except that we have recognized that she's just way more comfortable around adults than kids her own age. Only child. Anyway, she refuses to disobey, even when every other kid in the class is acting out. We've heard that repeatedly.

          That has trickled home. I've worked to reason with her and to leverage that angelic behavior at school to encourage her to listen. I'm not saying that will work for anyone else, but it's worked for her. She's also figured out a very simple thing: if you listen to Dad, you aren't going to get in trouble.

          1. My nephew is similar. Rambunctious, loud, and outgoing at home but is respectful, hard-working, and shy at school.

      2. I was spanked sometimes as a child, my younger sister less so and my little brothers very rarely. Probably more effective for me was the Irish Catholic guilt and carrot-stick manipulation. I was mostly a good kid, but being the first, my parents learned to be parents with me.

        No spanking in our house. There have been times I've been tempted but I can't rationalize it with forbidding my daughter from hitting of any kind. We act horrified when she hits as she has a tendency to slap you when she's angry - sometimes when you're close and not expecting it, like leaning over to unbuckle her car seat.

        She's very smart, very sensitive (emotional), bossy (says our daycare provider) and stubborn as get-all. Not openly defiant, but defiant nonetheless. Time outs work here and there. Rationalizing...sometimes. I'm still not sure how we're going to deal with her when she's a teenager.

      2. I have spanked Aquinas maybe a half dozen times. He's 4. All but one of those was "Warning, time-out, longer time-out, advanced time out (kneeling in the bathroom... was my parent's go-to, always seemed very effective), warning, spanking." Each time he kept doing the thing that got him in trouble, or some other related thing, while on time out. One time the spanking was a quick response to something or other, and I still regret that one.

        Aristotle is 2, going on 16, and it is absolutely clear already that punishment will not work with her.

        And I have no idea how punishing #3 will go.

          2. There is certainly something in the water lately. We know several people between work, church and other friends that are expecting. Watch what you drink everyone.

            1. What can I say? Clearly I was so happy for you that I couldn't be bothered to properly nest the comment.

    3. I was spanked as a child, but honestly could not tell you at what age I received my last. The parent I was always most afraid of getting in trouble with - Pops - I can't remember spanking me at all. Pops had a quiet anger when you'd gotten in trouble that always made me dread telling him I'd done something wrong, even though I wasn't worried about physical punishment. One morning in my junior year we had a life-altering argument about something that should have been trivial, and he kicked me out of the house. (My parents had joint custody, so I went to live with my mom.) I didn't speak to him for three or four months, rarely spoke to him for two years after that, and things weren't patched up for years afterward. After I got out of the Corps and moved back to Wisconsin we became very close, even before his diagnosis. Still, we lost a lot of time we shouldn't have, which I know we both regretted when we found out how little we had left. I did my best to make it clear exactly where we stood before we ran out of time, and I think he knew we were more than okay.

      The less said about the other house I grew up in, the better. It was abusive, verbally, emotionally, and occasionally physically, particularly for my younger siblings, but I also got my share. I was lucky to be the oldest, and to get out and away once I could. I love my mom and Pa, but for many years they had a lot of issues with one another and with us kids, and while I don't think spanking is wrong if used very sparingly and in the right situation, I don't ever want to be like that to my children.

      1. I don't think spanking is wrong if used very sparingly and in the right situation

        That was my attitude as a new parent. I've pretty much come around to mrsS's position on this issue. Identifying a circumstance in which spanking is an effective and appropriate strategy is ... difficult.

        1. Like I said earlier, when all other punishments aren't stopping the behavior, I've used it, to some effect. It's just one quick swat, never more, never very hard, but it has seemed to do the trick.

        2. We've pretty much limited spanking to cases of open defiance and for bad behavior that threatens the boy's life (i.e., running out into streets, etc.). I can remember doing it only two or three times with Junior for defiance and I don't ever remember doing it with Trey. Our most effective punishment is taking away things they want, usually playing video games or watching their own TV programs. Sometimes both.

        3. I should have caveated loudly at the start that I'm not trying to call out the parenting strategies of anyone here. I just found the new research findings interesting and worth sharing. The discussion that followed the initial post has been interesting, and worthy of the site, I think.

          1. My sister's response:

            Very interesting. [Husband] has read some research that shows positive reinforcement, when used to the complete exclusion of any "negative" discipline, is also ineffective.

            She didn't cite what the research was, but he's a pretty sharp guy so I trust the source.

    4. Regarding the linked study- 2 points on a 70 point scale increase in behavior issues is 2.9%. I find it hard to draw conclusions on such a complicated subject based on that. Heck, later on in the article-

      The average vocabulary score for all nine-year-olds in the study was 93, slightly below the test-wide standard score of 100. Frequent spanking by fathers was linked to a four-point lower score. But the researchers couldn't be sure that small difference wasn't due to chance.

      4 points lower than the average of 93 is 4.3%, and the researchers aren't attaching significance to that because it could be due to chance. So why are they okay with saying the even smaller difference in measured behavior is enough to draw conclusions on?

      1. good questions, bhigs. I'm now looking at the full text of the article (not sure if that link will work; it might be IP-authenticated).

        the model regresses language score on a bunch of control variables and some dummy variables for the various spanking levels by the parents. unfortunately, they did NOT include any interaction terms to assess the joint spanking behaviors of the parents, so all of their results are, uhh, tenuous.

        That said, fathers' spanking is quite a bit rarer in this data than is mothers' spanking. It is entirely reasonable and conceivable that fathers' spanking frequency at age 5 does have a significant impact on key outcomes later in life for the kids. The statistical result here is slim (the estimated regression coefficient is slightly less than twice its standard error; hence "couldn't be sure that small difference wasn't due to chance").

        the data source is the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study, a panel study of ~5,000 kids and their families over about 9 years.

        The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study follows a cohort of nearly 5,000 children born in the U.S. between 1998 and 2000. The study over samples births to unmarried couples; and, when weighted, the data are representative of births in large U.S. cities at the turn of the century.

        The Study was designed to address four questions of great interest to researchers and policy makers: (1) What are the conditions and capabilities of unmarried parents, especially fathers?; (2) What is the nature of the relationships between unmarried parents?; (3) How do children born into these families fare?; and (4) How do policies and environmental conditions affect families and children?

        The Study consists of interviews with both mothers and fathers at birth and again when children are ages one, three and five. The parent interviews collect information on attitudes, relationships, parenting behavior, demographic characteristics, health (mental and physical), economic and employment status, neighborhood characteristics, and program participation.

        1. Aah- that's a much more detailed report. I still wouldn't be comfortable saying that spanking was the only reason some children in the study had behavior issues. This was a 1,900-child subset of a 5,000-child study starting off from births to unmarried couples. As the study says,

          That seems to me like a bad way to skew your results from the start.

  5. Bryant McKinney was traded from the Raven to the Dolphins.
    All the strip clubs in South Beach rejoiced.

    1. Indeed, when I was doing jury duty this summer, during the jury selection process the first question they asked the pool at large was how they felt about the McDonald's coffee case. The plaintiff's attorney introduced the discussion by claiming that she was chatting with her young daughter about what to ask in jury selection for that case and her daughter suggested that she should ask about the McDonald's case. I really, really did not buy that the suggestion came from her daughter, and the end of that video only reinforces that.

      Anyway, they had enough other strong opinions in the group that they never got around to asking me my opinion.

      1. In the personal injury trials I've sat through in the past year, I would say the McDonald's case gets mentioned (usually by the plaintiff's attorney) about 75% of the time. It's a quick and easy way for them to find someone to strike who admits right away that they won't award damages regardless of the facts.

      2. Have (finally) been called up for jury duty - not sure why I've missed the calling all these years - the wife has been to the courthouse plenty of times...

        I've read that I can't come here and blog about any case materiel - the Nation's tassle-loafed lawyers won't be able to sway me one bit - Hodar!

        1. We had an issue last week with a juror who was tweeting during the trial (for example, he tweeted during voir dire on the first day). He never actually mentioned anything about the case (type, parties, etc.) beyond that he had been called for jury duty (much like what you did), but he expressed an extreme dislike for being on a jury. It left a very bad taste in everyone's mouth (especially because it created an appeal issue!).

    2. That's definitely not the case in my wife's family (her older sister had a learning disability while my wife has an elementary ed. degree) and I don't think is the case in my family. My older brother and I are both college grads, but he struggled for a year or two at the school I graduated from before transferring to a different school and completing his degree. I also was National Honor Society in HS, and I don't think he got into NHS. No one in our family really struggled academically (my sister is an RN), but I would say that I did the best in school even though I was the youngest.

    3. Based on the mother's reporting of the child's performance.
      And I don't see correction for the overall number of children in the family.
      So first-borns is a mix of 1, 2, and more child families.
      Second-borns are 2 and more child families. Etc.

      Perhaps parents of more children have less rose-tinted glasses about their children's performance because they've seen more children and know what kids actually are capable of. Things that I thought were amazing from our first-born are ho-hum from our third.

      Disclosure: I'm a first-born of two and was a better student than my sister.
      She was a better athlete (by miles).

      Disclosure:
      httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkk2H3Ztrfk

      1. I thought this issue was resolved a long time ago.

        Sibling data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth are evaluated, and the results are compared with those from other studies using within-family data. It appears that although low-IQ parents have been making large families, large families do not make low-IQ children in modern U.S. society. The apparent relation between birth order and intelligence has been a methodological illusion.

        I would also add, consistent with AMR's point, that the sample sizes on 2nd, 3rd, and 4th child are progressively smaller than the sample size for first child, so that one's confidence in the representativeness of the binning proportions is declining in family size.

        A working paper version of the Hotz-Pantano paper is available here for the interested reader.

        They imply that the analysis is restricted to families with 2, 3, or 4 children (p.9).

        One possible concern with the results in Table 1 is that there is that they may confound
        birth order and family size effects, an issue that has been recognized very early in the
        development of the birth order literature. Figure 2 below explores birth order effects within
        family of specific sizes. Higher birth orders, by construction, belong in families of bigger
        size. As pointed out by Berhman & Taubman (1986), such families locate themselves at a
        different locus of the quantity-quality trade-off. Therefore we risk attributing to birth order
        what really comes from family size. As can be seen in the Figure, birth order effects appear
        to persist in all these families, regardless of size.

        One of the things I don't get about the paper is the modeling. They present OLS models of whether the child is perceived by the mother as "one of the best students" in his/her class (a zero/one dummy variable). Ummm, okaaaaay. In my world, this is a dichotomous dependent variable, and OLS is generally not a good choice for estimating the probability of an event (since that probability is bounded between zero and one). I'd like to see some diagnostics....

        Third-born here. The middle sibling died very young, but I was the better student and athlete than brotherS, fwiw.

      2. I'll admit I wasn't sure how seriously to take the study even when I posted the link yesterday. I'm the first-born of two, but my sister is a doctor. And she scored 1 point better than me on the ACT. So I'll probably send her the article as a joke to needle her about her obviously inferior intellectual abilities.

  9. this paper is all kinds of academic awesomeness:

    ARE ETHICISTS ANY MORE LIKELY TO PAY THEIR REGISTRATION FEES AT PROFESSIONAL MEETINGS?
    Eric Schwitzgebel

    University of California at Riverside, USA eric.schwitzgebel@ucr.edu

    Abstract

    Lists of paid registrants at Pacific Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association from 2006–2008 were compared with lists of people appearing as presenters, commentators or chairs on the meeting programme those same years. These were years in which fee payment depended primarily on an honour system rather than on enforcement. Seventy-four per cent of ethicist participants and 76% of non-ethicist participants appear to have paid their meeting registration fees: not a statistically significant difference. This finding of no difference survives scrutiny for several possible confounds. Thus, professional ethicists seem no less likely to free-ride in this context than do philosophers not specializing in ethics. These data fit with other recent findings suggesting that on average professional ethicists behave no morally better than do professors not specializing in ethics.

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