This American Life–Retraction

I’ve become something of a podcast junkie. I don’t listen to music much while at work. I prefer the telling of stories to music when I’m doing CAD modeling. I makes it a lot easier to pause right in the middle and I’m less likely to hum along, which is distracting to the people around me.

One of the podcasts I enjoy, like a lot of people, is This American Life. They’ve been fairly popular in the news lately due to a show they produced recently about Apple and Chinese manufacturing. This week was their first ever retraction, and they dedicated the entire show to it. In that sense, it’s the best retraction I’ve ever seen or heard. Retractions are often simple apologies or corrections run at the bottom of an online article, or published the next day at the back of the newspaper that you have to track down, which few people will see or care.

One of the ironies is that I’ve been working my way through the archives of This American Life and had just finished up an episode in 2000 out people who convince themselves of their own lies before listening to the retraction episode, where the man telling about his experiences in China made up things that did not really happen to enhance his story.

That being said, I have a couple of issues of my own.

First of all, contrary to what the reporter from marketplace or the translator said, there are factories guarded by men with guns. It’s true that only military men are allowed to carry weapons, but sometimes these men are hired to guard factories. They are displayed very prominently at the entrances and are scary as hell. I only visited one factory where this was the case, and I remember wondering why they needed to have military guards at the entrance, as they predominantly make toys, but nonetheless they do exist.

The other big emphasis on the narrator’s character teardown was that he reported things that did not actually happen to him, but have actually happened. They talk in detail about N-Hexane and the damage it does to people. While I do not condone his lying about the experience, I understand his desire to increase people’s awareness of bad things that are happening.

At the same time, I’d like to share a couple of stories and observations. When working with a factory in China, I witnessed several instances of the management taking steps to ensure employee morale and safety. They have festivals to clear away bad spirits that are effectively one giant party. There was an instance where my company wanted to use a UV curing process on some electronics and the factory agreed with a contingency that we purchase sufficiently rated eye protection equipment. It was an instance where we should have thought of it, but did not, and the management stepped in to protect its workers.

One of the greatest dangers to workers is their lack of knowledge about how some things might be harmful to them. There is another operation involving ultrasonic welding that is occasionally performed. It involves pushing to pieces of plastic together with a thin rib between them. A horn comes down and shakes the top pieces at an ultrasonic frequency that melts the rib of plastic and bonds the two together. The problem is that the horn has to ramp up from no noise to an ultrasonic frequency, which passes through the audible range, including those that can be bad for the ear at close range. As such, we hand out earplugs to all of the workers nearby. The catch? They don’t wear them. They don’t like them. The person using the tool will wear them, but the person right next to the tool doesn’t see the need. You explain it to them, they put in the earplugs, then pull them out again as you walk away.

The last observation I want to make is that of wages and living expenses. My last trip to China was around 2006 or 2007, so things may have changed, but I had a conversation regarding cost of living with some of the factory managers. They explained that workers at the particular factory I was at paid 800 RMB a month for people working a 40 hour work week. That’s about $100 a month in US wages. Not much, but at the same time their cost for room and board is 100 RMB per month. Their living expenses are 1/8th of their earnings.

Assume that the average person in Boston makes $60K. It’s actually less than that, but that’s what a toll taker makes. That’s a lot more than 800 RMB a month. It’s 40000 RMB a month, or $5000. Of course, there are taxes and insurance that comes out of your paycheck, possibly union dues. That stuff account for about 25% of gross pay give or take, leaving you with a check for $3750. Assume rent for an average Boston apartment is about $1200 per month. That does not include utilities like heat, water and electricity. Take off another $250 or so for that. There are also grocery bills, which with current food prices can easily run to $100 per week, or $400 per month. Take that stuff out and you’re left with $1900. A fair chunk of change, but .38 of your original take home salary. Our living expenses are 3/5 of our earnings. In a lot of situations, the expenses are higher and the wages are less, pushing that disparity further.

I once believed that we enjoy a higher standard of living because of the higher wages and availability of cash. That’s a part of it, but given that things are so much less expensive in China, a lot of that advantage is in the noise. Our higher standard of living comes from the amount of money we have to put into it, and I worry about its sustainability.

The last point I want to make is that it’s wrong to assume that people working in these factories are planning to work there doing these dull and dangerous jobs for the next forty to fifty years. Again, from my experience, the workers are predominantly women, they come to the industrialized areas for two to three years, earn enough for a dowry, then go back home and get married. When designing assembly lines, you have to have stations that you can pluck someone off the street and sit them down and have them doing work within minutes. This is a problem right after Chinese New Year, as a lot of the workers go home, and just don’t come back. There’s no such thing at two week’s notice. Because these jobs are not enjoyable, it’s understandable that workers want to put this part of their life behind them as quickly as possible. The more hours you work, the sooner its over. In that sense, it’s sort of like college. You work incredibly hard for several years doing work that isn’t always enjoyable, but helps ensure a prosperous future.

I have a great deal of respect for the workers in China, and would not want to trade places with them at all. At the same time, I wonder what I could give up to move my own earnings to expenses ratio closer to theirs.

The A-word

For those of you who do not know, I might as well make it official. Our son was diagnosed with autism in December.
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Here’s the quick summary of autism for folks whose knowledge on the subject are largely limited to Dustin Hoffman’s performance in Rain Man. Autism is a neurological disorder that limits the brain’s natural development. Research has shown that people with autism tend to have an overgrowth of white brain cells, specifically excess synapses often localized in the logic centers of the brain. That might sound like a good thing, but the running theory is that it crowds out development of the social center of the brain. What’s more, if left unchecked, this premature overgrowth can cause the brain to stop developing early, severely limiting a child’s ability to learn new skills over time. It is, on the grand scheme of things, a relatively new disorder that is still be researched and analyzed. As a result, it goes under a variety of different names, like PDD-NOS, though there are efforts to unify all of the different cases under the general name of Autism Spectrum disorder. Emphasis on the word spectrum. Autism means a whole host of possible things, of which Mr. Hoffman only covered a few. In our case, Alex has had trouble with eye contact, expressing his needs and desires, obsession with things that spin, and not interacting with other kids socially.
Other things in the spectrum that Alex has been blessed to not manifest thus far include seizures, problems with digestion and being unable to express joy.
Reading about autism suggests that it is something of a Rosetta of disorders. There are implications that unlocking the nature of autism stands to reveal a lot of knowledge about other problems people face, including asthma and Alzheimer's. I don’t know why the two examples I can think of both start with A.
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In the short term, what this means is that Alex now qualifies for 20 hours of early intervention services a week instead of the previous 5. This is good news. We’ve only been working with the counselors for a  few months, and he has already made tremendous strides. He can now ask for things very reliably when prompted, and has even begun to ask for things without prompting. He’s become much better at self regulating, and no longer needs to spend long periods spinning a top, playing with a light switch, or growling to calm himself down.
We do not know where he is on the spectrum. Only time will reveal that answer. We do not know what caused the autism to trigger. It is a combination of genetics and environment. I provided the genetics, but we don’t know about the environment part. No one does.
Treating autism is like treating the common cold. The common cold is actually a multitude of different viruses that all manifest similar symptoms, but require different antibodies to fight as they are effectively different viruses. There are a lot of common symptoms, but what works great for one kid may not work at all for another. As such, we’ll probably try most anything once, but with the understanding that our mileage may vary from other people’s anecdotes. For example, one child given a Vitamin E supplement very quickly caught up on their language delay, but that does not mean Vitamin E is a cure for autism, or that it will even help another child who has been diagnosed.
Julie has been reading all of the books by Temple Grandin, a woman with autism born in the late 40’s who was fortunate to have parents who decided to see if treatments could be created rather than simply have their daughter institutionalized. She’s a hero for parents who believe that their child can have a healthy, productive life. That’s the other bit of good news.
Research into treatments has been going on long enough and enough results have been produced that it’s expected to have results, rather than nothing you try ever working. This can definitely be said of Alex. He’s working hard to understand what we’re trying to communicate, and he’s working hard to communicate himself. He’s got the attitude, he’s got a lot of people working hard to help him break down those barriers. I remain confident that he will continue to be successful, and make an excellent big brother.

Mobile App update: It’s not dead!

The last few months have been busy. The time when I’m sitting on the bus is the time I have to work on personal projects. Unfortunately, a project for the church has occupied that time for the last few months. I have been reading profiles of pastors, and lots of them.

Interesting stuff. There are a lot of different pastors out there, all of them very different and quite interesting. It’s made choosing who and who not to interview very challenging. That being said, 80+ profiles each with an average of 30 pages that have to be read like I’m reviewing thesis tends to be rather time intensive, and I’ve been fully preoccupied with that, when not doing work for my job.

I’ve not played videogames in over a month.

The good news? The reading of profiles has tapered off and I’m getting my bus time back to work on personal projects. I’m continuing to develop content for the mobile app, and hope to have something for people to play around with in the next few months.