DADWAGON

Featured by FastCompany and the Beeb, and now at TED (a famous intellectual colloquium that somehow forgets to invite DadWagon each year): a super-intrusive MIT-scientist dad who recorded his child’s first 90,000 hours of life and words and had supercomputers boil it down to create the Human Speechome Project. From the BBC:

Professor [Deb] Roy wandered into this debate as someone originally more interested in robots than children.

“I was initially inspired by how children learn language as a new way of building machines,” he says.

But looking through the raft of prior research on the effect of environment on language, he noticed a common problem; previous studies only offered snapshots of a child’s development.

“Every parent knows that a child can change a lot in a week or a month,” he told BBC News. “If you’re interested in the process of development then it is important to have a continuous view.”

It is a problem recognised by other linguists as well.

“Current samples that the field works with – typically an hour of recorded speech a week – are one to two orders of magnitude too small for our scientific purposes,” Professor Steven Pinker of Harvard University told BBC News.

So, Professor Roy, who by then had a child on the way, set about solving the conundrum. His solution: wire up his house with 11 cameras, 14 microphones and terabytes of storage and record every waking moment of his soon-to-arrive son.

It was christened the Human Speechome project and immediately drew comparisons with its genetic counterpart.

As with many ideas that come through TED, this one makes us at DadWagon feel like idiots. I mean, we experiment with our children–Matt feeds his toddler booze, I titrate my kids with variable doses of anger–but there’s no scientific rigor to what we do. So we applaud Prof. Roy, and will look forward, in a dozen years time, to his comprehensive study of the masturbatory patterns of teenage boys, as captured by his remorseless and unblinking in-house camera array.

As a teaser to that future work, here’s a video compilation of his boy learning to say ‘ball’.

Over in the local paper, ‘wagoneer Theodore Ross—or, as he’s known around DadWagon HQ, The Odor—has a nice little piece up today about how the publishing industry revolves around drinking, even (or perhaps especially) when that industry is ridding itself of you with all the delicacy of a toddler emptying her bowels. Here’s a taste:

I didn’t really feel that I had taken possession of the office until I procured a bottle of bourbon and several drinking glasses. I remember telling my father, who is not exactly a teetotaler, about this, and he was appalled, unconvinced by my explanation that practically every journalist and editor I’d ever met kept a bottle around. (One of my friends, a writer, keeps seven mostly-full bottles of Schnapps on his desk next to a photo of his daughter dressed as a bumblebee.) You don’t necessarily have to drink it — I hardly touched the bourbon — but it has to be there.

As the schnappsmeister and father of said bumblebee, I feel entitled to comment, or really to burden you with my dreary thoughts on drinking, which have been changing over the past couple of months. In short: I don’t like it as much as I used to.

It started, I think, well before the last couple of months. In the past few years, I began to notice that if I drank beer at night—even just a single pint—getting up the next morning was an inconceivable chore. This didn’t happen with wine or spirits, just beer. So, I cut back. Well, okay, not really. But a few weeks ago, I went out to a new bar with a fellow writer and had a few pints—some kind of wonderful dark beer from Barrier—and found myself, in the middle of the night, puking into the toilet. I hadn’t had that much, I thought, so maybe I’m just getting older, no longer able, physically, to handle what I put in.

So now it’s the occasional beer, with wine taking its place. I have no scientific justification for this decision, only the vague memory of another friend who’d been told by his doctor to do the same thing. But even then, I’m skeptical. Last week I spent in Montreal with my brother, and we ate and drank a lot: you know, foie gras and pork and duck at every meal, washed down with generally great wine and the occasional shot of armagnac to cut through the fat. Everything tasted great, and yet there would always come some indefinable point in the evening when the effects of the wine began to eclipse its enjoyment. I wouldn’t get drunk exactly, but I could tell my taste buds were dulled. And in the morning, I’d feel awful—though more in an “I just ate a week’s worth of saturated fat” way than hungover.

All of which is to say it’s time to cut back. But just a little. I know a few people who’ve stopped drinking entirely, and another who’s always questioning whether his desire for a beer after work is evidence of creeping alcoholism. But that’s not for me. I still like the stuff—how it tastes and how it makes me feel—and rare are the times when I really do have too much. I like the rituals of drinking, of surprising my wife with a gin-and-tonic. I like the relief of a beer when I get home. In the absence of religious or cultural traditions, drinking is all I’ve got. I just want a little less of it.

And I’ve got a great solution: Sasha! Lately when I pull out a glass or bottle of “daddy juice,” Sasha demands a sip. And, sometimes, she gets one. For every sip she takes, that’s one I don’t, and I’m well on the way to temperance!

It’s been strange following the ways in which the conservative governors of our middle American states have turned so virulently on a paragon of traditional American virtue: the teacher. Regardless of where you come down on the political activities in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Indiana–brutal response to fiscal reality or brutally cynical political wedge issue–it’s been shocking to hear the vitriol directed toward the nation’s educators.

Frankly, I don’t really understand it. Certainly there are bad teachers in the United States, and I imagine there are ways in which the national union stifles innovation. But, really, teachers? The people caring for and our educating our children? It doesn’t track.

Now, using the Times as a source of American perspective is a dangerous thing. As an institution it feels compelled to display all sides of an issue, regardless of how preposterous one side might be. But does a broad cross-section of the American public really begrudge teachers their summer break:

Even in a country that is of two minds about teachers — Americans glowingly recall the ones who changed their lives, but think the job with its summers off is cushy — education experts say teachers have rarely been the targets of such scorn from politicians and voters.

Republican lawmakers in half a dozen states are pressing to unwind tenure and seniority protections in place for more than 50 years. Gov. Chris Christie’s dressing down of New Jersey teachers in town-hall-style meetings, accusing them of greed, has touched a populist vein and made him a national star.

I know that directing money at large bureaucracies doesn’t solve systemic problems, but seriously, as a parent, if there is one bloated, unwieldy, and poorly-performing institution I like seeing awash in money, its schools, particularly the public ones. So, let’s assume for the moment that our teachers really are the bloodsuckers that Republican elected officials would like them to be–they’re not, but assume it–wouldn’t paying them off be a worthy trade on behalf of our young? Balancing the budget on their backs is really just balancing it on our own.

Unless of course you’re wealthy enough to send your children to private school. But even then, no, that’s too simple. It’s still absurd.

Play nice, boys.

I have no idea what this Mother Jones interview is about, but it’s funny, and at least some of it has to do with children, albeit ones with undesirable super-powers, so therefore, I feel justified in running it at DadWagon:

MJ: If a superhero has sex with a woman who doesn’t know he’s a superhero—say Clark Kent, rather than Superman—can she sue if the child turns out to have undesirable uncontrollable superpowers?

JD: I don’t think so. I mean I’m not positive, but I would think that by analogy to, for example, someone who knows that they are the carrier to a hereditary disease.

RD: Yeah, a hereditary condition is different than a disease. If you know you have a disease and you give to someone else through sex and you know you have it, that’s a crime.

Read the whole thing, and perhaps explain it to me.