Bad Mom, Good Mom

Now I'm really insulted

2012-01-25T19:13:00.000-08:00

The LA Times rarely gives the south bay region any coverage. And, when they do, they parachute out of the sky and botch it.

El Segundo was formerly known as an aerospace hub in the shadow of Los Angeles International Airport and a refinery town — its name derives from the 1911 selection of the spot by Standard Oil Co. of California for the company's second oil refinery.
But recently the city has begun to attract a variety of creative businesses that might once have looked down their noses at the humble burg of 17,000 residents.

I've written many times about my affection for my daytime hometown of El Segundo. But I take exception to the categorization that my work--and that of my colleagues--is not "creative".

I was so mad to read a LAT columnist describe ES as "lily-white", I didn't trust myself to blog about it at the time. Take a look at the school demographics. Take a look around at lunch-time. Not only is the town diverse, but the dining parties are diverse. That is, friendships form over shared interests beyond superficial ones of race.

The farmers' market is also fun. I wore a me-made linen skirt to the market last summer before dining at the Farmstand.

the El Segundo series
Mariposa (What does a town do when growth is constrained by an endangered species? You embrace it as the town mascot!)
From the mountains to the sea (watching supertankers roll in is a favorite past-time and I explain how to tell whether one is empty or full)

Happy Year of the Dragon

2012-01-23T20:33:00.000-08:00

In the last flurry of nesting activity before giving birth, I went a little crazy buying dragon fabric at the Cotton Shop in 2000. I used a leftover scrap of pink dragons for the outside yoke of Simplicity 2689. The body and yoke facing were from two preconsumer waste bits bought at SAS Fabrics.

I still have a two pieces of dragon fabric left to sew up*. If I do finish them, I will buy more before the dragon fabrics are retired for another 12 years.

* One's destined to become a dress and the other a pillow or vest. It shouldn't be too hard to finish those.

Tide Pooling 2012

2012-01-22T19:40:00.000-08:00

Oops. While I was gearing up for and staffing the Wellness Fair, I postponed looking at the tide tables. It looks like our family missed a wonderful opportunity this weekend. The mid-afternoon low tide reached -1.4 (1.4 feet below mean low tide). Whenever the low tide reaches about -1.0 or below, the tide pools at Abalone Cove are exposed.

Photo courtesy of Steve Wolfe's slideshow of Abalone Cove.

If you had gone this weekend, the weather would have been windy, chilly and you might even have experienced intermittent rain showers. However, the tide pool denizens are more likely to be active in cold and damp weather than on hot, sunny days.

Hardy folks who went yesterday might even have been treated to the sight of TWO WHALES BREACHING SIMULTANEOUSLY. From the ACS/LA logbook for 21 Jan 2012:

As of 21 JAN 2012

Southbound Today --------------- 17
Northbound Today ---------------- 0
Total Whales Today ------------- 17
Southbound Calves Today --------- 0
Northbound Calves Today --------- 0

Season to Date (since 1 Dec 2011)

Southbound -------------------- 472
Northbound ---------------------- 5
Total ------------------------- 477
Calves South ------------------- 16
Calves North -------------------- 0

Message from the observers: High winds and BREACHING gray whales! Two different whales were breaching at the same time: one breached four times, and the other breached once. A short time later, another whale breached three times; we actually found this whale when it first breached. We saw flukes on three of the ten sightings. All sightings were within a mile offshore; one was just beyond the kelp line. We also spotted a large pod of common dolphin. The day ended with a series of three green flashes; the last flash turned blue at the end.

The Los Angeles Chapter of the American Cetacean Society takes their census of the near-shore migratory route from the patio of the Palos Verdes Interpretive Center. Local newspapers had reported an unprecedented number of whales sighted in the early season. (No one can tell if this is a shift toward an earlier migration or a shift in routes or an increase in total whale population.)

Our family stopped by Point Vicente on our way home last weekend with our binoculars. The whale census taker on duty said that she had only seen two whales that day. We did see countless birds of many varieties, a large pod of cavorting dolphins just beyond the kelp line and two sea lions lazing on the rocks.

There's still plenty of good whale watching opportunities this year. And there will be another good tide pooling opportunity at Abalone Cove the weekend of February 18-19, 2012.

More info:

NOAA Tide Predictions General
NOAA Tide Predictions California
NOAA Tide Predictions King Harbor, Santa Monica Bay (near Abalone Cove)
Abalone Cove Shoreline Park
Point Vicente Interpretive Center (great place for whale watching from shore)
Tie-dye Family at PVIC
Past tidepooling posts
ACS/LA Gray Whale Census and Behavior Project

Call of the wild: read me a quilt 2012

2012-01-19T06:05:00.000-08:00

When cleaning out Iris' room, we found a copy of Call of the wild and this stuffed dog that barks when you squeeze it. It begged for a delectable mountains quilt for the read me a quilt program. (The book+quilt combos are given to children in the LA County foster care program with the help of Court Appointed Special Advocates, CASA.)

I started with this fabric sample donated by Robert Kaufman, when the fabric was discontinued.

I made three delectable mountains blocks by sewing two roughly 18" square pieces of fabric into half square blocks. Then I sliced them vertically in three places, reversed their order and sewed them up into liberated delectable mountains blocks. I used my ruler strictly as a straight edge and did not look at the markings.

I used two fabric samples, 5 purchased 1/2 yard fabrics (I lacked suitable sky fabric), 1.5 yards of yardage from my collection for the mountains and then improvisationally pieced the rest using fabric from my scrap bin. Inspired by Completely Cauchy's, Scraptacularity, Part I, in which she pieced straight strips into log cabins and then cut them up as fabric, I pieced my backing log cabin style. Can you see how the backing was constructed?

The pieces ranged in size from fat quarters to this tiny triangle.

While piecing the quilt, I relived memories of past projects. Many of the blue/green fabrics were leftover from a baby quilt from pre-blog days; that baby is now in 7th grade. The gray faux bois were also used in the gray tiered skirts in Hello Goth!

The blue shirting with green stripes came from one of Bad Dad's thrifted shirt. When the collar & cuffs became too frayed to be presentable, I cut the body up to make a blue tiered skirt shown in Blue. The sleeves were cut up and used for this quilt.

Piecing scraps into fabric is labor intensive. In analyzing why I am drawn to quilts that are traditionally associated with African American quilt communities, I realized that I appreciate both the visual texture derived from the worn nature of the old fabrics and the labor-intensive and miraculous act of making something from nothing.

The process is part of the quality of the quilt, the inherent thingness of the thingy that Robert Pirsig wrote about in Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.

This is my entry for the Scrap Attack Quilt Along.

Past read me a quilts:
2011: Treasure Island
2010: Cat in a hat
Artful resourcefulness from fiber artist Abigail Doan

Sea creature?

2012-01-18T19:18:00.001-08:00

Is this a cuttlefish?

No, it's a citrus fruit called Buddha's hand!

Just one finger makes a lovely vinaigrette as shown here.

It was not in your CSA box. But, I share my hyperlocal garden bounty with other area gardeners. Right now, my Meyer lemon tree is groaning under the weight of many lemons. I traded a few for this Buddha's hand.

I can't use the entire thing, so I am offering up chunks of this to other CSA participants. Email me if you would like some. I also have Meyer lemons, rosemary, oregano and bay leaves to share.

Better yet, drop by the Adams Middle School Wellness Fair this Saturday, January 21, 2012 from 10:00AM to 1:00PM at (where else?) Adams Middle School.

I will be there. Stop by to say hello and pick up some hyperlocal Buddha's hand, Meyer lemons, rosemary, oregano and bay leaves!

This was originally posted at the Adams School CSA Blog, but I thought this was too cool not to share here, also. Please come by and say hello. Better yet, sign up for regular CSA deliveries.

2012-01-18T19:18:00.000-08:00

Moonrise on the 10

2012-01-17T20:02:00.000-08:00

Coming home after a full day out and about LA.

Postconsumer waste sewing

2012-01-17T11:14:00.001-08:00

LA Times Garbage Maven, Susan Carpenter, explored what to do with old clothes. She's only recently began researching the topic. Read my wardrobe refashion, quilting and sewing posts for some of my experiences/ideas.

Many sewing blogs focus on sewing the latest patterns and fabrics. I do pattern reviews of recent patterns, too, in the hopes of helping out others as they have helped me. However, very few people show their more mundane projects like turning old t-shirts into rags or old towels into terry mop covers for cleaning hardwood floors.

So here's how I turn our worn-out hole-y t-shirts into rags. By themselves, they are too thin. So I cut off the sleeves and neckline/shoulders, turn the shirt inside out (so that the graphics stay on the inside and don't grab/drag on the furniture it polishes), fold them mid-torso, and then sew down the edges to hold it all together. These are now 4-ply thick, absorbent, lint-free and sturdy.

These rags are used and washed repeatedly until they fall apart.

The sleeves are separately sewn on one end to form a polishing mitt. Socks are used to polish shoes or for bicycle chain lubrication. They get tossed when they are dirtied.

Leftovers from sewing projects get thrown in a 66 quart bin of scraps. The bin was overflowing and I made 6 baby togs for two toddlers. The blue and white ensemble was made from scraps from my PJ pants (black) and a t-shirt (blue/black print) project.

The pink and purple ensemble was made from an old tie-dyed t-shirt (itself a refashion) and scraps from the two kits hoodies. I had to patch together fabric for some of the pieces. Kids clothes and quilts are perfect for using up scraps.

Here they are, lying on another post-consumer waste sewing project. More on that later.

OMG, I just saw the original leopard hoodie back in 2009 in Camouflage. Cute, cute, cute!

Related:

Mr Daisey goes to Shenzhen

2012-01-12T21:03:00.000-08:00

Ever wonder who makes your stuff? Mike Daisey did and he went to China to meet the people who make his Apple stuff. The result is both humorous and heartbreaking. Don't miss Mr Daisey and the Apple Factory.

This confirms the stuff I read Factory Girls, a book that follows the lives of several teenage girls that left the countryside to seek factory jobs. The girls report that factories don't allow them to leave on their (once monthly) day off if the guards suspect that they won't return. If a worker can't leave when the conditions are intolerable, then they are slaves. (You say involuntary labor, I say slaves.)

There's so much else I want to talk about, but I don't have time.

Follow these links instead:

Victoria’s Secret Revealed in Child Picking Burkina Faso Cotton: involuntary labor used to produce "fair trade" cotton without labor-saving technology, which the farmers cannot afford at the prices they command for their organic cotton.
How many slaves work for you? a slavery footprint calculator
Making it in America: Maddie Parlier in Greenville, South Carolina and the girls in Shenzhen have one thing in common--they owe their jobs to the fact that they are cheaper than a robot.

Vogue 8605

2012-01-09T19:27:00.000-08:00

Doesn't thislook much better than this?

It looked so sad and baggy on the dressform that approximates my figure, yet it looks so fabulous on Pennamite. The pattern illustration is deceptive. The simple-looking design contains no bust darts and it looked like a loose-fitting sack that would fit anyone.

In reality, it was an engineering marvel with bust darts incorporated into the shape of the collar, which were integrated into the front pattern piece. The body has only a front/collar and a back piece (aside from two rectangles for the button/buttonhole patches, pockets and a curved piece to finish the collar).

I finished it beautifully with bound seam allowances and a window buttonhole. I used a wool blend crepe (mostly wool from the way it behaves when steamed) and a small amount of linen/rayon plainweave for the contrast.

I sewed a size 12, which should fit my measurements. But it was huge. I might try making this for myself in a much smaller size (8?), but am not sure that it still wouldn't sag up front. It was engineered to flatter a womanly figure. If you've got one, then I heartily recommend this pattern for you.

It looked so great on Pennamite, and she took the lifetime Wardrobe Refashion pledge, that I offered to make her another one in a drapey graphic black/white check in my fabric collection. She replied that she would accept one, but wouldn't I want to make myself something from the fabric? What she doesn't know is that I have more than one black/white fabric. ;-)

I think the next one will have a giant snap so I can eliminate the buttonhole. I will also serge finish the seam allowances and hems, allowing her to add some of her crochet designs to trim the collar. Because we already have the fit worked out, it can be a 1 hr project. I can cut and sew while she crochets the edging.

Why do I want to foist clothing on a friend instead of sewing for myself? Have you seen the custom shoes and art handbags that she creates? You can purchase one of her creations at the Pennamite Zibbet store, or contact her for a custom commission.

The planetary cost of cashmere

2012-01-03T20:50:00.000-08:00

So Zo asked her readers what bullshit they had uncovered recently. I emailed that I have a whole blog series about bullshit and that I felt a rising rant about cashmere bullshit. I promised to write this post and cross-post it on her blog.

So why was I so upset?

Last month, I had toured the giant Macy's in Union Square (San Francisco), which contained racks and racks of cashmere. They represented a lot of goats! 20-30 years ago, cashmere was a rare luxury, not an ubiquitous gift sold for $49.

Where did they all come from? How could there be enough goats in central Asia to make so many sweaters in so many outlets?

The media was full of stories about how to be a discerning consumer of quality cashmere or how to avoid being fleeced by adulterated cashmere. Newspapers need to write upbeat stories that draw many readers and teach them how to consume (products from their advertisers). But fearless bloggers like Zoe question whether this consumption is even necessary.

I was in San Francisco for the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting and had met Ryan Boller from NASA Goddard, who was showing an improved algorithm for the detection of aerosols from space.

The global dust belt has not received as much press as the global fashion weeks so you might not be familiar with this story. (Aerosols can be dust, clouds--both liquid water and ice, pollution, sea spray and volcanic ash). Occasionally, dust can be injected into the jet stream, a fast-moving river of air that circles the globe. Asian dust ends up in north America, American dust ends up in Europe, European dust ends up in Asia and so on.

The Sahara desert used to be THE major source for dust, but there are other smaller seasonal sources, such as glaciers grinding rocks in Alaska. The amount of dust is rising, and global dust season is lengthening due to both growth in dust sources (industrialization and desertification) and lengthening of local dust seasons.

In recent years, Mongolia has become a major source of dust. The Gobi desert is spreading up into the Mongolia Steppes and the goats did it. Or rather, we did it, with our collective lust for cashmere.

Pastoralism Unraveling in Mongolia explains

Sukhtseren Sharav has a herd of 150 goats and 100 sheep, and as they chew their way through everything else, and the sharilj spreads, he must shepherd them ever higher into the mountains to find fresh grazing land.

The lack of foraging terrain is not Mr. Sharav’s only worry. The price for cashmere, the wool made from the fleece of his goats, has plunged 50 percent from last year. The price of flour, his most essential food staple, has more doubled.

These are hard times for Mongolia’s cashmere industry, which provides jobs and income for a third of the country’s population of 2.6 million and supplies about 20 percent of the world’s market for the fluffy, feather-light fiber, prized for its warmth, delicate feel and long wear.

To compensate for low prices, herders have been increasing supply by breeding more goats — a classic vicious circle. Mongolia’s goat population is now approaching 20 million, the highest ever recorded.

Environmentalists and social scientists say this is destroying biodiversity and pastureland, and undermining herding livelihoods. But goats are hardier than other livestock, breed faster and can survive on sparser resources: so, the more the land is degraded, the more herders are driven to switch from cows, camels or other less destructive herds — another vicious circle.

This is a tragedy for the herders with global consequences. Aerosols are a strong feedback to the global radiative budget. In plain English, this means that dust traps heat. This can have both local and global consequences as the trapped heat changes the global air circulation, impacting storm patterns, heat waves, etc.

Ryan shared some examples. You can find more in the NASA Earth Observatory Dust, Smoke and Haze page. Take a look at the dust traveling from Mongolia toward China in April 2011.

The sparsely vegetated grasslands of the Gobi frequently give rise to dust storms, especially in springtime.

Here's another example, from May 2008.

According to a May 27 report from the Agence France-Presse news agency, dust from this storm pushed Beijing’s pollution levels to the highest level, prompting the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau to warn sensitive individuals to stay indoors.

Seeing the global-scale devastation caused by the cashmere industry, and learning of the suffering it has caused Mongolian herders has taken the luster off cashmere for me. I didn't purchase any this year (though I did knit a cotton/cashmere blend sweater this year with yarn purchased and stashed previously).

If you already have cashmere, don't sweat it. Take good care of it so it lasts. I have cashmere sweaters that are 25+ years old (one bought new, two bought at thrift shops).

I hope that, after reading this, you will consume more carefully, and in smaller quantities. I further hope that your natural curiosity and bullshit detector will lead you to delve deeper.

I recommend:

golden fleece? to learn more about the history of the Scottish cashmere industry.
A synopsis of the "Cashmerino" yarn that may or may not contain any cashmere at all, and the lawsuit that ensued.
Zero waste goal for how I use leftovers from the LA fashion industry to make clothes for myself and others.

2011 Wrap-up

2012-01-02T15:31:00.000-08:00

Imagine a collage of the 74 things I sewed and knitted in 2011 right here. Further imagine that I threw in some highlights from our family travels. Imagine that the Picasa collage software lost all my carefully selected images and added random ones that I did not want .four. .times. and that is why there is no collage here.

Instead, you will get pictures of the first and last things I completed in 2011, the Japanese Feather and Fan and Akimbo Shawls, both in Malabrigo sock yarn.

I took time off at midnight to toast with my family, but then I went back into the sewing room and finished another pair of pajama pants from Vogue 1146.

There is no point in modeling yet another pair of serviceable and comfy PJs.

My first FO made completely in 2012 is Vogue 8605 and it was a partial fail. I finished it beautifully with bound seam allowances and a window buttonhole. I used a wool blend crepe (mostly wool from the way it behaves when steamed) and a small amount of linen/rayon plainweave for the contrast.

But, it was a painful and time-consuming way to learn that the Vogue Woman patterns, even loose ones like this, are sized for a womanly D-cup, which certainly does not work for me.

I started tracking my projects on a spreadsheet and was surprised at the 2011 total.

I made 34 things for me and 40 things for others.
Iris received 18 of the 40.
Some were really quick.
Eight of the items were simple baby pants; I can turn out 3 in an hour when I batch them and I don't have to change serger thread colors.
But some took .forever., like the pirate-themed improvisational quilt.
13 skirts
16 tops
6 dresses
4 jackets
6 scarves or shawls (2 sewn, 4 knitted)
2 nightgowns or PJs
12 pairs of pants--all knit pull-on style
2 pairs of shorts
7 sweaters
1 complete quilt for charity
5 quilt tops for charity
1 wall hanging for our home not included in count above.

I started the first project of 2011, the feather and fan shawl, while sitting on an ocean-view balcony in Zanzibar. I finished the last project of the year at home, chatting with my family. It was a challenging and rewarding year.

I wish you the best in 2012.

Q & A with Collette Patterns' Sarai Mitnick

2011-12-20T19:31:00.000-08:00

With all the travel and other distractions chez BMGM, I haven't had a chance to post this (email) interview with fellow UC Berkeley alumna, Sarai Mitnick.

[Disclosure: Sarai and I have never met in person, but we have a friend in common from her former corporate life. I haven't tried any of the patterns. However, I am sorely tempted to sew the Taffy blouse and Meringue skirt. ]

There is no shortage of sewing books aimed at the brand new young sewist with beautiful photography and cute garments. I even succumbed and bought [name redacted], which I was tempted to throw away in frustration with the poor/missing instructions, mislabeled diagrams, lack of copy-editing and wasteful pattern printing layout. I am an experienced sewist and I knew when the book was wrong. But, how would a new sewist know that? If you want to convince a frenemy that s/he is too dumb to sew, you can have my copy of [name redacted].

What sets Sarai's book apart is the excellent and clear instructions. It's like you have an experienced friend looking over your shoulder, telling you how to navigate around all the gotchas. If you are looking for a book you can hand a friend just learning to sew, and you want her to be successful enough that she makes clothes that you want to borrow, this is it.

I was so impressed with the design and writing I saw in the book (as well as the gorgeous photos), that I swiftly emailed Sarai some questions, which she graciously answered and gave me permission to post. I think her answers are interesting enough to post in their entirety.

Sarai's hard work and background in User Experience really shows in The Colette Sewing Handbook.

Q: I am very curious about your background. The book jacket says
that you have worked in "user experience".
Can you explain what that is?
How did you land in that field?
Did that have any role in your decision to launch your own line of patterns?
Or to write a book?

User Experience is basically a design discipline that involves studying people's needs and behavior, and then designing interactions or experiences to make things better for them. It's all about product design.

In a way, it's similar to marketing in that marketers also study how people behave and what they want. The difference is that marketers collect data in order to sell stuff. User Experience researchers use information to make products better and everyday lives easier.

I studied human-computer interaction and got my graduate degree in that area from UC Berkeley, mostly because I had always been interested in both technology and human behavior. I loved that it blended so many fields, from cognitive science to anthropology to computer science. And I love learning new things, so having a career all about making discoveries and applying them to real life was right up my alley.

It definitely influenced my own company. First of all, I saw a need that wasn't being completely filled, because I had so much difficulty finding sewing patterns that really appealed to me. I think working in that field gave me better intuition about what people would look for and respond to, in a way. It also made me very sensitive to thoughtless design, and to want to make things better.

It also gave me the ethos that you should always put the user first, to see things from her point of view and to try to make things easier and more enjoyable for her. I think that really carries through my company, or at least I hope it does.

Q: Your patterns are famous for their complete instructions.
You assume no prior knowledge and explain all sewing terms
and techniques used. This makes your instructions much longer
than competitors'. Why did you choose to go this route?
Are you aiming for the brand new sewist?
Do you plan to offer a short-form version of sewing order
for seasoned sewists? Or do you feel that we can all
learn something new?

I think laying things out for beginners really does benefit everyone. There often is something new you can learn, or at the very least ideas that can inspire you to sew in a new and different way.

I've heard from more advanced sewists that they mostly just skim pattern instructions, so I try to design my instructions with that in mind as well. That means using plenty of diagrams, and putting headings over different sections. So, for example, a more advanced sewist can skim and see a section with a header that says "sew side seams" and a diagram and know what to do. A more beginning sewist might read every step under that header to figure out how to sew and press the side seams.

It seems that a lot of people learn to sew from following pattern instructions, so having more complete instructions helps to draw those people into sewing more fully.

Q: Your sizing system is very different from the Big 4.
How did you develop your sizing system?
Do you think that bodies have changed over the decades?
I keep reading that cup sizes for all weights are larger in
today's young women (vs. their mothers). Is that why
your patterns fit a much curvier build than the Big 4?

Yes, that's pretty much the case. The sizing charts for most patterns out there haven't changed in the last 40 years or so, and I'm afraid that doesn't make much sense to me. If you look at the data about people's actual measurements, we are different than we were decades ago, on average.

I just wanted to make patterns that appealed to a wide variety of women, so I did some researched and tried to developed sizing based on that. I couldn't really find a good reason to stick to the sizing systems used by the larger sewing pattern companies, though I know that many people are used to them if they've been sewing for a long time.

Q: Do your patterns have lengthen and shorten lines to
accommodate a range of heights?
Different cup sizes?

I don't make them in different cup sizes, unless the pattern is something specific like my Nutmeg bralette pattern.

All the pattern in the book have lengthen/shorten lines. Some of the earlier patterns didn't have them, but I've been adding them as things are reprinted because I think they're so helpful for people with non-average heights or (like me) unusual proportions. I myself am quite short waisted, and I almost always have to shorten bodices to fit me.

Q: How did you select the patterns that you would include in
the book? Are dresses the backbone of a modern woman's
wardrobe? Can some of the dresses be turned into blouses
instead?

I'm not sure I'd venture to say whether they are the backbone or not, but I know that my customers like to sew them! My publisher also liked the focus on dresses, and I do think there's something very satisfying about completing a dress.

The patterns were designed to be things that could be fairly simple and without a huge number of pieces, teach the concepts in the book, and still be interesting to sew. I've found through my pattern line that my customers are most attracted to things that are simple, elegant, and leave room for their own creativity.

Q: Your versatility (and work ethic) is astounding.
Assuming you have a 24-hour day, like the rest of us,
do you work with a pattern maker? Sample Maker?

I have a wonderful assistant who helps me draft and test patterns, and she also makes the sample garments we use in photo shoots and such. But I don't outsource any of that work, at least not at this stage. It's all done in our little studio.

I do work pretty long hours, especially while I was writing this book, but I'm hoping to slow down a little bit in 2012. I just have way more ideas than I have time, and I also like to constantly be doing new things. So I have competing urges, I guess!

The thing that helps me the most is just being really organized and having systems for managing my work. That's the number one thing I've learned from being a small business owner.

Q: I first came across your work through Wardrobe Refashion.
The using what you have mentality is very evident in your personal
work. Your book is beautifully illustrated with samples made with
new fabric. Can you offer suggestions on how to use this book with
recycled materials?

There's actually one bit of recycled fabric in there, in the bias tape used on the Taffy blouse! I made it out of a thrifted blouse. Secondhand clothes are fantastic for making bias tape, if you just look for small scale patterns! It's also a good way to make use of leftover fabric scraps.

I also often use old sheets for making muslins, which I think is a good way to reduce waste (and save money).

One thing that I think would help the most is the chapter on understanding fabric. I think learning as much as you can about fabric is really helpful to identifying good raw materials, either at the thrift store or in your own closet. You end up seeing a lot more possibilities that way.

Finally, I think concentrating on making things you really love and want can help reduce waste. Sometimes I find myself getting into this "more more more" attitude with sewing, which feels very greedy. I end up buying way too much fabric and not having nearly enough time to make everything I want. The truth is, I don't need to make or buy tons of clothes. I feel much better making and buying less, but making it something that's special to me.

Fight Back Against Content Theft

2011-12-18T13:58:00.000-08:00

Many bloggers have been plagued by content theft, including myself. Plagiarism is an age old problem and will never be fully eradicated. But, there are a few ways you can reduce your chances of being ripped off.

I'm not an intellectual property expert, but my understanding is that your work is implicitly understood to be copyrighted UNLESS you specifically say that it is not. Just to make it abundantly clear, you can put a copyright notice on your blog to let people know that it is not OK to take any content from your blog. On blogger, put a footer that says something like this:

[In dashboard, click on your blog, then on the design tab at the top. Then click on "Add a gadget" at the bottom of the template. Type your copyright text statement into the box.]

That cuts out the naive but honest actors. What about the dishonest ones?

Many websites had reposted part of What Do Automobiles and Spacecraft Have in Common?, a guest post I wrote for the James Fallows' blog at the Atlantic Monthly website. Only one had the chutzpah to repost it verbatim in it's entirety. Grrr. Very bad karma.

The upside is that I did a little research and learned some interesting lessons for this new post.

The overwhelming majority of blogs are known in the industry as "spam blogs" because they exist solely to serve up ads. To generate a large quantity of content as cheaply as possible, they resort to stealing it.

There are many companies that sell software to automate the process of "content scraping". (This cuts out the hard work of generating content and stealing it by hand!) There are a few legitimate reasons to scrape a website, e.g. to back it up. But I am just going to talk about the search and theft issue here.

This problem became particularly acute in Pakistan after news stories were published about a few spam bloggers (including a school boy) earning real $$$$ from the Google AdSense program. See this Express Tribune article from Pakistan that estimates that ~90% of Pakistani blogs were serving exclusively stolen content. (I've heard that is an underestimate.)

Note, the bloggers were not blocked from blogging and that their blogs continued to be included in search and referral. They were merely banned from participating in the Google AdSense advertising (for $) program. They could still earn money from other sources. Some articles in the media, including Global Voices, don't make that distinction clear. It's not censorship. It's just preventing people from profiting off theft on your ad network.

If you find your content someplace it doesn't belong, take these steps.
[This is not meant to be a complete list because I am not an expert. If you know more things to try, please teach us by leaving a comment.]

If you find a theft, don't link to it. You'll only drive up their importance ranking for search.

Instead, inform the search engines so that they can devalue the ranking for that webpage, and possibly for the entire site.

Google provides a Report Scraper Pages online document. Fill it out with the URL addresses of the original content that you wrote and the offending webpage and submit. (If you know a similar link for other search engines, please leave the link in a comment.)

It may take a while, but the scraper website will slowly disappear from the Google search engine. After several days, I noticed that the entire site that stole my content was excluded from the Google AdSense program and had slipped in the keyword search ranking.

Get the stolen content removed. You may want to give the search engine companies a few days to look at the offending website before you do this.

Do a domain trace on the URL address to find out who owns it and where it is hosted. You can use any one of the many whois lookups on the web.

For instance I did a trace at both Network Solutions and Whois.net and found out that the address was bought through a domain reseller rather than registered directly (a common obfuscation trick) and that the domain registration contact is hidden rather than public (there are sound security reasons to do this, sometimes).

Scroll down to see the name servers. That tells you the name of the ISP that is hosting the website. In my example, I saw:

Name Servers:
ns1.gothost.org
ns2.gothost.org

Write the ISP at abuse@hostingcompany.whatever. In my case, that would be abuse@gothost.org. Include in your message the page of the stolen content that they are hosting, the url of the original content, and request that they take down the stolen content.

I lucked out because gothost is an American company based in Florida and needs to comply with US laws. They took the content off their servers immediately. Abroad, you may be out of luck.

Robots are your friend.
Do you know what your robots.txt file says? I didn't even know what it was until a friend told me about it a month ago. Wikipedia has a synopsis.

Basically, it tells webcrawler robots where they can and can not access. This is purely advisory and nonbinding, but the major search engines all follow the instructions you set.

On blogger dashboard, select your blog, then click on the setting tab. Select yes for "Let search engines find your blog?"

If you do that, then your robots.txt file will look something like http://badmomgoodmom.blogspot.com/robots.txt

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Allow: /

Sitemap: http://badmomgoodmom.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

Note: robots.txt must always reside at the top-level root directory. If you put it anywhere else, it won't work.

Why do you want robots to "crawl" your content? Because that's how they index what your website is about and refer readers to you. It's also how they find high quality and original content.

If you don't allow search engines to "crawl" your data, the first time they see your content is AFTER it has been stolen and reposted elsewhere.

I know you are a good writer and you have tons of original content and creative ideas. Take credit for them. Make sure the search engines know where to find you.

How I became a victim.

I discovered What Do Automobiles and Spacecraft Have in Common? on a spam blog. Perusing it, it looked like the blog was set up to serve car ads for Google Adsense. 100% of their content was stolen. The "About Us" page said:

All content in this Site is gather from all over the internet. From All of the best resource of internet. That can be digitized – books, newspapers, magazines, newsletters, journals, research, music and film – is being digitized and distributed via the Internet. This Site aim to provide the world’s easiest-to-use, most flexible and most affordable solution for getting all this content online.
We always strive to bring you the best information available, in the internet, Our vision is to give readers information and provided, as fastest and fresh as it can. Finally we want to create a platform that is completely open so publishers and developers can shape it anyway they want to meet their own special needs.

Admin

So I am not sure if I should be offended or flattered to be considered among the "best resource of internet". ;-)

It looked like it was one of a family of websites--each organized around an advertising theme--that all link to each other. There was not one iota of original content, except possibly for the "About Us" info above. (Are they non-native English speakers? Or just pretending to be?)

I wrote some guest posts for theatlantic.com. They have a very restrictive http://www.theatlantic.com/robots.txt file.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /james-fallows/*/*
Disallow: /james-fallows/*/?cid=*
Disallow: /megan-mcardle/*/*
Disallow: /derek-thompson/*/*
Disallow: /marc-ambinder/*/*
Disallow: /ta-nehisi-coates/*/*
Disallow: /chris-good/*/*
Disallow: /alyssa-rosenberg/*/*
Disallow: /william-powers/*/*
Disallow: /jeffrey-goldberg/*/*
Disallow: /matthew-yglesias/*/*
Disallow: /bruce-falconer/*/*
Disallow: /daniel-indiviglio/*/*
Disallow: /derek-lowe/*/*
Disallow: /culture/category/*
Disallow: /special-report/archive/*
Disallow: /*/print/20*
Disallow: /*/this-week/*
Disallow: /*/last-week/*
Disallow: /*/thisweek/*
Disallow: /*/lastweek/*
Disallow: /*/magazinearticles/*
Disallow: /*/magazine-articles/*
Disallow: /*/blogarticles/*
Disallow: /*/blog-articles/*
Crawl-delay: 5
Allow: /

This is very unusual. Take a look at http://www.thedailybeast.com/robots.txt.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search.html

Sitemap: http://www.thedailybeast.com/sitemap.xml

The Daily Beast makes everything visible to the search engines.

Now go peek at the robots.txt file of all your favorite news sites. I'll wait.

Inside Search, the official Google Search Blog, recently wrote about some search tweaks. If you were a web crawler, you'd know how much badly-written dreck there is out there on the internets. They program their web crawler robots to search for original content that can't be found elsewhere. I put significant effort into What Do Automobiles and Spacecraft Have in Common? and it's not a connection that I've seen pointed out in the popular press. Unfortunately, the first time the web search robots encountered it was on a spam blog. Don't let that happen to you.

Aside:
There are sound reasons to exclude some portions of your website to robots. I've seen this at the beginning of several robots.txt files. It looks like a template was passed around and I don't know the original source.

$Id: robots.txt,v 1.9.2.1 2008/12/10 20:12:19 goba Exp $
#
# robots.txt
#
# This file is to prevent the crawling and indexing of certain parts
# of your site by web crawlers and spiders run by sites like Yahoo!
# and Google. By telling these "robots" where not to go on your site,
# you save bandwidth and server resources.
#
# This file will be ignored unless it is at the root of your host:
# Used:    http://example.com/robots.txt
# Ignored: http://example.com/site/robots.txt
#
# For more information about the robots.txt standard, see:
# http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html
#
# For syntax checking, see:
# http://www.sxw.org.uk/computing/robots/check.html

If you are a scientific data center, serving terabytes of data to the public, you need to be careful about what you allow the robots to crawl. Otherwise, no science users can get through to download data to actually use. I asked around at AGU for best practices. Several people suggested blocking off most of the data areas but leaving a few selected examples of data that can be downloaded from the site open to the the robots.

AI Finis!

2011-12-16T22:30:00.001-08:00

Remember when Iris and I signed up for the online AI (Artificial Intelligence) class as a team?

But she quit in frustration during the Bayesian algebra unit?

I carried on alone.

But she wandered by while I was working with the (logic) Truth Tables for a final exam question and asked me to explain the notation.

Then she proceeded to rattle off the correct answers by inspection.

It't not cheating because I would have gotten the correct answers in the end. Truly.

Besides, we signed up as a team.

And, is it fair that a guy who competed in all of the DARPA Grand Challenges (and placed quite highly on some of them) and already has a PhD in robotics is also taking the class?

Yes, the percentage of people in the on-line version of the class that has gotten perfect marks on all the homework assignments and the midterm is double the percentage among the students actually taking the class at Stanford, but what if we disqualify all of the ringers like the one above? From the discussion forums, it appears that quite a few professors are taking the class to learn about e-learning rather than robotics.

Or is it sour grapes because I can do complicated Bayesian statistics calculations but can't subtract 14 from 100 correctly? (I was a math major. We don't use actual numbers after the first year.)

This class was a blast. It took the full 10 hours a week that the teachers estimated we needed to put into it. But, looking back over the homework and exams, I can see how much makes sense to me now. Before the class, I had no clue even how to read the ~~gobbleygook~~ notation.

Serendipitously, I embarked on a new project at work where I can apply some of what I learned. What fun! And I get paid for it.

A big thank-you to instructors Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun and all the IT staff that kept the servers (mostly) running during this record-breaking huge class.

Related Posts:

Trip report from the DARPA Urban Challenge Semi-Finals
Trip report from the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Lab
Use the search bar for our experiences with Lego and Robotics
Particularly Robot Sumo
What Do Automobiles and Spacecraft Have in Common? guest post for the Atlantic Monthly website

And the feathers flew

2011-12-15T21:45:00.000-08:00

In 20 consecutive days, I was away for all but a 10 hour stretch and a 36 hour stretch. Within those 46 hours, I unpacked, did laundry, repacked, went to work (and unpacked from my office move in abstentia), and slept a little bit.

It's been hectic. No wonder I came back a little under the weather.

What did I find at home? Not toilet paper. We were running low before I left, but I didn't have time to get any. Do you think the other toilet users in my household would have bought some on their way home from work or school? We don't lack for stores en-route in our high density urban infill neighborhood.

OTOH, Bad Dad helped out on a coworker's field experiment in addition to his regular work and he was a single dad two weeks in a row. Plus, they claim that we haven't truly run out unless ALL bathrooms are out of TP and we have no facial tissues in the house.

When I got home, Bad Dad said that he had to spend Sunday at the office so I had to supervise homework and take care of the home front on my own. I have to admit that the field campaign and single dad trump cards are compelling.

I also discovered that my daughter had only one weekend day left before her end of semester video project was due. She told me that her partner dropped out the prior Wednesday, she wrote her script on Thursday, and it was due on Friday of the following week.

The script had more than half a dozen characters so I asked her who she had lined up as actors and her filming schedule.

You guessed it.

I told her to work those phones double time.

Then she showed me the script with her notes on costumes and wanted me to make them .right now.

In the end, she rounded up two friends who brought their own hats. That pile of cut up brown paper bags on the dining room table turned out to be headdresses (who would have guessed?) and we found all the feathers, fabric, belts, jewelry and pins she needed in my sewing room and closet.

There were feathers flying everywhere downstairs during and after headdress construction, but I have to admit the headdress was very creative. It's pretty cool to come home to a child who sees a grocery sack as an Aztec headdress (with paper curls) and a husband game enough to put it on and read dialogue like he means it.

I was always a method actress anyway. If you play a happy family, you can almost believe it yourself.

Meeting Shams

2011-12-08T08:03:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I took a break from work meetings to lunch with Shams. We did NOT plan to coordinate, but we did. Note that she made her coat, cowl and pants. The only thing I made in the picture is my sweater.

We didn't natter on as much about sewing as I expected. We were both taking a quick break from work and the conversation flowed between Berkeley (which both of us attended), working in tech, raising our daughters and fitting exceptional figures.

What is an exceptional figure? Chances are very good that you have one.

Suppose something is engineered to work for 90% of circumstances, from between the 5th and 95th percentile in some metric. That seems reasonable and your product will work for 90% of the market, right?

Not so fast. Think multi-dimensionally.

(0.9)⁶ = 0.53

In six independent dimensions, nearly half of the potential market will fall outside your engineering specs in at least one dimension.

Ready-to-wear (RTW) clothing manufacturers can't fit everyone. They have to make decisions about who their market is. Consumers have to take RTW items to tailors. Even people who can't sew can become virtual dressmakers by hiring custom clothiers. (I haven't sewn for others for money since my undergrad days, but I do swap favors with friends. Eric's wife gets clothes and I get a place to stay when in their town.)

Look back at the picture at the top of this post. Who is easier to fit?

That's a trick question. Shams' hips are an inch smaller than mine. We are both 5'5" tall, but our torso to leg proportions vary. She has to add inches to bust darts and I have to take them out.

In college, I had a 14" drop between my hip and waist measurements, 39" to 25" . In mid-life, that has decreased to 10-11"; my hips are still 39" but my waist is ~28-29". I can sometimes find RTW pants that fit, but it is still not easy. It was nearly impossible 20 years ago.

We both agreed that we are not fitting experts. But we are experts in fitting our own unique bodies. And we like to think that we fit our own unique personalities, too. ;-)

We had such a good time in our short meeting, I invited Shams to visit me in LA. She's never shopped the LA garment district. That needs to be rectified.

Shams posted her account of our meeting. Go there to see another photo.

When you shouldn't trust the GPS

2011-11-27T23:31:00.000-08:00

That's the San Francisco-Oakland Bay bridge looming above us and shown in red on the Garmin's screen. That's fine, but the unit appears to be telling us to drive right into the water. (Click to see bigger and in more detail.)

Since we didn't have a boat/car combo, we decided to use the on-ramp from Fremont via Folsom.

When the proxy becomes more important than reality

2011-11-14T21:28:00.000-08:00

I am experiencing technical difficulties posting the podcast. While I sort that out, I am going to ~~beat a dead horse~~ shed light on another improper use of statistics.

Here's another quote from Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard):

The latest research also suggests that there could be more subtle problems at work, like the proliferation of grade inflation in the humanities and social sciences, which provides another incentive for students to leave STEM majors. It is no surprise that grades are lower in math and science, where the answers are clear-cut and there are no bonus points for flair.

[Aside: That's a totally unfair and ignorant comment about flair. Flair matters a lot in STEM. I've gotten some pretty nice approbation from professors (and peers) because of the atypical way I solved some homework and exam questions. Some even offered to write letters of recommendation for grad school, despite my mediocre overall grades.

In STEM, flair means solving problems with elegant and/or unconventional, but correct approaches. Remember the emails in climategate with praise like "slick trick"? That's praise for good work, not evidence of a cover-up.]

What is the point of giving grades? Is it to spur students to work harder? To distinguish the stronger students from the rest? To measure the amount learning or mastery of a subject? A progress report?

Did we really mean to turn GPA into a Hogwarts-like sorting hat?

Why do we fetishsize absolute GPAs? Why do employers give hard floors on GPAs when selecting students for interviews, regardless of differences in median GPAs and difficulty of fields of study? Why do scholarships--even the largest need-based scholarship at my alma mater--require a minimum GPA of 3.5 (higher than the average GPA of science majors at the school)?

In the article above, many possible solutions were suggested such as raising the average grades in science classes to match the easy grading in humanities, social sciences and business. However, the simplest thing to do is to just not attach such extreme importance to absolute GPA.

Science departments aren't wrong to grade toughly. Why should a department compress the dynamic range of grades? (If you don't know what a dynamic range is, then you weren't a STEM major.)

I found these two great visualizations from gradeinflation.com. It is well worthwhile to visit the site and read their research and methodology in full. I will wait.

There is about a 0.3 point difference in GPA between natural science and humanities. If you were a STEM major receiving a Berkeley Undergraduate Scholarship, the largest UCB program for need-based financial aid, and you were in the top 1/3 of your class, your GPA would still be too low to receive need-based financial aid.

Why punish the poor students for choosing hard majors? Don't we want all majors to be open to rich and poor students alike?
Read also, the 5 hardest and easiest college majors by GPA.

5 Lowest Grade Point Averages
Chemistry 2.78 GPA
Math 2.90 GPA
Economics 2.95 GPA
Psychology 2.98 GPA
Biology 3.02 GPA
5 Highest Grade Point Averages
Education 3.36 GPA
Language 3.34 GPA
English 3.33 GPA
Music 3.30 GPA
Religion 3.22 GPA

Is the average Chemistry major that much dumber than the average Education major?

Ironically, I was a Regents' and Chancellor's scholar while at CAL. It's the most selective academic scholarship for undergraduates:

The Regents’ and Chancellor’s Scholarship carries the highest honor awarded by the University of California, Berkeley to entering undergraduates.

Yet, the minimum GPA required is 3.0, lower than the need-based Berkeley Undergraduate Scholarship. I don't mean to pick on BUS, the California Alumni Association's leadership scholarship has an identical 3.5 GPA cutoff. I guess they think that STEM students lack leadership potential. (IMHO, I would like to see fewer elected officials who are trained as lawyers and more trained in STEM.)

While I was at Cal, I asked an administrator for the RCS program why their academic scholarship would have a lower GPA cutoff than the nonacademic ones. She replied, "Our students choose harder majors and we don't think they should be penalized for that." How refreshing!

Another way that the hard floors on GPA reinforce the gap between rich and poor is that you can buy a higher GPA simply by attending a private school.

Yup, you can buy a 0.4 point boost to your GPA, helping you land that job over the plebes at State U.

What can you do to help?
I called UC Berkeley to complain, but the nice folks at the University Relations office are all humanities majors and had no idea that STEM departments grade so much harder. They thought that a GPA of 3.5 should be a cakewalk.

I was getting nowhere with them so I decided to start a need-based financial aid program for STEM majors with no minimum GPA cutoff. Students need only be making adequate progress, and their academic departments get to decide what is adequate, based on the rigor of the department and how hard the student is working.

Thus, the bootstrap fund was born. It is not an endowment. Whatever money comes in is awarded that year to STEM majors at UC Berkeley that demonstrate financial need. In case you want to join me in this crusade, just send a check with a letter that looks something like this.

Your Name

Address
City, State Zip

Date

The Board of Trustees

The Regents of the University of California

c/o UC Berkeley, University Relations

2080 Addison St, #4200

Berkeley, CA 94720-4200

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen:

To help the University of California, Berkeley uphold its commitment to excellence and opportunity, and in consideration of the generosity of other alumni and friends of the campus, I wish to support the University in the following manner.

I hereby give to the University of California, Berkeley the sum of X Thousand Dollars ($X,000). Payment will be in the form of cash, marketable securities, or other property acceptable to the Regents.

Please use my gift to create a fund to be known as The Bootstrap Fund. The Bootstrap Fund shall be used at the discretion of Financial Aid to support students pursuing STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) fields of study and who are in good academic standing and demonstrate financial need.

I understand that under campus policy the University will assess a one-time administrative fee of not more than 2 ½%.

Please indicate your acceptance of this gift by signing and returning to me a copy of this letter.

Sincerely,

Your Name

The trouble with metrics
The metrics are running the insane asylum
Genteel majors
STEM is hard, but the headlines are wrong .again.
Education Links
Bachelor's degrees conferred by degree-granting institutions, by field of study: Selected years, 1970-71 through 2008-09: growth in college enrollment has been entirely in fields that grade the easiest
Academically Adrift: fields that grade the easiest are also the ones where students learn and master the least.

Aside:
Bad Dad and I have been accused of having a competitive marriage. I beg to differ. When I pointed out that his alma mater, MIT, beats Cal in grade inflation (see the links by specific schools at the bottom of the page), he protested.

It's notable that the growth in Cal student population, like the national trend, has been nearly entirely in fields with high GPAs and easier coursework. So, if you compare just the science departments against each other, the grade inflation might be even greater. But he insists that couldn't be the case.

Some men just can't win graciously.

STEM is hard, but the headlines are wrong .again.

2011-11-13T20:43:00.000-08:00

Don't miss Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard).

It makes some good points, but it also misses some, too. Journalism on a deadline will never capture the complete picture, so this blogger who has graduated with two STEM degrees from Berkeley will fill in some gaps.

Professor Chang says that rather than losing mainly students from disadvantaged backgrounds or with lackluster records, the attrition rate can be higher at the most selective schools, where he believes the competition overwhelms even well-qualified students.

“You’d like to think that since these institutions are getting the best students, the students who go there would have the best chances to succeed,” he says. “But if you take two students who have the same high school grade-point average and SAT scores, and you put one in a highly selective school like Berkeley and the other in a school with lower average scores like Cal State, that Berkeley student is at least 13 percent less likely than the one at Cal State to finish a STEM degree.”

You can't compare apples to oranges. For instance the mathematics curriculum for majors is at Cal State prepares graduates to teach mathematics at the K-12 level. Berkeley does not train math teachers, they train math researchers. It's not due to elitism; the California master plan for higher education defined the roles of the two campus systems. Cal State (CSU) educates for practical professions like teaching and nursing, and the UC system educates more broadly.

The STEM classes at Berkeley and Cal State are taught at a different level and with different texts. We routinely used the graduate texts in mathematics (GTM) series in undergraduate classes. We were taught the theoretical underpinnings to help us perform research, not to go out and teach math right away. To do that, we'd need to attend a Cal State for a teaching credential.

Berkeley math and science majors can complete the core required curricula in just three years and then spend their fourth year on individual studies. Math majors can select from clusters of classes with emphases in different math specialties or interdisciplinary studies in physics, biology, statistics and economics. (I chose mathematical physics.)

Berkeley chemistry majors can also select from specialties and interdisciplinary studies. (I chose physical chemistry and spectroscopy.) Many of my classes counted toward both majors so I could easily complete both majors in four years.

Had I not come from a strong suburban school, I could still have completed a STEM major (though not necessarily two) within four years. I had a friend who was a class valedictorian at an inner city school. She was not as well prepared as I was, but she took advantage of the resources available to her. She took remedial STEM classes her first year and really worked hard. She went to office hours and the professors and teaching assistants helped her. Her grades went from very low to very respectable. She took a semester or two longer to graduate than I did, but she graduated. The last time I talked to her, she was headed for med school.

By the end of our second year, we are told to start looking around for our undergraduate research topics. Some people start on research in their junior year; others wait until their senior year. I started one as a junior, found it was a bad fit, and started on a different project in a different lab the summer between my junior and senior years.

One of my chemistry professors told me that 1/3 of the college of chemistry undergraduates went to med school, 1/3 went to PhD programs in chemistry, and the rest were roughly evenly split between industry and graduate programs in related fields such as epidemiology and public health/public policy.

The undergraduate programs at Berkeley have to be harder than the ones at CSU because they are preparing students for different futures. While one can obtain a Bachelor of Science degree at either university system, the experiences will be very different. Telling a poor kid that they should attend CSU over Berkeley because they are more likely to graduate is selling that student short. Ask them about their goals. If they are unsure, encourage them to aim high, but have a back up plan.

I also want to point out .again. that Berkeley leads the nation in producing female students that go on to earn PhDs in STEM--in absolute numbers and per capita. It's hard, but you are not alone. And, if you manage to survive, you'll belong to an elite sorority that will help you for life.

Addendum:
UC Berkeley also differs from other state flagship universities such as Michigan and Illinois. Those schools offer mathematics tracks for future K-12 math teachers as well as tracks for students heading for PhD programs in math and related fields. You can't compare graduation rates without looking more deeply in the curriculum of the different schools and programs.

Improvisational Quilt

2011-11-09T21:57:00.000-08:00

Is this the "right side"?
Or is this the "right side"?
I had intended the orderly one as the right side and improvisationally-pieced side as the backing, but I think that I like the "wrong" side better.

It all started when the Santa Monica and South Bay Quilters' guilds got together last Spring to sell everyone's bits and bobs as a joint fundraiser. I walked away with three shopping bags full of fabric, yarn, patterns and oddities that I thought I might have a use for. Bad Dad thought the point was for me to unload my own surplus. Silly man.

Anyway, I saw the two skull fabrics and thought that my girly goth girl might want a quilt made out of these scraps. She didn't like them.
Plan B had me making a "Read me a quilt" to accompany the book, Treasure Island. I challenged myself to use only what I already had in my collection, which meant that I had to piece some fabrics like the reds below.
For the backing, I sewed scraps into blocks and then sewed the blocks together. (I promised in Zero Waste Goal to show an example of scraps sewn into fabric and here it is.) I added a black and white striped shirt from Goodwill. I call it the "Big Kahuna" shirt because it measured 70" in circumference. I harvested the buttons for a future shirt and cut up the body for the backing. Notice the triangular patches in the holes left by the armscythe of the shirt.
There were other triangles, too. I had barely enough fabric to pull this off.
The solid red is a Kona cotton leftover from another quilt. The red/white and yellow/white prints are pre-consumer waste from SAS. The black/white geometric is a remnant from Joann's premium cotton section.

[ I was surprised that the selvage says 2005 and they are selling it as current fabric. But, if you look closely, their premium fabrics are often old stock that the independent fabric stores cleared out years ago. I guess that's how they can mark it up to $10/yard and then mark it down to $5/yard and still turn a profit.]

The red/white pindot is a fabric second. The dye is spread unevenly where it became jammed in the machinery. I like the visual texture that the mistake provides.
I pieced this before I read Gwen Marston's Liberated Quiltmaking I and II. The seams were so crooked, I was thinking more Gees Bend than Liberated.

Anyway, Read me a quilt was started by a SBQG member 10 years ago. Working with Court Appointed Special Advocates (for children in foster care), CASA, we try to provide each child with a book and a quilt that goes with the book. If your quilt group would like to join our effort, drop me a line. You need not be a member of SBQG, or any guild, to help out.

I chose Treasure Island to go with the pirate theme. I couldn't decide between the unabridged one with beautiful illustrations, but archaic language, or the modernized and simplified version. I decided to buy both. I figure the child can read the simple one on his/her own, and an adult can read and explain the unabridged one to him/her. This quilt is about 55"x67"; there should be plenty of room for two under this quilt.

Iris was sorting out her unused toys and we thought this pirate bear should go in the care package. Aargh!
We found this puppy (squeeze it and it barks!) and Jack London's The Call of the Wild in her giveaway pile. I already know what next year's quilt will look like. I think I just might have the fabric I need already in my collection.
The South Bay Quilters' Guild takes the philanthropy aspect of our 503c nonprofit status very seriously. We provide hundreds of quilts each year (nearly a thousand) for local charities and college scholarships to students studying for the garment trades. Our community services chair takes fabric donations. She says that we use 160 yards per month from the donation stash for our charity quilts. Yet, the stash never seems to get smaller. I wonder how many sewists can relate. ;-)

See my 2010 Read me a quilt, another improvisational piece.

Divergent Thinking

2011-11-08T21:10:00.000-08:00

Iris and I recorded a podcast last night and we will post it shortly. But, it will make more sense if you knew what we meant by divergent thinking. So, in preparation for our first podcast, I am embedding this RSA Animate video in which Ken Robinson explains it (very well).

Zero Waste Goal

2011-11-01T09:17:00.000-07:00

The October 23, 2011 LA Times business section ran one of their occasional "Made in California" series--this time, about jeans maker Adriano Goldschmied. Don't miss Premium denim maker AG Adriano Goldschmied has a leg up on rivals. One of the things that struck me about this operation is the quote:

With carefully designed cuts, all but 3% to 5% of the fabric is used.

Look at how little is left after they cut the jeans parts! But is that really 3-5% waste? I like to think that I use efficient layout. What is my waste percentage? That weekend, I was making baby sweats from 1 yard of pre-consumer waste navy fleece. (You can see it, and other examples in Preconsumer waste fashion.) It was too late to weigh the total piece, but I weighed the cut pieces and the scraps leftover:

301 g used for the sweatshirt and two pairs of pants
158 g scraps
This doesn't count the scrap of gray rayon/lycra at the neck, leftover from another project.

This means my frugal cutting still generates 10 times as much waste as the AG factory. Additionally, at the factory, they can bag up all their scraps and send it to a textile recycler to be turned into household insulation, upholstery and such. I just toss mine in the trash.

I do toss my larger scraps into a large bin in the sewing room. Iris makes art projects and I sometimes piece together scraps to create larger pieces of fabric and make stuff from that. ~~I will show examples in a later post.~~ Improvisational quilt is an example.

I'd used scraps from the same fabric for one of my tops, too.

Do read the article and see the slide show. I found the photos of how they lay the fabric out on a long table under tension and then suck the fabric down to the table with a vacuum fascinating. That explains the little short ends of premium denim that I can buy for $1.50/pound a few miles from their factory. I don't know which jean factory they came from, but they are very good quality--not the stuff you see offered at Joann.

The NY Times also recently ran a story, Stone-Washed Blue Jeans (Minus the Washed). Note that lasers are used to "distress" jeans in both stories. Lasers can use quite a lot of energy, too. This is also done under an industrial-sized fume hood because the fabric outgasses quite a bit of nasty stuff.
Why are lasers and fume hoods eco? Because the alternative, sandblasting, can give the workers silicosis. In this case, workers' deaths could be directly attributed. I suspect that many more are sickened until they are too weak to work. Their deaths may be attributed to malnutrition or tuberculosis at a later time. But they were weakened by producing our jeans.

Do you remember a time when we saved up, bought one pair of jeans a year (stiff as a board) and spent the summer weathering them ourselves until they were ready for the first day of school? Wasn't that fun? Did it kill us like the workers in the factories today?

Zero waste applies to not just fabric, but to people as well.

Have a spooktacular birthday

2011-10-31T09:46:00.000-07:00

Launch schedules slip. Due dates go by and babies .still. fail to make their appearance. Don't try to plan kids around satellite launch schedules. They are both moving targets.

Iris was supposed to arrive before Halloween, and we had to induce labor after Halloween. Do you know how hard it is to find birthday party supplies at the party store when they are stocked for Halloween? This year, we decided to just go with the flow and celebrate a spooktacular birthday.

After the success of last year's cake, we contacted Erin Smith of A Piece of Cake by Erin for an encore. The cake was breathtakingly beautiful, and tasted great, too!
She even put cobwebs along the sides. (Pardon my finger swipe when I lifted it out of the box.)
Can you believe this cake design came out of this drawing that Iris and I made with iPad Brushes?
Erin is a true artist. We'll be calling her again.

I survived the weekend. 10 teens and tweens at a party, 6 of them stayed overnight. Throw in a one day machine quilting class with Frances Moore and the homework for AI* on top of the normal mayhem of soccer and housework and I am ready to go back to work to get some rest.

Oh, wait, I need to get 8 technical reports out the door (no kidding, I counted) and we are entering satellite Cal/Val.

Dear Santa, all I want this year is more hours in the day.

* Mommy and me AI is not going so well. I lost her at Bayesian algebra and haven't been able to pull her back in. This is a nontrivial class. When they said it was geared toward upper division or first year graduate students, they weren't kidding. That, coupled with AI class server crashes and my workload at work and home mean that I finished the homework at 2AM ~~last night~~ this morning.

Insomniac's delight

2011-10-27T08:14:00.000-07:00

In case you are awake at 2:48 AM (or want to set your alarm clock), the viewing conditions from the Los Angeles region should be just about perfect. From Spaceflight Now's NPP mission status page:

The Launch Readiness Review occurred today to verify the NPP spacecraft and Delta 2 rocket are standing in perfect shape for blastoff at precisely 2:48:01 a.m. local (5:48:01 a.m. EDT; 0948:01 GMT) from Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Friday's launch opportunity extends 9 minutes and 10 seconds to ensure NPP reaches the desired orbit. The window closes at 2:57:11 a.m. local (5:57:11 a.m. EDT; 0957:11 GMT)

NPP is a meteorological satellite that will fly a sun-synchronous polar orbit in the 13:30 (early afternoon) local time plane. It will be launched southward from Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB) slightly less than 12 hours from the desired local time plane so that it will go northbound across the equator at the named local time (aka local time of right ascension).

Sun-synchronous satellites fly over each region twice a day, once at the named local time plane, and again ~12 hours offset--one dayside, one nightside. Relative to the sun, they orbit in a stationary plane (other than circling about the sun along w/ the earth) and the earth rotates under them, through the orbit plane. If this is unclear, catch me at the next school or soccer event and ask; I can demonstrate with a piece of fruit.

Anyway, NPP is fairly large as met satellites go, so it will need to go up on a relatively large Delta 2 rocket. That, coupled with the night-time launch and 0% predicted cloud cover, mean that the rocket should be visible for a long distance. It should be easily viewable from the beaches south of VAFB. (VAFB is slightly north of Santa Barbara.)

Read A really big firecracker for a smaller Minotaur rocket launch. It was very bright and visible when viewed from the Redondo Beach harbor area. This one will be even more so.

Sign up for Spaceflight Now's twitter feed. Head down to the beach or the hills--anywhere you have a good view over the ocean--and watch the show. A very bright moving object, the rocket, will appear over Malibu about a minute after launch from VAFB. You can watch it move southbound across the sky for a couple of minutes.

Rouse your kids from bed to watch from the beach. They can sleep later in school. ;-)

Outdone

2011-10-21T20:54:00.000-07:00

I told my daughter the way to improve her writing is to write more often. Deliberate daily practice and all that. In response, she started Iris' Everything Blog, where she wrote some stuff that made her mommy proud. But she had a little trouble deciding what to write and what to keep private. Don't we all? Why do you think I blog so much about knitting and sewing?

Then she discovered Wizard 101. (Has anyone called Club Penguin the gateway drug to Wizard 101?) You can tell when she started playing Wizard 101 because it precipitated a drastic decline in my blogging frequency. Our photo library is on our household's sole Windows PC and Wizard 101 only runs on the Windows platform. I can't blog if I can't get time on the PC.

She became so obsessed with the game, we had to limit her computer time in order to get our daughter back.

But she's a clever one. She started a new blog devoted to Wizard 101, Wizzy101 Myth Style, where she posts semi-regularly. I thought it was just a ploy to get screen time. "I'm not avoiding homework/bedtime/chores; I'm doing research for my blog." It works, somewhat. We let her play a limited amount on weekends.

If you read her blog posts aloud, you can experience the authentic flavor of her verbal style and rhythm. It's not baby talk, but it's still delightful.

She sent an email out to her friends about her blog, but not many of them play Wizard 101 so she expected her readership to be low.

You know that new blogger dashboard feature that let's you see your blog readership stats? We clicked on her stats and discovered that she has gotten up to 5,000 visitors a day, especially when the Friendly Necromancer added her blog to their sidebar.

I've been blogging for years and only get 5,000 pageviews per month. In fact, when I guest blogged for the Atlantic magazine's website, I don't think I picked up 500 visitors from their links. I guess more people are interested in Wizard 101 than in my take on the state of science and technology in America and the history of women in STEM.

In case you missed it, I've compiled a list of my posts for the Atlantic.

Lessons in Freeway Calculus
What Do Automobiles and Spacecraft Have in Common?
The Sad Decline of Tech Support
Give a Rocket Scientist a Lift
Thanks and 再見 (Goodbye)
Why bother educating girls? was submitted too late to be posted at the Atlantic and was posted at BMGM instead.

Preconsumer waste fashion

2011-10-19T20:40:00.000-07:00

Have you ever looked at the label on your recycled paper that says, "100% recycled content, 30% post-consumer waste" and wondered what that means? Post-consumer waste is stuff that has been used by consumers (end users) and then collected for recycling. The What would Rachel wear? dress, made with a men's shirt from Goodwill, is an example of post-consumer recycled fashion.

Pre-consumer waste is collected in the manufacturing process. For instance, denim scraps from jeans factories can be collected and turned into home insulation and high-quality rag content paper. Sometimes, the larger scraps can be sold to consumers like myself to make the pants I showed in Kids Clothing Week Challenge.

Here's a trio of adult-sized pre-consumer waste t-shirts
made from the TNT Burda 2565. It's an excellently-drafted basic, slightly fitted t-shirt.
The snakeskin-print T is made from 4 scraps of poly/lycra found in a bin for 50 cents a piece.
It's very difficult to photograph it, but this flash photo shows the scale. Although I made it years ago, the snakes skin print is very au courant.
The red/white jersey is 100% cotton. The blue stripes are rayon, but the black stripes are synthetic (nylon?). I lined the fronts of both with bamboo rayon jersey. The shoulder seams are enclosed, but the rest of the seams are sewn as one with the face fabric.
I was inspired by Vogue's Maine Attraction feature last June. Stripes and polka dots, what's not to like?
Which was the inspiration for pairing this silk polka dot skirt I found at Goodwill ($2, post-consumer waste) with the red/ivory t-shirt ($2 pre-consumer waste). I don't live in Maine, so I swung by the beach on my commute home and asked two old guys carrying skateboards to snap my picture. They grudgingly did it; I could tell they were eager to hit the "strand", a paved trail that runs the length of Santa Monica Bay, from Torrance in the south to Malibu in the north.
We tried the other direction, because the sun is low in the west after work and you can't see the outfit at all. This is not the most flattering shot because the guys were really, really impatient.
Iris snapped this picture of the blue/black t-shirt before school/work.
In the same Vogue feature, I was inspired by this cabled sweater.
But I have a plan to address this void in my Fall wardrobe, using some pre-consumer waste cotton/cashmere blend yarn from Colourmart.

Kids Clothing Week Challenge Wrap-up

2011-10-17T08:21:00.000-07:00

I didn't officially join kcwc (kids clothing week challenge), but here's what I sewed in the month of October.

I bought nearly all of the fabrics that I used from SAS fabrics, an odd jobber near Los Angeles that sells leftovers from the garment industry by the pound. The fabric often has oddly-shaped chunks cut out of it or stains or writing or rips. This makes pattern layout challenging at times. But, at $3.49/pound, this piece of good-quality cotton French terry was worth the effort. Besides, I couldn't resist fabric printed with the fashion capitol cities of the world.

A pound-sized piece was enough to make this jacket made for Iris. She picked the buttons out. They also came from SAS (25 cents each).I lengthened the jacket in Burda 9574 to waist length and the sleeves to full-length.

There is an interesting double dart detail at the sleeve cap. Overall, this is a very well-drafted and quick pattern.

I used Kwik Sew 2666 again for two pairs of shorts. The black double knit rayon/lycra might have come from Kashi at Metro Textiles, but the turquoise cotton rib knit came from SAS.

It's baby season at work so I pulled out some of my Kwik Sew favorites, Sewing for Babies/Toddlers/Children.

If you want to sew quick basics for kids, you couldn't go wrong with these books. Here are line drawings of all the things you can make with these books.

I used some remnants to make 3 pairs of baby pants, 2 small, 1 large. They were a hit.

Los Angeles is the epicenter for the "premium jeans" craze. Much of the sewing and "distressing" takes place in Gardena, CA, near SAS Fabrics. Scraps of really nice denim are sold for $1.50/pound at SAS. I bought two 24" long, full-width remnants ($1.75), cut out two baby pants (L) and have enough left over for another pair of baby pants or a girl's skirt.

I tucked this note in with the pants.

An estimated 10% of Los Angeles’ landfill waste is textile*, much of it from the garment industry. Some factory waste is collected by odd-jobbers and sold by the pound at centers throughout the region.

The fabrics for these pants come from this type of pre-consumer waste. The thread and elastic are scraps left over from other projects. All components of these pants were diverted from the waste stream.

Dress your baby in garbage! ;-)

* This is from a 1991 estimate, before much of our apparel industry went overseas. However, a recent EPA study showed that over 5% of municipal waste nationally is textiles. LA, which has become the largest remaining garment manufacturing region in the US, will likely have somewhat higher than 5%. Fortunately, we have an economic ecosystem diverting scraps from the waste stream and I am happy to be part of this food chain.

Dennis Ritchie, RIP

2011-10-13T09:55:00.000-07:00

I just want to point out that, had OS X not been founded on Unix, I never would have switched from PC to Mac or bought a Mac for my daughter's first computer. Unix and open-source compilers changed everything. It made it possible for millions of tinkerers to tink. We didn't buy a Mac because it was cool or because we liked black turtlenecks. We bought them to mess around under the hood.

I am astonished at how little attention Dennis Ritchie's death has generated in the lamestream media (a phrase I learned from Eric). If you don't know who Dennis Ritchie is, read this eulogy at ZDNet, Dennis Ritchie, father of Unix and C, dies.

Iris and I had fun messing around with "Hello, world" in Perl last year. When she saw me on my MacBookPro working the exercises in a Perl programming book, I started expanding the program with questions and decision trees. I had the code in one Xterm window and ran the code from another one.

She watched the effect of the code changes on the behavior of the program and exclaimed, "I see how they made The Moron Test."

Well, not really. The Moron Test was likely written in a proprietary API, application programming interface. APIs have been proliferating like tribbles of late.

Us old-timers prefer open source ubiquitous languages. Our memory banks are too full to cram in every API du jour.

Byron Lars

2011-10-07T09:44:00.000-07:00

This post is for sewing geek goddess Carolyn, who shared her delightful new BIG-pocketed skirt today.

I once saw clothes in a boutique with four sleeves--two where they normally go and two more growing out of the side seams to tie as a sash. The label said Byron Lars. Imagine my delight when Vogue Patterns started offering some of his designs in the mid 1990s. Sadly, they are different from the ones I saw in the boutique. These are the two I have in my collection, Vogue 1419 and 1529, circa 1994 and 1995 respectively.

You can find lots more on Flickr, Ebay and Etsy.

I, too, am working on my own skirt with BIG pockets. Actually, they are sleeve-sized.
I'm still playing around with the design, trying to incorporate the shirt collars and sleeves.
I found two identical shirts at Goodwill. I didn't like the original Kelly green and white check, so I over-dyed it with turquoise. I found some turquoise washed rayon challis and a remnant of silk/cotton jacquard in the same lovely color in my collection. There are definitely possibilities here.

Black

2011-10-05T21:39:00.000-07:00

The web has exploded with eulogies for Steve Jobs. I've never met the man, but I wanted to write a little bit of my experiences with Apple and NeXT computers (shown below*) and explain why my daughter's first computer is a Mac.

It's hard to explain to the youth of today, who grew up with ubiquitous computing devices and omnipresent network connectivity what it was like in the dark ages of computing. ;-) And, even I, who grew up with solid state electronics, was fascinated by stories of even earlier vacuum tube computers (and the armies of men and women who worked on them).

My story is that of a girl who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in what later became known as Silicon Valley. Most of the stories are being posted by men and I wanted to write a story for my daughter because she is about the same age I was when I first started writing computer programs.

When I was in the 6th grade, my parents split up. I don't know how my mom found the money, but she sent my sister and I to a BASIC programming class at a local computer store. Back then, all computer stores were independent mom and pop operations that also served as a nexus for computer hobbyists. They offered meetings and classes nightly.

Most of the students were adults, but there was also a boy of similar age. His mom told me that, prior to marriage and motherhood, she had worked as an IBM programmer and wrote her code in machine language. I laugh when people tell me that programming in BASIC is too painful. (All that allocating and deallocating memory.) Have they programmed in machine language?

We didn't have money to buy our own computer, so we wrote the programming exercises solutions on paper and the teacher told us whether or not they would work. I don't recall if we were able to actually use a computer in the store to test our programs.

I got serious about violin and dropped computing until the 8th grade when I took it as an elective in school. The entire class of ~20 students shared a single Apple IIe. I had a leg up on the other kids because of my prior exposure to BASIC. Or, perhaps, I just naturally think algorithmically.

The Apple IIe was beige. Some marketing genius thought that beige would be less intimidating and more likely to be brought into people's homes. Perhaps that is an apocryphal story. But beige did reign for some time. Atari, IBM, Compaq, Apple--all beige.

I took another programming class in high school and we used terminals connected to the school district's mainframe. They allowed kids to work on the same system that handled the district payroll! The only reason that our high school was able to offer a CS class was because we were co-located with the district main office. None of the other schools offered it because networking was still in its infancy. Again, we programmed in BASIC.

In high school, my dad bought my sister and me an Atari 800 and we programmed it in BASIC. We also became very proficient in the Atari classic game, Asteroids. To this day, I cannot look at a bagel without thinking of Asteroids. (There are two options for handling the screen edges in Asteroids. The selection that makes objects drifting off the R edge appear at the L edge and off the top edge to the bottom edge, vs. pure reflection, is topologically equivalent to a torus aka a bagel shape.)

I should mention that personal computers of all flavors used to boot up very quickly because they had very "lightweight" operating systems without any modern doodads. You turned the switch on, and in under a minute, you were confronted with a flickering cursor on a blank screen. It was easier to get work done because you had fewer distractions. When you turned off the computer, all of your programs disappeared--unless you recorded it to an audio cassette tape. Reading your programs off the cassette was always exciting because, unless you synchronized the play button just so, you didn't start at the beginning of the file and you lost your file.

As a freshman at Cal, I took Programming for Scientists in Engineers and we wrote our code in Fortran. I continue to use Fortran to this day because so much science code is written in it. We did our work on terminals connected to a mainframe. I can't recall how we saved our programs. I look back now and see that I did fine in that class. But, for some reason, I came away from that class thinking that I was not cut out for computing.

By the time I was a junior, I could avoid computers no longer. Physical chemistry lab required us to write analysis and modeling computer programs. Although we were allowed to use a chemistry department computer lab full of IBM PCs (beige), the lab was closed on weekends and evenings. By then, we were saving our programs on floppy disks.

The CS dept computers were available longer hours than the chemistry dept ones. At the time, I was dating a guy in the CS department who would log me into a departmental computer so I could do my homework anytime I needed it and he was around. The only problem is that that the CS dept computers ran on Unix and I hadn't learned it yet.

Fortunately, one of my friends taking the same class had previously held a workstudy job helping a biology professor work up his data. He spent the time to teach her Unix because her labor was free to him (the university, not the professors, paid workstudy students) and she took the time to teach me. We wrote our code in Fortran. My friend and I both did well in the class and I do appreciate the help from the guy who lent us his login id. That would be against university rules today and I don't want to get him in trouble. I also realized that I might not be hopeless at computers.

My senior year, I took upper division numerical analysis in the Math department. It was reputed to be a "weeder" class that forced many a student to switch majors. Oddly, I didn't find the coursework difficult at all. The social scene in the computer lab was the main hurdle.

Sun had donated a batch of beige Solaris (a flavor of Unix) workstations to Cal and the university installed it in a the basement of the Math building in a warren of rooms called the Web. Each little room contained ~4 workstations and there were about 30 workstations in all. Contention for resources were high, but the department did not enforce time limits. Most of the machines were taken up by male students playing games and the lab proctors refused to boot game players off to let us do our homework.

Moreover, the boys had installed Sports Illustrated swimsuit images as screen backgrounds so we were confronted with 20" screens of tits and ass everywhere we looked. I asked a lab proctor once if he could get the boys to remove their screen backgrounds and reinstall the default one from Sun. He said that it was not his business to police behavior. The boys were in there for hours and the place smelled like them, too. It was a really, really hostile place for girls trying to do homework.

A female classmate and I banded together for protection. We would set our alarm clocks extra early and show up at 6 AM, just as they unlocked the lab for the morning. We had the place to ourselves and got our work done. By the end of the semester, we noticed that the other girls had developed the same coping strategy. The downside was that, at 6 AM, there were no teaching assistants or lab techs around if you had trouble with your code or your machine. We helped each other. We were allowed to program in either C or Fortran and I turned in my homework in Fortran. I also shared my rudimentary Unix skills with the other girls.

By the time I started grad school at CU Boulder, I was feeling pretty computer-proficient. A friend introduced me to one of the Unix help desk workers at CU and I visited him occasionally both for CS help and socially. One day, in 1988, he was playing with a big black monolith on his desk. It really did remind us of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey with it's sharp edges and glossy dark color.

He said it was a NeXT (pictured above) loaner for review. I asked how it differed from other Unix workstations. He pointed to it and replied, "It's black, not beige." Actually, the color choice hinted at other things that were different under the hood. Overall, my friend was very impressed with it and was sad when NeXT failed to gain traction and died.

In grad school, I took a class in Unix system administration and was a co-admin for my research group's workstation. After graduation, I took a more advanced Unix sysadmin course at my current workplace so I can do my own care and feeding of workstations. I also picked up several more programming languages. I made my first computer animation in 1990. I made my first website in 1994. If I needed to do something that required new computer skills, I would pick up a book (or several), ask friends for sample code and just do it. I did all of these on Unix systems. I even wrote my PhD thesis with LaTeX on Unix systems, but I did make some of the figures on a Mac and export them in postscript for ingest into LaTeX.

Then Bad Dad said that he only wanted one operating system in our house and we should go with the dominant PC DOS/Windows. I was never very happy with Windows because I never knew where it was putting the DLLs. If you don't know where your executables are going, you aren't practicing safe computing. Anyway, I feel more at home with Unix/OS X than with Windows.

So, when Apple introduced OS X, which is built upon Unix, I agitated to get a Mac at home. There is something so reassuring about being able to open up an xterm and see a command line with a blinking cursor. It gives me a kind of warm milk in a cozy kitchen type of feeling.

OS X comes with many compilers for all sorts of different languages. You can download more by installing Xcode. You can download even more from SourceForge. When you compile a program, the executable stays right there in the directory where you invoked the compiler. Or you can redirect it to a place of your choice. But you know where things are going because YOU control it. It's not as clear on a PC.

[I am really mad at Apple about the marginalization of Xcode. It used to come on a disk with every system. But then they stopped giving customers a disk and told us to download it from the Apple website. Now they charge $5 to download it. $5 doesn't sound like much, but this means that you need a credit card to get it. Kids don't have credit cards. So now they've placed a barrier in front of kids who want to learn how to program on Macs. And why can't a kid write an iOS program and load it up on their own iPods without joining the Apple developer program for an additional $99?]

I wanted to teach my daughter how to write computer programs. I didn't want her messing with my computers so I bought her her own 13" MacBookPro and set up Xcode for her and bought her introductory books for Unix, BASIC and Python.

Unfortunately, the web has too many distractions. Sitcom humor on Disney.com is more alluring to her than a blank screen and a blinking cursor. When I was her age, I had less access to computers, but I knew more about programming and the inner workings of a computer than she does.

How do I turn her from a consumer to a creator?

* I snagged the picture of Tim Berners-Lee's NeXT computer from Wikipedia. It is the world's first web server.

Getting it backwards

2011-09-28T07:12:00.000-07:00

Firstly, Rick Perry's situation is not analogous to Galileo's. Galileo stuck to the data, upsetting the religious establishment which ultimately persecuted him. Rick Perry is with the gang of thugs that is suppressing the data. Read the statement by Texas scientists who stick to the data.

The "diversity bake sale" price list also has it backwards. The campus republicans charged $2 to whites and $1.50 to Asians. If they stuck to the admissions data before passage of proposition 209, they should have charged Asians more than whites. The problem had become so severe, that the gap in SAT between admitted Asian and white students was larger than that between whites and blacks. That's ancient history in internet time and the only current link I could find is this lame NYT article.

In the late 1980s, administrators appeared to be limiting Asian-American admissions, prompting a federal investigation. The result was an apology by the chancellor at the time, and a vow that there would be no cap on Asian enrollment.

I am embarrassed that today's students at my Alma mater could be so ignorant of history. They totally demean the value of my degree. ;)

Note also that the campus republicans charged men more than women. In actuality, colleges are admitting less qualified men over women in the name of "gender balance" due to the higher numbers and qualifications of women applying to college.

Why do white males have such a persecution complex despite contrary evidence?

Aside:
Before Prop 209, it was a tough time for white students in the sciences at Cal for the same reason Ward Connerly cited for the harmful effect of affirmative action on black students. Professors assumed that white students got in on affirmative action and devoted their time and attention to the Asian students who got in on merit.

One highly qualified white classmate complained that teachers ignored him at office hours, assuming that he had only stupid questions. They would much rather take questions from Asian students, who were perceived as smarter and had higher order questions. I watched class dynamics after that and he had a good point.

Bad Dad, a white male (also a Berkeley alum), states that he doesn't feel persecuted--quite the opposite. "How can we be discriminated against when we run everything?"

But I still notice that he "drives while white". A black, latino or Asian driver could never roll through stop signs in a "California stop" in front of the police and get away with it. He insists it is fine and I have seen many a person of color stopped for driving violations that he makes every day.

Your Favorite Little Girl...

2011-09-25T18:24:00.000-07:00

... is now a guest blogger. I'm Iris, and you should have already known that. Just wanted to say hi. Well, bye!

Mommy and me AI

2011-09-16T03:00:00.000-07:00

I am not sure if this is a violation of the rules. But Iris and I signed up to take an online AI (Artificial Intelligence) class together, but using my email account only.

We are going to listen to the lectures and discuss the problem sets together. I will be responsible for writing up and emailing our homework sets. I don't know in advance whether she has a long enough attention span for this. Or whether either of us really have the time to do this in between her school and my work commitments.

We signed up for the advanced class, which requires us to do all the homework and take all the exams. If we fall behind in our homework, we can always change to the basic (audit) version of the class.

We are really excited about this. I have had a long-time interest in Markov models. Are there any other people doing this with their kids? Is this considered cheating or collaborative learning? After all, she's 10 years old--too young to sign up on her own.

Simplicity 2192

2011-09-14T18:27:00.000-07:00

This is top #11 for 2011 that I've sewn, but I haven't had much time to post about my sewing progress this year. It's Simplicity 2192 with modifications. I have a fantastic blue and white hat that I wanted to wear for photographing this shirt, but Iris packed that hat for her weekend in NorCal with my sister. I had to commandeer her pink hat instead. Nevertheless, the blue coffee mug matches the shirt. It's filled with Peet's coffee, very apropos for a couple of Berkeley alums on a child-free weekend beach stroll.

I was inspired to post about this particular top because Lindsay T posted her version of Simplicity 2192. She had written earlier that she grew up in Palos Verdes, the hill in the background behind me in the above photo.

I used mid-weight stretch cotton twill that I bought by the pound (~$3/lb, or ~$3 worth of fabric) from SAS Fabrics in Hawthorne. It is perfect for this design, except that the directional print required me to cut the top on the cross-wise grain and the stretch direction runs up and down the top.

Like Lindsay, I found the top extremely roomy. But, we have radically different builds and employed different fitting solutions. The design looks purposely drop-shouldered, but was overly so on my average frame. On the paper pattern, I made 2/3" tucks at the center front/back and midway between the shoulder and the neck but left the sides and hips alone. That took out 2.0" of width across the shoulder area and it sits nicely on my shoulders.

It has just the kind of slouchy casual vibe I was after. My only problem now is that the high neckline feels like it is strangling me. I may remove the topstitching and bring the front neckline down by 1/2".

I was inspired by the casual insouciance of the Stella McCartney citrus print from her Spring 2011 RTW line. (Photos courtesy of Style.com.) The SM top is ubiquitous in LA this Summer.

Lindsay wrote that she was inspired by Dries Van Noten's print mixing when she made her top. I thought I would show you top #10, my DVN-inspired top. I used an OOP Kwik Sew Pattern and two stretch wovens from SAS Fabrics and a scrap of rayon/lycra doubleknit from Metro Textiles. I bought some on our NYC trip in 2010. Then Kashi mailed me some swatches of fabrics that he thought I would like and I purchased it again. I didn't realize it until I was putting it away in my fabric closet. ;-)

I read an interview with DVN in which he said that he pulled out some of his past season fabrics and noticed how well they looked, mixed with one another. So he made a few samples and everyone who saw them loved them. And that's how he developed his first collection of mixed fabrics.

I like that story because it's a recycling/reuse story. These are tough economic times and he uses very costly fabrics. I am glad that he's able to put his old leftover bolts to creative new uses.

My fabrics are much more prosaic washable cotton/rayon/lycra blends for the most part. The purple/green paisley looks like it might have some acetate blended in there, too. Most of the stuff that I sew and wear for my everyday life are mystery pieces purchased by the pound at SAS Fabrics. They sell leftovers from the LA garment trade. Some of them are bolt ends, others are sample cuts. Some are damaged sections and I have to cut carefully around the defects.

I like the idea that factory waste can be reused by home sewers like myself instead of being sent to a landfill. It takes a bit more time to cut around the fabric flaws, but I do it because I am a dyed in the wool recycler. Moreover, the fabrics that I can purchase from SAS are not usually available to home sewers. Now that Florence Fabrics, TreadleArt and the Cotton Shop have closed, there are no apparel fabric stores in the South Bay region of LA.

I have purchased apparel fabric from Joann, but they have all been disappointing after washing. In fact, I returned three cottons that I purchased this year because they were unbearably scratchy after the fabric finishes were washed off. I've been tracking my sewing projects for the past couple of years and noticed that my favorite clothes have all been sewn with fabric from SAS or independent stores like the defunct Cotton Shop.

After the top photo was taken, we walked back up the hill along a "walk street". These homes have alley access in the rear. The times are a changing. The one-story beach cottages are being torn down and replaced with 3-story ones that take up the entire footprint on the small lots.

I, too, live on a redeveloped lot. At one time, our lot held one < 1000 sf one-story shack, which was torn down and replaced with two two-story townhouses.

Launching a weather balloon

2011-08-31T08:54:00.001-07:00

BMGM wears very unflattering cargo pants and an even more fattening latex balloon! There's a Vaisala 92-SGP instrument package/payload attached to this 200 gram balloon. For the tropical sounding missions, we used a 600 gram balloon.

Bad Dad was flying overhead with a spectrometer. A satellite we were calibrating was flying higher still.

We are back. The first day of school went fine in our absence. She's very enthusiastic about the school year. She came home and practiced her German dialogue with us. (Bad Dad learned to speak German before English and I had studied it in HS and college.)

A Thousand-to-One Long Shot Hits!

2011-08-29T17:23:00.000-07:00

Eric checks in:

You may recall some saying there was only a one-in-a-thousand chance that an exotic-looking "new-physics" bump in the Fermilab data was due to statistical fluctuation.

And yet, that's what it must have been. Newly released LHC data, with higher statistical precision, show no hint of the bump.

Astonishing: a one-in-a-thousand long shot comes true! Truly an outcome no one would have expected. Unless, just maybe, the original Fermilab "one-in-a-thousand" claim was classic misinterpreted-p-value bullshit?

Storm Surge

2011-08-24T22:12:00.000-07:00

I am unseemly fascinated by natural disasters. An earthquake and a hurricane in one week! It makes life here seem tame by comparison*.

One headline from CSM, Hurricane Irene: why storm surge could be the biggest problem, piqued my interest, but it didn't explain all the environmental dangers.

Do visit this University of Illinois multimedia page with a video demonstrating the effect of a hurricane-generated storm surge and the slope of the beach at landfall.

The timing of the storm surge upon landfall is also going to be key. If it coincides with a high tide, it will be more damaging than if it made landfall at low tide. Keep an eye on the NOAA tide tables and the predicted storm track. Right now, Irene looks likely to approach the shores of NC and New England shortly after low tide. But things can change in the upcoming days.

The article didn't even mention salt water intrusion into aquifers, something I mentioned in Consequences and Blog Action Day 2010: Our water footprint. I follow this closely, as part of my tapwater comes from a coastal aquifer.

According to NOAA, "U.S. coastal counties depend on groundwater for 18% of their fresh, potable water. This groundwater is at risk from an increasing coastal population and coastal storms." Salt water from the storm surge can contaminate freshwater aquifers through cracks in the ground, both natural and man-made (wells). If that happens, wells turn brackish and unusable.

If you have it, you can throw money at the problem. I read about one family in North Carolina who complained to a reporter about how they had to buy trucked-in water for a year following another hurricane for that reason. A Bangladeshi family living on low-lying delta farmland probably does not have that option.

There is an entire magazine devoted to promoting the lifestyle of ~~putting oneself in harm's way~~ Coastal Living. I, for one, would like to stop subsidizing this lifestyle with our federal FEMA money, but I digress.

Read Saltwater Intrusion Puts Drinking Water at Risk and the case studies. IMHO, that's a much better use of our federal tax dollars. I'd much rather support scientists and their work than shoring up beaches for the vacation homes of the wealthy who really ought to know better.

If you want to read some more hair-raising stories about storm surges, try Storm-driven groundwater flow in a salt-marsh. "Storm-related flow could also drive significant contaminant discharge from developed coastlines. The enhanced transport and variability observed here likely affected hundreds of kilometers of the coastline impacted by the storm."

Happy reading.

* Actually, this week is very exciting chez BMGM. We've got a camp production and a botched school registration (class schedule conflicts galore) on the home front, a field test on the work front, and then another field test almost immediately following this one. I will be launching weather balloons timed for satellite overflights while Bad Dad flies under the satellite track with a spectrometer. What an exciting date! It's enough to make one dream about two line elements.

We hope to be back in time for the camp production. I heard the kids in rehearsal this morning and they sound awesome.

Not gray, but the weather was uncooperative

2011-08-23T21:10:00.001-07:00

I've made a few things this summer that are not gray.

Iris attends a performing arts summer camp in downtown El Segundo, where she also practices going free range. I am not a fan of the new 2 week sessions that replaced the 3 week ones. That gives me only one weekend to get a costume together.

This year, the auditions went very well and she was cast as Captain Hook #1 in Tinker Bell. She sang her solo beautifully. Her costume IMHO, was equally impressive. I apologize for cutting off her head, but I didn't get permission from Captain Hook #2 or his parents to post his picture on the internet. His costume is store-bought.

Iris' costume is made out of polyester stuff I found at SAS Fabrics in Hawthorne. I had very low expectations for the item, which I had determined would be a one-use costume not suitable for repurposing into her regular wardrobe.

I couldn't find a suitable children's pattern. I went through my entire pattern collection, looking for something suitable. Then I came across Vogue 8721, an Elizabeth Gillet NYC pattern. It comes in XS, which is slightly too large for my 10 year old. I rationalized that coats need to be over-sized anyway. Her coat does not resemble the pattern envelope picture.
I elongated the body of View D to coat length, lengthened the sleeves to full-length and removed the bust dart fullness/length. The pattern has high-ish set-in sleeves and a fat 5/8 inch seam allowance. The fabric is an unforgiving polyester. I didn't pin or baste the sleeve but put the longer sleeve side next to the feed dogs and stitched away. I figured, if there were any dimples at the sleeve cap, it wouldn't show from the cheap seats where the working parents who come in at the last minute are relegated. ;)

I did a double take when I looked at the armscythe on the pattern. The sleeve is highly asymmetrical front to back. It allows the sleeve to hang towards the front of the body, the way our arms are attached. I had to measure around the body and sleeve pieces to convince myself that there was no error.

Amazingly, the sleeve set in perfectly on the first try on both sides. I shouldn't have been surprised, because Kathleen over at Fashion Incubator has been harping on forever about how to draft a proper sleeve. She would approve of this pattern. Kudos to the patternmaker for this one!

Now I really want to try View B. I bought the pattern just to see how this one is assembled.

The play finished at 3:30 PM. Bad Dad had to go back to work. Iris wanted to go to a library. The El Segundo library was closed on Fridays due to the state budget crisis. The main Redondo Beach library is open on Friday, but is 3 towns south. I checked the Thomas guide with a sinking feeling. There is no good way to get between downtown El Segundo and downtown Redondo Beach without enduring a ~6 mile/10 kilometer stretch of PCH. PCH is a parking lot on summer Friday afternoons.

I was feeling really sorry for myself before I got a grip. PCH stands for Pacific Coast Highway, California State Route 1, the stuff of California legend.

Moreover, this particular stretch has the double distinction of following historic El Camino Real.
People come from all over the world to visit this place. Traffic, schmaffic. They are here for both the sunshine and the people-watching. So I donned my shades, fresh lipstick and we rolled through El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach and Redondo Beach, putting on a good show for the tourists. (The Beach Boys hail from Hawthorne, bordering ES and MB to the east. )

The sun didn't cooperate, as evident in these GOES imagery animations from the CIMSS Satellite Blog.

GOES-11 West, geostationary over the equator at 135 West longitude, is on the left panel.
GOES-14 stored in space, geostationary at 110 West longitude, is in the middle.
GOES-13 East, geostationary at 75 West Longitude, is on the right panel.

These are three views of the same area from three different look angles.

The NOAA GOES-14 satellite (positioned over the Equator at 105º West longitude) was brought out of on-orbit storage for a brief period of testing, beginning on 10 August 2011. A comparison of GOES-11 (GOES-West), GOES-14, and GOES-13 (GOES-East) visible channel images (above) shows the evolution of stratus clouds along the southern California coast and the immediate offshore waters of the Pacific Ocean on 10 August. The images are displayed in the native projection of each GOES satellite, so the cloud features appear slightly different due to the different viewing angles.

Go visit the CIMSS Satellite Blog to learn more about how scientists calibrate satellites, often by intercomparison between different satellites. A NASA Goddard SFC scientist once told an audience at an American Meteorological Society meeting that GOES East and GOES West IR brightness temperatures vary by 3-4 degrees Celcius/Kelvin over Colorado!

They knew it was not an error because GOES East reads hotter in the morning and GOES West reads hotter in the afternoon.

Do you know why? Do you know why the temperatures are different between the two satellites over Colorado, but not over Oklahoma at a similar latitude?

Fail to Win!

2011-08-11T20:00:00.000-07:00

I look happy because I've refashioned two items that were not quite right into things that I wear frequently.

Remember Burda 7517 FAIL? I lopped of the bottom to turn it into a top, narrowed the side seams to get rid of the unflattering bell shape, removed the front darts and added back darts. I actually like it now.

Remember the Butterick 3133 I made to wear in conservative Zanzibar? It like it much better at 27" than at the old 32" length.

I turned two fails into a big WIN.

Notice in the background that it is 5 PM and the marine layer (off-shore fog bank) still hasn't fully dissipated (or, perhaps it is rolling back in before it even had a chance to fully dissipate).

I shouldn't complain when the rest of the nation is suffering weather like this.

Partly cloudy with a high of 70F every day is preferable to heat indices over 120F and sensible (bulb) temperatures of 108F.

This week's forecast for our area is typical. If you come visit us in coastal LA during the summer, don't forget to pack your jacket along with your bikini. You'll also need less sunblock than you think.

No More Gray

2011-08-10T22:23:00.000-07:00

We've had marine layer clouds every morning for months on end. It doesn't help that I've been sewing and knitting gray all summer*. In reality, they are subtle non-colors (black/gray/cream/brown) with hints of myriad colors. Exhibit A, Aran Ring V2 in undyed alpaca from the Twist Yarns of Intrigue's own line of yarns.
The yarn comes in enormous 8 oz/650 yd skeins for ~$27/skein. It's a finer micron count than Frog Tree Alpaca, another yarn I considered for this design. In the end, the softer Twist yarn won out. I thought that 1 skein would be sufficient to make myself a version of the Golden Braid. When I finished the cabled section, I decided to keep knitting to make a short vest.

I ran out of yarn at a very unflattering length. I had to go back for a second skein for another $27. This sweater weighs 9 oz so I have quite a bit left. What should I do with the rest?

Although it is light in actual weight, it is incredibly warm and I won't be able to wear it until the weather cools down. In the mean time, you can pet it at Twist Yarns of Intrigue in Manhattan Beach, CA. It's front and center as you walk in (paired with Cathy's shibori skirt). Cathy has more alpaca, some undyed, some hand-dyed in her own subtle shades.
I might even be willing to sell or trade the 7 oz I have left.

* But I've recently switched to pink. More on that later.

Aside:
How thick is the marine layer? (Translation: How cloudy is it?)
Consider the MODIS La Jolla subset from NASA's Terra satellite, local time of ascension, 10:30. The marine layer is inland.
Compare with the MODIS La Jolla subset from NASA's Aqua satellite, local time of ascension, 13:30. It's a little bit clearer inland, but there are still plenty of thin clouds along the coast that are a bit too thin to show up well in the visible spectrum. On the ground, it still looks a bit gray.

Does this ever work?

2011-08-09T13:06:00.000-07:00

This person (?robot?) won't let up. This is the second one I've gotten recently. Does this kind of email solicitation ever work?

from Monique Aros moniquearos@americanpopdigital.com via mcsv148.net
reply-to Monique Aros
to badmomgoodmom@gmail.com
date Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 1:01 PM
subject Reminder to Join the Tampico Beverages Blogging Program
mailed-by mcsv148.net
unsubscribe Unsubscribe from this sender

1:01 PM (6 minutes ago)

Hi [BMGM] -

I haven’t heard back, but I don’t want you to miss an exclusive opportunity to be part of our blogging program! TAMPICO® Beverages has just launched “Unique Like You” – a photo contest celebrating the arrival of the 20oz, single-serve bottles now in store! Enter today for a chance to win some cool swag – including a laptop computer – plus have the chance to be included in a TAMPICO® photo mosaic! :)

We’d love for you to be part of this launch by joining our blogging program*! Let me know ASAP if you’re interested and I’ll send over all the details you need to be an official program participant on behalf of Bad Mom Good Mom!

Looking forward to hearing from you,
Monique

Monique Aros
Account Executive
_____________________

American Pop
Social Media Marketing
main: 818 840 1030
web: www.americanpopdigital.com
twitter: @moniquearos

OMG
She's a real person. She is apparently a journalism student and she had to post a blog for Journalism 100 class. I will let the quality of her analysis speak for itself.

A friend about to be downsized said that she is considering going back to school to get a masters in social media marketing from USC (total tuition about $100,000 she doesn't have). Do you think this kind of education is helpful? Valuable in either an intellectual or economic marketplace sense?

Is there a better way to allocate our collective time and money?

Do tell. I have my own biased opinions about this, but I want to hear others.

The problem with data...

2011-07-28T20:16:00.001-07:00

...is that it is so darn hard to use!
This looks very easy, right? But it was a PITA to get from the data I downloaded from the Guardian website to the plots shown here.

I write notes to myself about data workups, both the statistical/science decisions and the software tricks. I thought I would show you how unnecessarily hard this is.

[I used to be embarrassed about how much time I spent on opening data files and getting different data files to play nice with each other--a process called data fusion. But, then I heard a bigwig at USGS state at a conference that her staff devote 85% of their time troubleshooting data reading issues and only 15% on the science stuff. I am so grateful for her openness. How else would I know that I hit par?]

So here are my data reading notes.
First, if you use your browser to go their link, All the US weather stations (CSV)
and then save it as plain text using Firefox (my browser of choice but YMMV), you get one file with all of the data written on one line!
I like to work up data on my Macbook Pro using X11 and the Mac flavor of Unix.
prompt> wc us.csv
1 21678 967827 us.csv
Yup, that's one line, 21678 words and 96827 characters.

To break it up into multiple lines that I (and my machine) can read,
I used vi and ex
prompt> vi us.csv
then type this easy to parse line (ctr-V means press ctr and v at the same time)
:g/ctr-V ctr-M/s//ctr-M/g
That turned the ^M characters that read as tabs on my computer
to Unix carriage returns.

Then I tried to use grep to find files tagged with
CA
and
CALIFORNIA
but discovered that the structure of the data for each station was slightly different.
Some were marked in the second field, after station name,
CALIFORNIA
CALIFORNI
CALIFORN
CA
and LOS ANGELES just omitted the state field altogether.

In all, I found 6 climate stations in California
(if you find more, please leave a comment!).
From North to South:
Eureka
Sacramento
San Francisco
Fresno
Los Angeles
San Diego

[If I were smart, I would have wrote a script to grep for every CA station in the Worldwide WMO station list by WMO identifier against the us.csv climate file. Consider this your homework assignment and send me the stations that I missed.]

I used unix again.
prompt> grep FRESNO us.csv > fre.csv
and so forth for each of the 6 stations to put them in a separate file.

Then I had to get rid of the extra column of CA variants in 5 of the 6 fields. I used MS Excel to open up each station's csv file, delete the column, and save again in csv.

There should be a way to do it using sed or awk, but I forgot how to do it. When I looked it up, the simple
prompt> awk < fre.csv '{print $1, $2, $3}'
showed that I had real problems.
prompt> awk < fre.csv '{print $1}'
gives FRESNO, as you would expect, but
prompt> awk < fre.csv '{print $2}'
gives
CALIFORNIA,723890,36.8,119.7,2009,8.8,11,13.4,16.8,24.1,24.3,29.4,27.7,26.5,17.6,,
because awk is expecting spaces as delimiters and there are no spaces after
CALIFORNIA FRESNO, CALIFORNIA,723890,36.8,119.7,1887,,,,,,,,,23.7,19.9,13.2,7.7

What to do?
prompt> awk < fre.csv '{FS = ","; print $1,$3,$4,$5,$6,$7,$8,$9,$10,$11,$12,$13,$14,$15,$16,$17}'
does the trick, but, by the time I remembered the awk syntax, I had already used MS Excel to do it for me.

I tried to make plots with Excel, but found it too limiting. So I resorted to my favorite programming language for parsing data, Interactive Data Language, IDL. If you want to be a meteorologist, you need to learn it. If you are at a university, chances are very good that your school has a site license for it.

If you have IDL version 7.1 and later, there is a handy-dandy built-in procedure that reads csv files called "read_csv.pro" !
IDL> eur = read_csv("eur.csv")
IDL> sac = read_csv("sac.csv")
IDL> sfo = read_csv("sfo.csv")
IDL> fre = read_csv("fre.csv")
IDL> lax = read_csv("lax.csv")
IDL> san = read_csv("san.csv")

Type help to find out what is in your data structure.
IDL> help, fre, /structure
** Structure <18d5208>, 18 tags, length=18704, data length=18696, refs=1:
FIELD01 STRING Array[123]
.
.
.
FIELD18 DOUBLE Array[123]

If you cleaned up your fields, then
field01 = station
field02 = wmo_id
field03 = latitude
field04 = longitude
field05 = year
field06 = Jan mean temperature in Celcius
field12 = Jul
field18 = Dec

I reversed the default plot and background colors
IDL> !p.background=255
IDL> !p.color=0
and used color table 39, rainbow + white
IDL> loadct,39

IDL> plot, lax.field05, lax.field06, xrange=[1850,2010], yrange=[0,30], min_value = 1., psym = 1, $
IDL> title = 'Los Angeles Monthly Mean Temps', xtitle = 'Year', ytitle = 'Degrees Celcius'
IDL> oplot, lax.field05, lax.field06, min_value = 1., psym = 1, color = 50
IDL> oplot, lax.field05, lax.field12, min_value = 1., psym = 2, color = 250
IDL> saveimage,'LAX_JanJul_Climate.jpg',/jpeg,quality=100

If you haven't already downloaded and installed Liam Gumley's saveimage.pro, what are you waiting for? You can find it here. Save it to somewhere early in your IDL path.

If you want to get fancy, you can plot all six CA stations on one page.

I want to discuss the features that I see in these graphs, but at a later date. Iris has a TKD party right now.

In loco parentis

2011-07-26T21:07:00.000-07:00

Another parent wrote in chalk on the side of their cabin, "I don't know where my children are...I'm at the Lair". That's the Lair spirit! Compare that with this conversation with a mother who didn't have the Lair spirit.

[I agreed with other Lair parents who say that they bring their kids to the Lair so they can roam the woods and the creek without adults trailing after them. The understanding is that all the adults at camp are keeping an eye on all the kids, giving them a long leash, but also stopping dangerous/reckless behavior. E.g. one mom shouted at some kids that were not her own to get off the roof of the stage (albeit carefully); she reasoned that she wouldn't want her kids to be on anything higher than six feet, so she thought those kids' parents wouldn't want their kids up there either.]

This picture captures her in a cuddly mood, but she went mostly free-range last week. Our entire family loves that hammock.
She babysat her 5 yo cousin so that all the adults in our cabin could go on the hike to Sword lake. Notice that the flowers are just coming into flower at this elevation.
Her independence also provides us with independence. It's a bittersweet feeling, though.

Down by the creek for a little bonding time. We walked, talked, painted some watercolors, and observed the standing waves behind the rocks. (Our rafting guide in Colorado had discussed standing waves; I was surprised how much Iris remembered about wave and hydro-dynamics from the guide's talk.)
It's hard to convey how much joy that gave me, discussing and observing waves with my daughter. I worked as a teaching assistant for Quantum Mechanics for three semesters and work as a meteorologist now. Wave mechanics is near and dear to my heart and it warms my mommy cockles to see that they fascinate my daughter, too.

While we were having our internet-free camping trip, international pi-day, 22 July, passed. I still owe you a post about how to know any size circle. I even brought along this shawl so that I could photograph it down by the creek. But I was so in the moment of our vacation, I plumb forgot. You'll have to gaze upon it on our family room carpet instead. More on knitting circles later.

Seashore Dress

2011-07-12T21:40:00.000-07:00

We went for a walk and had lunch at the beach on Sunday. Are they having a deep conversation?Or is she complaining .again. about the sand kicked up by the waves? Or how we have ruined her forever by raising her in a weather paradise so that she can never leave?

The dress sure looks great IMHO. Here it is, washed and drying on the dress form. It is outbound to her younger cousin.

I made a size 140 cm (height) or US size 10. But, I didn't realize the dress pattern is for knits until too late. It barely fits over her head and is a tad too short.

Because I was working with a thrifted ruffled skirt, I cut the dress pattern with the bottom along the skirt hem, being careful to align the sides. I forgot to pay attention to the total length and the hem rises up in the center back. It is more of a tunic than a dress.

The front has deep pleats so the front piece is wider than the back piece. Thus, I preserved one side seam so the F piece could extend slightly into the B of the skirt. I also had to make each pleat slightly shallower. I used up almost the entire skirt to make this dress/tunic.

The full pattern review.
The Burda 9546 Flickr set, including those hard-to-find Burda envelope front and back pictures and my slapdash interior finishing techniques for children's clothes.

I am under orders to make her a longer one with a wider head opening. I am not sure if I feel cooperative.

Scaling Up

2011-07-09T04:00:00.000-07:00

Remember when I reknit my favorites in 2/3 scale for Iris here and here?
2/3 scale turned into 3/4 and then 4/5 scale. I was quite melancholy when I was cutting out yoga pants for the two of us and laid the two patterns on top of each other for comparison. She's growing so fast!
Compare with the all in one (F and B cut in one piece) pattern piece for the first pair of pants I made for her.
We bought her shoes this week for back to school. Remember last year when I realized I could fit in her shoes (though it was a tight fit)? She'll be wearing my shoes soon, if I let her. We are in negotiations.

My Marilyn

2011-07-07T22:28:00.000-07:00

When we visited Wupatki National Monument (near Flagstaff, AZ) the blowhole was blowing. We couldn't resist taking this photo.
The sale of the Debbie Reynolds movie costume collection was in the news that week, so I thought about this.
The break-up of the collection fills me with sadness. Read this analysis.

As he picked up costume after costume, Randy Habercamp of the [Motion Picture] Academy shook his head as it sunk in how many iconic pieces were leaving this country for good. “Well,” he said, seeking to put it all in some perspective, “it happened to the treasures of Greece. It happened to Italy. I guess now it’s our turn.” (Randy was there for the experience—the Academy did not send an official representative to bid on costumes.)

Info about construction of the skirt is in Hello Goth!

Top-down road trip pullover

2011-07-06T00:05:00.000-07:00

The sweater was knit top-down. We drove our hard top Prius from LA, CA to Boulder, CO.
This was intended as a hostess gift for our friend in Boulder, CO. It's a 16 hour drive so I hoped to have it mostly finished by the time we got there. Hah!

It did take ~15 hours to complete, but I didn't take into account pretty scenery and darkness. At least I was able to try it on the hostess and adjust the length to suit while the sweater was in progress. It will be mailed tomorrow.

It's a variation of the Lion Brand Yarn's free pattern for a top-down pullover. I substituted Dharma Trading's Andee (50/50 wool/alpaca) instead so I had to adjust the gauge. I made many other changes.

Because it is knit from the top down, I used a stretchy tubular cast-on from a crochet foundation chain (in a waste yarn).
I misread the instructions and knit a yoke for a size Small instead of the intended Medium.
That meant increasing generously across the body at the end of the yoke when switching to stockinette stitch portion. Fortunately, it doesn't show much.
The pattern has the front and neck at the same 4" height. The recipient wanted no more than 2" height. To avoid strangling her (we really like her and want her to stick around), I short-row shaped the neck to bring the center front 2" lower than the center back.
I added waist shaping. You can see that the waist shaping starts 2" further beyond the yoke on the back than in the front.
I shortened the sweater to fit the petite recipient. She likes things roomy. IMHO, a Small would have fit her just fine. But, this will give her room to layer a turtleneck underneath.
Not that she will need it because this alpaca and wool blend is WARM.
I added 3 garter ridges instead of the plain curling hem of the original pattern. I think it looks neater this way.
The body was knit with size 7 needles, the ribbing and garter bands with size 5.
The pattern has 3/4 sleeves. I lengthened them slightly to get full-length sleeves for a petite.
The pattern has straight sleeves. I decreased from 65 down to 45 stitches.
The sweater body hem wanted to flip up (until I blocked it into submission), so I decreased 3 stitches (from 45 to 42), evenly spaced, across the wrist hems to control the flip.

The yoke was completed between LA and St George, Utah. The sweater was divided for body and sleeves and the body was short-row shaped through Glenwood Canyon. We got stuck in a huge traffic jam when I-70 was periodically closed to move heavy equipment across the road.

Look at the water level of the Colorado river! It comes nearly up to the new highway and the railroad tracks. It flooded over the bike path and the old highway.
I was able to try the sweater on our hostess and plot the waist, hip and arm widths from her measurements. Then I finished the sweater body in Crested Butte and Mesa Verde, CO.

After lunch in Flagstaff, AZ, I started the first sleeve. It was just about done by dark.

Back at home, I finished the first sleeve and started the second.

During the drive to visit my in-laws in San Diego last weekend, I finished the second sleeve and wove in all the ends.

When I returned home, I washed and blocked the sweater. When I photographed it, I thought about where I was for every piece of the construction. It's full of memories. I hope she likes it.

This is a really nice, simple sweater. If I take another road-trip, I may make another.

Aside:
I asked the recipient to measure a sweater she likes. It sounded too roomy but I went with her measurement. (When buying RTW sweaters, you pick the size that fits your widest point. If you are pear-shaped like us, then RTW sweaters are often too roomy around the shoulders and chest if they fit our hips. Custom-knit sweaters can be knit to fit the wearer's measurements and don't need to be so roomy at the chest. That's a subtle point that non-knitters might not realize.)

But I forgot to ask her the length. So I called her home as soon as we got out of Glenwood Canyon's cell phone dark spot and her daughter said I had just missed her. I recalled that the two are nearly the same height so I asked the daughter to measure her back and front shoulder to waist length.

She said that it would take her a while to go get the tape measure.

When she got back, she asked, "Do you want it in centimeters or inches?"

Spoken like a true daughter of a NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) employee!

Ravelry project notes.

Is that all?

2011-07-01T08:42:00.001-07:00

In catching up with the local news after vacation, I came across LAT's Buying clothing made locally. I buy sewing supplies from SAS Fabrics, an odd-jobber that buys fabrics and trims from area clothing manufacturers. I have noticed an uptick in the quality and selection of their offerings recently so I was not surprised to read that LA-area clothing production had started to grow slightly after years of decline.

I've even met two women making comfortable livings producing specialty clothing in small lots in my own neighborhood. (And that's not counting Renko.) What did surprise me was this quote.

L.A's Single brand can turn around 800 silk print dresses for Neiman Marcus and Lord & Taylor in as little as two weeks, now that 90% of its production is done at home. "We recently brought more of our production back from China," said Galina Sobolev, designer-founder of the $15-million brand. "The price difference was only about a dollar per [dress], and the quality control and timing were much better. We're also providing jobs and keeping domestic factories working."

It costs just $1 more to make a dress in LA than in China? I checked the retail prices at Single Dress and online retailers. That's $1 more for a dress that retails at $200-400.

In Deluxe, Dana Thomas wrote that her research showed that manufacturing costs account for about 10% of the price of luxury products; advertising and PR cost 11%. Manufacturing in higher wage countries (Europe and North America) costs about 20% more than in China.

The book came out in 2008 so Thomas' numbers are older than the statistic given in the LAT article. $200 is not quite a luxury price point. But, which is right? $1 or ~$5-10 price difference given by Thomas?

I asked Kathleen Fasanella, the creator of Fashion Incubator. She said that I should have read her more closely because she's been reporting about this for years. Kathleen is right, as usual, but she was so far ahead of my thinking, I didn't grock what she was saying until I read these links together in succession.

Value Circularity: cotton, colanders & the specialty store market If you can read just one link, this is a must-read for why you can't find nice stuff anymore except at boutiques and specialty stores.
Why you should start your own sewing factory She details why the cost-savings of Chinese production are evaporating. She also proselytizes that producing in small lots (of a few hundred instead of the 10,000-100,000 item lots common in Chinese production) is more cost-effective for the manufacturer and kinder to the planet.
Consequences of the fashion school bubble My pet-peeve about too many chiefs, not enough Indians to do the actual work of making stuff. This is universally true in science, software and clothing.
Slow vs Fast Fashion pt.1 She didn't recommend this, but I thought this was a much more nuanced position than the one I took in Slow Fashion.

Slow Fashion

2011-06-26T22:01:00.000-07:00

We reached home at a quarter before midnight on Saturday. By Sunday night, not only is everything unpacked, but everything has been cleaned and put away, including the laundry.

While I slaved away on the home front, Bad Dad took the car for a wash, hunted and gathered groceries, took Iris to CTY camp registration, bought her textbooks and supplies and coordinated camp carpool plans. They are now at a classic film screening. He signed them both up for a Last Remaining Seats, a summer classic film series in "movie palaces of downtown L.A.'s Broadway Historic Theatre District." They have returned. It's official. She is as squeamish about Sunset Boulevard as I am. Anyone who takes a 10 year old to see Sunset Boulevard deserves the Bad Dad moniker, n'est pas?

I took advantage of the time alone to inventory their clothes and make up a shopping list, mending pile and sewing plan. They're actually not that long.

I had inventoried my own clothes before the trip, bringing a suitcase of clothing to friends in Boulder who would provide a better use for some of my clothes.

The arms of Big Apple Cardigan and Wren grew while I wore them. I felt like I Alice in Wonderland during her shrinking phase as my hands retreated into the sleeves. Those two cardigans look so much better on their new owner, a 15-year old competitive swimmer with her big shoulders and long arms.

Similarly, sweaters whose sleeves had shrunk look much better on a petite friend. I also left her the Leaf Yoke Ensemble and Katrina Rib. My closet feels so much lighter.

Anyway, I've been mulling over a couple of things my daughter said about our fashion differences.

First, she said that I should wear my shirts untucked. I remember having this discussion, at a similar age, with my own mother. She prefers her shirts untucked. I asserted myself by tucking in my shirts. Now my daughter is asserting herself by not tucking her shirts. This must be a generational thing because a friend says that her kids tell her that shirts shouldn't be tucked.

The second thing is a bit more serious. She remarked that there is such a time lag between my sewing plans and actual production, that the clothes will have gone out of fashion by the time I finish them. Thus, one needs to buy trendy clothes quickly, before they fall out of fashion.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

I do not want to participate in fast fashion, where kids toil to make t-shirts for other kids (Gap), or the garment workers are locked into the factories (like just about every cheap mass-market retailer) or the workers have to sue just to get paid their wages (Forever 21). This blog is about the antithesis to fast anything. We make everything from elemental carbon and water in this household*.

This is one reason I signed up for Wardrobe Refashion, a program where people commit to not buying mass-market clothes. It's like Weight Watchers for people who over-consume clothing because you get to buy one new item every two months, like WW food points. Exceptions are made only for clothes needed for work. Thus, WR forces people to rethink their consumption patterns to only what they really need, what they can find used, or what they can make.

She was just upset because I sewed a bunch of things for her in January and February, and then went on strike until June. I was upset to see the things I had laboriously made for her thrown on the floor in a trampled mess. I decided to behave more like The Selfish Seamstress until her behavior shaped up.

I broke the strike with a tunic for her made out of a skirt I bought from Goodwill two summers ago. I was going to turn this skirt into a pillowcase when she intercepted and said that she wanted it for a sundress. Two years of growth later and the skirt only stretches to tunic length. So perhaps her criticism about my sewing production rate was legitimate.

She has issued a press embargo on her clothes until she has debuted them in front of her friends. Thus, I cannot show the tunic, which we both think is the cat's meow.

Luckily, I am a year behind in blogging about the clothes I have already made for her. So I will show you another item I made from ~~thrifted~~ pre-softened jeans. These flares were a bit too tight at the knees so I slit the side seam in the offending area and inserted a flash of purple flowers in the seam. 1970s retro-groovy!

*This is an old affectionate joke about UC Berkeley synthetic organic chemistry professor, Henry Rapoport. He was a spatial genius. In lecture, he used to switch writing hands to give the audience a better view of the blackboard. When he was trying to explain a complex reaction, he used to write with both his left and right hands simultaneously. Try taking lecture notes in his class!

Crested Butte

2011-06-22T21:46:00.000-07:00

The first time Bad Dad and I visited Crested Butte, we approached it from Marble via Schofield Park on our loaded mountain bikes in early August. The glacier-carved alpine meadow was carpeted with wildflowers--like the sleepy scene in The Wizard of Oz. We didn't think anything could be prettier than that.

When we carried our bicycles over the avalanche chute at Schofield pass, we saw the most jaw-droppingly beautiful scene. This doesn't even begin to describe the beauty. It's still early in the wildflower season.We introduced our daughter to mountain biking by riding up to Peanut Lake.
She was a real trooper. Not only did she ride off pavement for the first time, but she even rode the lower loop trail, which was still wet and muddy in sections. I worried about how she would handle the mud*. She plowed right through it, filling her mama's heart to bursting.
We turned around where the trail hit the water in the Slate River. Notice the mud on our backsides. That's why Crested Butte is nicknamed "Crusty Butt".

* The wagon trail between Marble and Crested Butte crosses the Crystal River in several places. It can be quite deep, even in August. I found out just how deep when I fell over during one crossing. I kept my panniers dry, but I was soaked. Amazingly, I didn't mind because it brought me eye level to the meadow and I noticed more flowers. But my butt was quite crusty when we made our way to the inn that evening.

We were so tired, we were passed by an old lady on a five-speed climbing out of the old mining town of Gothic, the last climb to Crested Butte. When I grow up, I want to be like her.

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Calvin Clean 1985-2011

2011-06-12T23:58:00.001-07:00

Do you remember when patterns were almost always sold at full price and we bought only a handful of patterns per year? Fewer were introduced and retired from the catalogs each season so we took our time and selected carefully.

Vogue 1507 is one of the first Vogue patterns I ever bought. I was so new to sewing, I bought by my RTW dress size (8) instead of the pattern size based on my measurements (12). I was also so naive, I bought patterns for the figure that I wished I had rather than the one I do have. If I were a six-foot tall slim-hipped wonder, I'd look like 1980's Calvin Klein muse and model, Josie Borain. Alas, the pattern has sat unused for 25 years.

I was inspired by several denim t-shirts seen at the Spring 2011 shows like this Celine one with a bateau neck. Photos courtesy of Style.com; click to see their coverage of the Celine spring 2011 collection.

Take an iconic American uniform of jeans and a t-shirt, and combine the two to make a denim t-shirt. Fashion geek genius!

Just to drive the point home even further, Stella McCartney added contrasting "jean orange" topstitching.

What's more iconic than a t-shirt from the designer who brought us "nothing comes between me and my Calvins"? I dug out the pattern.

It was a very easy and fast project. I had some very lightweight denim lying about--the same stuff I used for Iris' blue 4-tiered pleated skirt. Because of the over-sized nature of the cut, a size 8 fits just fine. I shortened the top by 3" (from 27" to 24") and added 1.5" of ease around the hip.

Asides:

Josie was also a Classic Elite sweater model!
No, you actually do see spots in the mirror. I thought my camera lens was dirty until I realized that terry cloth fuzz from Household Sewing had flown all over the cutting area and stuck to the glass. What a mess. I should pick up a vacuum someday, but that would cut into my sewing time.

Bye-bye!

Speaking of keeping notes

2011-06-12T12:28:00.000-07:00

UMBC eBiquity managed to combine two things near and dear to my heart, robots and construction notes! Moreover, the robots crawled under the Great Pyramids of Giza to discover the red writing, which were later deciphered to be builders' measurement notes. Add in the great pyramids and a mystery solved, it's really a trifecta.

Robot discovers construction notes.

Sewing Notebook Meme

2011-06-06T22:44:00.000-07:00

Lucky Sew and Sew posted her Ten Years of Sewing Notes and Records and I found it fascinating enough to see if we can start an internet meme. Inspired by her swatches, I've started stapling my swatches to my project notes, too. I hope more people post their notebooks so we can all improve our record-keeping practices.

I found notebooks starting in 1994, the year I bought a new Bernette 740. My grad student budget stretched only to a Bernette, not a Swiss-made Bernina. But the purchase qualified me for a series of Bernina owners' lessons. Because I had just missed the last series, Studio Bernina owner Susan Igou gave me a quick one-on-one lesson to get me started.

I have never experienced sewing lessons like Susan's. If you live in the front range and want to move your sewing skills up a notch, you couldn't do better than take a class with her. She explains the why and the how exactly the way a techie needs.

Anyway, she taught me the importance of keeping a good notebook. At first, I tried to keep my clothing construction and quilting life separate.

But switching notebooks proved cumbersome. (Did I really believe that taking up quilting would help me use up my sewing scraps and reduce my ~~stash~~ fabric collection?) Eventually, I used one notebook at a time.
I even started pasting in inspiration photos.
I admired turquoise and print mixing in 1997. I still do in 2011.
Everything old is new again. Look at the bias cowl blouse at the bottom right. Doesn't it look like the blouse in the top book?
The blouse is out of this book. I haven't made anything from this book yet, but Carolyn has made several items and they all look great on her. On her sidebar, she translates the title to Unique Clothes Any Way You Like by Natsuno Hiraiwa. I bought it at Books Sanseido in Torrance. They had several copies last time I was there.

Please join this meme and post pictures of your sewing notebooks and provide a link in the comments to her original post, Ten Years of Sewing Notes and Records.

Correlation does not imply causality: the algebra version

2011-06-04T20:47:00.000-07:00

We've come a long way since the controversial "Math class is tough!" Barbie.

I have repeatedly mentioned that our school district places ~20% of the 6th graders in a math class that compacts the CA 6th grade and 7th grade math curriculum into one year. Those kids are then able to take algebra in the 7th grade, putting them on track to complete calculus by 11th grade. That's the de facto honors math track.

Nationally, it is quite rare. Even within California, only 6.7% of all 7th graders do so--mainly in well-to-do and high-tech areas. That 18.5% of the kids at my daughter's Title 1 school (40% of the kids are poor and/or have parents who did not complete high school) did so last year is a source of pride for our community. (Even though kids of highly educated parents are more likely to be on that track, a significant number of at-risk kids take the class alongside them and do fine.)

I was chatting with my daughter's pre-algebra teacher at open house, when I lamented that the 7th graders wouldn't be segregated from the 8th graders in algebra. I had hoped my daughter could continue in a fast-paced math class. She has often told me how much she liked that class and the teacher. I was worried that the 8th graders would slow the 7th graders down.

If you look at the CST Algebra 1 test scores for the entire state of California (below), you will see that 7th grade algebra students score much, much higher (430 vs 350 ) than 8th graders. 9th graders fare worse and 10th and 11th graders do even more poorly.

Then the teacher said what appeared to be a non-sequitur. She said that we could sign her up for gender-based algebra.

When my daughter asked us to fill out a gender-based algebra form, stating our preference that she be placed in an algebra class of all girls, we reluctantly signed it. It was her preference, not ours. My husband and I had assumed that the class would be filled with girls who were NOT math-confident.

The teacher elaborated that the school district superintendent was a big proponent of gender-based algebra and that education scholars were following the results in our district with great interest. I said the results are not statistically valid because of selection bias. At this point, I was still clueless, assuming that the girls' scores would be lower than the boys'. But I couldn't understand why the superintendent would so strongly support this program because he struck me as a data-driven guy.

Then the teacher said that the parents of the boys complained because the girls' algebra class had become the de facto honors math class because only the girls very serious about math signed up for it. The boys were relegated to algebra classes with a higher percentage of kids who had difficulty with math. To be fair to the boys, she would also teach a boys only algebra class next year.

Her point was that gender-based algebra test scores look really good because of selection bias.

I would like to point out that 7th graders test higher than 8th graders in the same math class because of selection bias, too. In a perfect world, kids take algebra when they are prepared for it. The kids that are ready at a younger age are more likely to excel than the kids that take it at a later time. But, you can't take the same kid and throw them in a higher level class and expect them to do better. (With the exception of bored and under-achieving kids.) Sorry, putting Kindergardeners in algebra is not going to make CA stack up against Singapore. ;-)

Correlation does not imply causality is my statistical pet peeve.

Just the same, I went to the assistant principal in charge of curriculum to explain that my daughter really, really wants to take gender-based algebra next year and could he check to make sure it doesn't conflict with her preferred electives?
We've come a long way, baby. Even MIT has matriculated more girls than boys in recent years.

CST Algebra I (California overall)

Result Type	7	8	9	10	11	EOC
Students Tested	31,492	274,508	269,800	118,412	56,830	751,042
% of Enrollment	6.7 %	57.3 %	52.3 %	23.8 %	12.1 %
Students with Scores	31,480	274,182	268,975	117,798	56,451	748,886
Mean Scale Score	430.9	350.3	307.9	290.1	282.3	323.9
% Advanced	50 %	16 %	3 %	1 %	1 %	9 %
% Proficient	35 %	30 %	19 %	11 %	8 %	22 %
% Basic	11 %	24 %	26 %	23 %	19 %	24 %
% Below Basic	4 %	22 %	36 %	42 %	45 %	31 %
% Far Below Basic	1 %	7 %	16 %	23 %	27 %	14 %

Mariposa (Schwaan)

2011-06-02T21:10:00.001-07:00

Email marketing really works. I received the Berroco Knitbits newsletter with a link to the newly-released Norah Gaughan Volume 8 pamphlet. I went out to the Slipt Stitch at lunch to buy it.
Notice that my version is not a literal interpretation of the cover sweater.
I really do not need the textured band around my hips, especially at the huge gauge of 3 stitches per inch. I also don't love the lace netting at the base of the triangles. I like the way it echoes the lace netting bands at the bottom, but I don't need it if I eliminate the bands.

Thanks to the magic of Ravelry, I had the collective wisdom of the 50+ people who had knitted the pattern before me. (Ravelry is crowd-sourcing done right. It's the category killer of online knitting communities.) Many got rid of the bulky bands at the bottom and substituted yarns at slightly different gauges.

One person mentioned that she didn't like the many holes in the base of the triangle and substituted one row of holes instead. Another person said that she didn't want bulky seams and knitted everything but the inset in one piece. That might have been the same person who mentioned short-row shaping to eliminate the weird triangle extensions at the neck.

In a recycling fervor, I hauled out the bag of Rowan Summer Tweed (70% silk/30% cotton/+bonus vegetable matter) that my sister sent. She had abandoned a project that was just not right for the yarn so I ripped it out and salvaged the yarn. There were the equivalent of 6 balls of this purple color, 2 in a dark blue and one in a chalky white. I tried to knit it at the recommended 4 sts/in and got a texture resembling cardboard. Moreover, knitting the yarn at this tight gauge made my hands and wrists hurt. When I switched to a larger needle, the resulting fabric had an appealing soft, drapey quality that matched its color. (3.5 by 5.5 sts/in)

Changing the gauge meant that I had to adapt the stitch count and all the shaping. I also had to rechart the lace triangles--these are 29 stitches wide. You can see the short-row shaping at the top of the sleeves. While I was changing everything else, why not change the neckline finish?

Note the short-row shaping of the back shoulders. Since both the overall gauge and the ratio of row and stitch gauge was drastically different, I changed the raglan shaping sequence.

My short-row shaping chart on top with a partial table of raglan shaping below. In case you haven't noticed before, I am a strongly visual person.
I also added back waist shaping. In this pattern, you can't add front waist shaping without destroying the geometric design on the front.
Another project from ~~freebie~~ reclaimed materials completed!

Ravelry link for project.

Aside:
Two people told me that the sweater reminded them of a butterfly. I work in El Segundo, home of the endangered El Segundo Blue Butterfly. It's a scrappy little thing, less than an inch across and it lives on the ocean bluffs sandwiched between a giant oil refinery, the main water treatment plant for metro LA and LAX, one of the ten busiest airports in the world. Its habitat is the last undeveloped area along the Santa Monica bay coastline.
I really respect the denizens of El Segundo for the way the community embraced this little butterfly. Instead of decrying the endangered species act and mouthing off about government interference and landowner rights, the entire town rallied to save and restore the habitat.

Mariposa (the Spanish word for butterfly) street is named it. Many business names in El Segundo contain the word Mariposa or Butterfly. You will see it on the sidewalks, on signs--the library even commissioned a blue butterfly quilt design. (I took a photo of it before I noticed the sign saying that the artist does not want images of the quilt to be posted on the internet and I am respecting her wish. But, if you are in ES, I urge you to see the gorgeous quilt.)

The town really identifies with the scrappiness of this little butterfly. Anyway, that is why I think of it as my Mariposa sweater. I've had a difficult time this year with my health and this sweater, in my favorite color, is a reminder to me to hang tough.

What is vegan sugar?

2011-05-31T22:40:00.000-07:00

Iris asked me why we buy the two pound bag of organic vegan sugar that costs the same as a five pound bag of regular sugar. And isn't all sugar vegan?

She was too small to remember, but we took a vacation to Australia in 2003. On the shuttle from the Cairns airport to our hotel, we drove past many sugar cane fields. A blur of a fast-moving animal caught my eye as it crossed the road and ran into the sugar cane.

I asked the driver what kind of animal lives in the cane. He replied that quite a few animals live in the cane fields.

Then we passed some cane that had been cut by a mechanical harvester.

"What happens to the animals when the cane is cut?"

"They become animal by-catch."

I told him that I just went off sugar.

Then he said that there were more reasons to go off sugar. He told us about all the chemicals that are sprayed on the sugar cane. Then the cane is cut, crushed, and the juices collected--chemicals, animal by-catch and all*.

Vegan sugar is made from hand-cut sugar cane, which gives the animals a chance to get away.

We've been buying organic vegan sugar ever since. The cost is revenue-neutral because I was looking for an excuse to cut down on our sugar intake anyway.

* In theory, the animal blood and guts are removed in the sugar refining steps. Our family does not eat vegan, but we didn't like the idea of "regular" sugar after we learned how it is made.

Household Sewing

2011-05-31T22:05:00.001-07:00

This was some of the most boring sewing I did all year. But it was necessary.

Ten years ago, we bought a bag of rags from Home Depot, sharing half with my MIL. The rags have worn down over the years and some have ripped to shreds. The absurdity of buying rags hit me. Rather than buy another bag, I asked my MIL if she had any old towels lying about.

Sure enough, she gave me three towels that had endured bleach accidents. (A reason why I don't bleach my laundry.) A few minutes with my rotary cutter and serger, and I had a stack of 10 rags.

The mop cover for the hardwood floor thingy was a bit more difficult. The HD replacement covers are too small for the mop that the hardwood floor installer left us. After struggling with covers that didn't fit, I decided to make my own to measure. The elastic was rather tricky and I broke a needle while stretching the elastic to fit the cloth. In the end, I had to resort to a combination of stretching the elastic and pushing the fabric through with an awl. It's done and a pile of stuff left the sewing room floor.

Why do I have so much stuff on the sewing room floor? Because when you make stuff from castoffs, like these three skirts and the little girls' blouse from 3 old sport-shirts, one old t-shirt and factory remnants, then people take give you more refashioning materials.

The gray skirts were blogged about in Hello Goth!.
The four-tiered skirt pattern was first introduced in Blue.
The pink hoodie was first seen in Two kits.
I haven't blogged about the little girl's skirt and blouse yet, but I made them back in January 2011. Notice that she put ultra-secret notes in the working pocket at the skirt hem.

I didn't make my t-shirt or sweater, but all the other clothes were made by me with cast-off materials. Well, I bought new thread and elastic.

It gets better, the gifted version

2011-05-17T20:47:00.000-07:00

Bad Dad and I were wondering if it is time for a It Gets Better campaign for gifted kids.

I was talking with a reporter about my finding that super-high-test score districts are less likely than average to advance their kids in math. He wondered how I stumbled upon that finding. Why had I bothered to look at the data in that way?

The short answer is that it is because I care. But I care for a reason that was not immediately obvious to him. I better spell it out really clearly.

It's not about bragging rights about whose child is more advanced.

It's about the child who is sitting in math class, thinking she just might not be cut out for math because she will tear her hair out if she has to sit through another fracking demonstration of long division.

It's about the child who gets sent to the principal's office for reading a book in math class (and being told to go back to the classroom to apologize).

It's about the child who quickly turns over her 100% test grade so that the other kids don't see it--lest she get beat up in the school yard over that.

It's about the child that got beaten up in the school yard anyway, while the other kids watched, and then took turns kicking her once she was pulled down to the ground.

It's about the kid who looked to the teacher across the school yard for a rescue, and watched the teacher walk away instead.

It's about me.

I'm here today to tell you that, if they ever let you go beyond long division and fractions, it gets better.

You'll learn that rational numbers are a field under addition, negation and multiplication but integers are not. Integers are merely a ring because they lack the inverse under multiplication. And every system of algebra opens up a different universe of possibilities.

And the special algebra of infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces will open up the world of quantum mechanics to you. And, once you gain entree into that world, you will see how the quantum world manifests itself in the macro world all around you.

Who knows? You might even learn about general relativity and make relativistic corrections for satellite-to-satellite communications.

You might even work at a place alongside 850 other PhD-holding rocket scientists, marry one of them, raise a family and take fantastic trips (with the MIT alumni travel program).

More implications of academic redshirting

2011-05-03T20:00:00.000-07:00

First read Implications of academic redshirting for how redshirting, holding kids back a year for kindergarten, can impact identification of giftedness.

California gives a small amount of money to school districts to help them provide appropriate schooling for gifted students. The federal government also helps, particularly for poor communities.

(This doesn't sound fair, until you learn that gifted kids are THREE times more likely than non-gifted ones to drop out of school early. This problem is especially acute in poor communities. NCLB has been catastrophic for bright kids left behind in schools struggling to raise their standardized test scores to avoid being closed down. Class time is often devoted to drilling for the tests, rather than the open-ended inquiry that gifted kids thrive on.)

Anyway, the districts themselves set their criteria for GATE (gifted and talented) identification. For MBUSD, the students must score in the 97th percentile on the OLSAT. RBUSD requires 95th percentile on the OLSAT but also accepts kids in the 90th percentile on the OLSAT but do very well in classroom or in the arts into the program. Another poorer district in the area is even more lenient. Is this cheating? Not necessarily.

MBUSD students, with their April birthday cutoff, are older than their peers in RBUSD. They have an edge on the OLSAT. The poorer district has a very high percentage of English-learners and parents with low educational attainment. They prefer to err on the side of providing more kids with more educational enrichment (and qualifying them for state and federal $).

MBUSD was sued for their higher than average test score requirement for GATE. I am not sure what decision was reached. But I learned something interesting when looking just at the test scores of GATE students for:

MBUSD has about the same percentage of GATE kids as the state average, ~10-15% while RBUSD identifies 10-24% of the kids in a grade as GATE.

The RBUSD GATE kids outperform their statewide peers slightly, but lag behind MBUSD GATE kids. The advantages of age, wealth, parental education and a more selective approach should come as no surprise.

But I do wonder if the winning candidates for the recent school board election are on to something. They said that RBUSD either burns kids out in the honors program, or they hold them back in the regular program. (No one is suggesting changes for the kids identified as needing extra help, the ones at the learning center.) They campaigned to make the curriculum for the "kids in the middle" more challenging so the kids on the cusp don't have to make such a stark choice.

I think it is laudable, but my wish is for a four track system instead of a three track one. Good luck finding the money in this climate.

Aside:
From these posts, it looks like I am more concerned about the plight of GATE kids of well-educated parents. I'm sorry; I write what I know.

But, my volunteer work with the schools has put me in contact with kids that are from economically struggling families and whose parents do not have much formal education. I am very impressed with the ingenuity and hard work of the kids and the parents.

Peruse the CA STAR database, and you will find that RBUSD is a leader in providing challenging coursework to economically disadvantaged kids. Poorer districts often don't offer accelerated classes at all. While poor kids in RBUSD are less likely to be in the GATE program or in the accelerated classrooms, they are more likely to do so than in schools serving surrounding middle income and wealthy communities.

And the kids (mostly) rise to the occasion. I am proud to be in a community and school district that serves everyone's kids.

More thoughts on STAR testing

2011-05-02T21:37:00.000-07:00

As we enter week two of STAR (standardized) testing in California, I have a few more thoughts. Actually, Pennamite and I came up with these ideas together.

First, listen to Diane Ravitch's interview on Fresh Air. She spoke about the intent of standardized testing--to collect data--and the results of standardized testing--to punish schools. It was never her intention that standardized tests would be used as a blunt instrument and that they would become a tool for those who aim to privatize the US public school system.

After my What the STAR tests really tell us post, Pennamite suggested that schools (and school districts) that are known for their ultra high test scores become prisoners of their past results. They must get ever higher scores--or at least stay flat--or risk the wrath or displeasure of the parents.

It takes a bit of massaging to maintain such steady upward progress in the face of statistical noise and educational policy and demographic changes. Remember, people's jobs (and pensions) depend on the pleasure of the parents. Take a look at the math classes taken by 8th graders in California, Redondo Beach and Manhattan Beach.

Former Governor Schwartzenegger wanted to have ALL California 8th graders to take Algebra or beyond. All is a tall order, but most districts are trying to comply.

Statewide, 57.3% of 8th graders are taking Algebra 1 and another 4.8% (have already taken it and) are taking Geometry. 62% are meeting the new goal.

In RBUSD, it's 57.3% and 18.9% respectively. 78% are meeting the new goal. RB parents are wealthier and better educated than the statewide average (but not by much), so these numbers are not that surprising.

In MBUSD, it's 35.0% and 9.2% respectively. 44% meet the new goal. Despite having some of the wealthiest and best-educated parents in the state, the students are taking lower level math classes than the state-wide average. They are a full grade level behind comparable schools with similar demographics.

This is even more alarming because MBUSD used to exert strong pressure on parents to hold kids born after April back a year. See Implications of academic redshirting.

It wasn't always this way. Look at the data from prior years. The rest of the state leapt to accelerate students in math while MBUSD moved more slowly. They are where the rest of the state used to be.

Pennamite pointed out that the ultimate losers in this game are the kids. They are being held back until the school is sure that they will perform very well on the standardized tests. The default is to not challenge/stress the students. Otherwise, the kids might not score so highly and the schools will face some angry parents.

There is some grumbling on the soccer fields about the lack of challenge in math curriculum in MBUSD. One MB mom who has her kids on permit in RB has cited that as the main driver for leaving their school district. She works in the education field. I wonder how long it will take for the rest of the parents to become aware of how fixation with test scores is shortchanging their kids?

A (IMHO) good use of standardized test scores:
The RBUSD superintendent and the administrators of RBUHS are concerned that the middle schools are pushing the kids too far and too fast into higher level math. When 9th graders take Algebra 2, some of them do very poorly in the class. Would they have done better with an extra year of maturity? Did the system set them up for failure?

The standardized test scores support that view. The average test scores of the kids in the accelerated math track in RBUSD are slightly above the statewide average for kids of the same age, and they are twice as likely to be on an accelerated math track. But they are far behind the kids in MBUSD, which takes a much more selective approach. Are higher test scores (which I hope means mastery of the subject) a consequence of the extra year of arithmetic and pre-pre-Algebra? That's a subject worth further study.

The district and the HS want to try a more selective approach. Giving only kids that we are confident will succeed a chance to succeed will certainly result in higher test scores. But is that a laudable goal? As I explained in Math class is tough!, my bias is to put kids in the most challenging math class they can handle. That might mean putting some kids on the edge to see if they surprise us--and themselves. I've triumphed over difficult math classes and it has changed me profoundly for the better.

RBUSD MS math teachers suggest that they intervene with struggling students earlier, before students start to fail. They already use benchmark tests several times a year to discover what the students do and do not fully comprehend. (The STAR test results come out during the summer so they are useless for individualized course correction.) Why don't the schools use the data they already have to call in students who have lapses in their math skills?

The teacher said that my conjecture in What the STAR tests really tell us was wrong. They do cover the entire Algebra 1 book before STAR testing in early May. The problem is that the pace may be slightly too fast for some of the kids. Math is a cumulative subject. Because Geometry is so orthogonal to Algebra, those gaps do not necessarily impair performance in Geometry. But missing some key concepts in Algebra 1 could really impair understanding in Algebra 2.

Teachers can use quiz and benchmark tests to identify struggling students and set up appointments at lunch and after school to help them. The teachers are already available at lunch and for one hour after school each day for tutoring. (The teachers cooperatively work out a schedule so that one teacher for each subject will be available each day.) But the students in most need of help may not be the ones savvy or confident enough to ask for help.

So they only thing they want to do differently is to reach out to those students rather than wait for them to come in on their own. It can be done at no extra cost--the teachers at this school work off the clock so much anyway. Only after exhausting all these options, would they recommend that the kids take a step back in math.

I think that's worth a try.

What would Rachel wear?

2011-04-28T09:35:00.001-07:00

When Iris saw me in the dress, she squealed that this is very, very Rachel. We are a Gleek family.

Burda World of Fashion 16-1996-114.
The dress back. I finally understand the topology involved in the Fashion Incubator centered zipper tutorial . But there was a slight problem with the execution. ;-)
Afterwards, I discovered that I could pull the dress on over my head without opening up the zip. I could have saved myself a lot of work, but wouldn't have learned so much.

Speaking of learning so much, remember Burda 7517 FAIL? I got the idea to put a tuck inside the midriff dart from that pattern. So the experience was not a complete fail because I learned what to do and what not to do.

Here's Iris' catalog shot with a garden prop. We've had such lovely weather.
I wanted to make myself a little something from recycled textiles for Earth Day. This dress is 95% recycled content, about half post-consumer waste. The bottom section is made from a men's thrift store poplin shirt. The top section is white quilting muslin lined in cotton voile. The only new stuff is thread.

Details:

Burda World of Fashion 06-1995-114.
Size 40.
I narrow the neckline for all my tops and dresses.
The original pattern had plain darts. I changed the bodice dart to gathers and removed some of the width as a SBA.
I added the tuck in the lower section to give my quadriceps more room.
The dress pattern called for one color, but I like the color contrast. Besides, how else could I have used the shirt?
One men's XL poplin shirt, 1/2 each of white cotton muslin and voile lining.

The pattern review.
The Flickr photo set.

It's the first English language BWOF I ever bought and the issue I've used the most often.
Their dress is quite snug and I went up from my usual 38/40 to 40/42 to get the ease I normally like.
This pattern was rated beginner. But BWOF instructions were never clear for the beginner. If you need directions to make such a simple dress, then you won't be able to decipher these instructions. ;-)
I am not sure this issue has any more distinct patterns that the new Burda Style magazine. There are many variations on the same theme.
As usual, the most classic patterns are for plus size.

What the STAR tests really tell us

2011-04-26T22:50:00.000-07:00

It is school enrollment and STAR (standardized testing and reporting) season in California so I want to dispel some myths that "everybody knows".

I spent Earth Day, last Friday, sewing with three friends. Between the four of us, we had earned 3 PhDs and were raising 4 kids. Unlike most (famous) education reformers, we had gone to public schools and are sending (or plan to send) our kids to public schools.

Of course, we conversed about standardized testing and NCLB and the limits of what metrics can tell us. Pennamite happens to have a PhD in Education, and she was surprised that anyone paid attention to the standardized test scores. I also wrangle data for a living and we discussed some glaring flaws in the data collection. People who actually looked at the data know that they are a better proxy for parental income and educational attainment than for teacher and school quality.

First, a bit of background.

The California Academic Performance Index, API, is a single number distillation of school performance based upon standardized test scores. The data is further distilled by binning the schools in deciles by API (10 highest, 1 lowest). After criticism that it is too simplistic, a second 1-10 number was introduced to represent school performance against schools with similar demographics, the similar schools rank.

How would you like your work performance reduced to a scale of 1-10 and published on the web with no place to explain the extenuating circumstances?

Magnet Yenta Sandra Tsing Loh (another science-trained mom) observed firsthand how real estate agents attempt to whip home-buying parents into a frenzy with school API and STAR test scores. She wrote a book about it, and privately told me that most of it was absolutely true. Only a small portion was exaggerated for comic effect.

For instance, as local realtors will be happy to point out, everyone knows that the best school district in the beach cities is Manhattan Beach Unified. Redondo Beach schools are a mixed bag, but stay away from gang-infested Adams Middle School in "felony flats" (our neighborhood school). The conventional wisdom had been that, if you must live within the Adams MS boundaries due to the lack of a half million or so in change, get your kids permits to attend Parras MS (in south Redondo Beach) or Manhattan Beach MS instead.

It's not just realtors. I was surprised to meet a new hire at work who spoke so authoritatively about the schools in our region, despite living 30 miles away. I asked her how she knew so much. She had been trolling the school test score websites. She felt like she knew the schools without ever stepping foot on a single campus.

Standardized test scores can give false impressions of schools and a false sense of security that one understands something that is very complex.

To prove that the conventional wisdom about STAR test scores is wrong, I will use--STAR test scores! Yes, I know that is ironic.

Anyway, let's compare the APIs of Manhattan Beach MS (941) with Adams MS (858). Notice the school demographics. MBMS students are 68% non-hispanic whites and AMS is 30% non-hispanic white.

(I am surprised that people will say in polite company that AMS has a gang problem, when there is absolutely no gang activity there. I think they are making assumptions based upon the melanin levels of the kids, but I am too polite to ask that people clarify what they mean by those remarks.)

Let's forget race for now and look at economic and class differences between the schools.

3% of the kids at MBMS are economically disadvantaged compared to 39% of the kids at AMS. 55% of the kids at MBMS have at least one parent with a graduate degree compared to 14% at AMS.

Like I wrote here and here, there is a huge amount of difference between going home to a 4000 square foot home with a full-time housekeeper AND a stay at home mom near parks and the beach and a one bedroom apartment with 5 other people in a neighborhood where kids get shot in the cross-fire in their front yards. It's hard to study effectively in the latter. (Though gang warfare is not a problem inside the AMS boundaries, some of the inter-district transfer students are trying to escape from those nearby neighborhoods.)

Wow, that was a long preamble to my rebuttal to real estate agents and trollers of greatschools.net.

It's late so I will just tackle the parental education angle. Take a look at the statistics for

The students at MBMS have higher test scores than the AMS. The difference narrows when comparing just the kids with parents with graduate degrees, but MBMS is still slightly higher. But, the language scores can easily be due to the much higher number of English learners at AMS.

Let's look closely at the math scores for just the kids with parents with graduate degrees (henceforth labeled "grad").

All 6th graders at both schools take the CST math test and MBMS edges out AMS with a mean score of 429.9 vs 417.9. But then the results are confounded by the different math classes that kids can take. Actually, let's just look at the data in tabular form.

Math 6, 7 and 8 mean regular math classes. When Bad Dad and I were students in California in the 1970s, the "smart" students took pre-Algebra in 7th grade and Algebra in the 8th grade. The regular kids took pre-Algebra in the 8th grade. 8th grade math was considered remedial. In AMS, the regular kids take pre-Algebra in 7th grade, a year earlier than at MBMS.

(But, Governor Schwarzenegger has moved the goal posts and wants them to push all CA students into Algebra by 8th grade, a year (or more) faster than a generation ago. He also does not make exception for kids with learning disabilities, hence the rush to create Algebra preparedness classes that qualify as Algebra for this purpose--but that's another story in itself.)

There is no standardized test for pre-Algebra so students who take pre-Algebra in 6th grade take the same 6th grade math test as the rest of the kids. Notice that, for all groups and schools, the kids that are accelerated in math score much higher than the students taking the same courses, but a year or so older. That suggests that the accelerated kids really are different than the rest, or that teaching advance math concepts at an early age helps them learn more. Unless we do a controlled experiment, we won't know.

We want kids that are good at math to be accelerated to a level that challenges them. The point of schooling is to teach the kids as much as they are capable of learning--not to maximize mean standardized test scores.

Adams Middle School 2010 STAR results

	# Grad	% Grad	Mean Grad	# All	% All	Mean All
Math 6	42	100	417.9	262	100	375.6
Math 7	23	68	360.1	227	80.5	359.9
Math 8	5	12	*	63	23	312.2
Alg-1 7	11	32	454.8	55	19.5	425.7
Alg-1 8	20	48	371.8	157	58	372.2
Geo 8	17	40	427.2	51	19	433.4
Alg-2	0	0	*	1	0	*

* means the score was withheld for subsets of < 10 students

Manhattan Beach Middle School 2010 STAR results

	# Grad	% Grad	Mean Grad	# All	% All	Mean All
Math 6	247	100	429.9	431	100	415
Math 7	220	88	417.8	414	90	407.3
Math 8	96	47	394.2	241	55	385.8
Alg-1 7	31	12	496.7	44	9.6	496.9
Alg-1 8	87	42	471.7	136	35	470.5
Geo 8	23	11	458.4	36	9.3	456.1
Alg-2	0	0	0	0	0	0

Notice that 77% of all kids at AMS, the school with the lower API ranking and the one labeled by realtors as "worse", met the new standards. Of those, 19% took Geometry in 8th grade, exceeding the new goal and besting their parents by 1-2 years. In contrast, only 45% and 9.3% of the all kids at the "better" school did the same.

Why are only half as many kids in the "better" school taking the same difficult classes as the kids at the "worse" school, despite having the advantage of coming from wealthier homes with better-educated parents?

It's even more dramatic for the "grad" kids. At AMS, 88% of those kids had taken Algebra 1 and 40% of those had taken Geometry while one had taken Algebra 2 (3 years ahead of my generation). In contrast, at MBMS, only 54% of the kids had taken Algebra by 8th grade; of those, 11% made it to Geometry.

Remember that 8th grade math, under the new state standards, is remedial math (though it was par a generation ago). So 55% of the kids in the "better" school took remedial math, including 47% of the "grad" kids. At the "worse" school, it is 23% and 12% respectively.

Most damning, the "grad" kids at MBMS are 4.2 times more likely to take the Math 8 exam than the Geometry exam. At AMS, the "grad" kids are 4.6 times more likely to take the Geometry exam than the Math 8 exam.

Yes, the mean test scores for nearly all subjects and groups is higher at MBMS than at AMS, but the kids are taking different classes and tests! That is, if you move 19.5% of the highest performing kids into pre-Algebra instead of Math 7, the mean test scores for the remaining kids in Math 7 will go down.

A high median test score hides a multitude of sins.

On the flip side, selecting only 9.6% of the kids for pre-Algebra in 7th grade probably allows you to cover more material in the school year. The higher test scores at MBMS in the Algebra and Geometry sequence are a result of this more selective/elitist approach.

Which is better? My conclusion is that neither school is "better". They have different demographics and different philosophies.

But, if you want to increase your kids' chances of being given the opportunity to take more difficult math classes, you might be better off in the cheaper neighborhood with the lower median API scores. You can use the half million of so you save by doing so for sending your kids to college and funding your retirement.

Looking more globally, if you want a student population that has been exposed to more difficult math before college, then the AMS approach will better meet those goals. Study after study has shown that success in college, particularly for under-represented minorities, is strongly correlated with mastery of Algebra. Correlation does not imply causality, but who will come out against taking tougher courses before college?

Addendum:
I've written plenty about educational statistics. Look for the Education and Statistics tags. School Correlations is another lengthy interpretation of school test scores.

Aside:
Additionally, the test scores don't tell you how much class time was devoted to the state standards and preparing for the tests. That is, some teachers may teach the more able student material beyond the state standards. If the standardized tests don't measure those content areas, they won't get credit for their work.

I don't know what happens at MBMS. But, at AMS, the kids taking pre-Algebra skip the 6th grade math text, diving directly into the 7th grade pre-Algebra textbook. (This is possible because of the "spiral learning" vogue in which concepts are repeatedly re-introduced with greater complexity each time. The 4th, 5th and 6th grade math books look cursorily similar because they cover the same territory.)

Adams students see the 6th grade textbook only for the three weeks before the state test, and only to work exercises in a few of the chapters not covered again in the pre-Algebra book. There is some test-prep, but not an excessive amount. I don't consider reviewing 6th grade math in 3 weeks an excessive amount of test prep, especially when the rest of the year is spent accelerating the kids a year ahead in math.

Bad Dad reminded me that MBMS kids are much more likely to be red-shirted in Kindergarten than AMS kids. MBUSD kids are about 6 months older than their RBUSD counterparts in every grade. That's great for athletics and gives a boost in test scores at the primary level, but that puts the MBMS kids even further behind in math.

Don't judge a school by median test scores.

Follow-up:
More thoughts on STAR testing

Robot Sumo

2011-04-24T14:21:00.000-07:00

I accompanied Iris' robotics class to the First Lego League Spring Showdown 2011 at Legoland in March. Her school sent four teams, one comprised of all girls.

Part of the competition involves running an obstacle course aka mission on the main stage. The first mission is announced two months in advance so that the kids can program the robots and practice at home. The cameras trained on the tables are used to project the action on the large screens behind them. I wonder if it makes the kids feel like rock stars?

Later, the kids are given an hour to program an "on the spot" mission. That tests the kids' abilities to think algorithmically and execute their vision quickly. It also helps judges determine if the kids or their team mentors did the programming for the pre-announced mission.

In order to leave the kids alone, the coaches were all pulled into another room for the coaches' challenge: robot sumo. Iris wasn't around to help me program the Bot, but the other members of my team were very capable.

We agreed that our bot should be small, with a low center of gravity. We wanted a scooper in the front that would slide under the other bots and then tap repeatedly.

The kit has 3 motors. The first motor went on the sensor, which looked for the nearest object (hopefully, the combatant bot). The second motor moves the bot toward the object at full speed, which we hope will slide the scoop underneath the other bot. The third motor does the tapping.
We won the first match because the algorithm of our first competitor (not shown) moved their bot out of the ring with no interference from ours.

Our second competitor looked so large and formidable next to our little bot. But, he first two matches against this bot were a draw.
The way the two bots were designed, it would always be a draw if they both started in opposite ends of the oval from a dead stop. In order to introduce a little bit of variability into the initial conditions (encourage the butterfly effect), the judges had the competitors run to the table and drop the bots quickly.

Here's what happened next. Our bot is the one that started on the left.

See another time when parents were separated from children in Lego class--to the benefit of all.

Burda 7517 FAIL

2011-04-24T14:01:00.001-07:00

It looks really nice on the dress dummy.
I like the curved pleats and the cut-on cap sleeves.
The back darts/tucks stuck out in a most unattractive way, so I removed them, using a belt instead to rein in the fullness.
The back neck darts give a nice fit there.
But you should be very, very wary of a dress pattern that is afraid to show a clear full view of the dress. Notice that neither model looks directly at the camera, and that an arm or handbag obscures the dress in both pictures?
That's because the pleats pull out whenever the wearer moves or breathes. It's not just me. Susannah at Cargo Cult Craft had the exact same problem.

Read my Burda 7517 Pattern Review for the full rant. Bigger pictures of the dress are on Flickr.

The fabric:
The same green/black cotton I used in this skirt (Butterick 3133). I love this fabric and still have nearly 3 yards left.

The changes I made:

The dress was ‘not quite right’ and I kept futzing with it. The pleats in the back would not fall gracefully, no matter what I did. So I let them out, took off the ribbon ties and used a belt instead.
But the front pleats were not quite at the waist, but not quite empire. I tried to bring them down 1.5″ to my real waist, but then the pleats wouldn’t stay put. I then elongated the pleats to extend from the pattern start point down to my waist.
Still .not.quite.right.
The bell shape of the skirt also poofed out in an unattractive way.
The neckline is cut very, very wide. As printed in my normal size (38), they would have slid off my shoulders. I brought them in to a size 32.
The bateau neckline was so high that it was uncomfortable; I lowered it half an inch. It still felt uncomfortable.

Conclusion:
This pattern is a huge FAIL. I put the dress in the donate pile and the pattern in the recycling bin. This is very unusual because, normally, if a pattern doesn't work for me, I donate it. But this pattern was so bad, I didn't want anyone else to waste time and fabric on this monstrosity.

Slow Art Day

2011-04-16T09:01:00.000-07:00

16 April, 2011 is Slow Art Day.

Slow Art Day was started to invite novices - and experts - to experience the art of looking at art slowly.

Iris is celebrating Slow Art Day 2011 by spending the morning at choir practice, something that Sitting Knitting calls Slow Music.

That's where you spend hours and days and weeks, months, and years of your life learning to play a musical instrument so that you can make your own music for entertainment.

When we prodded Iris to choose an instrument, she said that she wanted to learn how to sing. That way, her instrument is always with her when the muse strikes and she can't leave it behind accidentally. ;-)

I am starting the day off with a Bernina Club meeting with other makers. After that, I am going to round up some of the folk art I have collected and made over the years and show them to Iris, telling her what I know about the history, meaning and techniques used in each.

How are you spending Slow Art Day?

Visual Rhyme

2011-04-15T20:41:00.000-07:00

Modern Art Notes recently posted another visual rhyme. So here's mine.

A complex pojangi, "traditional wrapping cloths that are hand stitched from scraps of ramie or moshi cloth" showcased at Sri Threads.
And this oil painting by Hedda Sterne, which I found via MAN's very interesting post about her life.

More Visual rhymes from MAN:

More cool stuff from MAN

Art Madness II (a riff on March Madness)
MAN's annual swimsuit issue, with frolicking!
Picasso's guitars

and Sri Threads.

Eaves
A Boro Hemp Edo Komon Kimono: Pattern upon Pattern, Patches and Holes The human condition, explored through folk textiles. Very humbling and moving post.

Thinking beyond pink

2011-04-14T22:07:00.001-07:00

When I was browsing the web for spring dresses, I saw this page in Jenna's Picks. Commercial imagery like this, showing such intimate and unhurried moments between mother and child invoke a wistful response in me. But it doesn't quite ~~manipulate~~ motivate me to purchase the items because I know my life will not be like that if I purchase the stuff in the picture.
I digress. This is actually a post about pink nail polish.

I initially cringed because she is shown applying carcinogens and endocrine disruptors on her child. I know that this is commonplace in our society, but it doesn't make it any less harmful.

My second thought was, "Wow, that boy has chutzpah! He admitted that pink is his favorite color and agreed to model pink nail polish on the internet to further his mother's career." (I do hope his mother asked for and received his permission.)

In Color: A Natural History of the Palette, Victoria Finlay wrote that, a century ago, people used to dress their boy children in pink and their girl children in light blue. Somehow, the color association was reversed in the middle of the twentieth century. But I worried that the boy's school mates might not have such a long view of history.

Sure enough, the blogosphere lit up with the "controversy" over the pink nail polish. E.g. this superficial piece quoting these luminaries.

Erin R. Brown writing on the website of the Culture and Media Institute -- whose mission is to uphold traditional values -- says the spread “features blatant propaganda celebrating transgendered children.” She adds that “Jenna's indulgence (or encouragement) could make life hard for the boy in the future.”

“This is a dramatic example of the way that our culture is being encouraged to abandon all trappings of gender identity -- homogenizing males and females when the outcome of such ‘psychological sterilization’ [my word choice] is not known,” Psychiatrist Keith Ablow writes on FoxNews.com.

I think they are missing the point here.

The boy's manhood is more threatened by the high level of phthalate in the nail polish. Phthalate is a common ingredient in nail polish and an oestrogenic compound (a chemical that mimics estrogen) that can be absorbed through the skin or inhalation. Anything that mimics a hormone is an endocrine disruptor. See the NRDC explanation. Or read the NIH explanation.

Boys with high environmental exposures to endocrine disruptors experience delayed onset of puberty. Males with higher levels of endocrine disruptors in their bloodstream also have lower sperm counts.

In girls, phthalate exposure leads to earlier onset of puberty. It is also suspected of increasing the risk of breast cancer and implicated in many other disorders of the reproductive system.

This is how we know that child obesity is not alone responsible for early onset of puberty. If it were, then boys, as well as girls, would also be experiencing earlier puberty. But they are not.

Nail polish is more than just phthalates (up to 10% by weight). It's main ingredient is a carrier solvent--typically toluene--which is a carcinogen and neurotoxin. Actually, there are a whole bunch of dangerous chemicals in nail polish.

Look at the nail polish ratings at the Environmental Working Group's Skin Deep Cosmetics Database. EWG gives the ingredient list and safety rating of 584 nail polishes. Most get a moderate to high hazard rating. There are no safe mass-market nail polishes.

If you look at the bottle in the picture carefully, you can see the Essie label. A search for Essie nail polishes at the cosmetics database shows that all of the Essie polishes are rated 7 (out of 10) or high hazard. I looked at the Essie color chart and guess that this pink is similar to Bachelorette Bash, which is more hazardous than 86% of the nail polishes in their database. Read the ingredient list and follow the links to educate yourself about any of the chemicals unfamiliar to you.

Ablow, a psychiatrist and therefore, a medical doctor, should have been aware of the health hazards posed by nail polish. So why is he harping on the increased risk that this boy will need psychotherapy instead of his increased risk of sterility and cancer?

We can't remove every carcinogen, toxin and endocrine disruptor from our homes. We need some plastics. But we don't need to thoughtlessly expose ourselves and our children to recreational chemicals like nail polish.

This has serious national health consequences as we grapple with climbing health care costs associated with the growth of cancer rates in children, treatment for infertility and complications of fertility treatment (multiple births and increased incidence of cancer).

If we are to have any hope of taming the health care beast that is eating our economy, we have to quit doing stupid stuff.

Good news from the science education front

2011-04-13T20:28:00.000-07:00

My daughter loves Tuesdays and Thursdays because she has two class periods* of earth science with her favorite teacher.

What makes him a favorite teacher with kids and parents alike? Let me count the ways.

He told the parents at Back to School Night at the beginning of the school year that the kids in the class are all bright enough--as evident from their quiz scores and the sophistication of their questions in class--that they don't require drilling. Instead, he will use the found time to let them loose in the science laboratory set up for the 8th grade physical science classes.
In class, he teaches the kids the difference between the right answer in their textbooks, which they should use on the standardized tests, and the much more complex physical reality. The kids really appreciate not being talked down to.
He covers all the state standards. It would be difficult not to with today's idiot-proof textbooks that start every section with a checklist of standards, review of standards that should have been mastered in prior sections, and the final standards-based quiz at the end of the unit. But he doesn't drill the kids over and over. If they get it, the class can cover something else.
Something else often takes the form of long digressions that integrate related principles not in this year's science curriculum standards.
This parent really appreciates the depth with which he covers the topics and the other topics that he pulls in. It leads to some very interesting dinner conversation.
This week, she told us about the triple point in phase diagrams as she stirred a glass of ice water at dinner.
Last week, she asked me about the butterfly effect and we discussed the Lyapunov exponent, a subject near and dear to my heart and something I calculated for "my" set of equations in my PhD thesis.
The science content of the 6th grade California earth science curriculum is not bad. Among other things, the kids learn how to read a weather chart using the same notation as professional meteorologists. This is way more than I did 30 years ago.

* They are on a "stacked" schedule with six 45 minute classes on Mondays and a "block" schedule with three 82 minute classes on TTh and WF. This gives them more time for project-based lessons.

Do you want the true answer or the right answer?

2011-04-12T23:45:00.000-07:00

Iris found another mistake in her most recent math "benchmark" test.

Her school gives multiple choice assessment tests at the beginning of each trimester to determine the appropriate class assignment and then to determine if students mastered the material. This is in addition to the state-mandated tests that they will take at the end of April. The textbook publisher writes the tests. But, as Iris has already pointed out in Error! Error! Error!, the publisher is fallible.

On her last pre-Algebra benchmark test, there was a picture of an equilateral triangle and the kids are supposed to select which choice describes the figure. Both equilateral and isosceles triangles were possible choices, but saying both was not an option.

Iris had a dilemma. The true answer is both as all equilateral triangles (all 3 sides and angles the same) are also isosceles (at least 2 equal sides and angles). But the test implied that there was only one right answer.

Which should she choose?

She had to guess. In the end, she decided that the test-writer didn't realize that all equilateral triangles are also isosceles so she had better select equilateral.

Then she came home and told me about it.

Then I emailed her math teacher, who was very annoyed with the publisher for making such a bone-headed mistake. (Do the publishers employ copy-editors?)

The teacher said that all the tests would be hand-checked so that kids were not penalized, and that they would flag that question when they used the test in subsequent years. She didn't mention alerting the publisher about the mistake.

That's too bad. So I am alerting Holt, Rinehart and Winston right now that there is a problem with their California state Mathematics Course 2: Pre-Algebra materials.

Perhaps you would like to hire my ten-year-old to copy-edit for you? She's been a proven beta-tester since she was five.

Don't miss Stanley Fish's classic gem, The True Answer and the Right Answer. I do like cranky and opinionated done well. ;-)

I agree that kids need to learn the distinction between the true answer and the right answer to get along and get along in our society. But, as Hopeless but not serious pointed out in I never really liked marshmallows, we lose something as well, when we bring up kids to perform the 'right' way.