I never figured I would be teaching an English class. I never figured I would be teaching any kind of class. That would require getting in front of a class several times a week and speaking semi-extemporaneously for an hour at a time. Terrifying!
Well, I've been doing it for two weeks now. And I think I'm actually getting used to it.
My job is to stand in front of a class of about seven students and talk with them, and try to get them to talk. In English. The actual class size varies dramatically. I've had as many as 13 students, and as few as two. And it's hard to get them to talk! Most of the time it's like talking to a bunch of brick walls. I can ask a simple yes or no question, and get complete silence.
I'm trying to figure out how to deal with this. I figure one way is to point to people who haven't talked in a while and direct questions to them in particular. This tends to lead to long, uncomfortable silences -- but at least this way someone else is motivated to say something.
Above all, I've discovered that stage fright wears off remarkably fast. Who would have guessed?
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Attention, Taiwan: the cold is a viral disease
I keep hearing people saying that if you get a cold you should go see a doctor. I may have a skewed impression from my small sample size, but it's still weird. So everybody, listen up: the cold is a virus, not a bacterium. The doctor can't give you magic get-better drugs for the cold yet.
I'm sure everybody's heard of the wonders of antibiotics. But antibiotics attack bacteria. Viruses are different, and are not affected by antibiotics. There are at least two companies working on antiviral drugs that target the most common kind of cold virus, but that's part of The Future. At the moment, all a doctor can do is listen to you list off symptoms, tell you that you have a cold, and tell you to drink lots of liquids and get plenty of sleep and maybe buy some Benadryl if the symptoms are really getting you down. And wash your hands so you don't give other people the disease.
That's it. Just the same things your mother told you when you were little. That one paragraph is all you really need to know about dealing with the cold. Just remember the symptoms and remember some simple instructions, and you can avoid unnecessary doctor visits. This is easy, Taiwan.
I'm sure everybody's heard of the wonders of antibiotics. But antibiotics attack bacteria. Viruses are different, and are not affected by antibiotics. There are at least two companies working on antiviral drugs that target the most common kind of cold virus, but that's part of The Future. At the moment, all a doctor can do is listen to you list off symptoms, tell you that you have a cold, and tell you to drink lots of liquids and get plenty of sleep and maybe buy some Benadryl if the symptoms are really getting you down. And wash your hands so you don't give other people the disease.
That's it. Just the same things your mother told you when you were little. That one paragraph is all you really need to know about dealing with the cold. Just remember the symptoms and remember some simple instructions, and you can avoid unnecessary doctor visits. This is easy, Taiwan.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Some important notes on semiconductor physics
Integrated circuit technology is easily my most difficult class right now -- it manages to use up every IQ point I can throw at it and still want more -- so I'm going to write down some of the essential stuff to get it straight in my own head. This isn't really intended to entertain readers, but hopefully it will help me. And not be too wrong.
The first thing to understand is how current flows in a semiconductor. I'll focus on a (possibly doped) crystalline silicon lattice here, rather than slightly weird stuff like III-IV semiconductors, for simplicity -- but most of the same stuff applies universally.
The Si atoms are covalently bonded to four of their neighbors in a regular pattern. Remember all that stuff about energy levels in the good ol' Bohr model of hydrogen? Well, forget that; in a crystal like silicon, those energy levels bifurcate and get all crazy, turning into energy bands. There are two big ones: the valence band and the conduction band. The valence band is the lower one, the energy levels that are filled at 0 degrees Kelvin. Those are the electrons that stick to the atoms or are shared between neighbors. The conduction band is higher energy; electrons there are free to move around through the crystal. If you want to ignore all the quantum stuff and stay far away from Schrödinger's equation, then you can think of those electrons as being little charges balls bouncing around.
But how do electrons find their way up to the valence band? There is a gap between the bands, creatively named the bandgap, which contains states that electrons cannot occupy. To get from one band to another, they have to jump across by either gaining or losing energy. Fortunately we're not operating at a temperature of absolute zero, so thermal fluctuations will kick electrons back and forth across the bandgap all the time. Don't trouble your beleaguered head about "phonons"; just think of the crystal as being kind of vibratey.
Since electrons are always going back and forth across the bandgap, how do we determine how many electrons we have in the conduction band, ready to do useful things? The answer is Fermi-Dirac statistics. Don't ask me to derive it, or even to explain it, but you can use a simple formula for the concentration of electrons in the conduction band in a pure ("undoped") semiconductor at a given temperature. This is called the "intrinsic concentration of charge carriers ni".
The concentration of charge carriers determines how well a material conducts electricity. If there are lots of carriers (as in a metal, with no bandgap), then current can flow easily. If there are a tiny number of charge carriers (as in an insulator, with a big bandgap), then current has a deuce of a time flowing at all. But for semiconductors, the bandgap is middling thickness and the conductivity could go either way.
I should probably mention something about charge carriers now. The term refers both to electrons and to "holes", which are not really particles at all. Holes are gaps in the valence electrons. They move by being filled with electrons, thus leaving another gap in the electrons nearby. They're bubbles, essentially. Bubbles are just gaps in water, and they bubble up by being filled with water. If holes are moving then it also means that valence electrons are moving the other way. Both are perfectly valid ways of transporting charge. In undoped silicon, the number of holes is the same as the number of free (i.e. conduction band) electrons. This is because of the way that both are created: thermal fluctuations knock an electron out of the valence band, and this leaves a hole behind.
This isn't the whole story, though. To do useful things, we need to add small concentrations of impurities to the silicon, called doping. This can be done quite precisely, so let's not worry about how they manage this feat. For now, just consider what it does to the lattice. The impurities in silicon have either one more or one less electron in the outer electron shell than silicon. In other words, they come from one of the two neighboring columns of the periodic table. Once one of these impure atoms (like Boron or Arsenic) bonds to the crystal lattice, it either has an extra loosely-bound electron or a hole for an electron to fall into. These are called donor and acceptor impurities, respectively.
When you go introducing holes or weakly bound valence electrons into the lattice, you're going to play hob with that "intrinsic carrier concentration" stuff I talked about above. Since impurities are so much more likely to donate or trap conduction electrons than silicon, just a tiny dash of impurity comes to dominate the carrier concentration. The doped silicon becomes filled with either free electrons or with holes, and whichever dominates is called the majority carrier. Doped silicon in which electrons are the majority carrier is called N-type (the N is for "negative"), and where holes are the majority carrier we call it P-type. The carrier concentration in doped silicon depends almost entirely on the net concentration of donor or acceptor impurities. That is, donor and acceptor impurities cancel each other out and whichever side is left standing contributes the vast majority of the charge carriers.
At this point it's worth explaining how to visualize current in a semiconductor. If you're using my favored silly-bouncing-balls model of how charge carriers behave, then this should be fairly easy. Electrons and holes are always bouncing around like a bunch of flying bumper-car Pokémons or something. If there's no electric field, then this random movement does not make them go in any particular direction on average. It's a random walk. But when you put a voltage across, and there's an electric field pushing carriers in one particular direction, then they tend to shuffle and bounce more in one direction than the other. This produces motion of the electron cloud, though very slow. Think of it as being like water pressure in pipes: the individual water molecules don't have to move very far for an increase in pressure to be felt several meters away.
Charge carriers in doped silicon do this too. There's a key difference, though. In wires, you have a sea of electrons and that's how your current flows. In doped silicon, it's pretty much all electrons or holes. This only really starts to matter when we stick P-type and N-type silicon right next to each other, as we do in transistors and diodes. When that happens, the free electrons in the N-type silicon start filling the holes in the P-type silicon, and there forms a thin layer of silicon without enough charge carriers to conduct. This is called the depletion region. It stops current from flowing across the p-n junction (where the P-type and N-type silicon touches), but the depletion region can be made to shrink by putting an electric field across it.
This is how diodes work: they put P-Si (P-type silicon) next to N-Si, which creates a depletion region and shuts off current. But if you give the P-Si a positive voltage with respect to the N-Si, this pushes the electrons and holes closer together and makes the depletion region so narrow that charges can move again! This is why, after you put a voltage of about 0.6 to 0.7 V across a typical diode, it becomes essentially a conductor -- but it needs that voltage drop. And if you put the voltage across in the other direction, it doesn't make the depletion region narrower, so it doesn't lead to current flowing.
(Corrections will be welcomed with open arms.)
The first thing to understand is how current flows in a semiconductor. I'll focus on a (possibly doped) crystalline silicon lattice here, rather than slightly weird stuff like III-IV semiconductors, for simplicity -- but most of the same stuff applies universally.
The Si atoms are covalently bonded to four of their neighbors in a regular pattern. Remember all that stuff about energy levels in the good ol' Bohr model of hydrogen? Well, forget that; in a crystal like silicon, those energy levels bifurcate and get all crazy, turning into energy bands. There are two big ones: the valence band and the conduction band. The valence band is the lower one, the energy levels that are filled at 0 degrees Kelvin. Those are the electrons that stick to the atoms or are shared between neighbors. The conduction band is higher energy; electrons there are free to move around through the crystal. If you want to ignore all the quantum stuff and stay far away from Schrödinger's equation, then you can think of those electrons as being little charges balls bouncing around.
But how do electrons find their way up to the valence band? There is a gap between the bands, creatively named the bandgap, which contains states that electrons cannot occupy. To get from one band to another, they have to jump across by either gaining or losing energy. Fortunately we're not operating at a temperature of absolute zero, so thermal fluctuations will kick electrons back and forth across the bandgap all the time. Don't trouble your beleaguered head about "phonons"; just think of the crystal as being kind of vibratey.
Since electrons are always going back and forth across the bandgap, how do we determine how many electrons we have in the conduction band, ready to do useful things? The answer is Fermi-Dirac statistics. Don't ask me to derive it, or even to explain it, but you can use a simple formula for the concentration of electrons in the conduction band in a pure ("undoped") semiconductor at a given temperature. This is called the "intrinsic concentration of charge carriers ni".
The concentration of charge carriers determines how well a material conducts electricity. If there are lots of carriers (as in a metal, with no bandgap), then current can flow easily. If there are a tiny number of charge carriers (as in an insulator, with a big bandgap), then current has a deuce of a time flowing at all. But for semiconductors, the bandgap is middling thickness and the conductivity could go either way.
I should probably mention something about charge carriers now. The term refers both to electrons and to "holes", which are not really particles at all. Holes are gaps in the valence electrons. They move by being filled with electrons, thus leaving another gap in the electrons nearby. They're bubbles, essentially. Bubbles are just gaps in water, and they bubble up by being filled with water. If holes are moving then it also means that valence electrons are moving the other way. Both are perfectly valid ways of transporting charge. In undoped silicon, the number of holes is the same as the number of free (i.e. conduction band) electrons. This is because of the way that both are created: thermal fluctuations knock an electron out of the valence band, and this leaves a hole behind.
This isn't the whole story, though. To do useful things, we need to add small concentrations of impurities to the silicon, called doping. This can be done quite precisely, so let's not worry about how they manage this feat. For now, just consider what it does to the lattice. The impurities in silicon have either one more or one less electron in the outer electron shell than silicon. In other words, they come from one of the two neighboring columns of the periodic table. Once one of these impure atoms (like Boron or Arsenic) bonds to the crystal lattice, it either has an extra loosely-bound electron or a hole for an electron to fall into. These are called donor and acceptor impurities, respectively.
When you go introducing holes or weakly bound valence electrons into the lattice, you're going to play hob with that "intrinsic carrier concentration" stuff I talked about above. Since impurities are so much more likely to donate or trap conduction electrons than silicon, just a tiny dash of impurity comes to dominate the carrier concentration. The doped silicon becomes filled with either free electrons or with holes, and whichever dominates is called the majority carrier. Doped silicon in which electrons are the majority carrier is called N-type (the N is for "negative"), and where holes are the majority carrier we call it P-type. The carrier concentration in doped silicon depends almost entirely on the net concentration of donor or acceptor impurities. That is, donor and acceptor impurities cancel each other out and whichever side is left standing contributes the vast majority of the charge carriers.
At this point it's worth explaining how to visualize current in a semiconductor. If you're using my favored silly-bouncing-balls model of how charge carriers behave, then this should be fairly easy. Electrons and holes are always bouncing around like a bunch of flying bumper-car Pokémons or something. If there's no electric field, then this random movement does not make them go in any particular direction on average. It's a random walk. But when you put a voltage across, and there's an electric field pushing carriers in one particular direction, then they tend to shuffle and bounce more in one direction than the other. This produces motion of the electron cloud, though very slow. Think of it as being like water pressure in pipes: the individual water molecules don't have to move very far for an increase in pressure to be felt several meters away.
Charge carriers in doped silicon do this too. There's a key difference, though. In wires, you have a sea of electrons and that's how your current flows. In doped silicon, it's pretty much all electrons or holes. This only really starts to matter when we stick P-type and N-type silicon right next to each other, as we do in transistors and diodes. When that happens, the free electrons in the N-type silicon start filling the holes in the P-type silicon, and there forms a thin layer of silicon without enough charge carriers to conduct. This is called the depletion region. It stops current from flowing across the p-n junction (where the P-type and N-type silicon touches), but the depletion region can be made to shrink by putting an electric field across it.
This is how diodes work: they put P-Si (P-type silicon) next to N-Si, which creates a depletion region and shuts off current. But if you give the P-Si a positive voltage with respect to the N-Si, this pushes the electrons and holes closer together and makes the depletion region so narrow that charges can move again! This is why, after you put a voltage of about 0.6 to 0.7 V across a typical diode, it becomes essentially a conductor -- but it needs that voltage drop. And if you put the voltage across in the other direction, it doesn't make the depletion region narrower, so it doesn't lead to current flowing.
(Corrections will be welcomed with open arms.)
Some good music: The Crane Wife by the Decemberists
I've really been enjoying listening to The Crane Wife by the Decemberists. It's their newest album, and it's a lot more musically complex than their earlier stuff.
The Decemberists are a band with a knack for poetry and a staggeringly large vocabulary. I'm not sure why anybody would want to rhyme "Sycorax" with "parallax", but they did it. And somehow they managed to make it sound good.
Their songs tend to sound like something particularly gritty yet flowery from the 1800s or thenabouts, with all their talk of chimney sweeps and sailing ships and the landed gentry. And for some reason they seem totally incapable of making a purely happy song. If they sing anything perky and optimistic then they have to set it in an air-raid shelter during the London Blitz or something. They still manage to create some beautiful songs, as well as some that are just plain cool.
For an example of the latter, consider The Mariner's Revenge Song, a rather long mini-epic about an orphaned boy who becomes a sailor and gets revenge for something with the aid of a giant whale and a priory. It's got some of the best accordion playing I've ever heard, and manages to get the spooky sea shanty sound just right. If there is anything more creepy-cool than the premise of this song, I have yet to hear it in musical form.
For an example of the Decemberists making something lovely, Yankee Bayonet will do nicely. It contains such phrases as "Look for me when the sun-bright swallow sings upon the birch bough high", sung in pleasant voices with pleasant instrumental accompaniment. Never mind that it's technically supposed to be a sad song; it's still a pretty image.
A list of all the songs, and what I think of them
Yes, I'm going to list every song on this album and talk about each of them in turn.
The Crane Wife (1, 2, and 3): This is a three-part series of songs. It tells one version of the old Japanese tragedy called "The Crane Wife". I think it was just an excuse for the Decemberists to try their hand at rocking out. They manage to make regretful lyrics sound bouncy. I'm not sure how. Or why.
The Island: Come and see / The Landlord's Daughter / You'll not feel the drowning: this song has a ridiculously long name because it has three different parts in one twelve-minute song. The music here is some of their best, both haunting and toe-tapping. I still don't know what the lyrics mean, but it's probably my favorite song on the album.
Yankee Bayonet: Imagine a beautiful, poetic love song in which one of the two main characters died in the Civil War. This is it.
The Perfect Crime No. 2: I don't know what the number one perfect crime was, but I don't really care that much. This is the weakest song on the album. They try to get funky (really!), but it doesn't work out quite as well as they'd hoped.
When the War Came: This is probably the only song ever written about Soviet botanists during World War 2 trying to protect experiemental high-yield crops during a famine. This actually happened. The song uses the word "caterwaul" to great effect.
Shankill Butchers: one of the spookiest songs since "Mister Tinkertrain". This is a slow, quiet warning to children about a militant group in Northern Ireland that used to go out and murder Catholics at random. It sounds like something that Roald Dahl would have written.
Summersong: This song sounds pretty cheerful. I haven't really listened to the lyrics because they're hard to make out and I just know they'll probably involve shipwrecks or something.
Sons & Daughters: You remember how I mentioned that the Decemberists couldn't make a song that's really happy and cheerful and optimistic without setting it during the London Blitz or something? This is the song I was talking about. It's bouncy. It's happy. It's set in a bomb shelter during the London Blitz.
All in all, a good album. Very unusual and different, and good to listen to.
The Decemberists are a band with a knack for poetry and a staggeringly large vocabulary. I'm not sure why anybody would want to rhyme "Sycorax" with "parallax", but they did it. And somehow they managed to make it sound good.
Their songs tend to sound like something particularly gritty yet flowery from the 1800s or thenabouts, with all their talk of chimney sweeps and sailing ships and the landed gentry. And for some reason they seem totally incapable of making a purely happy song. If they sing anything perky and optimistic then they have to set it in an air-raid shelter during the London Blitz or something. They still manage to create some beautiful songs, as well as some that are just plain cool.
For an example of the latter, consider The Mariner's Revenge Song, a rather long mini-epic about an orphaned boy who becomes a sailor and gets revenge for something with the aid of a giant whale and a priory. It's got some of the best accordion playing I've ever heard, and manages to get the spooky sea shanty sound just right. If there is anything more creepy-cool than the premise of this song, I have yet to hear it in musical form.
For an example of the Decemberists making something lovely, Yankee Bayonet will do nicely. It contains such phrases as "Look for me when the sun-bright swallow sings upon the birch bough high", sung in pleasant voices with pleasant instrumental accompaniment. Never mind that it's technically supposed to be a sad song; it's still a pretty image.
A list of all the songs, and what I think of them
Yes, I'm going to list every song on this album and talk about each of them in turn.
The Crane Wife (1, 2, and 3): This is a three-part series of songs. It tells one version of the old Japanese tragedy called "The Crane Wife". I think it was just an excuse for the Decemberists to try their hand at rocking out. They manage to make regretful lyrics sound bouncy. I'm not sure how. Or why.
The Island: Come and see / The Landlord's Daughter / You'll not feel the drowning: this song has a ridiculously long name because it has three different parts in one twelve-minute song. The music here is some of their best, both haunting and toe-tapping. I still don't know what the lyrics mean, but it's probably my favorite song on the album.
Yankee Bayonet: Imagine a beautiful, poetic love song in which one of the two main characters died in the Civil War. This is it.
The Perfect Crime No. 2: I don't know what the number one perfect crime was, but I don't really care that much. This is the weakest song on the album. They try to get funky (really!), but it doesn't work out quite as well as they'd hoped.
When the War Came: This is probably the only song ever written about Soviet botanists during World War 2 trying to protect experiemental high-yield crops during a famine. This actually happened. The song uses the word "caterwaul" to great effect.
Shankill Butchers: one of the spookiest songs since "Mister Tinkertrain". This is a slow, quiet warning to children about a militant group in Northern Ireland that used to go out and murder Catholics at random. It sounds like something that Roald Dahl would have written.
Summersong: This song sounds pretty cheerful. I haven't really listened to the lyrics because they're hard to make out and I just know they'll probably involve shipwrecks or something.
Sons & Daughters: You remember how I mentioned that the Decemberists couldn't make a song that's really happy and cheerful and optimistic without setting it during the London Blitz or something? This is the song I was talking about. It's bouncy. It's happy. It's set in a bomb shelter during the London Blitz.
All in all, a good album. Very unusual and different, and good to listen to.
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Obama
Recently I went and thorougly read through Barack Obama's policies -- where he stands on issues. Yesterday I was skeptical about Obama: he seemed like a good candidate, much better than John McCain and somewhat better than Hillary Clinton, and more charismatic than any of the other candidates. Today, after comparing policies, I've realized: Obama is not the lesser evil. He's a genuinely great candidate, someone I can truly support, and he'll probably be the best president we've had in my lifetime.
This is an extraordinary claim in a country that's used to politicians being incompetent and corrupt. After eight years of Bush, who could blame us for being wary? But Obama's policies are big things, important things, and his specific positions on them are surprisingly smart.
Economy
For starters, take a look at Obama's positions on science-related issues. He supports doubling federal funding for basic research! He wants to make permanent a tax credit to encourage companies to do research and development in the US. He supports stem-cell research, embryonic and otherwise. And he says that he'll continue his track record in Illinois of making math and science education a bigger priority (and backing this up with funding, unlike No-Child-Left-Behind Bush).
This kind of thing is crucially important to our country. China and India have huge masses of people willing to work cheaper than Americans are legally allowed to work. Other countries are even cheaper than they are. Our big advantage is that we have a large educated population, combined with lots of money and land and resources and the world's best university system. Under the Bush administration we've been squandering the biggest advantage the US has in the global economy: science and technology. For example, our broadband Internet infrastructure is pathetic compared to that of more population-dense developed countries, when by rights we should have municipal wireless networking and fiber to the home in cities, with really fast Internet connections cheap and widely available. This is every bit as important today as universal telephone access was in the last century -- probably more important, actually, since the Internet is a gateway to a huge amount of ever-growing useful information, and can do long-distance telephone calls with Voice over IP.
Obama wants to do some major improvement of our Internet infrastructure, allocating a bunch of money to get cheaper, faster Internet access to everyone. He's a little vague on the specifics, which is good; even if he had a perfect plan today it would soon be outdated as new networking technology is introduced. For example, by using a combination of special high-tech light fixtures and broadband over powerlines, we could get Ethernet-speed wireless networks in our houses with a connection to the Internet that's about the same speed as DSL in the simplest configuration. Even an ideal plan would have to change once this technology becomes commercially available. Lack of flexibility is part of what gave us the incredibly clunky telephone system we have today; I think we can do better with the Internet.
He also supports Net Neutrality. For those of you who somehow escaped hearing about this last year, I'll explain what it's about. Some of the telecommunications companies that have local near-monopolies on Internet access want to introduce stratified service, charging web sites extra for the priviledge of being fast and pleasant for the telecoms' customers to use. The consequence of this would naturally be that the big companies that can afford to pay extra will be able to tilt the playing field toward themselves, stifling the small companies that are the Internet economy's lifeblood. And the telecoms would make a bundle, at our expense. Net Neutrality is one of those big issues where it really is about as simple as "the people versus the big companies", and Obama is on the right side. The fact that he gets his advice on intellectual property law from no less a hero than Lawrence Lessig (the guy who came up with the Creative Commons) completes the trifecta: Obama is a great candidate for technology development.
He's a great candidate for infrastructure in general, actually. Have a look at his transportation policies. The quick summary: rebuild our crumbling roads and bridges, both now and over the long term; commit to long-term funding and reform of Amtrak; build new passenger and freight rail; change city planning to focus more on pedestrians and bicycles; increase access to cheap public transit for lower-income workers who spend too much of their money on gas and car maintenence. The stuff about railroads is more important than it sounds. Ignoring subsidies, rail is the cheapest, most energy-efficient way of transporting huge amounts of goods over land. Our rail infrastructure has been slowly decaying for decades, but the good news is that building it up again will be easier than you might suppose. We still have large tracts of railroad-owned land where railroad tracks used to be and could be placed again, thus saving us the cost of massive earthmoving and land purchasing. There are old unused railway trestles that seem to be basically sound. We can do it.
An advantage of high-speed passenger trains in cities is that the density of passengers is hard to beat. A train packs a lot of people into a fairly small space and sends them quickly down a narrow track without needing to worry about stoplights or rush hour traffic. This does wonders for city planning. It's also cheaper all-around than cars, and pollutes less, and is not particularly sensitive to the cost of oil. If you electrify the tracks, you can power a city's trains using nice green power sources like wind, nuclear, and solar. I've often wished that more places in the US had something like Taipei's Mass Rapid Transit system, which can get you anywhere in the city, usually faster and always cheaper than driving.
Social issues
Obama's web site doesn't mention this very prominently, but he has a good record of supporting gay rights. About the only thing he doesn't publicly support is outright gay marriage -- he's going the separate-but-equal route by supporting civil unions. That's still an immense improvement over the typical Republican response, as illustrated by John McCain: oppose both while shouting non-sequiturs like "PROTECT THE SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE!" and "KEEP FAMILIES STRONG!". Obama's position on gay rights is pretty much identical to Hillary Clinton's, but I have more confidence that Obama would try to actually do something about it. (I strongly suspect that Obama is a good deal more liberal than he says. But Kucinich tried being honestly sane and liberal, and look how well that worked out for him.)
Moving on: while the mention of the words "religion" and "politics" in the same sentence always makes me nervous, Obama seems to have the best possible politically-feasible position on it. He somehow managed to support separation of church and state in front of an evangelical audience and not get shouted down from the podium. The fact that he actually came out and said the right thing without pussyfooting around it is very impressive, as is the way he managed to make this go over well with evangelical Christians. I think we could all use a change from the kind of extreme pandering to the Religious Right that made the Bush administration even worse than it would otherwise have been.
Education
Senator Obama's voting record on education has been good, and it looks like his record as a president could be even better. Near the top of the list of issues is fixing No Child Left Behind: fund it, somehow change the tests so that teachers don't spend huge amounts of time teaching the test, and when schools do badly, help them instead of punishing them. This sounds like it has potential for abuse -- schools looking for extra funding might try to artificially lower their test scores -- but I'm pretty sure that will be hashed out somewhere along the line to get a system that mostly kind of works. At this point, just about any change to NCLB would be an improvement.
I'm still very skeptical about how much Obama could improve our horrendously broken K-12 education system, but as usual when you look at higher education things get less grim. He has two big proposed improvements for higher education, and both of them are intensely excellent. First off, he wants to ditch the FAFSA. Filling out the FAFSA is a huge pain in the bum every year, and it could be eliminated by taxpayers "checking a box on their tax form, authorizing their tax information to be used, and eliminating the need for a separate application." There are an enormous number of people who miss out on financial aid because they don't fill out their FAFSA. This is an easy fix.
Second, and even bigger, he wants to create something called the "American Opportunity Tax Credit". This is a $4000 per student per year tax break, for which everyone is eligible if they or a dependent are going to college. With college tuitions spiralling ever higher and debt becoming a bigger and bigger issue, we really need to do something if we're to stay an educated and solvent society. The page I linked to neglects to mention, though, that there's a string attached: in order to get the $4000 tax credit, the student must complete 100 hours of some kind of voluntary public service each year. That's equivalent to $40 per hour in untaxed cash. Not bad for a student job.
Of course, this leaves us with thousands of college students needing to do something with those 100 hours a year. Obama has some ideas about that as well: he has plans to dramatically expand the number of public service opportunities and make them more attractive. He wants to make a Classroom Corps to help improve education (especially in poorer areas that can't afford to spend a reasonable amount on schools), a Health Corps to help improve public health (thus potentially saving billions on medical bills down the road), a Clean Energy Corps to work on building up our clean energy infrastructure and make buildings more energy efficient, a Homeland Security Corps to make sure we're organized the next time an emergency like Hurricane Katrina or 9/11 comes along, and several others. These will also be available as part-time jobs for college students, in an effort to move work-study students away from traditional library-and-cafeteria campus jobs.
I really like the fact that Obama is planning to make public service one of the big causes of his presidency. It's been way too long since we could feel good about our country. Wouldn't it be nice to have a president who asked you not just to feel good about your country, but to make it better? I would love to have a president who seriously asks us to donate our time and energy to make our world better! I would love to have a president who tells us that we can make a difference, and then hands us opportunities to actually go and make a difference. If the mark of patriotism is putting one of those "Support Our Troops" bumper stickers on your car, then patriotism is nothing more than a particularly hollow word. But if the mark of a patriot is freely choosing to serve your country and your world, then we can feel some pride again.
I miss the kind of idealism that made people volunteer en masse for the Peace Corps in the 60s. Incidentally, Obama wants to double the size of the Peace Corps by 2011 and "work with the leaders of other countries to build an international network of overseas volunteers so that Americans work side-by-side with volunteers from other countries."
Obama also has plans to use public service as a way of helping people out of poverty. Take the YouthBuild program, for instance: the idea is that "disadvantaged young people" can build public-works housing to get some decent income while completing high school and learning marketable skills. Now, construction jobs are not the best-paying -- they tend to get filled by Mexican immigrants willing to work for low wages -- but it's a darn sight better than dope dealing or picking up aluminum cans. And as a bonus, you get affordable housing. I helped build a couple of cheap houses in high school, and they were some of the sweetest little domiciles ever made. It's pleasant, rewarding work.
Government Openness
I really like one acutely underrated part of Obama's plans: make the government more transparent by making all its information available to the public: who voted how on what bills, all the govenrment documents, videos of meetings -- the whole thing. That's nothing new; people have been pushing for this sort of thing for years, with some success. The new thing, the big idea, is that he wants to make this stuff freely available over the Internet in machine-readable open formats. This has two subtle points going for it:
And now, a look at the competition
The primaries will be over soon enough, so I'l pass over Hillary and focus on the guy who's almost certainly going to get the Republican nomination: John McCain.
After looking through Obama's list of policies, McCain's platform was a sulfurous blast of Republican more-of-the-same. He tries to look bold and tough, panders shamelessly to social conservatives of every stripe (even toadying up to prominent nutcase televangelist Jerry Falwell), pushes more tax cuts as the omnisolution, talks about staying in Iraq until we "win" an ultimately unwinnable conflict, and essentially positions himself as being the guy who's probably not quite as bad as Bush. In his defense, he would probably get the government to mostly stop torturing people. He might even reinstate habeas corpus. Faint praise indeed!
If McCain is elected, it'll be Bush part 3. It's too horrifying to contemplate, so back to cheerier things:
Political feasibility of Obama's plans
The great thing about most of what I've mentioned is that they're not one-party issues. They're not even exclusively liberal issues, although liberals tend to focus on them more. Most of the great things Obama wants to do are things that can get bipartisan support.
Sure, Republicans aren't going to be too happy about Obama's liberal views on social issues like gay rights and stem-cell research and abortion and not being afraid of everything all the dang time. And there's still a minority of people who'll get mad at him for pulling our troops out of Iraq. Building railroads and maintaining our highways, on the other hand, is something both parties can support. And the public service? Republicans claim to be all about honorable sacrifice for your country! They pay lip-service to it every day! How could they possibly be against someone having the guts to actually straight-up ask Americans to serve their country? And everyone claims to support more government accountability, so Obama's brilliant machine-readable government information reporting plan has a good chance of going through in some form. The same goes for his No Child Left Behind reform, streamlining FAFSA, tax cuts for families sending students to college, and most of his other good ideas. These major improvements can actually happen, with broad bipartisan support!
I believe that Barack Obama will be a truly great president. He's the first candidate I've ever been able to honestly support. Ever.
This is an extraordinary claim in a country that's used to politicians being incompetent and corrupt. After eight years of Bush, who could blame us for being wary? But Obama's policies are big things, important things, and his specific positions on them are surprisingly smart.
Economy
For starters, take a look at Obama's positions on science-related issues. He supports doubling federal funding for basic research! He wants to make permanent a tax credit to encourage companies to do research and development in the US. He supports stem-cell research, embryonic and otherwise. And he says that he'll continue his track record in Illinois of making math and science education a bigger priority (and backing this up with funding, unlike No-Child-Left-Behind Bush).
This kind of thing is crucially important to our country. China and India have huge masses of people willing to work cheaper than Americans are legally allowed to work. Other countries are even cheaper than they are. Our big advantage is that we have a large educated population, combined with lots of money and land and resources and the world's best university system. Under the Bush administration we've been squandering the biggest advantage the US has in the global economy: science and technology. For example, our broadband Internet infrastructure is pathetic compared to that of more population-dense developed countries, when by rights we should have municipal wireless networking and fiber to the home in cities, with really fast Internet connections cheap and widely available. This is every bit as important today as universal telephone access was in the last century -- probably more important, actually, since the Internet is a gateway to a huge amount of ever-growing useful information, and can do long-distance telephone calls with Voice over IP.
Obama wants to do some major improvement of our Internet infrastructure, allocating a bunch of money to get cheaper, faster Internet access to everyone. He's a little vague on the specifics, which is good; even if he had a perfect plan today it would soon be outdated as new networking technology is introduced. For example, by using a combination of special high-tech light fixtures and broadband over powerlines, we could get Ethernet-speed wireless networks in our houses with a connection to the Internet that's about the same speed as DSL in the simplest configuration. Even an ideal plan would have to change once this technology becomes commercially available. Lack of flexibility is part of what gave us the incredibly clunky telephone system we have today; I think we can do better with the Internet.
He also supports Net Neutrality. For those of you who somehow escaped hearing about this last year, I'll explain what it's about. Some of the telecommunications companies that have local near-monopolies on Internet access want to introduce stratified service, charging web sites extra for the priviledge of being fast and pleasant for the telecoms' customers to use. The consequence of this would naturally be that the big companies that can afford to pay extra will be able to tilt the playing field toward themselves, stifling the small companies that are the Internet economy's lifeblood. And the telecoms would make a bundle, at our expense. Net Neutrality is one of those big issues where it really is about as simple as "the people versus the big companies", and Obama is on the right side. The fact that he gets his advice on intellectual property law from no less a hero than Lawrence Lessig (the guy who came up with the Creative Commons) completes the trifecta: Obama is a great candidate for technology development.
He's a great candidate for infrastructure in general, actually. Have a look at his transportation policies. The quick summary: rebuild our crumbling roads and bridges, both now and over the long term; commit to long-term funding and reform of Amtrak; build new passenger and freight rail; change city planning to focus more on pedestrians and bicycles; increase access to cheap public transit for lower-income workers who spend too much of their money on gas and car maintenence. The stuff about railroads is more important than it sounds. Ignoring subsidies, rail is the cheapest, most energy-efficient way of transporting huge amounts of goods over land. Our rail infrastructure has been slowly decaying for decades, but the good news is that building it up again will be easier than you might suppose. We still have large tracts of railroad-owned land where railroad tracks used to be and could be placed again, thus saving us the cost of massive earthmoving and land purchasing. There are old unused railway trestles that seem to be basically sound. We can do it.
An advantage of high-speed passenger trains in cities is that the density of passengers is hard to beat. A train packs a lot of people into a fairly small space and sends them quickly down a narrow track without needing to worry about stoplights or rush hour traffic. This does wonders for city planning. It's also cheaper all-around than cars, and pollutes less, and is not particularly sensitive to the cost of oil. If you electrify the tracks, you can power a city's trains using nice green power sources like wind, nuclear, and solar. I've often wished that more places in the US had something like Taipei's Mass Rapid Transit system, which can get you anywhere in the city, usually faster and always cheaper than driving.
Social issues
Obama's web site doesn't mention this very prominently, but he has a good record of supporting gay rights. About the only thing he doesn't publicly support is outright gay marriage -- he's going the separate-but-equal route by supporting civil unions. That's still an immense improvement over the typical Republican response, as illustrated by John McCain: oppose both while shouting non-sequiturs like "PROTECT THE SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE!" and "KEEP FAMILIES STRONG!". Obama's position on gay rights is pretty much identical to Hillary Clinton's, but I have more confidence that Obama would try to actually do something about it. (I strongly suspect that Obama is a good deal more liberal than he says. But Kucinich tried being honestly sane and liberal, and look how well that worked out for him.)
Moving on: while the mention of the words "religion" and "politics" in the same sentence always makes me nervous, Obama seems to have the best possible politically-feasible position on it. He somehow managed to support separation of church and state in front of an evangelical audience and not get shouted down from the podium. The fact that he actually came out and said the right thing without pussyfooting around it is very impressive, as is the way he managed to make this go over well with evangelical Christians. I think we could all use a change from the kind of extreme pandering to the Religious Right that made the Bush administration even worse than it would otherwise have been.
Education
Senator Obama's voting record on education has been good, and it looks like his record as a president could be even better. Near the top of the list of issues is fixing No Child Left Behind: fund it, somehow change the tests so that teachers don't spend huge amounts of time teaching the test, and when schools do badly, help them instead of punishing them. This sounds like it has potential for abuse -- schools looking for extra funding might try to artificially lower their test scores -- but I'm pretty sure that will be hashed out somewhere along the line to get a system that mostly kind of works. At this point, just about any change to NCLB would be an improvement.
I'm still very skeptical about how much Obama could improve our horrendously broken K-12 education system, but as usual when you look at higher education things get less grim. He has two big proposed improvements for higher education, and both of them are intensely excellent. First off, he wants to ditch the FAFSA. Filling out the FAFSA is a huge pain in the bum every year, and it could be eliminated by taxpayers "checking a box on their tax form, authorizing their tax information to be used, and eliminating the need for a separate application." There are an enormous number of people who miss out on financial aid because they don't fill out their FAFSA. This is an easy fix.
Second, and even bigger, he wants to create something called the "American Opportunity Tax Credit". This is a $4000 per student per year tax break, for which everyone is eligible if they or a dependent are going to college. With college tuitions spiralling ever higher and debt becoming a bigger and bigger issue, we really need to do something if we're to stay an educated and solvent society. The page I linked to neglects to mention, though, that there's a string attached: in order to get the $4000 tax credit, the student must complete 100 hours of some kind of voluntary public service each year. That's equivalent to $40 per hour in untaxed cash. Not bad for a student job.
Of course, this leaves us with thousands of college students needing to do something with those 100 hours a year. Obama has some ideas about that as well: he has plans to dramatically expand the number of public service opportunities and make them more attractive. He wants to make a Classroom Corps to help improve education (especially in poorer areas that can't afford to spend a reasonable amount on schools), a Health Corps to help improve public health (thus potentially saving billions on medical bills down the road), a Clean Energy Corps to work on building up our clean energy infrastructure and make buildings more energy efficient, a Homeland Security Corps to make sure we're organized the next time an emergency like Hurricane Katrina or 9/11 comes along, and several others. These will also be available as part-time jobs for college students, in an effort to move work-study students away from traditional library-and-cafeteria campus jobs.
I really like the fact that Obama is planning to make public service one of the big causes of his presidency. It's been way too long since we could feel good about our country. Wouldn't it be nice to have a president who asked you not just to feel good about your country, but to make it better? I would love to have a president who seriously asks us to donate our time and energy to make our world better! I would love to have a president who tells us that we can make a difference, and then hands us opportunities to actually go and make a difference. If the mark of patriotism is putting one of those "Support Our Troops" bumper stickers on your car, then patriotism is nothing more than a particularly hollow word. But if the mark of a patriot is freely choosing to serve your country and your world, then we can feel some pride again.
I miss the kind of idealism that made people volunteer en masse for the Peace Corps in the 60s. Incidentally, Obama wants to double the size of the Peace Corps by 2011 and "work with the leaders of other countries to build an international network of overseas volunteers so that Americans work side-by-side with volunteers from other countries."
Obama also has plans to use public service as a way of helping people out of poverty. Take the YouthBuild program, for instance: the idea is that "disadvantaged young people" can build public-works housing to get some decent income while completing high school and learning marketable skills. Now, construction jobs are not the best-paying -- they tend to get filled by Mexican immigrants willing to work for low wages -- but it's a darn sight better than dope dealing or picking up aluminum cans. And as a bonus, you get affordable housing. I helped build a couple of cheap houses in high school, and they were some of the sweetest little domiciles ever made. It's pleasant, rewarding work.
Government Openness
I really like one acutely underrated part of Obama's plans: make the government more transparent by making all its information available to the public: who voted how on what bills, all the govenrment documents, videos of meetings -- the whole thing. That's nothing new; people have been pushing for this sort of thing for years, with some success. The new thing, the big idea, is that he wants to make this stuff freely available over the Internet in machine-readable open formats. This has two subtle points going for it:
- That bit about "open formats" means that anybody can read the information without needing to shell out a bunch of money for the software to read it. It's more important than it sounds.
- The "machine readable" part is crucial. The sentence "Representative Hidebinder voted for HB2718" is easy enough for humans to read, but computers have trouble understanding arbitrary English. If all such information is in formats that computers can handle, then we could have web sites that track exactly what's going on in the government, as it's happening, with the full text of bills and recordings of debates and discussions in the news just a few clicks away. It's inevitable, if Obama's plan is put in place.
And now, a look at the competition
The primaries will be over soon enough, so I'l pass over Hillary and focus on the guy who's almost certainly going to get the Republican nomination: John McCain.
After looking through Obama's list of policies, McCain's platform was a sulfurous blast of Republican more-of-the-same. He tries to look bold and tough, panders shamelessly to social conservatives of every stripe (even toadying up to prominent nutcase televangelist Jerry Falwell), pushes more tax cuts as the omnisolution, talks about staying in Iraq until we "win" an ultimately unwinnable conflict, and essentially positions himself as being the guy who's probably not quite as bad as Bush. In his defense, he would probably get the government to mostly stop torturing people. He might even reinstate habeas corpus. Faint praise indeed!
If McCain is elected, it'll be Bush part 3. It's too horrifying to contemplate, so back to cheerier things:
Political feasibility of Obama's plans
The great thing about most of what I've mentioned is that they're not one-party issues. They're not even exclusively liberal issues, although liberals tend to focus on them more. Most of the great things Obama wants to do are things that can get bipartisan support.
Sure, Republicans aren't going to be too happy about Obama's liberal views on social issues like gay rights and stem-cell research and abortion and not being afraid of everything all the dang time. And there's still a minority of people who'll get mad at him for pulling our troops out of Iraq. Building railroads and maintaining our highways, on the other hand, is something both parties can support. And the public service? Republicans claim to be all about honorable sacrifice for your country! They pay lip-service to it every day! How could they possibly be against someone having the guts to actually straight-up ask Americans to serve their country? And everyone claims to support more government accountability, so Obama's brilliant machine-readable government information reporting plan has a good chance of going through in some form. The same goes for his No Child Left Behind reform, streamlining FAFSA, tax cuts for families sending students to college, and most of his other good ideas. These major improvements can actually happen, with broad bipartisan support!
I believe that Barack Obama will be a truly great president. He's the first candidate I've ever been able to honestly support. Ever.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)