andrew plemmons pratt

From Rafe Esquith’s Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire—you can self-assess your reading proficiency at any grade level with the following simple test:

1. Have you ever secretly read under you desk in school because the teacher was boring and you were dying to finish the book you were reading?
2. Have you ever been scolded for reading at the dinner table?
3. Have you ever read secretly under the covers after being told to go to bed?

The point being that you can do a bang-up job of teaching students the technical skills necessary to absorb and comprehend what they’re asked to read, but real success means helping students cultivate a life-long hunger for knowledge and stories.

I think the current version of this test for myself would go something like this:

1. Have you ever been reading something on the bus, then kept reading as you went up the elevator into the office, and then kept reading after you turned on your computer and were supposed to be working, and then kept going to refill your coffee mug and taken your book along to the kitchen?
2. Have you ever been too engrossed in what you were reading to bother fixing yourself dinner and instead eaten vegetarian hot dogs wrapped in tortillas for the second time in a week?
3. Have you ever wished that you had a reason to read under the covers in secrecy and done it anyway, perhaps using one of those silly travel book lights that someone gave you for Christmas years ago and for which there really isn’t a proper use besides this?

Removed the croissant dough from the fridge and prepared for baking this afternoon.

Was not sure how much the Sur la Table recipe would make so I attacked the whole batch. Twenty-two in all, half of which I made as chocolate.

Working with the dough is not a fast process. With a whole batch, the second half had started rising on the counter by the time I had the first dozen prepped. Should probably try to chill or freeze the other half next time.

Baking is absurd. So much butter just spills out of the croissants. Good luck that I used two pans with lips on the edges.

Next fall I will be teaching secondary school English, and in order to be effective I’m going to need to brush up on my math. As I was starting the process of applying to Teach for America, one of the reasons I kept citing for why I wanted to go into education was that effective schools and programs (like TFA) measure whether they’re successful at what they’re doing. This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon in education, but we’re no where near to realizing the full the power of measuring what we do U.S. schools, seeing if it benefits students, and adjusting things accordingly. Fortunately there are a whole slew of districts, policy shops, and nonprofits working on figuring out what we’re not measuring, determining how to measure it, maintain that information, and act on it.

Take this report that my humble employer, the Center for American Progress, and College Summit released last week. The authors explain that while many public high schools have a rigorous college preparation curriculum that includes Advanced Placement classes and the like, smart successful students often make it to their first year of college and find themselves totally adrift, unprepared for the academic expectations of higher ed. High schools, despite their best intentions, often don’t know whether or not they’re preparing students for success in college because they don’t keep track of how those students perform in their “13th” year. Simply put, they don’t measure the outcome of their work. It’s a matter of counting.

Now, building a data system that follows students from secondary school to potentially far-flung colleges is not trivial, but the principle—take note of what you do, measure, and make adjustments to better meet your goals—is one of those simple ideas that made for a lot of successful projects over the past decade.

The business community is generally out ahead on this whole counting and measuring thing, but it’s also worth noting that much of the exponential growth of web-based and social media technologies over the past 10 years is due, fundamentally, to the ability to use computers to measure what people are doing and craft tools and products that fit people’s needs. Google does this, incrementally, billions of times day. Similar story for most everything else you clicked on around the Internet today. But in a whole variety of other fields, counting has been around for decades, and its impact has snowballed in the face of cheap, fast computing, and the basic acceptance that if you want to understand a problem, you need data.

Atul Gwande’s Better offers a terrific tour of how measurement has improved various corners of medicine since the middle of the 20th century. Hospitals have beaten back onslaughts of drug-resistant bacteria by persuading everyone to wash his or her hands and counting the results. The introduction of the Apgar score, which enumerates on a 0-10 scale the health of newborn infants upon delivery, lead to a dramatic upswing the in the quality of care for infants and dramatic upswing in survival rates, which are now about 8 times better than they were in the 1930s. And the 90 percent survival rates for U.S. combat troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan is due in large part to the fact that military physicians diligently record copious information on injuries, treatments, and outcomes—so they can constantly find ways to improve on their success.

The next big step in education and in medicine is to take what we’ve counted, standardize the information, and compare it. That means national testing and data standards for education and interoperable electronic health records for medicine. Fortunately, there’s federal money for both of those projects: $4.35 billion for schools and $19 billion health information technology.

So one day at the farmer’s market over the summer I decided that it was time to learn how to cook with cabbage. I grabbed a tasty-looking specimen from one of the stalls and came home to find a recipe. The index in Bittman’s How to Cook Everything led me to “White Beans with Cabbage, Pasta, and Ham.” I took a chance on it and was genuinely surprised at how tasty it came out with minimal effort.

It’s now a staple go-to dinner dish because this is one of those recipes where you’ll tend to have most of the core ingredients on hand, but you can easily mix and adjust because it’s built on a core of mild ingredients seasoned with broth, onions, and thyme. As well, I make this as a vegetarian dish with small amounts of various fake meats—which I’ve found is a a great way to inject another jolt of flavor. The resulting portions are hefty and you can easily double or treble them, as cooking just involves two saucepans. I’ll run through the Bittman ingredient list and offer my substitutions:

• 3 cups chopped cabbage, preferably Savoy [Never used Savoy myself, which sounds pricey. Part of the point here is just to use a hunk of cabbage you might have left over from something else. One head goes a long way. I find that it only takes about one quarter of a normal size cabbage to get the 3 cups here.]
• 8 ounces small pasta, like cavatelli or orecchiette [Again, just use whatever you have open and want to finish off. You can also up the amount wildly without risk.]
• 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 2 cups chopped leak or onion [Leeks are really good here. Obviously regular onion will do just fine.]
• 1 celery stalk, chopped [I find that getting celery just for this creates a problem because then you have the whole rest of the stalk and, eh, what else are you going to do with celery? I usually use carrots, which help break up the monotone color of the dish anyway.]
• 2 sprigs fresh thyme [The thyme, surprisingly, is really the heart of the dish. I tend to only have dry chopped on hand and gusstimate a substitution—2 teaspoons or so. Again, you can increase that to taste without throwing off the balance. Herb substitutions are 3 fresh units to 1 dried unit according to Google.]
• 1/4 cup chopped prosciutto or 1/2 cup chopped ham [I always make this vegetarian by using fake Italian sausage instead. Trader Joes sells a spectacular house brand imitation Italian sausage and you only need 1/2 of a link chopped small to get a lot of meaty flavor into this dish.]
• 1 cup chicken or other stock [I use 1 cube of vegetable bullion in 1 cup of boiling water—just toss it in the microwave in a Pyrex cup for a few minutes.]
• 3 cups cooked or canned cannellini or other white beans, dried but still moist [That's three cans, which I feel is a little excessive. I'll use as little as 1 can depending on what I have around. Just as good, you can use garbonzoes.]
• Black pepper
• Parmesan or Romano [A crucial garnish. Bear in mind the concentrated stock will be salty, so sometimes a less salty cheese is better.]

Bittman recommends cooking the cabbage first then reserving that water for the pasta. Here are the steps, simplified:

1. Boil salted water for the cabbage. Cook until tender, about 3 minutes. Strain but save the water. Reboil the water and cook the pasta al dente—it’s going to cook some more when combined with the rest of the ingredients.
2. Heat the oil in a separate saucepan or large skillet that can hold all of the final volume of ingredients. Add the onions and celery/carrots. Soften, then add the thyme, imitation sausage, stock, beans, and cabbage. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Toss that for 5 minutes or so to blend flavors. Bittman reminds you to keep it moist but not soupy.
3. Toss the pasta in at the last and then move to your serving vessel. Serve with grated cheese.

Voila! A whole dish based around cabbage that’s not coleslaw. Hearty and just as good as leftovers the next day for lunch.

Every so often, I’m on a road trip, driving around the great southern states, and I’m overtaken with a very strong need for some public radio. Unfortunately, I don’t have one of the handy NPR Station Locator Maps. I also don’t have an iPhone, for which I could get the free NPR Station Locator app. What I have is a work-detail Blackberry and soft sport for dabbling in scripting languages. So I took the opportunity to learn some PHP and build a rudimentary station finder using the NPR API.

NPR of course offers a spiffy web-based station finder map for scoring your closest Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me! or All Things Considered fix. But it’s a little too full-featured to work on a dinky mobile browser. But let’s also not kid ourselves about functionality here; this was an excuse to learn some super-basic PHP:

http://appratt.com/npr/

We’ll call this version 1.0 because it lacks anything resembling a design; it doesn’t verify that you’re feeding it ZIP codes or return appropriate error messages if nothing is in range; and it doesn’t indicate station strength (though station strength is something you can figure out pretty quickly with your tuner).

What is does do is query the NPR API and return a list of the closest stations with city and call number, ranked in order of proximity. Which is all you need when you know you’re missing Michelle Norris and all you can find is Delilah.

So the original draft of this spring’s mixtape was a solid start, and I’ve been listening to it a good bit this past week, and thinking about advice from friends who provided input. Here I present the final version—and all imperfections in it are solely the fault of the arranger.

Some recent additions: Ida Maria, which @lauraolin reminded me of, brings an additional dose of dancearoundwithyourarmsintheair power. As well, any proper spring mix needs something that makes you feel like you could be sitting on a sunny stoop on Sesame Street: hence the Cat Stevens.

I developed some serious qualms with Pete and the Pirates, mainly because they’re not very good musicians, and listening to them in concert with groups like the Violent Femmes, who can not only harmonize three strange male voices and create more melody with a tenth as many notes, really doesn’t do the former band any justice. But I’m giving Pete the benefit of the season and keeping the sprightly tune in.

Now on many occasions, I’ve tried to engineer mixes that take you up, ease you down, and then roar back to a crescendo. That end, the I’ve kicked in some more juice with a double shot of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and what seemed like a necessity for a spring mix: Le Tigre.

As much as some of these new tracks could have made great closers, I took Kristen’s advice seriously and stayed with the Avett Bros. at the caboose. The transition from “All This Time” into “Paper Planes” was too good to lose though, so I kept M.I.A. I would have worried about leaving a single hip-hop track floating alone, but I’ve ended up with a enough variety between rock, folk, punk, indie, and riot grrrl, that I’m not too worried. I attempted to fold in some funk and R&B, but it wasn’t working. There will be plenty of room for James Brown on the next mix.

Here’s the final, which I’ve decided to entitle “Sunglasses,” for obvious reasons:

http://www.appratt.com/mixtapes/sunglasses/

Recently inspired by the indie twee lovefest Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, I’m working on the occasional project of designing a seasonal mix. This is an opportunity to gather together a bunch of the great music I’ve been listening to in the mornings on KEXP. It also affords the chance to test out Opentape, the standalone software that recreates the functionality of Muxtape on your own servers.

Muxtape was a brilliant minimalist web app that allowed you to upload songs and share them in a cute playlist on a web page. The RIAA was all over that and shut it down after a brief, shining run.

So here’s the current version of the list (it’s not embeddable): http://www.appratt.com/mixtapes/spring09/

Got any suggestions? Leave them in the comments.

P.S.: If you are teaching a screen writing class in the near future, consider using Nick and Norah as an example of how to take the framework from a mediocre book and turn it into a decent movie script.

Conceived by a couple of grad students working with John Maeda at the MIT Media Lab, Processing is an open source programming language and environment for designers. Built on top of Java, the platform is a simplified way of allowing digital artists (who might have no familiarity with coding), information designers (who might have some), or even skilled animators (who might have plenty) to construct programs that allow for dancing typography and iterative motion. Seven years in the making (hat tip to Design Observer), creators Ben Fry and Casey Reas released version 1.0 over the holiday weekend.

In an attempt to learn how to make information graphics dance around on the screen, I’ve learned the basics of ActionScript and have attempted (with little success) to learn the rudiments of Ruby On Rails. I’m dubious about the utility of a language built on top of another somewhat defunct language, but the ability to manipulate typography within a web browser without having to muck around with a timeline is intriguing.

This example from the Processing site’s “Exhibition” section is well within the realm of what’s possible in Flash, but it has a pleasant polish to it:

Venture outside the world of information graphics and into digital art and you get Processing applications like this, a music video for Radiohead’s “Bodysnatchers” generated by a reactive program that responds to audio input:

Bodysnatchers – Zeno Music Visualiser from Glenn Marshall on Vimeo.

And finally, here’s an applet I pulled directly from the examples that come with the v1.0.1 package, exported, and then uploaded to my server. The code is 17 lines long:


void setup()
{
size(200, 200);
noStroke();
colorMode(RGB, 255, 255, 255, 100);
rectMode(CENTER);
}



void draw()
{
background(51);
fill(255, 80);
rect(mouseX, height/2, mouseY/2+10, mouseY/2+10);
fill(255, 80);
int inverseX = width-mouseX;
int inverseY = height-mouseY;
rect(inverseX, height/2, (inverseY/2)+10, (inverseY/2)+10);
}


This could be worth playing around with.

An email arrived in my Gmail inbox today from the annual giving officer for the University of Virginia class of 2005. It explained in simple terms what has been true for years: despite the fact that UVa is a state school, the vast majority if its operating budget comes from private dollars. When I finished undergrad, state funds made up about eight percent of annual expenditures. So to maintain the high level of excellence at the university, they need my dollars. Normally, I delete such emails without a second thought. But today, a commentary in The Chronicle of Higher Education captured perfectly the reason why my alma mater will likely never see a single development dime from me.

In the piece, fourth-year student Honor Jones highlights the inequality that UVa insists upon codifying in brick and mortar. Her point is this: the University of Virginia, which is still a public school, should spend its money on programs that increase economic and educational equality. It should not erect gawdy Jeffersonian buildings as it continues to refuse to pay its direct and contract employees a living wage. It is just as the email from my class annual giving officer said: “While some things from your student days remain the same, others have changed.”

Clicking back through the Cavalier Daily archives for articles covering the living wage sit-in of spring 2006 fills me with anger and despair. In the past, the pages of the CD were full of commentary from well-bred students professing to know the motivations behind low-wage workers who took jobs at UVa and spouting the supply-demand basics they picked up in Econ 101. But Jones’s commentary pushes beyond the willful ignorance of students who refuse to acknowledge that in Charlottesville, where the largest engine of economic activity is the university, a person can work full time and still live in poverty. The Census Bureau’s most recent data for the city is from 2000, but at that time, 12 percent of families were below the federal poverty line.

Jones points out that the school makes other attempts to support low-income families and students as it pursues a $3 billion capital campaign. The AccessUVA program provides need-based grants to students from families with incomes below $40,000 a year, but the program appears stagnant. Efforts to grow the diversity of incoming classes have paid off, only to be met with more enlightened commentary in the CD: “financial aid encourages people who have no business being in college to attend.”

But perhaps the most frustrating fact from Jones’s piece, the strongest indication that some things from my student days remain the same, were the quotes from the UVa administration’s cheerleader for supply-side economics, Leonard Sandridge. At a public meeting of the Commission on the Future of the University, he trotted out this boiler-plate: “we have a responsibility to serve the public,” which is “expecting more from us than we’ve ever seen before.” The quote resonated with something an administrator told living wage organizers in the spring of 2006: social justice is not a mission of the university.

Part of what baffled me about all the arguments between students and with the administration over the living wage was that for opponents, this shocking statement from the administrator was implicit. The school, a bastion of learning and a crucible of opportunity, had no obligation to largely invisible workers.

Intricacies of the living wage debate aside, what I always wanted most from the university administrators was a simple recognition that institutions of higher education should make the world a better place—not just in theory, but in practice. And that is just what Jones asks for: “Public colleges and universities need to work harder at recruiting, enrolling, and retaining low-income students; paying better wages to employees; and supporting employee education. We should foster an inclusive academic debate that goes beyond theory to explore the inequalities right in front of us.”

At a rally during the 2006 sit-in, activist and attorney Mark Lane brilliantly inverted the reactionary stance of the administration: “If social justice is not on the agenda of this university, then this university has no agenda.” I would happily support an institution that declared its intentions to serve and empower the public, and then took concrete action to do so. An email with that declaration from my annual giving officer would really make my day.

Tomorrow is National DNA Day, in commemoration of the 1953 discovery of the molecule’s double helix structure and the 2003 completion of the Human Genome Project. But while the focus of the government-conceived holiday is on the DNA of one familiar species, homo sapiens, there are some other genomes worth considering on a day devoted to nucleic acid.

The Human Genome Project, as I learned researching for an interview on genetic testing with Nancy Spinner, began in 1990 and was originally planned to take 15 years. Advances in sequencing technology moved so quickly that the project finished two years early. In 2005, the NSF, USDA, and DOE funded a project at Washington University and Iowa State University to sequence the maize genome. The two institutions published a draft of the genome in February of this year.

News of the corn genetic sequencing arrived the same week the Svalbard Seed Vault opened in Norway—a coincidence I noted on Science Progress. Each project represents different but complementary approaches to plant genetic resources: the sequencing an understanding and control over biological materials, the seed bank a commitment to the preservation of biodiversity.

But in light of some of the most complicated global resource problems of late—soaring energy and food prices, and competition between crops grown for food, fuel, and feed—DNA day could be a moment to reflect on the sustainability of genetic resources beyond our own.

The Senate today passed the Genetic Information Non-discrimination Act, designed to protect patients from abuses of their genetic information by insurance companies or employers. Cutting people from insurance rolls is one possible scary use of genetic information that is getting easier to obtain. Another is the reckless creation of synthetic organisms (like nasty pathogens) from readily available cassettes of DNA—which enabled the construction of the first artificial bacteria genome at the Craig Venter Institute just a few months ago.

But what does Venter plan to do with those engineered microbes? Make biofuels.

The point being that understanding and celebrating achievements in genetics isn’t just going to make us healthier. Genetics already plays a significant role in determining what we eat—and that role will only increase—but DNA will also shape the fuel we use to move that food around.