Too much noise in census results, or not enough?

Years ago, a speaker at a seminar I attended advised teachers to intentionally make mistakes on tests for students to find. The premise was that these errors would make educators appear more human.

It was a bad idea then, and it’s a bad idea now. Mistakes happen often enough without making them on purpose.

I wonder if similar concerns wafted through statisticians’ heads at the U.S. Census Bureau over so-called differential privacy. The controversial practice introduces “noise,” or mistakes, into census data to make it harder for third parties to reconstruct the identities of census respondents.

The law requires census records to stay private for 72 years, so it was just last month that the National Archives opened the vault, so to speak, and released names and addresses from 1950.

However, many experts argue that data from the 2020 census, already marred by controversy over President Trump’s insistence that it exclude unauthorized immigrants (he lost that bid), could be merged with publicly available information to reveal the identities of individual respondents almost immediately if steps aren’t taken to obscure them.

A recent New York Times report mentions a census block in Chicago that has 14 people living underwater. They don’t really, of course, but the census computers assigned them there to make it harder for bad actors to connect the information to specific people. And this particular census block is just one of tens of thousands such locations that are wrong in the name of privacy.

It’s the proverbial Rock, meet Hard Place situation. On the one hand, people who volunteer potentially sensitive information on a Census Bureau survey do so because their identities will remain anonymous. Without such a guarantee, they are less likely to share information, which makes census results less complete.

On the other hand, intentional errors in census data – even for the best of reasons – undermine the public’s faith in that data, used to determine budgets, government aid, and legislative districts.

Some readers likely feel the same nonchalance toward census privacy that they do to various forms of in-person or online surveillance. In other words, if you aren’t doing anything wrong, what are you worried about? Out of 330 million people in the nation, why would somebody bother to reconstruct information about you and the people you know?

That’s an easy attitude to have if you’re a WASP and most of your personal data couldn’t be weaponized against you.

But if you’re a minority, or an immigrant, or LGBTQ+, answering census questions increases the chances that some unscrupulous third party could merge your data with other readily available information (voting registration, for instance) and create a list to share with the world. Why take the risk?

Still, fuzzing up the data creates its own set of challenges. The whole “people living underwater” faux pas was an unintentional mistake made in the course of trying to make an intentional mistake, a computer that randomly assigned respondents to a census block that no longer has at least one person actually living in it.

And it doesn’t humanize the US Census Bureau, like that long-ago speaker suggested would happen when students caught teachers in a mistake. No, Americans already recognize the bureau is all too human, trying to do an impossible job made even more challenging since the advent of easily available computing power in the hands of those who would misuse it.

I don’t know the solution. Results should not be made inaccurate in the name of privacy, and privacy should not be violated in the name of accuracy.

At least the Census Bureau will have more time to ponder it, as most 2020 data has been delayed until next year, partially because of COVID and partially because of this fuzzy-data issue.

Is there a middle ground – private enough? accurate enough?

One “enough” is for sure: Whatever the solution, It’ll never be enough to satisfy everybody.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

Look, Ma, it's me — on Friday!

Here I am on Friday.

In all the years I’ve written a weekly column, I’ve never appeared regularly on this day. Even so, I’ve always considered Friday the best fit for what I first pitched as a lighthearted look at the world.

No day is better situated to help readers blow off steam after a week in white- or blue-collar America. And no day is more forgiving. Even the bosses are less annoying because you won’t see them for the next two days.

After all, if I rile you up with my opinion on a Friday morning, with only eight hours between you and the end of the workweek, how angry can you be? And if I make you angry on a Friday night, after the trials and tribulations of the day have passed … well, let’s be honest, you probably aren’t reading this on a Friday night. Too many other things to do.

Days of the week don’t matter much in the newspaper industry these days. The print product exists mostly to round up material posted on a “newspaper” website hours or even days earlier. Readers no longer worry about the paperboy tossing their laptops or phones into a mud puddle or onto the roof, and those two means of communication – laptops and phones, not mud puddles and roofs – are the way most readers get information in this brave new world.

Still, Fridays are pretty cool.

Pop-culture enthusiasts of a certain age, and especially aficionados of TV horror and sci-fi, know Fridays have a distinguished pedigree. The first three seasons of “The Twilight Zone” aired on Friday nights. “Kolchak: The Night Stalker,” a short-lived series about a heroic reporter — see, newspapers again! — battled vampires and zombies on Fridays. “Kolchak” is arguably best remembered for starring Darren McGavin before he went on to holiday immortality as the father in “A Christmas Story.”

In my childhood, Friday nights were the home of the greatest one-two (and sometimes -three) in semi-rural, corduroy-pants-wearing history – “The Incredible Hulk,” followed by “The Dukes of Hazzard,” followed by – if Mom and Dad fell asleep – the super-steamy “Dallas,” all on CBS.

If I were really lucky, I stayed awake until 11:30 p.m. for “Hoolihan and Big Chuck,” the Cleveland movie hosts. They eventually morphed into “Big Chuck and Little John,” mixing un-politically correct sketches with bottom-of-the-barrel fright flicks.

If you’re getting the impression that my social calendar wasn’t exactly filled to bursting, you’re not wrong. My idea of fun was to invite friends over on Friday nights and subject them to arduous sessions of recording my homemade comedy scripts on a portable tape recorder, complete with sound effects of flushing toilets and slamming doors.

For some reason, few friends came over more than once.

Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the greatest Friday series of all, “The X-Files,” which aired on that night for its first few seasons before being moved to a much-less-scary Sunday timeslot. I’m traumatized enough by thoughts of work on Monday; I don’t need extra thrills courtesy of Mulder and Scully, thank you very much.

I realize for most people Friday night is more about whatever high school sport is in season, preceded or followed by pizza and adult beverages. Whatever floats your boat.

For me, though, Fridays have always been about horror and comedy, in somewhat equal measure.

And if you think about today’s world, being scared senseless or laughing hysterically at the news is pretty much de rigueur, pardon my French.

So catch me in this space each Friday, if you’re so inclined. I’ll do my best to scare you or make you chuckle, like the Incredible Hulk and Bo and Luke Duke, way back when.

And if you really want me to, I can stop over and record the sound of your toilet flushing or your doors slamming. I mean, my social calendar is still very open.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

Recent decisions put score at Political Expedience 1, Earth 0

It’s one step forward, two steps back for the environment this Earth Day.

The step forward is President Biden’s reinstatement of parts of the National Environmental Policy Act dumped by former President Trump. Federal agencies must once again consider greenhouse-gas emissions for proposed projects like pipelines and roadways, and local communities unduly impacted by such projects will have a stronger voice at the bargaining table.

The step back is the decision by Biden to once again allow the federal government to drill for oil and gas on public lands, violating a signature campaign promise.

Neither decision is as big a deal as it first appears, which may provide some political cover from fallout on both sides of the aisle.

Restoring parts of the National Environmental Policy Act will have little immediate effect because “the Biden administration had already been weighing the climate change impacts of proposed projects,” according to a New York Times story. The long-range implications are for future administrations, which must abide by the same set of rules.

Unfortunately, nothing can stop a future president from doing just what Trump did by gutting parts of a policy he disagreed with, or what Biden did by restoring it. So the announcement effectively changes nothing in the short term and is poised to have a dubious impact in the long term, depending on which way the political winds blow. But it’s good political theater for Earth Day.

The drilling decision, too, is something less than it first appears, neither a slam-dunk win for fossil-fuel advocates nor a sky-is-falling moment for environmentalists. This is because it will be years before such drilling actually commences, and because the new permits come with a steep increase in the royalties that drilling companies pay to the federal government.

Optimists might say the two announcements give Biden a chance to demonstrate moderation and compromise, components sorely lacking in politics today. Pessimists might note that the twin decisions give everybody something to be mad about.

Without a doubt, the high price of gasoline, coupled with ongoing inflation, have many Americans cranky about their budgets, with some facing hard, no-win decisions as a result. Biden is trying to balance his commitment to fighting climate change with the immediate reality of Americans being more worried about finances than saving the environment.

Coincidentally, as these monetary tensions are bandied about at dinner tables and boardrooms across the country, climate scientists have been protesting in record numbers. More than 1,000 such specialists from 25 different countries, calling themselves the Scientist Rebellion, spoke out earlier this month after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report. It warned of more pronounced climate effects if greenhouse-gas emissions aren’t cut in the next three years.

The letter from the Scientist Rebellion is harrowing reading. While it has become reflexive in some quarters to dismiss such warnings as the same white noise that has been playing for decades, the letter demonstrates that many of these predictions, sadly, have come true. Among them are a large decrease in animal populations, an increase in weather extremes, and imminent harm to human habitats and food supplies.

At some point, politicians the world over, at every level, must give priority to the environment, keeping it at the forefront of proactive change no matter which party or regime is in power.

Fighting climate change and decreasing pollution should not be viewed as competing with other pressing concerns. Indeed, a decrease in fossil-fuel usage and more stringent standards for clean air and water are part of the solution to other problems. Abandoning or deemphasizing them – the latter appearing to be the current Biden strategy – when they become politically inconvenient is unacceptable.

Americans should hold their elected officials accountable for their climate promises and press them for long-term policy solutions. Implementation should then be held inviolate, part of a legacy we leave to future generations, who will either prosper or fall based on decisions we make today.

It’s not the Earth we should be worried about this Earth Day, but the people on it. The planet will keep on keeping on. Whether it will do so in a way conducive to human life is the bigger question.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

Happy Birthday, Shakespeare!

When Romeo looks down on Juliet’s body, the mourning man notes that “Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath, / Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.”

One could make the same observation about the play’s author, William Shakespeare, who died 400 years ago this month, on April 23. After four centuries, his words still ring with beauty and truth. Like Juliet in the scene above, Shakespeare is not really dead. Because his plays continue to be performed every day in theaters and classrooms around the world, he has achieved true literary immortality.

We live in an age of transitory entertainment. This month’s tentpole-event film is next month’s bargain-bin DVD at Walmart. (“Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice,” I’m looking at you.) Walk into any bookstore and scan the selection of bargain books to see recent bestsellers marked down to prices that more accurately reflect the impression they’ve made. It’s enough to silence many a budding writer.

Yet Shakespeare, like The Dude in “The Big Lebowski,” abides.

His work has become part of the fabric of our culture. Even somebody who has never heard of Shakespeare or read any of his plays is likely to recognize the balcony scene from “Romeo and Juliet” or know that a man holding a skull is referencing Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. They can probably even identify the character’s signature line, “To be or not to be.”

Performances of “Hamlet” can be somewhat problematic because so many of its lines have become part of our lexicon that audience members find themselves nodding in recognition at one after another, the theatrical equivalent of a greatest hits album. “Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark” is applied to many a political quagmire. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” is sound advice, even for those who have never set foot in a theatre.

Add these to “the lady doth protest too much,” “hoist with his own petard,” the oft-misquoted “though this be madness, yet there is method in’t” and a score of others, including “Good night, sweet prince,” so often applied last week to the late capital-P Prince, musician extraordinaire.

If Shakespeare were alive today, he would likely be horrified at what we have done to his work. He is often despised by teens, who strain under the yoke of his language in English classes, scratching their heads over his thees and thous and what they consider to be the tortured syntax of his sentences.

Shakespeare — and, by extension, the theater — was the popular entertainment of his time. Plays were not burdens to be endured; they were events to be celebrated. The best way to reconnect with that sentiment is to see a Shakespeare play, preferably live. But if that isn’t feasible, then a filmed version will suffice.

Watching a Shakespearean play proves the old adage that you can’t bathe in the same river twice. The lines may be the same, but they will be delivered in a different way by different actors on different nights. Even if you are watching one on film, where lines and performances are fixed, (ital.) you (end ital.) will be a different person each time — older, wiser, and of different disposition than when you watched it last.

Adam Gopnik, writing about Paul McCartney in the April 25 issue of “The New Yorker, notes that “each of us has only so many heartbeats. All artists have fat years and leaner ones afterward. They just hope that the lean years don’t turn into a famine, and that there’s enough seed corn left over for sweet if stressed fruit.” Yet Shakespeare seems not to have had such lean years. The man who wrote “The Taming of the Shrew” and “Romeo and Juliet” early in his career saved works like “King Lear” and “The Tempest” for much later, although the exact chronology can be difficult to mark. He went out on top, the exception that proves the rule.

Recent high-tech radar scans of Shakespeare’s grave at Holy Trinity Church in his native Stratford indicate that the Bard may be as headless as poor Macbeth at the end of that tragedy. The playwright’s skull appears to be missing, perhaps spirited away by graverobbers in the late eighteenth century.

No matter. Wherever his head may be, his heart still dwells in his sonnets and plays, beating away on the page and especially on the stage.

Shakespeare lives, on his 400th anniversary and quite likely on his 800th, wherever an audience looks for a good story, well told. And that’s an event worth celebrating.

Originally published April 28, 2016, in The Alliance Review. 


chris.schillig@yahoo.com

cschillig on Twitter

Egging on the competition over Easter candies

I tell my students that the higher they climb in academia, the less appropriate binary arguments become.

After all, the world is more complex than right vs. wrong, good vs. evil, yes vs. no. The truth, to the extent it can be determined at all, is more than one of two sides. It’s often somewhere in between.

So I hope they’ll understand my sole exception, the area where it comes down to choosing the truth or the lie. And it happens at Easter.

I’m talking about the Cadbury Creme Egg or the Reese’s Peanut Butter Egg.

You like one or the other. There is no middle ground.

Picture a lone microphone descending from the roof of an arena toward the lighted ring below. The boxing announcer intones:

“In this corner, weighing in at 1.2 ounces, is the Cadbury Creme Egg. It’s 150 calories of milk, eggs and soy, wrapped in colorful tinfoil, that has never seen the actual inside of a hen.

“And, in this corner, also weighing 1.2 ounces, is the Reese’s Peanut Butter Egg, 170 calories and a blend of peanuts, chocolate and milk, also a stranger to any oviparous creature.

“Come out and touch gloves, boys, and let’s have a clean fight.”

At the risk of belaboring the boxing imagery a little longer, let me say that, for this chocophile, Reese’s is the winner by TKO every day and twice on (Easter) Sunday.

And I’m all about the egg. Forget Reese’s hearts for Valentine’s Day, pumpkin shapes for Halloween and Christmas trees in December.

Those seasonal delights, while still yummy, are walking on chocolate-covered eggshells compared to the Easter iteration, with its perfect ratio of chocolate to peanut butter.

Heck, Reese’s eggs are even better than the regular Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, which are too greasy for my taste.

I know, I know, Cadbury Creme Eggs have the better pedigree. They hail originally from England, which makes them more proper and stiff-upper-lipped.

A fact sheet straight outta Cadbury World, the chocolatier’s tourist trap, er, “family attraction” in Birmingham (home of, I kid you not, the 4D Chocolate Adventure), notes that John Cadbury was monkeying around with so-called “French eating chocolate” as early as 1842. The first Cadbury Easter Eggs arrived some 33 years later. The modern Cadbury Creme Egg, with the distinctive yellow center, however, is a spring chicken by comparison, arriving only in 1971.

Meanwhile, Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs get an F for marketing, with little officially sanctioned information available online. The best I could find is an unauthorized history on collectingcandy.com, which says the candy made the national scene in 1967 after being tested only in Pennsylvania the year before.

Originally, they cost only 10 cents each, at a time when a dozen real eggs cost just 49 cents. This year, my Reese’s obsession has cost me almost nine times as much.

Here’s a little secret, though: I’d pay almost any price for them. It’s like “The Devil and Daniel Webster” written in chocolate.

My wife and I have a friendly back-and-forth about Cadbury and Reese’s every year, in the same way some couples banter about Browns or Steelers, Democrat or Republican.

She’s a Cadbury aficionado, something I didn’t know before we married. That’s a question that belongs in every couple’s premarital counseling. Forget finances, desire for children and division of household duties, what you really need to soul-search is if you can pledge to honor and cherish somebody who prefers the putrid insides of a Cadbury Creme Egg over the sublime perfection of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Egg.

I’m not saying it’s a dealbreaker, but it’s definitely a point to ponder, right up there with finding out your future partner prefers box wines to bottles, or Chick-fil-A to Raising Cane’s.

Interestingly (which is what people always say right before telling you something not in the least bit interesting), both products are made by Hershey’s in the United States (with U.S. manufacturing of Cadbury eggs outsourced to Canada). So whichever side you choose, Hershey’s wins.

There’s an egg-cellent Easter argument about capitalism in there somewhere, kids, and that’s no yolk.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

Why deprive students of helpful writing tools on tests?

Education has a habit of introducing students to useful tools and then taking those tools away at test time.

It’s happening again this year.

If you have a child in public school, chances are good they’ve caught a case of testing fever. High school students in Ohio, for example, are taking or preparing to take various state-mandated, end-of-course tests and College Board Advanced Placement exams, many of which involve writing.

While the content of each writing assessment may be different, one element is depressingly common: Students may not use tools considered basic to almost any working writer.

The tests prohibit students from taking advantage of spell-checking programs, online dictionaries or online thesauruses. They can’t even use physical dictionaries and thesauruses.

By the way, the old-school plural of “thesaurus” is “thesauri,” which I looked up online while typing this piece, something students would be barred from doing on a writing test.

In some cases, even typing, a common composing method since the late 1800s, is prohibited. This, in an educational system that has prioritized typewritten work for decades, and which was so high-tech just two years ago that teachers were delivering curriculum through Zoom links.

But when high-stakes testing rolls around, it’s back to the Stone Age.

Just as unfortunate as the prohibition of various lexicographical tools is the failure to give students time for more than rudimentary revision. Gone are peer reviews and thoughtful reassessment of problematic sentences. Nobody gets to phone a friend on the AP English Language essay, even though peer assessment is integral to that curriculum throughout the year.

There are purists — I know you’re out there, I can feel your fiery breath on the back of my neck — who argue that spell checkers and revision time lead to final products that do not reflect what students know, but are more a function of how skillfully they take advantage of various resources.

But when teachers and schools prioritize such resources as useful (which they are) and teach with them throughout the year (as they should), why aren’t students allowed to use them on high-stakes tests? What is the point of preaching that the essence of good writing is rewriting if students aren’t given time to do it on a test, if the first draft, which they’ve been taught is merely a starting point, becomes the finished product?

If we trace arguments in favor of traditional pencil-and-paper samples back far enough, we discover a seldom-articulated fear: On some unspecified future day, students will be faced with a writing task where they cannot use technology, leaving them naked with their many writing flaws exposed.

A similar argument was advanced for many years to keep students away from calculators. It’s an odd belief that their survival may someday be contingent upon figuring out 18 percent of 287 with only paper and pencil. But if I’m living in such a world, maybe one where civilization itself has been annihilated, I’m probably too busy killing giant, mutated crickets with a rusty shovel to be overly concerned about math.

Seriously, though, I understand writing is produced for many reasons and under many conditions — text messages, emails, research essays, novels and timed pieces among them.

Some writing samples are meant to gauge basic writing competence, while others are intended to determine more sophisticated skills. All timed essays are considered first drafts and are evaluated as such, but so what?

A goal of education is to produce more students who excel at writing as opposed to identifying those who barely clear the bar. Given this, evaluating writing portfolios instead of timed-writing samples is far more beneficial to students and schools. Let a group of evaluators look at each student’s efforts to write arguments, analyses, and narratives, along with examples of the writing process, from first through final drafts.

Yes, this would take longer, with an evaluation process far more subjective and open to bias. These are issues that need to be addressed.

Granted, slapping an arbitrary number on an essay is far easier and more efficient. Yet the production of good writing is seldom easy or efficient. Why should the evaluation process get a pass?

And if these arguments aren’t convincing, then let those who would be horrified to send out even a casual email without using a spellchecker be the first to share an unedited piece of writing with the world, something we ask students to do all the time on tests.

Crickets, again, and not the giant mutated kind.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

I'm a patient, easy-going 'golden retriever'

A few weeks ago, I took a five-minute personality test at work to determine the type of animal I am. Based on my responses to 10 sets of words, my result was a golden retriever. In other words, patient, easy-going, over-accommodating, and confrontation-avoidant.

The other animals in the mix were lions, otters and beavers, displaying traits often associated with these creatures. Lions, say the test results, are leaders, otters are “cheerleading types,” and beavers are detail-oriented, dam (sorry) them.

The other people in my department were mostly lions, with a couple beavers and one otter/lion hybrid. (That person must’ve filled out the survey near a nuclear reactor.)

The rationale for the test was to determine how to best interact and communicate among our different “species.” When I approach one of the lions in my department, I should recognize they want results and have a tendency to take charge. An otter, meanwhile, wants me to validate them, while a beaver appreciates when I maintain a high level of quality.

I take all such tests with a grain of salt. A pillar, actually.

Merve Emre, in a Washington Post piece from 2018, writes that personality tests “are based on powerful, enduring myths about what personality is and how we can measure it” and are often rooted in stereotypes. While some people see the tests as “harmless fun, like astrology,” Emre notes that such tests are sometimes used by companies as a basis for hiring and firing. After all, if you’re in a business that values beavers, who wants an otter gumming up the works?

Speaking of astrology, back in the ’90s, when I worked in the advertising department of the paper you might be holding in your hands (unless you’re looking at it online), one of my responsibilities was the daily horoscope.

At the time, horoscopes were delivered on paper from a syndicate and were pasted onto the comics page. Once, I dropped the papers and hopelessly jumbled the dates, so the horoscopes that week were published out of order. I often wondered if this led any readers to take a risk on a day they were supposed to be cautious or stay home when they were advised to take a trip. In any event, nobody ever complained.

Similarly, none of my current colleagues complained on the day of our great unveiling, when we learned our spirit-personality animals.

Maybe it’s because personality tests are largely self-fulfilling prophecies. We select the words, traits or images that will give us results that best align with how we want to be perceived. We may do this at least as often as we select answers that actually indicate what we believe about ourselves.

But if the end results are the same, that’s a distinction without a difference.

I can’t quibble with my results: The golden retriever traits match me perfectly, especially the breed’s weaknesses. I am indecisive, over-accommodating, and willing to go to almost any lengths to avoid conflict. When I know somebody is angry with me, even if it’s somebody I barely know – like a driver I’ve cut off in traffic – it threatens to overwhelm all other concerns.

Still, one of the biggest benefits of personality tests is their aspirational nature. If I want to be more beaver-like or otter-like, I can practice diplomacy and intuition, respectively. I can also start foraging for sticks and balancing balls on my nose.

And here I am again, going out of my way to avoid criticizing a personality test created by people I’ll never meet, whose opinions should mean nothing to me.

Exactly the behavior you’d expect from a conflict-avoiding retriever.

If you want to try the test, use this shortened link, bit.ly/3LuV4hO.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com