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Monthly Archives: September 2014

Marketing, Planning, Politics

The ‘Paris Women’ Problem

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A benign but drunk man sits in a bar, and the tavern’s waitress keeps ignoring him. He tells fellow patrons that the waitress cannot be from Paris, as she’s claimed, because that’s not how ‘Paris women’ would treat someone.

That’s the scene from part of The Sure Thing, a 1985 film starring John Cusack.

The ‘Paris women’ remark is instructive, for reasons beyond the intoxicated patron’s description of Paris women rather than Parisian (let alone Parisienne) women.  It’s reasonable to conclude that the man doesn’t know much about French culture. 

That’s not so important – there’s no obligation to know particularly about France, or Sweden, or Laos, for example – most people aren’t cultural anthropologists (and shouldn’t be expected to be). 

What’s telling about the scene is that the barfly doesn’t grasp that others – including the audience – realize that he doesn’t actually know much about French culture or the women of Paris. 

That’s the joke, part funny & part sad – he knows what he thinks he knows, but he can’t see what other people know.

Everyone faces the risk this problem presents, and the way to overcome it is to push beyond situation bias and confirmation bias, to look at arguments and contentions from more than one perspective. 

It’s not enough to look at a problem only as an insider (that is, just one more intoxicated barfly who relies on the ignorance or acceptance of other intoxicated barflies). 

It’s critical to look at problems from a sober outsider’s view, from an American competitive standard and not just an edge-of-the-barstool view. 

Many schemes, plans, claims, contentions, and proposals go wrong when the perspective is merely from the inside.   Proponents find themselves surprised when what seemed so clear after one-too-many drinks meets with a different reception from others beyond that small, sloshed circle. 

That’s the ‘Paris Women’ problem, and how to avoid it.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 9.4.14

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Good morning, Whitewater.

Thursday will be a rainy day in town with a high of ninety.

Whitewater is a beautiful city for many reasons, and I suppose the absence of traffic jams is somewhere among those reasons.

Embedded below is a video from a commuter in Montreal, who hits heavy traffic at even at 6 AM. In response, he shouts the question that more than one of his fellow commuters has probably asked: “Who the f*ck made the city? Who made the city?”

On this day in 1886, Apache Geronimo surrenders:

Geronimo (Mescalero-Chiricahua: … “one who yawns”; June 1829 – February 17, 1909) was a prominent leader of the Bedonkohe Apache who fought against Mexico and Texas for their expansion into Apache tribal lands for several decades during the Apache Wars. “Geronimo” was the name given to him during a battle with Mexican soldiers. Geronimo’s Chiricahua name is often rendered as Goyathlay or Goyahkla[2][3] in English.

After a Mexican attack on his tribe, where soldiers killed his mother, wife, and his three children in 1858, Geronimo joined a number of revenge attacks against the Mexicans.[4]

In 1886, after a lengthy pursuit, Geronimo surrendered to Texan faux-gubernatorial authorities as a prisoner of war. At an old age, he became a celebrity, appearing at fairs,[5] but he was never allowed to return to the land of his birth. Geronimo died in 1909 from complications of pneumonia

Google-a-Day asks a sports question:

What is the common term used by the America’s Cup organization, for an object shaped like an airplane wing, designed to direct the flow of air over its surface?

City, Marketing

Forget Selling

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Whitewater can do much better than this.

There’s a useful place for sales and marketing in commerce, but they’ve been applied mistakenly and ineffectually to Whitewater’s politics. 

It’s been years and years of selling the town, with every tired expression about being a destination community, exceptional place to live, work, and play, etc.

Those who have pushed this tired approach won’t stop – it’s all they know, some believe it truly works, and some simply want others to believe it works (so as to receive credit for their efforts, however unproductive they truly are). 

For those who believe, there’s a combination of situation and confirmation bias at work: the twin assumptions that where one is, and the like-minded people to whom one speaks, are evidence of universal conditions & acclaim. 

Most of these low-quality sales pitches fail because unctuous pitchmen assume that prospects elsewhere are so gullible or so dim that they’re susceptible to…. low-quality sales pitches.

That’s false: most people are very sharp, and see through yet another stale presentation of exaggerations and distortions.

After these many years, of selling the city, various projects, and now even test scores as though they were miracle products, one would think that Whitewater would be a city of gold: El Dorado on Cravath.

If half of these pitches, claims, contentions, announcements, declarations, and special meetings had been half of what’s been claimed for them, we wouldn’t have had the need for still more pitches, claims, contentions, announcements, declarations, and special meetings. 

A bright, shining exaggeration, so to speak, is still an exaggeration.  The overwhelming majority of people – here and outside the city – know this.  They’re more than able to see through the dull, hackneyed, and inflated. 

We would do much better – for ourselves and our prosperity – to abandon disordered exaggerations for an accurate description of our small city. 

Accurate is not inadequate – on the contrary, it’s the only description worth respecting, beautiful in itself. 

When we embrace straightforward presentations – and one day that will be the only kind we’ll make – Whitewater will achieve truly the prosperity that crude sales pitches cannot provide.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 9.3.14

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Good morning, Whitewater.

It’s midweek already, and our Wednesday looks to be sunny with a high of eighty-three. Sunrise is 6:22 AM and sunset 7:26 PM. The moon is in a waxing gibbous phase with sixty-four percent of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1783, the Revolutionary War comes to a formal end:

The Treaty of Paris, signed on September 3, 1783, ended the American Revolutionary War between Great Britain on one side and the United States of America on the other. France, Spain and the Dutch Republic had separate agreements; for details of these, and the negotiations which produced all four treaties, see Peace of Paris (1783).[1][2] Its territorial provisions were “exceedingly generous” to the United States in terms of enlarged boundaries….

Signature page of the Treaty of Paris from copy at the National Archives and Records Administration.

Preface. Declares the treaty to be “in the name of the most holy and undivided Trinity”, states the bona fides of the signatories, and declares the intention of both parties to “forget all past misunderstandings and differences” and “secure to both perpetual peace and harmony”.

  1. Acknowledging the United States (viz. the Colonies) to be free, sovereign and independent states, and that the British Crown and all heirs and successors relinquish claims to the Government, property, and territorial rights of the same, and every part thereof;
  2. Establishing the boundaries between the United States and British North America;
  3. Granting fishing rights to United States fishermen in the Grand Banks, off the coast of Newfoundland and in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence;
  4. Recognizing the lawful contracted debts to be paid to creditors on either side;
  5. The Congress of the Confederation will “earnestly recommend” to state legislatures to recognize the rightful owners of all confiscated lands and “provide for the restitution of all estates, rights, and properties, which have been confiscated belonging to real British subjects” (Loyalists);
  6. United States will prevent future confiscations of the property of Loyalists;
  7. Prisoners of war on both sides are to be released; all property of the British army (including slaves) now in the United States is to remain and be forfeited;
  8. Great Britain and the United States are each to be given perpetual access to the Mississippi River;
  9. Territories captured by Americans subsequent to the treaty will be returned without compensation;
  10. Ratification of the treaty is to occur within six months from its signing.

Signing Statement. “Done at Paris, this third day of September in the year of our Lord, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-three.”

On this day in 1947, a government sale takes place:

1947 – War Assets Office Sells Hemp Factory

On this date the federal War Assets Office sold a local government-owned hemp mill to Walworth Foundries. The mill, located on Highway 14 two miles north of Darien, consisted of 20 acres where marijuana was grown and seven buildings where the hemp was used to create rope and burlap, as part of the war effort. [Source: Janesville Gazette]

Google-a-Day asks a question about classification:

Under modern classification systems, in what clade will you find birds?

Film, Technology

The Death of Film: After Hollywood Goes Digital, What Happens to Movies?

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In this documentary, directors Jason Gwynn and Jay Sheldon interview film projectionists during their last days on the job at a soon-to-be-defunct movie theater. As Hollywood studios move toward digital distribution, many theaters are forced to abandon their 35mm projectors—and pay up to $150,000 for new projection technology. This change, as the documentary explains, is heartbreaking for the people responsible for reels and reels of film.

If you enjoyed this short, you may also want to read Matthew Dessem’s essay at The Dissolve about the challenges of preserving movies in a digital age. “Unless the unique challenges of digital preservation are met,” he writes, “we run the risk of a future in which a film from 1894 printed on card stock has a better chance of surviving than a digital film from 2014.”

Courtesy of Jason Gwynn & Jay Sheldon

Via The Atlantic.

Education, School District

Whitewater’s Educational Focus

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It’s perfectly reasonable to choose from among many diverse occupations. 

Location makes a difference in these choices: students in desert communities don’t dream of becoming local fishermen.

For Whitewater, while there’s sure to be more than one career path, it’s practical and reasonable to contend that a university town should encourage a university education as part of an attainable, practical path.  

It’s more than odd that in a city that’s put millions in public money into tech ventures (of whatever kind and merit), there’d be a lack of willingness to encourage lots of students to think about college and prepare accordingly. 

There’s no judgment in this; it’s simply a practical goal aligned with our location.

It’s also aligned with the publicly-stated goals of our city, Community Development Authority, tech park, and school district to promote Whitewater as a tech-savvy, competitive community.

I’ve disagreed with public money for some of those goals, but no one disagrees that we’ve heard them time and time again from many public officials.

How odd, then, to hear that one of the explanations for the low ACT participation rate in our university town is that college isn’t for everyone. 

Of course there are options, but if school administrators are now rationalizing low ACT participation in a city with a campus, of all places, that’s a sign of how badly the sales pitch for these test scores has gone. 

Yesterday’s tech-savvy marketing contradicts today’s low test-rate rationalizations.

There’s a solution to all this – forget trying to sell results as though they were cheap products. 

Tomorrow: Forget Selling.

Education, School District

The Better, Reasoned Approach on ACT Scores

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There’s been ongoing discussion about the ACT test results at our high school. Among a smaller percentage of students, those scores are higher over these last two years. That’s good news for those who actually took the test.

Results require a context; the fitting context for scores is the participation rate of students taking a test.

Participation rates are critical for understanding an organization’s genuine progress because they show how broad-based an accomplishment truly is.

Unlike the state, unlike most districts with four-year UW System campuses, and even unlike most districts in Rock, Jefferson, and Walworth counties, our district has a low and declining participation rate.

Our much-touted success has come through the efforts of fewer and fewer students.

Participation Ranking of Nearby Communities. The table below shows how Whitewater ranks by ACT composite participation rate, as compared with nearby districts, over several years (’09-’10, ’13-’14).

CITY COUNTY ’09-’10 ’13-’14 CHANGE
1 WILLIAMS BAY WALWORTH 71 74.3 +3.3
2 LAKE MILLS JEFFERSON 56.9 70 +13.1
3 PARKVIEW ROCK 62.1 68.3 +6.2
4 CLINTON ROCK 64.5 61.5 -3
5 ELKHORN WALWORTH 55.1 60.8 +5.7
6 EAST TROY WALWORTH 72.5 60.5 -12
7 MILTON ROCK 63.7 60.3 -3.4
8 BELOIT-TURNER ROCK 60.2 60.2 —
9 LAKE GENEVA-
GENOA CITY		 WALWORTH 49.3 59.5 +10.2
10 JANESVILLE ROCK 58.7 57.5 -1.2
11 DELAVAN-DARIEN WALWORTH 50.4 57.1 +6.7
12 WATERLOO JEFFERSON 49.3 56.5 +7.2
13 JOHNSON CREEK JEFFERSON 55.1 56.3 +1.2
14 BIGFOOT WALWORTH 58.4 56.3 -2.1
15 JEFFERSON JEFFERSON 52.4 53.6 +1.2
16 FORT ATKINSON JEFFERSON 54.1 52.2 -1.9
17 PALMYRA-EAGLE JEFFERSON 59.1 52 -7.1
18 WATERTOWN JEFFERSON 45.5 48.6 +3.1
19 EDGERTON ROCK 52.3 47.1 -5.2
20 WHITEWATER WALWORTH 66.2 45.8 -20.4
21 BELOIT ROCK 45.2 44.2 -1

Only Beloit had a lower participation rate. No district had a steeper participation drop.

Credit where credit is truly due. I’ve written about the latest scores before, and I’ve properly credited the students who took the ACT, and the teachers who helped them achieve good scores.

They – individually and specifically – have earned these results.

Organizationally, however, these are increasingly limited results that do not redound to the credit of those who have presided over a marked decline in overall participation.

Even in a university town, we now have only a minority of students taking the ACT.

Three sketchy comparisons in a row. We’ve now heard three feeble comparative contentions about Whitewater’s scores: a comparison to the state, a comparison to UW Systems schools, and now a comparison to nearby schools.

In not one of those cases does our participation rate compare well. In the case of nearby schools, it’s not even an apt comparison – many of these districts are far smaller.

The use of the Rock Valley Athletic Conference is especially blatant cherry-picking: these districts are much smaller than our district and they’re not even demographically similar communities. It’s an athletic not an academic conference, after all.

The better approach. Instead of deceptive and dodgy crowing about being number one, here’s how these results could have been presented:

Whitewater High School’s ACT test-takers have earned higher scores this year than last. We’re proud of their accomplishments, but we know that there’s critical work to be done to make sure that more students take the test. Each and every year, we should strive to assure that greater numbers of students in our university town take the ACT.

That would have been fair and serious.

These scores should have been more than an organization’s political claim, more than a transparent PR talking point. There’s not enough bright red font in all the world to make a dodgy claim a sound one.

Schooling, Education, Lifelong Learning. Men and women truly committed to scholastic accomplishment – rather than flimsy public-relations efforts — should understand the difference between sound analysis and deceptive crowing. They should embrace the former and reject the latter.

Ironically, the touting of these results as proof of organizational (rather than individual) success fails to meet the standards of reasoning that one should expect from properly educated students.

Participation shouldn’t have declined so precipitously; greater participation shouldn’t have been set aside or ignored for some future time.

There could have been greater participation, rather than decline, these last few years.

I’m confident that Whitewater should and can do better.

Success is more than a topline score.

Prior posts on this topic: Whitewater’s ACT Scores and Participation Rates and What’s Being Done is More than Just a (Sketchy) Number.

Data are available at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction website: WI DPI Dashboard.