華仔手記之熄匙務者為俊傑
胡恩威
(政治自白小說,歡迎對座入號)
每天早上醒來感覺特別良好，作為一個問責局長，感覺良好十分重要。我每天都會對著鏡子說＂我是一個好官”真的我真的覺得自已很掂，和我同年入職的同事都沒有我昇得這麼快，成就那麼高. 做官最重要是有得昇，昇得高才可能夠為市民做更大的事。就算今天我昇到咁高，我都會提醒自已，高山還有高山高, high mountain always have higher mountain higher, 不可以過份滿足, 要好努力去做好呢份官. 做官最緊要係識做, 識做官最重要是識做兩個字。做野雖然係好重要，但係識做都好重要，點先至係識做? 就係在識當的時候做識當的事, 好似朝早起身一定係去刷牙而吾系去游水。停車一定係熄匙. 環境一定係要保護啦.
記得幾年前的今天老細叫我pick up環保呢個政策, 我就唸都吾唸就答應了, 環保呢個政策真係好識合我, 因為我是一個吾會做錯野的官, 回想這幾年,香港的環保政策真係做得吾錯not bad, 吾錯, 所以係我下面的環保政策真係無也點錯,推動膠袋稅,反吸煙,新高中課程,研究電動車邊度可以叉電,點叉法呢D政策都無野好錯。環保係一種精神,也是一種科學,所以研究很重要,做每一個決定都是應該先要研究清楚, 依家香港越黎越民主, 民意好重要, 環保一定要有民意support 至得,我吾可以在沒有民意支持下面做野, 每個policy都要好深入地諮詢每一個階層的市民,個班環保團體太心急太精英, 他們可能真的是對,但是對的事不一定是絕對的對。錯又沒有絕對的錯。人生在世但求心安理得,對得住人對得住自己, 人係有好多,所以要對得住甘多人就要好小心的去insult, sori 係consult , 今日我在我的AM福士座駕裏就consult 我個司機阿ken支吾支持”停車熄匙”, 他想也不想就話"支持....”,一定支持, 我仲問阿ken 熄匙之後支吾支持得住, “支持得住' , 聽到阿ken 甘講,真係同我唸的是一樣,停車熄匙一定要支持得住. 環保要成功,一定要付出,仲要change the way we do thing, 現在的人沒有停車熄匙, 所以就要改變他們的行為. 停車熄匙之後香港的空氣質素一定得到大大的改善,根據我的觀察同分析, 目前香港空氣污染最大的源頭最有可能是在街上吸煙的人士, 所以我已經同幾十個政府部門成立了一個工作小組研究禁止戶外吸煙的可能性。政府做事最重要的是團隊精神team spirit,因為每個政策都係同其他政策相互關連, 即是佛教說的互即互入,我中有很多個不同的你,環保政策裏面有教育政策,城市規劃,醫療政策,運輸政策,經濟政策,文化藝術政策,電訊政策保育政策,能源政策好多好多政策,環保政策吾可以甘自私,只是看見自己的需要,而吾理其他政策. 做人做官都不可以自私,我雖然不是佛教徒,但係就好認同佛家的很多道理,佛家叫我們不要執著,做官也是一樣,不可以執著,因為所有事都係無常, 世界每分每秒都係度變,做官一定要娣定D , 以不變應萬變,佛家又說我們要'活在當下', 所以依家係比未來更家重要, 那些反對停車熄匙的人想得太多, 未執行就認定一定有人有可能會熱死。那位長者小巴司機是自願停車熄匙而過身,他的離身令我感到很悲傷。正所謂”熄匙務者為俊傑“, 停車熄匙是識時務的表現. 所以我一定吾會好像他們那樣執著,好似膠袋稅,最後我地政府都無執著地要每一個膠袋都要比稅, 每一件垃圾也不一定要分類, 環保政策的目標係要改變人的心, 行為只係表像,好似今次好多投票支持政改的立法會議員,心裏面不一定是支持政改。反對高鐵的心裏面不一定是反對高鐵。寫到這裏,我真的覺得做官是一件十分有趣和令人愉快的工作,我能夠昇到今天的位置,有人說是因為我進了合適的馬房,特首視我為'契仔', 又有人說因為我做人做事夠”契弟”會逢合老細的想法, 這些想法實在太封建了,他們都受了八卦雜誌的影響,所有人都係衰人,我吾會比這些負能量影響, 能夠做特首的契仔係一種honor, 契弟有什麼不好,關雲長也不就是劉備的契弟嗎? 能夠做到關公那樣的契第真係終身無遺呀.
(政治自白小說,歡迎對座入號)
20100804
20100614
20100515
香港公務員需要再教育 ．胡恩威
九七回歸以來，香港特區政府的管治質素一直為人詬病。不
論是始於前特首董建華時期提出的「知識型社會」，還是時至今天特首曾蔭權常說的「進步發展觀」等宏大施政理念，似乎皆未能真正實踐。反之，各種社會政策諸如教育政策、規劃政策、環保政策、保育政策、文化政策的失誤卻造成了很多社會矛盾，窒礙香港整體發展之餘，普羅大眾的生活質素也每況愈下。歸根究柢，這局面乃由政府管治能力、公務員團體體制落伍所致。
回歸前，英國殖民政府掌控了香港的政策制訂，公務員只須妥善執行政策的工作便可；但九七過後，政制不再一樣。在高官問責制下，局長負責決定政策的具體方向，並須向立法會、持份界別解釋政策以吸納更多支持；而公務員的工作則為政策支援的專業隊伍，應憑其專業知識向局長提供不偏不倚的資料作為施政參考。香港的問責局長是由特首任命，不過特首卻是由間選產生，以致特首及至局長的認受性一直存在問題。
而事實上，目前所見，局長一般也鮮見資深政治人才，未具有彰顯政治家精於制訂、推舉、維護政策的本領。故此，在現時的政制環境下，公務員尤其是專門負責協助政策制訂的政務官，就推動香港管治質素的角色特別重要，因為政務官便是各項經濟、社會、民生政策的推動源和基礎。沒有了政務官這層施政基礎，局長也會缺少施政的參考方向。政府施政與政務官的政策研究能力，其實是緊緊相扣。
特區的管治屢遇挫折，公務員的責任首當其衝。但不能否認，沿襲英國文官制度的香港公務員體制也有其良好的本質。香港公務員制度自殖民政府時期見雛型至今，已建立一套體現公平、公正精神的價值系統。傳統上，香港公務員的工作模式都十分尊重程序，辦事有規有矩且透明度高，政府公布的資料數據準確可靠，這便於市民大眾監察政府、監察官員。可是，隨著社會的變化，政策方向亦須作調整，才能顧及城市的發展需要。二十一世紀，全球先進地區都邁向推動知識型的經濟發展，然而，我們的公務員體制有沒有隨之而變革，還是仍停留在英治時期的官僚模式？
為了應對社會發展取向，真正推動香港作「知識型經濟」，特區政府的首要工作是要重新界定「政務官」的角色。回歸以後，「港人治港」，政務官再不能只作行政秘書之類的工作，而是要求走向專業路線，以學識和政策研究能力，成為政府施政的驅動平台。觀乎現時的公務員制度，政務官似乎只單單側重行政辦事效率而不是以政策質素為本的工作邏輯辦事。政務官須每隔兩至三年調職一次，又怎能鼓勵政務官在其熟悉的政策範疇專注工作，以專業帶動香港長遠發展？在「調來調去」的機制下，政務官的工作變相更像是應付當前政治問題多於制訂長遠政策。
再者，香港公務員現時的考核制度只偏重於上司評語，專業知識考核（如透過考試）則欠奉。政務官的表現取決於其上司的看法，他們的晉升亦不在乎是否擁有相關層面的專業知識。若「知識水平」不是考核政務官的重點，作為公務員之首的政務官憑甚麼特質顯示其「政治中立」的特質？難道是是討上司歡心的政治手腕？
現時公務員的培訓工作主要是公務員事務局下的政府部門「公務員培訓處」負責。不難想像，在向來只視政務官為行政通才的思維模式下，其對政務官的培訓工作亦只多集中在行政、溝通、語文等技巧，至於針對相關學科專業和政策研究的訓練則少之又少。全球各先進地方過去十多年對公務員的專業化都作出不少探求。譬如英國，前首相貝理雅（布萊爾）便訂出公務員往後發展的藍圖，內容重點是強化公務員的政策研究能力。針對戴卓爾年代，太著重公務員管理制度的改革，忽略加強政策質素。貝理雅成立了管理及政策研究中心，並將原有的文官學院納入中心之內，既一方面培訓公務員的政策能力，另方面推展政府的政策研究工作。
同樣曾受英國殖民統治的新加坡，其公務員制度也有所改革，非常注重對高級行政官員及專業技術官員的培訓。新加坡設有專門培訓公務員精英的計劃，獲挑選參與計劃的公務員會安排到政府部門及私人機構實習的機會，待實習過後，當局會評核他們應否加入高級行政官員的行列，還是到特定的部門作專門長遠的發展。整套培訓計劃經過嚴謹設計，而新加坡當局亦設有公務員的進修機制，供他們申請獎學金到海外著名學府，修讀公共行政、公共管理、或與自己個別工作範疇相關的學科，深化知識基礎。
綜觀海外乃至中國大陸的公務員發展趨勢，都以提升專業性為目標，為甚麼唯獨香港的公務員制度仍是這麼落伍，只要求政務官作行政通才的角色？曾特首若要兌現「香港必須發展『知識型經濟』」，公務員團隊也必須循「知識」方向改革。加強公務員專業性，提升各政策局的政策質量是推動香港正面發展的關鍵。面對二十一世紀的經濟需要及競爭，香港的發展再不能單是就政策制訂作取巧式的程序檢討而漠視專業導向的重要性。■
wooyanwai@yahoo.com.hk
九七回歸以來，香港特區政府的管治質素一直為人詬病。不
論是始於前特首董建華時期提出的「知識型社會」，還是時至今天特首曾蔭權常說的「進步發展觀」等宏大施政理念，似乎皆未能真正實踐。反之，各種社會政策諸如教育政策、規劃政策、環保政策、保育政策、文化政策的失誤卻造成了很多社會矛盾，窒礙香港整體發展之餘，普羅大眾的生活質素也每況愈下。歸根究柢，這局面乃由政府管治能力、公務員團體體制落伍所致。
回歸前，英國殖民政府掌控了香港的政策制訂，公務員只須妥善執行政策的工作便可；但九七過後，政制不再一樣。在高官問責制下，局長負責決定政策的具體方向，並須向立法會、持份界別解釋政策以吸納更多支持；而公務員的工作則為政策支援的專業隊伍，應憑其專業知識向局長提供不偏不倚的資料作為施政參考。香港的問責局長是由特首任命，不過特首卻是由間選產生，以致特首及至局長的認受性一直存在問題。
而事實上，目前所見，局長一般也鮮見資深政治人才，未具有彰顯政治家精於制訂、推舉、維護政策的本領。故此，在現時的政制環境下，公務員尤其是專門負責協助政策制訂的政務官，就推動香港管治質素的角色特別重要，因為政務官便是各項經濟、社會、民生政策的推動源和基礎。沒有了政務官這層施政基礎，局長也會缺少施政的參考方向。政府施政與政務官的政策研究能力，其實是緊緊相扣。
特區的管治屢遇挫折，公務員的責任首當其衝。但不能否認，沿襲英國文官制度的香港公務員體制也有其良好的本質。香港公務員制度自殖民政府時期見雛型至今，已建立一套體現公平、公正精神的價值系統。傳統上，香港公務員的工作模式都十分尊重程序，辦事有規有矩且透明度高，政府公布的資料數據準確可靠，這便於市民大眾監察政府、監察官員。可是，隨著社會的變化，政策方向亦須作調整，才能顧及城市的發展需要。二十一世紀，全球先進地區都邁向推動知識型的經濟發展，然而，我們的公務員體制有沒有隨之而變革，還是仍停留在英治時期的官僚模式？
為了應對社會發展取向，真正推動香港作「知識型經濟」，特區政府的首要工作是要重新界定「政務官」的角色。回歸以後，「港人治港」，政務官再不能只作行政秘書之類的工作，而是要求走向專業路線，以學識和政策研究能力，成為政府施政的驅動平台。觀乎現時的公務員制度，政務官似乎只單單側重行政辦事效率而不是以政策質素為本的工作邏輯辦事。政務官須每隔兩至三年調職一次，又怎能鼓勵政務官在其熟悉的政策範疇專注工作，以專業帶動香港長遠發展？在「調來調去」的機制下，政務官的工作變相更像是應付當前政治問題多於制訂長遠政策。
再者，香港公務員現時的考核制度只偏重於上司評語，專業知識考核（如透過考試）則欠奉。政務官的表現取決於其上司的看法，他們的晉升亦不在乎是否擁有相關層面的專業知識。若「知識水平」不是考核政務官的重點，作為公務員之首的政務官憑甚麼特質顯示其「政治中立」的特質？難道是是討上司歡心的政治手腕？
現時公務員的培訓工作主要是公務員事務局下的政府部門「公務員培訓處」負責。不難想像，在向來只視政務官為行政通才的思維模式下，其對政務官的培訓工作亦只多集中在行政、溝通、語文等技巧，至於針對相關學科專業和政策研究的訓練則少之又少。全球各先進地方過去十多年對公務員的專業化都作出不少探求。譬如英國，前首相貝理雅（布萊爾）便訂出公務員往後發展的藍圖，內容重點是強化公務員的政策研究能力。針對戴卓爾年代，太著重公務員管理制度的改革，忽略加強政策質素。貝理雅成立了管理及政策研究中心，並將原有的文官學院納入中心之內，既一方面培訓公務員的政策能力，另方面推展政府的政策研究工作。
同樣曾受英國殖民統治的新加坡，其公務員制度也有所改革，非常注重對高級行政官員及專業技術官員的培訓。新加坡設有專門培訓公務員精英的計劃，獲挑選參與計劃的公務員會安排到政府部門及私人機構實習的機會，待實習過後，當局會評核他們應否加入高級行政官員的行列，還是到特定的部門作專門長遠的發展。整套培訓計劃經過嚴謹設計，而新加坡當局亦設有公務員的進修機制，供他們申請獎學金到海外著名學府，修讀公共行政、公共管理、或與自己個別工作範疇相關的學科，深化知識基礎。
綜觀海外乃至中國大陸的公務員發展趨勢，都以提升專業性為目標，為甚麼唯獨香港的公務員制度仍是這麼落伍，只要求政務官作行政通才的角色？曾特首若要兌現「香港必須發展『知識型經濟』」，公務員團隊也必須循「知識」方向改革。加強公務員專業性，提升各政策局的政策質量是推動香港正面發展的關鍵。面對二十一世紀的經濟需要及競爭，香港的發展再不能單是就政策制訂作取巧式的程序檢討而漠視專業導向的重要性。■
wooyanwai@yahoo.com.hk
20100405
香港娛樂圈隨想
胡恩威
娛樂圈,不論是香港,是日本,是美國,都是以“造假“為本。只是香港娛樂圈太過獨沽一味的低俗,沒有什麼人文情懷,所以是假上加假,或者是說因為要節省成本,所以不用花太多心機和資源去做真。香港娛樂圈的假和西方娛樂圈不同,西方是把假造成很真,要觀眾相信。香港娛樂圈只有娛樂兩個字。即時官能不用思想那一種,這種香港式的假,每年在那些分豬肉樂壇獎典禮上面是一種假,那些打打殺殺黑道片又是另外一種假了,電視台的電視劇也是要假,假的歷史假的感情,假的演技,因為香港是一個不要看見”現實“的狀況 ? 因為現實是是太多可佈了?香港人追求們是“頭腦簡單“生活,最容易的說法是香港人工作壓力大,娛樂就是為了減壓,所以不用太真也不需要太認真, 這種說法成為了一種好像是真理的藉口,也成為了香港娛樂圈退化的理由.
『平常心』是香港常用的一個名詞,意思是“以平常的心態“去處理和面對一些事情,來自佛家的道理,面對什麼大事非常之事都以”平常心〝面對,但是這個平常心,好像都是出自一些不平常人的口中說出來,高官大明星歌星政客商人,記者追問什麼,最典型就是用”用平常心面對“,平常心成為一種model answer, 也許日後通識考試也會以“平常心”作為一種標準答案了香港人的心是平常嗎?,看看那些遍地八卦,那些俗到不能的氣質,娛樂圈是在影響著很多人的價值思想和氣質,香港人的心不正常的可能比平常的多, 非禮勿言勿視勿聽的道理,在香港就是正好相反,非禮之事最多人在言在看在聽。甲由是最“平常”的“生物”,最低最低的,生命力也特別強,也許香港人這些年追求的,正正是一種甲由人生,沒有什麼能夠生存就好了,什麼大智慧大理想太不平常了。
香港娛樂圈是西遊記裏面的各種妖精之集成嗎?白骨精蛛蛛精牛魔王豬八介猴子精牛鬼蛇神一大堆,對號入座看娛樂圈也許是一種樂趣,要有娛樂人的本事,也是要成為一種精,或者是一種魔,才有那種魔力去迷惑人心。娛樂圈就是要放大我的慾望,性的慾望,愛的慾望,恨幻慾望。唐僧也是一種慾望的Icon, 禁慾的慾望,破戒的慾望,白白的皮膚和單純的理想,理想也是一種慾了。慾望之物object of desire, 香港娛樂圈八十年代很會創造object of desire, 男男女女名種類型都有,小生花旦肉旦妖男妖女,有身材的有智慧都任君選擇,今天是平凡的年代,所以平凡入屋就ok, 不要太多幻想了。
胡恩威
娛樂圈,不論是香港,是日本,是美國,都是以“造假“為本。只是香港娛樂圈太過獨沽一味的低俗,沒有什麼人文情懷,所以是假上加假,或者是說因為要節省成本,所以不用花太多心機和資源去做真。香港娛樂圈的假和西方娛樂圈不同,西方是把假造成很真,要觀眾相信。香港娛樂圈只有娛樂兩個字。即時官能不用思想那一種,這種香港式的假,每年在那些分豬肉樂壇獎典禮上面是一種假,那些打打殺殺黑道片又是另外一種假了,電視台的電視劇也是要假,假的歷史假的感情,假的演技,因為香港是一個不要看見”現實“的狀況 ? 因為現實是是太多可佈了?香港人追求們是“頭腦簡單“生活,最容易的說法是香港人工作壓力大,娛樂就是為了減壓,所以不用太真也不需要太認真, 這種說法成為了一種好像是真理的藉口,也成為了香港娛樂圈退化的理由.
『平常心』是香港常用的一個名詞,意思是“以平常的心態“去處理和面對一些事情,來自佛家的道理,面對什麼大事非常之事都以”平常心〝面對,但是這個平常心,好像都是出自一些不平常人的口中說出來,高官大明星歌星政客商人,記者追問什麼,最典型就是用”用平常心面對“,平常心成為一種model answer, 也許日後通識考試也會以“平常心”作為一種標準答案了香港人的心是平常嗎?,看看那些遍地八卦,那些俗到不能的氣質,娛樂圈是在影響著很多人的價值思想和氣質,香港人的心不正常的可能比平常的多, 非禮勿言勿視勿聽的道理,在香港就是正好相反,非禮之事最多人在言在看在聽。甲由是最“平常”的“生物”,最低最低的,生命力也特別強,也許香港人這些年追求的,正正是一種甲由人生,沒有什麼能夠生存就好了,什麼大智慧大理想太不平常了。
香港娛樂圈是西遊記裏面的各種妖精之集成嗎?白骨精蛛蛛精牛魔王豬八介猴子精牛鬼蛇神一大堆,對號入座看娛樂圈也許是一種樂趣,要有娛樂人的本事,也是要成為一種精,或者是一種魔,才有那種魔力去迷惑人心。娛樂圈就是要放大我的慾望,性的慾望,愛的慾望,恨幻慾望。唐僧也是一種慾望的Icon, 禁慾的慾望,破戒的慾望,白白的皮膚和單純的理想,理想也是一種慾了。慾望之物object of desire, 香港娛樂圈八十年代很會創造object of desire, 男男女女名種類型都有,小生花旦肉旦妖男妖女,有身材的有智慧都任君選擇,今天是平凡的年代,所以平凡入屋就ok, 不要太多幻想了。
20100205
香港作為一個現象
胡恩威
香港作為一個現象，香港殖民地的本質，形成了一種不能有著一種可以發展傳統的文化土壤，沒有傳統就是香港的傳統。在香港一百多年的歷史裏面，只有眾多沒有關連的短編小說，而沒有一種像長編小說一樣的連續性。五十六十七十八十九十年代到今天的二十一世紀，都有著各自不相連的事件和運動出現，香港的文化土壤只是一種不能落地生根狀態，也許這就是為什麼香港被稱為文化沙漠的理由，培育文化的土壤太多沙石了太荒涼了，人人為了生存都沒有好好的去思想了，思想被即是反應所取代，反應要馬上要立即，像動物本能一樣，資本主義達爾文進化論適者生存下的一種生態環境，只有很多很多很復雜的思想和頭腦很簡單的動物本能，香港的文化成為了膚淺和反對深度思考反對認真討論，一切都回歸致動物本能的求存，在這個主流膚淺文化之下，其他的文化也成為了一種存在的現像，表像化的多元化現像，多元化的香港現像有的只是多，數量的多而不是多種類的多，不是因為香港沒有文化，香港的文化有很多很多，像沙漠下面也存在很多植物和生物，但都是小小的隨時消失的，香港就是一個充滿著各種小文化的地方，英國人六十年設計出來的文化体制，由博物館表演場地演藝學院都是由西方移殖過來，目的不是建立一個培養人才和傳統的土壤，而是提供一些文娛活動場地，再加上香港過客城市的本質，香港只是一處中轉站，一處轉机到其他地方的地方，八九之後香港那種未大難臨頭已經各自飛的情况。也許香港只是一個不能共患難只能共富貴的地方。居英權加拿大移民，一代人一代人就這樣走了；九七後回來的香港已經是人面全非了，都是過客式的過度式的烟花式的轉眼即逝，第一代第二代第三代第四代第五代一直一直數下去，一代只是年份吧，香港本質上只有一代人，自私的一代，沒有根一代，事事都要馬上解決，馬上上馬，馬上的立刻，分析也沒有時間，找個外國顧問來分析吧，把思考簡約到最簡約，把生活簡化到只有吃，把人生簡化到只有供樓，人人活在無線電視劇的權力遊戲價值系統裹面，利益著數就是原則，沒有原則就是原則，對與錯永遠是相對的，香港只可以是現像，香港不可以是歷史，香港不可以是理論，香港不可以是知識，香港的言論自由只可以是一系列的活動而不是運動，香港的民主運動也只是一系列的活動，而不是深層次的体制改革，因為只有感性式的活動而沒有深刻的去思考。一切都是現像，一切都是活動，這也許是香港深層次茅盾的源頭，應付了一件事又一事，前言不用對後語，每一個人都只有即時利益的立場，批評也被異化了，知識已經沒有需要了，只有一連串的立場，支持和反對，我永遠是對的你永遠是錯的.
胡恩威
香港作為一個現象，香港殖民地的本質，形成了一種不能有著一種可以發展傳統的文化土壤，沒有傳統就是香港的傳統。在香港一百多年的歷史裏面，只有眾多沒有關連的短編小說，而沒有一種像長編小說一樣的連續性。五十六十七十八十九十年代到今天的二十一世紀，都有著各自不相連的事件和運動出現，香港的文化土壤只是一種不能落地生根狀態，也許這就是為什麼香港被稱為文化沙漠的理由，培育文化的土壤太多沙石了太荒涼了，人人為了生存都沒有好好的去思想了，思想被即是反應所取代，反應要馬上要立即，像動物本能一樣，資本主義達爾文進化論適者生存下的一種生態環境，只有很多很多很復雜的思想和頭腦很簡單的動物本能，香港的文化成為了膚淺和反對深度思考反對認真討論，一切都回歸致動物本能的求存，在這個主流膚淺文化之下，其他的文化也成為了一種存在的現像，表像化的多元化現像，多元化的香港現像有的只是多，數量的多而不是多種類的多，不是因為香港沒有文化，香港的文化有很多很多，像沙漠下面也存在很多植物和生物，但都是小小的隨時消失的，香港就是一個充滿著各種小文化的地方，英國人六十年設計出來的文化体制，由博物館表演場地演藝學院都是由西方移殖過來，目的不是建立一個培養人才和傳統的土壤，而是提供一些文娛活動場地，再加上香港過客城市的本質，香港只是一處中轉站，一處轉机到其他地方的地方，八九之後香港那種未大難臨頭已經各自飛的情况。也許香港只是一個不能共患難只能共富貴的地方。居英權加拿大移民，一代人一代人就這樣走了；九七後回來的香港已經是人面全非了，都是過客式的過度式的烟花式的轉眼即逝，第一代第二代第三代第四代第五代一直一直數下去，一代只是年份吧，香港本質上只有一代人，自私的一代，沒有根一代，事事都要馬上解決，馬上上馬，馬上的立刻，分析也沒有時間，找個外國顧問來分析吧，把思考簡約到最簡約，把生活簡化到只有吃，把人生簡化到只有供樓，人人活在無線電視劇的權力遊戲價值系統裹面，利益著數就是原則，沒有原則就是原則，對與錯永遠是相對的，香港只可以是現像，香港不可以是歷史，香港不可以是理論，香港不可以是知識，香港的言論自由只可以是一系列的活動而不是運動，香港的民主運動也只是一系列的活動，而不是深層次的体制改革，因為只有感性式的活動而沒有深刻的去思考。一切都是現像，一切都是活動，這也許是香港深層次茅盾的源頭，應付了一件事又一事，前言不用對後語，每一個人都只有即時利益的立場，批評也被異化了，知識已經沒有需要了，只有一連串的立場，支持和反對，我永遠是對的你永遠是錯的.
20091115
胡恩威： 發展創意產業 教育先行
胡恩威香港大學建築系畢業，現為跨媒體文化人，多年來從事劇場及多媒體創作、文化政策評論、藝術教育、建築設計、電影劇本等工作，他自1988年加入進念．二十面體，現任該機構的行政總裁。自80年代起，他積極參與藝術評論、文化政策研究、城市發展等活動，06年獲政府委任為西九龍文娛藝術區核心文化藝術設施諮詢委員會轄下之表演藝術與旅遊小組成員，今年又獲委任為經機會成員。他亦是香港兆基創意書院創意教育委員會委員，積極推廣藝術教育。
特首在最新一份《施政報告》中將重點放在發展六大產業，追溯政府首次提出六大產業，是今年4月特首主持香港經濟機遇委員會（下稱經機會）第四次會議後發表的措施，目的是發展本地中長期經濟機遇。身兼經機會成員的跨媒體文化人胡恩威認同政府發展六大產業的建議，不過他認為《施政報告》所提出的六大產業發展方向不夠深入，若要有效地發展知識型產業，當由教育入手。作為本地創意專才的一分子，他認為政府應善用社會的自由空間，既培育創意人才，又要教育公眾，營造合適的生態環境，這才是發展文化及創意產業（下稱創意產業）的出路。
本身從事劇場及多媒體創作超過20年的胡恩威認為，香港社會獨有的自由空間，是發展本地創意產業的最大優勢。「相對地說，香港有言論自由，創作上少了很多掣肘，例如內地政府對歌詞、劇本都有審查的機制，反之香港沒有事先審查，這為創意人才提供很大的創作自由度。足見在發展創意產業上，香港已有適當水土，尚欠政府為這片水土所準備的養料。
有知識才有創意
縱有自由的創作空間，但胡恩威不諱言，現時欣賞舞蹈及藝術性較高的舞台劇的觀眾比以前少。「現時在戲劇方面，只有搞笑及愛情喜劇才能吸引觀眾入場，而舞蹈表演的觀眾流失更為明顯，由於舞蹈是與抽象思維相關，香港教育又不著重文學和藝術欣賞，觀眾又怎會懂得欣賞呢？」因此他認為要有效發展創意產業，當從教育及科研入手，這就是他一向強調的——「有知識才有創意。」
創意是長遠投資
胡恩威表示，在經機會「文化及創意產業」（下稱創意產業）的3小時小組研討會中，不同的委員均提出「教育」這兩個字，足足有成70、80次，足見不少委員都明白教育對發展創意產業的重要性。當時他曾指出，現時香港的藝術教育不是必修科，只當作課外活動，但很多國家已把藝術當作必修科，所以香港在人才及觀眾培養方面較為薄弱，加上香港大專教育較倫敦、紐約及其他國家與地區，在量與質方面都還未如理想。
他指出，韓國本身有7,000萬人口，共有700多間電影、電視學院和學系；香港有700萬人，按比例計，應該有70多所才對，然而香港至今仍只有香港演藝學院。他又指，倫敦、紐約有很多藝術學院，學生不為金錢而學，他們想學甚麼藝術範疇都有，可是在香港，學生只是為未來賺錢求生而學，而不是為興趣而學。
他進一步舉例說，韓國在80年代已經投放資源來培育創意人才，因此現時市場上出現很多大型韓國品牌，如Samsung、LG等，由此可見，發展創意產業實屬一項長遠的投資。「創意產業可結合工業來發展，如韓國品牌Samsung花了20年時間來建立品牌，過程中要培育一些具備設計技巧及美學觀念的設計師，須知道要訓練一個人的美學觀念，並非一朝一夕做得到，政府需要作出長遠的投資。」
從教育入手 營造文化環境
創意產業涵蓋範圍甚廣，包括表演藝術、設計、出版、電影、動畫、網絡遊戲……等等，胡恩威認為政府須了解每一個行業的生態環境，才可以知道如何協助各行各業的發展，他以表演藝術為例，該行業的生態環境可以包括由紅磡體育館的演唱會以至一些商業的演出，由1萬個座位至200個座位都有，或是在酒吧聽爵士樂都有；有些團體需要政府補貼，如管弦樂或芭蕾舞等屬於high culture的演出，有些則可以依靠票房的商業模式運作。
不論屬於創意產業內的哪個行業，他都強調要由教育入手，即是培育創意人才及教育觀眾，從而為業界創造合適的生態環境。
「要有良好的教育政策才能帶領市民追求文化，從基礎教育來令到學生對文化藝術產生興趣，以致追求有品味的生活，這樣將來的聽眾、觀眾、受眾的數量才會增加，才可以推動文化產業的長遠發展，為業界營造合適的生態環境。」
為支援業界，政府於6月成立「創意香港」辦公室，並推出一系列計劃，包括：「設計智優計劃」、「電影發展基金」、「電影貸款保證基金」、「創意智優計劃」等以助業界發展及拓展市場。不過胡恩威認為這是不足夠，他建議政府成立一個專責的文化及創意產業局，這樣才能表現出政府有心去發展創意產業。
要為六大產業找定位
胡恩威認為《施政報告》的著眼點始終放在土地運用方面，政府未能提出深層次且具針對性的措施，因此他表示十分失望。「六大產業本為知識型產業，要有效地發展知識型產業，就要得到教育及科研的配合，而不是撥地了事，重點應該放在為六大產業尋找定位，並創造良好的行業發展生態。」他以創意產業為例，如果政府有意將本地的創意產業拓展至全中國的話，就要幫助業界培訓人才，以及打開內地市場才行。
他強調，六大產業並非救助本地經濟的特效藥，而是需要時間來烹調的藥材，所以政府不能心存「賺快錢」的心態，以增加土地來發展產業，否則便變相成為以六大產業作包裝的地產產業。
樓價太高阻礙文化發展
胡恩威表示六大產業是用來豐富市民的生活，而市民能夠安居樂業才能為產業提供理想的發展空間及社會氣氛，換言之，安居是發展產業的基本要素。可是近月來本地樓價一再攀升，他直言樓價太高，加上生活緊張，以致市民太多焦慮，難以安居樂業。既然基本條件也符合不到，又怎能空言發展產業呢？
但他認為經濟與文化並不呈現對立的關係，也不存在很大的矛盾。「文化影響一個人的價值觀，要有文化作基礎，社會及經濟才可以持續地發展。」
胡恩威香港大學建築系畢業，現為跨媒體文化人，多年來從事劇場及多媒體創作、文化政策評論、藝術教育、建築設計、電影劇本等工作，他自1988年加入進念．二十面體，現任該機構的行政總裁。自80年代起，他積極參與藝術評論、文化政策研究、城市發展等活動，06年獲政府委任為西九龍文娛藝術區核心文化藝術設施諮詢委員會轄下之表演藝術與旅遊小組成員，今年又獲委任為經機會成員。他亦是香港兆基創意書院創意教育委員會委員，積極推廣藝術教育。
特首在最新一份《施政報告》中將重點放在發展六大產業，追溯政府首次提出六大產業，是今年4月特首主持香港經濟機遇委員會（下稱經機會）第四次會議後發表的措施，目的是發展本地中長期經濟機遇。身兼經機會成員的跨媒體文化人胡恩威認同政府發展六大產業的建議，不過他認為《施政報告》所提出的六大產業發展方向不夠深入，若要有效地發展知識型產業，當由教育入手。作為本地創意專才的一分子，他認為政府應善用社會的自由空間，既培育創意人才，又要教育公眾，營造合適的生態環境，這才是發展文化及創意產業（下稱創意產業）的出路。
本身從事劇場及多媒體創作超過20年的胡恩威認為，香港社會獨有的自由空間，是發展本地創意產業的最大優勢。「相對地說，香港有言論自由，創作上少了很多掣肘，例如內地政府對歌詞、劇本都有審查的機制，反之香港沒有事先審查，這為創意人才提供很大的創作自由度。足見在發展創意產業上，香港已有適當水土，尚欠政府為這片水土所準備的養料。
有知識才有創意
縱有自由的創作空間，但胡恩威不諱言，現時欣賞舞蹈及藝術性較高的舞台劇的觀眾比以前少。「現時在戲劇方面，只有搞笑及愛情喜劇才能吸引觀眾入場，而舞蹈表演的觀眾流失更為明顯，由於舞蹈是與抽象思維相關，香港教育又不著重文學和藝術欣賞，觀眾又怎會懂得欣賞呢？」因此他認為要有效發展創意產業，當從教育及科研入手，這就是他一向強調的——「有知識才有創意。」
創意是長遠投資
胡恩威表示，在經機會「文化及創意產業」（下稱創意產業）的3小時小組研討會中，不同的委員均提出「教育」這兩個字，足足有成70、80次，足見不少委員都明白教育對發展創意產業的重要性。當時他曾指出，現時香港的藝術教育不是必修科，只當作課外活動，但很多國家已把藝術當作必修科，所以香港在人才及觀眾培養方面較為薄弱，加上香港大專教育較倫敦、紐約及其他國家與地區，在量與質方面都還未如理想。
他指出，韓國本身有7,000萬人口，共有700多間電影、電視學院和學系；香港有700萬人，按比例計，應該有70多所才對，然而香港至今仍只有香港演藝學院。他又指，倫敦、紐約有很多藝術學院，學生不為金錢而學，他們想學甚麼藝術範疇都有，可是在香港，學生只是為未來賺錢求生而學，而不是為興趣而學。
他進一步舉例說，韓國在80年代已經投放資源來培育創意人才，因此現時市場上出現很多大型韓國品牌，如Samsung、LG等，由此可見，發展創意產業實屬一項長遠的投資。「創意產業可結合工業來發展，如韓國品牌Samsung花了20年時間來建立品牌，過程中要培育一些具備設計技巧及美學觀念的設計師，須知道要訓練一個人的美學觀念，並非一朝一夕做得到，政府需要作出長遠的投資。」
從教育入手 營造文化環境
創意產業涵蓋範圍甚廣，包括表演藝術、設計、出版、電影、動畫、網絡遊戲……等等，胡恩威認為政府須了解每一個行業的生態環境，才可以知道如何協助各行各業的發展，他以表演藝術為例，該行業的生態環境可以包括由紅磡體育館的演唱會以至一些商業的演出，由1萬個座位至200個座位都有，或是在酒吧聽爵士樂都有；有些團體需要政府補貼，如管弦樂或芭蕾舞等屬於high culture的演出，有些則可以依靠票房的商業模式運作。
不論屬於創意產業內的哪個行業，他都強調要由教育入手，即是培育創意人才及教育觀眾，從而為業界創造合適的生態環境。
「要有良好的教育政策才能帶領市民追求文化，從基礎教育來令到學生對文化藝術產生興趣，以致追求有品味的生活，這樣將來的聽眾、觀眾、受眾的數量才會增加，才可以推動文化產業的長遠發展，為業界營造合適的生態環境。」
為支援業界，政府於6月成立「創意香港」辦公室，並推出一系列計劃，包括：「設計智優計劃」、「電影發展基金」、「電影貸款保證基金」、「創意智優計劃」等以助業界發展及拓展市場。不過胡恩威認為這是不足夠，他建議政府成立一個專責的文化及創意產業局，這樣才能表現出政府有心去發展創意產業。
要為六大產業找定位
胡恩威認為《施政報告》的著眼點始終放在土地運用方面，政府未能提出深層次且具針對性的措施，因此他表示十分失望。「六大產業本為知識型產業，要有效地發展知識型產業，就要得到教育及科研的配合，而不是撥地了事，重點應該放在為六大產業尋找定位，並創造良好的行業發展生態。」他以創意產業為例，如果政府有意將本地的創意產業拓展至全中國的話，就要幫助業界培訓人才，以及打開內地市場才行。
他強調，六大產業並非救助本地經濟的特效藥，而是需要時間來烹調的藥材，所以政府不能心存「賺快錢」的心態，以增加土地來發展產業，否則便變相成為以六大產業作包裝的地產產業。
樓價太高阻礙文化發展
胡恩威表示六大產業是用來豐富市民的生活，而市民能夠安居樂業才能為產業提供理想的發展空間及社會氣氛，換言之，安居是發展產業的基本要素。可是近月來本地樓價一再攀升，他直言樓價太高，加上生活緊張，以致市民太多焦慮，難以安居樂業。既然基本條件也符合不到，又怎能空言發展產業呢？
但他認為經濟與文化並不呈現對立的關係，也不存在很大的矛盾。「文化影響一個人的價值觀，要有文化作基礎，社會及經濟才可以持續地發展。」
20091028
人文西九還是「搵食」西九？
http://paper.wenweipo.com [2009-10-24]
胡恩威
致西九管理局主席唐英年司長：
唐司長，你好。數周前，本人所屬藝團進念‧二十面體接到一家西九管理局委託的顧問公司來函，表示其正就香港表演藝術項目及場地的市場進行研究。為進一步了解訪問的內容方向，我團要求顧問公司提供一些參考資料予作接受訪問前的準備。顧問公司及後傳來一份「討論指引」，列出了訪問預期涵蓋的範圍和相關的問題。但是，「討論指引」卻只有英文版本，而當中的問題更反映顧問公司的研究竟全是以商業角度來考量，完全漠視司長提出的「人文西九人民西九」發展理念，實在令人費解，故望司長仔細思量並作出回應。
只是研究西九「賺錢」能力？
仔細看看這份只有英文版本的「討論指引」，甚至發覺這項以關於「香港表演藝術項目及場地的市場」為名的研究，其實只是集中研究西九的「賺錢」、「搵錢」能力，而就針對如何提升大眾的文化賞析力，培養藝術家，擴大觀眾群這些更關鍵的部分卻絕無提及，令人驚訝萬分。「討論指引」的字裡行間充分反映顧問公司看待西九如「搵錢」工具的思維，關注的是藝團有關「YourCustomers」，「subscriber」的情況，以作為有關西九市場的參考。
「Customer」即是顧客，到商店買東西的人才稱作顧客。難道西九是商店？是商場？是大型娛樂區？為何顧問公司的思維會把進入劇場的觀眾等同(具消費力的)顧客？顧問公司的市場研究單是傾向藝團和場地所能涵生利潤的能力，強調的只是「商業市場」，只是「顧客」而已。再者，顧問公司研究西九文化場地的方向不應集中於從「需求者」方面出發。文化藝術是應由「供應者」來帶動，即由文化藝術工作者創作和規劃節目，吸引觀眾參與和欣賞，創造需求，建立市場。但如今西九連最基本的定位也沒有，顧問公司在「討論指引」中卻問及西九應設有哪一些場地、市場和觀眾對發展文化場地/項目扮演甚麼角色，這是沒意思的，這是否意味西九根本不是發展文化而只是用來「搵錢」？
誰來培育藝術家和觀眾？
若政府真的希望發展文化，帶領香港由從前所謂的「文化沙漠」這初階，發展至其他先進城市如倫敦、紐約的多元文化，政府和西九管理局現時最要做的是提升文藝教育的質素，提升人民的素質，繼而拓展文化市場。本人希望唐司長能用心檢視西九現時的發展方向，並懇請司長回答以下問題，以說清楚政府和西九管理局如何言行合一，切實推動發展「人文西九 人民西九」，謝謝。
問題一：唐司長在《人文西九人民西九》一文中強調「軟件的配合是西九成功與否的關鍵……即將實施和研究中的舉措，集中在培育藝術家、擴大觀眾群、加強藝術教育三方面」，請問司長說的「培育藝術家」和「加強藝術教育」是由哪一些政策局或機構負責？有關的項目預算一共是多少？具體來說，「培育藝術家」和「加強藝術教育」的工作是如何執行？司長說的「藝術家」確切是指哪類藝術人士；加強藝術教育予哪些人？有否就培育人才制訂指標？若有，那些指標是甚麼？
問題二：顧問公司現正進行的有關表演藝術項目/市場研究，其方向反映了西九的發展是由市場主導，加上政府和西九管理局至今仍未就強化文化軟件的工作例如培訓文藝人才作實質的承擔，請問司長是否已打算將西九商業化、走向發展文化的低俗路？請司長交代西九真正的發展方向。
問題三：政府多次強調發展西九是硬件軟件兼重。但如今所見，西九管理局成立近一年，文化軟件的部分例如西九的定位和節目策略發展方向卻仍未形成，請問原因何在？若司長真的重視西九的軟件規劃，為什麼在規劃西九之初至今都未曾認真聆聽本地文化藝術工作者的專業意見？倒過來卻委託不熟悉本地文藝發展的顧問公司展開市場研究，作為決定西九場地定位的重要參考？若西九的規劃發展嚴重欠缺本地文藝專業的參與，將來落成的西九怎能有公信力？胡恩威謹啟
http://paper.wenweipo.com [2009-10-24]
胡恩威
致西九管理局主席唐英年司長：
唐司長，你好。數周前，本人所屬藝團進念‧二十面體接到一家西九管理局委託的顧問公司來函，表示其正就香港表演藝術項目及場地的市場進行研究。為進一步了解訪問的內容方向，我團要求顧問公司提供一些參考資料予作接受訪問前的準備。顧問公司及後傳來一份「討論指引」，列出了訪問預期涵蓋的範圍和相關的問題。但是，「討論指引」卻只有英文版本，而當中的問題更反映顧問公司的研究竟全是以商業角度來考量，完全漠視司長提出的「人文西九人民西九」發展理念，實在令人費解，故望司長仔細思量並作出回應。
只是研究西九「賺錢」能力？
仔細看看這份只有英文版本的「討論指引」，甚至發覺這項以關於「香港表演藝術項目及場地的市場」為名的研究，其實只是集中研究西九的「賺錢」、「搵錢」能力，而就針對如何提升大眾的文化賞析力，培養藝術家，擴大觀眾群這些更關鍵的部分卻絕無提及，令人驚訝萬分。「討論指引」的字裡行間充分反映顧問公司看待西九如「搵錢」工具的思維，關注的是藝團有關「YourCustomers」，「subscriber」的情況，以作為有關西九市場的參考。
「Customer」即是顧客，到商店買東西的人才稱作顧客。難道西九是商店？是商場？是大型娛樂區？為何顧問公司的思維會把進入劇場的觀眾等同(具消費力的)顧客？顧問公司的市場研究單是傾向藝團和場地所能涵生利潤的能力，強調的只是「商業市場」，只是「顧客」而已。再者，顧問公司研究西九文化場地的方向不應集中於從「需求者」方面出發。文化藝術是應由「供應者」來帶動，即由文化藝術工作者創作和規劃節目，吸引觀眾參與和欣賞，創造需求，建立市場。但如今西九連最基本的定位也沒有，顧問公司在「討論指引」中卻問及西九應設有哪一些場地、市場和觀眾對發展文化場地/項目扮演甚麼角色，這是沒意思的，這是否意味西九根本不是發展文化而只是用來「搵錢」？
誰來培育藝術家和觀眾？
若政府真的希望發展文化，帶領香港由從前所謂的「文化沙漠」這初階，發展至其他先進城市如倫敦、紐約的多元文化，政府和西九管理局現時最要做的是提升文藝教育的質素，提升人民的素質，繼而拓展文化市場。本人希望唐司長能用心檢視西九現時的發展方向，並懇請司長回答以下問題，以說清楚政府和西九管理局如何言行合一，切實推動發展「人文西九 人民西九」，謝謝。
問題一：唐司長在《人文西九人民西九》一文中強調「軟件的配合是西九成功與否的關鍵……即將實施和研究中的舉措，集中在培育藝術家、擴大觀眾群、加強藝術教育三方面」，請問司長說的「培育藝術家」和「加強藝術教育」是由哪一些政策局或機構負責？有關的項目預算一共是多少？具體來說，「培育藝術家」和「加強藝術教育」的工作是如何執行？司長說的「藝術家」確切是指哪類藝術人士；加強藝術教育予哪些人？有否就培育人才制訂指標？若有，那些指標是甚麼？
問題二：顧問公司現正進行的有關表演藝術項目/市場研究，其方向反映了西九的發展是由市場主導，加上政府和西九管理局至今仍未就強化文化軟件的工作例如培訓文藝人才作實質的承擔，請問司長是否已打算將西九商業化、走向發展文化的低俗路？請司長交代西九真正的發展方向。
問題三：政府多次強調發展西九是硬件軟件兼重。但如今所見，西九管理局成立近一年，文化軟件的部分例如西九的定位和節目策略發展方向卻仍未形成，請問原因何在？若司長真的重視西九的軟件規劃，為什麼在規劃西九之初至今都未曾認真聆聽本地文化藝術工作者的專業意見？倒過來卻委託不熟悉本地文藝發展的顧問公司展開市場研究，作為決定西九場地定位的重要參考？若西九的規劃發展嚴重欠缺本地文藝專業的參與，將來落成的西九怎能有公信力？胡恩威謹啟
20090526
人文西九人民西九？
人文西九人民西九 ?
唐司長，你好！
讀過了唐司長兩個多星期前在報章發表的文章《人文西九人民西九》，當中提及到的西九六大願景和列出的(即將實施和研究中)的十多項舉措，本人認為都是一些方向正確的原則性重點。但是，本人更關注的是那些措施將如何落實執行。政府或唐司長有否就那些方向可取的舉措構思周詳的執行方案？
在唐司長文章的末段提出的多項應對加強文化軟件的舉措，雖然都是圍繞着「培育藝術家」、「擴大觀眾群」、「加強公眾藝術教育」的方向，但卻沒有附以具體的執行綱領，諸如該些舉措是由哪個部門哪個組織負責、會以怎樣的形式準則、基於哪些檢討和問責機制執行，以及清楚列出各項舉措的執行時間表等。
有關西九的討論已輾轉多年，如今各項針對其發展的舉措只是娓娓道出，卻欠缺具體封行細則的表述，唐司長，大家怎能不擔心這只會可能是「講一套做一套」呢？
以下是本人細閱唐司長提出的多點加強文化軟件舉措後想到的10點問題，請作為西九管理局主席的唐司長逐一解答，好讓市民大眾也可更清楚了解西九的發展進程，以作更具建設性的評議和審視。
問題1.
就「強化公眾藝術教育」，得悉現時教育局、民政局、康文署，以致各大藝團都會做一些此類工作，政府有沒有就各方的工作作出清晰的分工？政府如何協調各部門和組織的工作？政府有沒有制訂具體的藍圖訂明強化公眾藝術教育的政策、列出哪單位負責哪方面的藝術教育工作？
問題 2.
跟前題同出一轍，就司長提出的措施「發揮香港藝術節的品牌效應」，政府各部門將如何協調推動呢？民政局和商務及經濟發展局或其他相關組織會否就此有一些分工安排？若有，司長可否交代具體的周詳計劃及期望達到的目標？
問題3.
就「支持藝團和藝術工作者赴內地和海外演出、參展、交流」，政府會在哪方面作出支持？是財政資源上的支持還是交流網絡拓展方面上的支持？若是財政上的支持，政府的預算是多少？有沒有設立交流次數、海外演出參展次數的上限？若是拓展交流網絡的支持，可否交代具體的工作時間表？
問題4.
就「將更多文藝活動帶進地區和學校」，唐司長這裏所指的文藝活動包括甚麼？政府安排哪些組織負責推行此項措施？是安排藝術團體定期到社區會堂或學校表演、教授文藝相關課程？還是由康文署和區議會組織活動？政府有否預留相應的資源予負責組織，並同時清楚訂出他們須作的工作？
問題5.
就「為年輕藝術工作者和中小型藝團物色表演場地並提供資助」，政府過往規劃土地用途時，是以哪些準則衡量地點是否適合發展成藝術表演場地？現時有沒有一些地點已在政府考慮之中，擬作為予年輕藝術工作者和中小型藝團的表演場地？若有，選址是甚麼？政府何時完成物色場地的過程？及將如何資助藝術工作者和藝團租用藝術表演場地？
問題6.
就「新高中學制引進更多元的藝術學習機會，並加強對藝術教師的支援」，新高中學制明年便會正式推行，直至現在，政府對藝術教師作出了哪些具體的支援？有沒有檢討成效？政府未來又會如何協助藝術教師適應配合新學制？會否對老師提供特定的培訓？若會，培訓課程的內容是甚麼、由誰負責制訂？
問題7.
就「檢討演藝學院的定位」和「增設學位和培訓職位，專門培養藝術行政人員」，首先請問已說了至少兩年的演藝學院定位檢討何時才會有結果報告？負責檢討演藝學院定位的人員是怎樣產生？他們擁有甚麼資歷、會根據哪些準則作檢討？請政府馬上交代檢討演藝學院定位的進度；另外，在主要培訓藝術人才的學院定位還未完全清晰時，政府憑甚麼準則釐定向哪些學院增設藝術相關的課程學位、並確保課程可真正培育文藝人才？
問題8.
就「鼓勵個人和商界贊助藝術」，政府將推行哪些實質的政策或措施鼓勵個人和商界贊助藝術？在現時還未有相應的法例如博物館法的配合下，政府如何締造一個可信賴的投資環境吸引個人和商界贊助藝術活動？請唐司長說明具體的安排。
問題9.
就「進行政策研究」，唐司長所指的政策研究包括哪些範疇？政府現時有哪些研究項目是針對強化文化軟件？該些研究是由誰負責開展？研究的經費是多少？為期多久？政府有沒有就文化發展訂立長期性的政策研究計劃？若有，投放的資源是多少？
問題10.
最後，請問政府如何確保提出的舉措是由具資格的文化專才來執行管理呢？政府現時有沒有制訂評估負責文化相關政策的官員是否稱職，以保證文化工作的管治具質素？
美其言「人文西九人民西九」是不足夠的，現在大眾期望的，是司長可領導各部門有系統、有計劃地執行各項推動文化軟件的政策。故此，本人十分期待司長對以上的問題可作出詳盡的答覆，謝謝。
胡恩威
人文西九人民西九 ?
唐司長，你好！
讀過了唐司長兩個多星期前在報章發表的文章《人文西九人民西九》，當中提及到的西九六大願景和列出的(即將實施和研究中)的十多項舉措，本人認為都是一些方向正確的原則性重點。但是，本人更關注的是那些措施將如何落實執行。政府或唐司長有否就那些方向可取的舉措構思周詳的執行方案？
在唐司長文章的末段提出的多項應對加強文化軟件的舉措，雖然都是圍繞着「培育藝術家」、「擴大觀眾群」、「加強公眾藝術教育」的方向，但卻沒有附以具體的執行綱領，諸如該些舉措是由哪個部門哪個組織負責、會以怎樣的形式準則、基於哪些檢討和問責機制執行，以及清楚列出各項舉措的執行時間表等。
有關西九的討論已輾轉多年，如今各項針對其發展的舉措只是娓娓道出，卻欠缺具體封行細則的表述，唐司長，大家怎能不擔心這只會可能是「講一套做一套」呢？
以下是本人細閱唐司長提出的多點加強文化軟件舉措後想到的10點問題，請作為西九管理局主席的唐司長逐一解答，好讓市民大眾也可更清楚了解西九的發展進程，以作更具建設性的評議和審視。
問題1.
就「強化公眾藝術教育」，得悉現時教育局、民政局、康文署，以致各大藝團都會做一些此類工作，政府有沒有就各方的工作作出清晰的分工？政府如何協調各部門和組織的工作？政府有沒有制訂具體的藍圖訂明強化公眾藝術教育的政策、列出哪單位負責哪方面的藝術教育工作？
問題 2.
跟前題同出一轍，就司長提出的措施「發揮香港藝術節的品牌效應」，政府各部門將如何協調推動呢？民政局和商務及經濟發展局或其他相關組織會否就此有一些分工安排？若有，司長可否交代具體的周詳計劃及期望達到的目標？
問題3.
就「支持藝團和藝術工作者赴內地和海外演出、參展、交流」，政府會在哪方面作出支持？是財政資源上的支持還是交流網絡拓展方面上的支持？若是財政上的支持，政府的預算是多少？有沒有設立交流次數、海外演出參展次數的上限？若是拓展交流網絡的支持，可否交代具體的工作時間表？
問題4.
就「將更多文藝活動帶進地區和學校」，唐司長這裏所指的文藝活動包括甚麼？政府安排哪些組織負責推行此項措施？是安排藝術團體定期到社區會堂或學校表演、教授文藝相關課程？還是由康文署和區議會組織活動？政府有否預留相應的資源予負責組織，並同時清楚訂出他們須作的工作？
問題5.
就「為年輕藝術工作者和中小型藝團物色表演場地並提供資助」，政府過往規劃土地用途時，是以哪些準則衡量地點是否適合發展成藝術表演場地？現時有沒有一些地點已在政府考慮之中，擬作為予年輕藝術工作者和中小型藝團的表演場地？若有，選址是甚麼？政府何時完成物色場地的過程？及將如何資助藝術工作者和藝團租用藝術表演場地？
問題6.
就「新高中學制引進更多元的藝術學習機會，並加強對藝術教師的支援」，新高中學制明年便會正式推行，直至現在，政府對藝術教師作出了哪些具體的支援？有沒有檢討成效？政府未來又會如何協助藝術教師適應配合新學制？會否對老師提供特定的培訓？若會，培訓課程的內容是甚麼、由誰負責制訂？
問題7.
就「檢討演藝學院的定位」和「增設學位和培訓職位，專門培養藝術行政人員」，首先請問已說了至少兩年的演藝學院定位檢討何時才會有結果報告？負責檢討演藝學院定位的人員是怎樣產生？他們擁有甚麼資歷、會根據哪些準則作檢討？請政府馬上交代檢討演藝學院定位的進度；另外，在主要培訓藝術人才的學院定位還未完全清晰時，政府憑甚麼準則釐定向哪些學院增設藝術相關的課程學位、並確保課程可真正培育文藝人才？
問題8.
就「鼓勵個人和商界贊助藝術」，政府將推行哪些實質的政策或措施鼓勵個人和商界贊助藝術？在現時還未有相應的法例如博物館法的配合下，政府如何締造一個可信賴的投資環境吸引個人和商界贊助藝術活動？請唐司長說明具體的安排。
問題9.
就「進行政策研究」，唐司長所指的政策研究包括哪些範疇？政府現時有哪些研究項目是針對強化文化軟件？該些研究是由誰負責開展？研究的經費是多少？為期多久？政府有沒有就文化發展訂立長期性的政策研究計劃？若有，投放的資源是多少？
問題10.
最後，請問政府如何確保提出的舉措是由具資格的文化專才來執行管理呢？政府現時有沒有制訂評估負責文化相關政策的官員是否稱職，以保證文化工作的管治具質素？
美其言「人文西九人民西九」是不足夠的，現在大眾期望的，是司長可領導各部門有系統、有計劃地執行各項推動文化軟件的政策。故此，本人十分期待司長對以上的問題可作出詳盡的答覆，謝謝。
胡恩威
20090517
街道研究
街道是城市的形式，每個城市均有自身的街道格式，紐約的打格子模式，像數學的橫直表格，直是avenue大道，橫是以阿拉伯數目字為結構的街，紐約舊城一帶是不規則的街道棋式，是典型早期西方城市的格局。紐約的路很易走，找對橫直位置便好了。街的長和闊度影響著一個城市的生活模式。倫敦的街道格局也是不規則的交錯連橫，因為是老城，老街小街特別多，像迷宮，倫敦城市特色是那大大小小的廣場square,早期的城市均以廣場作多用途公共空間，經濟的市集，政治集會，各種節日的慶祝活動。香港也是一個街道城市，但這十多年的城市規劃和舊區重建本身是沒有街道觀念的，新市鎮是沒有街道只有一個一個自我中心封閉式的商場，像天水圍將軍澳，街道是開放的外向的，商場是內向的，總是會一個大業主控制的，街道是一種真正的公共空間，但香港的舊區重建就目的不是優化街道，而是要把街道消滅，把香港舊區的街道文化和以小商戶為主導的方式，完全改變為大大財團完全控制，香港因此失去大量宝貴的舊區特色文化，不單止是舊區重建，整個香港政府的各項改策，運輸偏旦港鐵消滅單車，一條又一條高架高速路，不發小販牌，消滅大排檔，都是要把街道消滅，這是英國人高地價政策留下來的惡是老城，老街小街特別多，像迷宮，倫敦城市特色是那大大小小的廣場square,早期的城市均以廣場作多用途公共空間，經濟的市集，政治集會，各種節日的慶祝活動。香港也是一個街道城市，但這十多年的城市規劃和舊區重建本身是沒有街道觀念的，新市鎮是沒有街道只有一個一個自我中心封閉式的商場，像天水圍將軍澳，街道是開放的外向的，商場是內向的，總是會一個大業主控制的，街道是一種真正的公共空間，但香港的舊區重建就目的不是優化街道，而是要把街道消滅，把香港舊區的街道文化和以小商戶為主導的方式，完全改變為大大財團完全控制，香港因此失去大量宝貴的舊區特色文化，不單止是舊區重建，整個香港政府的各項改策，運輸偏旦港鐵消滅單車，一條又一條高架高速路，不發小販牌，消滅大排檔，都是要把街道消滅，這是英國人高地價政策留下來的惡果！
街道是城市的形式，每個城市均有自身的街道格式，紐約的打格子模式，像數學的橫直表格，直是avenue大道，橫是以阿拉伯數目字為結構的街，紐約舊城一帶是不規則的街道棋式，是典型早期西方城市的格局。紐約的路很易走，找對橫直位置便好了。街的長和闊度影響著一個城市的生活模式。倫敦的街道格局也是不規則的交錯連橫，因為是老城，老街小街特別多，像迷宮，倫敦城市特色是那大大小小的廣場square,早期的城市均以廣場作多用途公共空間，經濟的市集，政治集會，各種節日的慶祝活動。香港也是一個街道城市，但這十多年的城市規劃和舊區重建本身是沒有街道觀念的，新市鎮是沒有街道只有一個一個自我中心封閉式的商場，像天水圍將軍澳，街道是開放的外向的，商場是內向的，總是會一個大業主控制的，街道是一種真正的公共空間，但香港的舊區重建就目的不是優化街道，而是要把街道消滅，把香港舊區的街道文化和以小商戶為主導的方式，完全改變為大大財團完全控制，香港因此失去大量宝貴的舊區特色文化，不單止是舊區重建，整個香港政府的各項改策，運輸偏旦港鐵消滅單車，一條又一條高架高速路，不發小販牌，消滅大排檔，都是要把街道消滅，這是英國人高地價政策留下來的惡是老城，老街小街特別多，像迷宮，倫敦城市特色是那大大小小的廣場square,早期的城市均以廣場作多用途公共空間，經濟的市集，政治集會，各種節日的慶祝活動。香港也是一個街道城市，但這十多年的城市規劃和舊區重建本身是沒有街道觀念的，新市鎮是沒有街道只有一個一個自我中心封閉式的商場，像天水圍將軍澳，街道是開放的外向的，商場是內向的，總是會一個大業主控制的，街道是一種真正的公共空間，但香港的舊區重建就目的不是優化街道，而是要把街道消滅，把香港舊區的街道文化和以小商戶為主導的方式，完全改變為大大財團完全控制，香港因此失去大量宝貴的舊區特色文化，不單止是舊區重建，整個香港政府的各項改策，運輸偏旦港鐵消滅單車，一條又一條高架高速路，不發小販牌，消滅大排檔，都是要把街道消滅，這是英國人高地價政策留下來的惡果！
20090503
電影的質素是取決於電視
電視的角色很重要，它不僅影響市民的價值觀，亦是傳媒的龍頭，它可培育明星、以致音樂出版等多項創意產業，牽連甚廣。例如，電影的質素是取決於電視，電視理應為電影的編劇、導演、演員、技術人員作培訓所，但香港的電視多年流水作業，培養不到人才，輸出創意產業的軟件人才配套。要改善電視的節目質素，推動資訊自由及多元，以致為創意產業灌輸人才，檢討廣播政策刻不容緩。首先是更新發牌制度，其實香港的市場並不少，我們實在是有需要改善現時傳媒產品單元化，壟斷的局面，引入多元，開放頻道，以免大氣電波被浪費。其二是傳媒要重新定位，取消跨媒體擁有權的限制服務區域性；其三是政府應著手培訓廣播人才。最後，政府在制訂廣播政策的時候，應連繫本港電訊、廣播、文化工業的結構和市場，進行宏觀的分析和研究，從而提出一套長遠的傳媒政策。
若負責廣播政策的官員/人員質素不夠，一些在廣播政策中的基本原則也會難以體現，導致我們現時傳媒十分單一化、走向低級而不是多元化的結果。由於本港的廣播未合時宜作適當的支援，令傳媒的發展湧現著危機。傳媒發展萎縮內向，不夠多元，不但影響了我們的選擇，也會直接影響言論自由的質素。在民主社會中，由不同的競爭對手擁有資訊資源是十分重要的。但現時的發牌制度令傳媒只集中由一、兩間企業支配，這將會嚴重影響本地的資訊自由，令內容單一化；而傳媒亦容易變了政府的喉舌、只是靠落廣告，而不是跟著市場規則運行。
電視的角色很重要，它不僅影響市民的價值觀，亦是傳媒的龍頭，它可培育明星、以致音樂出版等多項創意產業，牽連甚廣。例如，電影的質素是取決於電視，電視理應為電影的編劇、導演、演員、技術人員作培訓所，但香港的電視多年流水作業，培養不到人才，輸出創意產業的軟件人才配套。要改善電視的節目質素，推動資訊自由及多元，以致為創意產業灌輸人才，檢討廣播政策刻不容緩。首先是更新發牌制度，其實香港的市場並不少，我們實在是有需要改善現時傳媒產品單元化，壟斷的局面，引入多元，開放頻道，以免大氣電波被浪費。其二是傳媒要重新定位，取消跨媒體擁有權的限制服務區域性；其三是政府應著手培訓廣播人才。最後，政府在制訂廣播政策的時候，應連繫本港電訊、廣播、文化工業的結構和市場，進行宏觀的分析和研究，從而提出一套長遠的傳媒政策。
若負責廣播政策的官員/人員質素不夠，一些在廣播政策中的基本原則也會難以體現，導致我們現時傳媒十分單一化、走向低級而不是多元化的結果。由於本港的廣播未合時宜作適當的支援，令傳媒的發展湧現著危機。傳媒發展萎縮內向，不夠多元，不但影響了我們的選擇，也會直接影響言論自由的質素。在民主社會中，由不同的競爭對手擁有資訊資源是十分重要的。但現時的發牌制度令傳媒只集中由一、兩間企業支配，這將會嚴重影響本地的資訊自由，令內容單一化；而傳媒亦容易變了政府的喉舌、只是靠落廣告，而不是跟著市場規則運行。
20090428
太多成龍
胡恩威
成龍關於中國人要管才不亂的言論, 先不要管是不是心直口快又或者是什麼無心,那是一種不可能有結論的討論。成龍的說法其實並不新鮮,那是典型怕事小商人的心聲, 以為只要表面太平,沒有反對聲音,就是好了,這種一箱情願其實也是一種不負責反智心態。香港台灣太自由,所以亂 ? 香港和台灣現在亂在那裏? 桃戰權威就是亂嗎 ? 台灣過去幾年的各項社會運動有沒有破壞台灣社會的安定?民進黨沒有當選台灣有沒有大亂 ? 成龍認為香港台灣亂在那裏? 用陰謀論我們會說成龍要給大陸貼金, 潛台詞是大陸沒有太多自由,所以沒有香港和台灣的亂, 但中國真的不亂嗎 ? 台灣和香港是明”亂”,中國是暗”亂”,香港和台灣的政洽制度透明度高, 所以好與不好也可以比較容易見到, 中國內地就是另一回事了, 中國地方大,亂像在不同區域也不一樣,這些道理都知道, 因為成龍是大人物,這種言論當然是被傳媒大做文章,一面指責成龍不對, 但也是把成龍當作陳冠希那樣暴民式指責, 成龍這種言論也是自降身價, 不合身份, 身為”國際巨星”見個世界見個世面,理應有些智慧之言,這種”街佬維國阿伯之言,真的有失身份。當然若我用佛洛依德潛意識分析成龍心態,那太多自由所以要管其實是成龍大哥生性風流的自我反思, 成大哥自身太自由了所以私生活都有些亂,要管一下才不會出亂. 這也是有些典型功利的夫妻之道,”當妻子不可以讓丈夫有太多自由,不然一定會亂! 政府和人民的關係不是男女關係, 政府要”管”人民和人民有沒有自由沒有關係, 人民質素高政府素質高才可以把人民”管”得住,中國的困局是,人民素質偏差太遠,香港台灣的能人異士太都只從商可只為自己利益服務,很少從政為公眾做事, 所以政府管治人才水平平均不高也是事實,從政人仕平均水平低也是事實,歐美教育和社會制度比輕有些分流,商界也有的人願全識從政。日本韓國這些亞州國家也有自身培育政治政府人才的布局,香港和台灣的政冶和政府人才培育,根本無人關心, 如何吸納人才從政也是缺乏深刻的分析。陳水扁這個個案也是民碎主義下,別無選擇的結果, 中國是政治先於經濟,所以總有人才是在黨和政府系統裏面,在不久將來中國也是政治制度集權,經濟人才也會被政治吸納,所以中國的政治管治能力是有的,香港台灣正正是相反,經濟不需服從政治,經濟具成就的能人也只會當政府顧問,不會全職問政執政。現在政府沒有機威是因為政府管治能力低,而不是單單有太多自由。
成龍大哥的那個“大哥”也是來自那種江湖味道,江湖也是自由人的世界,沒有自由也不是江湖了,成大哥這些年都喜歡像叔父輩那樣教訓人,但說一套做那一套也是光天化日人人看見,成大哥真的關心香港臺灣也許應該去上上政治課,知道多一些政府具体的運作, 也許會對”自由””太自由”會有多一些體會。
胡恩威
成龍關於中國人要管才不亂的言論, 先不要管是不是心直口快又或者是什麼無心,那是一種不可能有結論的討論。成龍的說法其實並不新鮮,那是典型怕事小商人的心聲, 以為只要表面太平,沒有反對聲音,就是好了,這種一箱情願其實也是一種不負責反智心態。香港台灣太自由,所以亂 ? 香港和台灣現在亂在那裏? 桃戰權威就是亂嗎 ? 台灣過去幾年的各項社會運動有沒有破壞台灣社會的安定?民進黨沒有當選台灣有沒有大亂 ? 成龍認為香港台灣亂在那裏? 用陰謀論我們會說成龍要給大陸貼金, 潛台詞是大陸沒有太多自由,所以沒有香港和台灣的亂, 但中國真的不亂嗎 ? 台灣和香港是明”亂”,中國是暗”亂”,香港和台灣的政洽制度透明度高, 所以好與不好也可以比較容易見到, 中國內地就是另一回事了, 中國地方大,亂像在不同區域也不一樣,這些道理都知道, 因為成龍是大人物,這種言論當然是被傳媒大做文章,一面指責成龍不對, 但也是把成龍當作陳冠希那樣暴民式指責, 成龍這種言論也是自降身價, 不合身份, 身為”國際巨星”見個世界見個世面,理應有些智慧之言,這種”街佬維國阿伯之言,真的有失身份。當然若我用佛洛依德潛意識分析成龍心態,那太多自由所以要管其實是成龍大哥生性風流的自我反思, 成大哥自身太自由了所以私生活都有些亂,要管一下才不會出亂. 這也是有些典型功利的夫妻之道,”當妻子不可以讓丈夫有太多自由,不然一定會亂! 政府和人民的關係不是男女關係, 政府要”管”人民和人民有沒有自由沒有關係, 人民質素高政府素質高才可以把人民”管”得住,中國的困局是,人民素質偏差太遠,香港台灣的能人異士太都只從商可只為自己利益服務,很少從政為公眾做事, 所以政府管治人才水平平均不高也是事實,從政人仕平均水平低也是事實,歐美教育和社會制度比輕有些分流,商界也有的人願全識從政。日本韓國這些亞州國家也有自身培育政治政府人才的布局,香港和台灣的政冶和政府人才培育,根本無人關心, 如何吸納人才從政也是缺乏深刻的分析。陳水扁這個個案也是民碎主義下,別無選擇的結果, 中國是政治先於經濟,所以總有人才是在黨和政府系統裏面,在不久將來中國也是政治制度集權,經濟人才也會被政治吸納,所以中國的政治管治能力是有的,香港台灣正正是相反,經濟不需服從政治,經濟具成就的能人也只會當政府顧問,不會全職問政執政。現在政府沒有機威是因為政府管治能力低,而不是單單有太多自由。
成龍大哥的那個“大哥”也是來自那種江湖味道,江湖也是自由人的世界,沒有自由也不是江湖了,成大哥這些年都喜歡像叔父輩那樣教訓人,但說一套做那一套也是光天化日人人看見,成大哥真的關心香港臺灣也許應該去上上政治課,知道多一些政府具体的運作, 也許會對”自由””太自由”會有多一些體會。
20090404
自己查自己
香港樹木政策的落後早在十多年前己經先後已有香港學者專家提出,落後的重點在於政府內部沒有 任何真正受過全面樹木植物學訓練的樹木專家, 那個由唐司長領導的樹木小組,也是要出人命才願意做些門表”程序”儉討, 而不是全面的樹木政策大改革!那個小組都是清一色的官員,都是程序專家,而不是以”樹木”知識為本的專家。政府要馬上做的是全面改革目前“白痴”的樹木保育體制,引入真正樹木專家,才是對正下藥,現在政府是自己查自己,根本是浪費時間. 為什麼不邀請港大的詹教授,作個全面研究,研究目前政府和樹木有關的決策制度, 專業人才培育和政府分工問題,自從兩個市政局廢除之後,香港的巿政越管越差,食環署康文署嚴重落後,公園政策,文藝政策,垃圾處理,樹木政策,小商販政策越來越“官僚”,這次樹木人命事件的整個過程,完全暴露了目前政府制度混亂權責不清知識不足意識不強的困局,現在唐司長自己查自己也像董特首那時查沙士一樣,出來的也是一些官僚自我感覺良好的程序改革建議。這次政府的麻木不仁再次說明改革公務員制度之必要和重要。現在的通才政務員三年調任一次根本不能應付目前香港發展之需要,不考的是政治問責局長也不是專家,負責樹木的康文署署長也無需因此而受處分或調識,無人問責,無人負責 !!
香港樹木政策的落後早在十多年前己經先後已有香港學者專家提出,落後的重點在於政府內部沒有 任何真正受過全面樹木植物學訓練的樹木專家, 那個由唐司長領導的樹木小組,也是要出人命才願意做些門表”程序”儉討, 而不是全面的樹木政策大改革!那個小組都是清一色的官員,都是程序專家,而不是以”樹木”知識為本的專家。政府要馬上做的是全面改革目前“白痴”的樹木保育體制,引入真正樹木專家,才是對正下藥,現在政府是自己查自己,根本是浪費時間. 為什麼不邀請港大的詹教授,作個全面研究,研究目前政府和樹木有關的決策制度, 專業人才培育和政府分工問題,自從兩個市政局廢除之後,香港的巿政越管越差,食環署康文署嚴重落後,公園政策,文藝政策,垃圾處理,樹木政策,小商販政策越來越“官僚”,這次樹木人命事件的整個過程,完全暴露了目前政府制度混亂權責不清知識不足意識不強的困局,現在唐司長自己查自己也像董特首那時查沙士一樣,出來的也是一些官僚自我感覺良好的程序改革建議。這次政府的麻木不仁再次說明改革公務員制度之必要和重要。現在的通才政務員三年調任一次根本不能應付目前香港發展之需要,不考的是政治問責局長也不是專家,負責樹木的康文署署長也無需因此而受處分或調識,無人問責,無人負責 !!
20090302
你個度
香港廣東話口語的"你個度"和普通話"那話兒"意思相同, 都是字面"正常"暗意帶著和那個男性性器官有關,"信吾信我打爆你個度?""Miss 時,拒打我個度""我個度好痛?""你個度係邊度?",除了"你個度"還有"你條野""你枝野" "好長好粗。"這種"意識不良"的市井術語, 文字上沒有什麼"不雅",但也是意淫,有些是具像的, "食蕉"本身也只是形容吃香蕉的行為, 但"食蕉"的食和蕉,食的蕉當然不是指"香蕉",而是指食"你個度", 用"食蕉"兩字來罵人也是很常常聽到,"食蕉啦你!""食蕉"給合"啦你"才順口有力 ,還有"正唸樣"不是說你的樣貌像在思考(唸野) ,而是在罵你的樣貌像"個度", 唸樣曾經是小學生學習光明正大"講粗口的主要名詞", "唸野個樣"就係唸樣啦! "正唸樣"和"正契弟"都是罵男人常用的三字詞, 罵女人的都是和"雞"字,"臭"字有個共,"正臭X",X這個X通常都是和西方的"西"字有關。門裏有個小字, 西字, 能字都是廣東"粗話"主要動詞形容詞名詞, 但門中有日,有月,是很雅的間和閒,空間的間,空閒的閒, 小聰明的用"像型"文字分析, 門中有小的門, 可能不是指"門",而是一雙腿,"小"是在兩腿之間, "小"就是"那話兒"的形像, 而不是大小的小。
香港廣東話口語的"你個度"和普通話"那話兒"意思相同, 都是字面"正常"暗意帶著和那個男性性器官有關,"信吾信我打爆你個度?""Miss 時,拒打我個度""我個度好痛?""你個度係邊度?",除了"你個度"還有"你條野""你枝野" "好長好粗。"這種"意識不良"的市井術語, 文字上沒有什麼"不雅",但也是意淫,有些是具像的, "食蕉"本身也只是形容吃香蕉的行為, 但"食蕉"的食和蕉,食的蕉當然不是指"香蕉",而是指食"你個度", 用"食蕉"兩字來罵人也是很常常聽到,"食蕉啦你!""食蕉"給合"啦你"才順口有力 ,還有"正唸樣"不是說你的樣貌像在思考(唸野) ,而是在罵你的樣貌像"個度", 唸樣曾經是小學生學習光明正大"講粗口的主要名詞", "唸野個樣"就係唸樣啦! "正唸樣"和"正契弟"都是罵男人常用的三字詞, 罵女人的都是和"雞"字,"臭"字有個共,"正臭X",X這個X通常都是和西方的"西"字有關。門裏有個小字, 西字, 能字都是廣東"粗話"主要動詞形容詞名詞, 但門中有日,有月,是很雅的間和閒,空間的間,空閒的閒, 小聰明的用"像型"文字分析, 門中有小的門, 可能不是指"門",而是一雙腿,"小"是在兩腿之間, "小"就是"那話兒"的形像, 而不是大小的小。
20090220
公信力第幾報？
自稱公信第一的大報頭條，把石峽尾報導成一種公共資源浪費，大大隻字七成無人！好像文化創意人又在占香港人的便宜，記者去了三次，還是農曆新年前後在放假期間去採訪，便下結論說空置無人，我以為真的是七成無人租，馬上通知一些設計師朋友，去信政府求租，一查之下己經滿座租滿了，不知公信力第一報說的無人七成是什麼道理？還有的是公信力第一報有沒有先好好研究創意產業園是怎樣運作，以一種十分膚淺的手法去提出指控文化工作者浪費公眾資源，五元一尺是平是貴也應要比較一下同區和其他區的斤租金水平。香港主流傳媒不尊重和不喜愛文化是現况，不可一日改變，但新聞尊業操守是十分重要，公信力第一報這樣粗糙的採訪手法，何來公信力？當然又可以大大聲以傳煤監督的理由，去找新闐來做。 新聞自由是應該建基於新聞專業的操守，香港傅媒最近十多年是走火入摩，狗仔八卦，小報扮大報，大報小報化，起題要激要爆，用字充滿語言暴力，沒有分守也沒有修養！記者採訪手法沒深度，先有結論再找方法去"証明"，公信力透明度自由民主都是利用。過年時份沒太大新聞，要弄些大新聞也許是原因，但太過份了。公信力第一報變第尾了。
自稱公信第一的大報頭條，把石峽尾報導成一種公共資源浪費，大大隻字七成無人！好像文化創意人又在占香港人的便宜，記者去了三次，還是農曆新年前後在放假期間去採訪，便下結論說空置無人，我以為真的是七成無人租，馬上通知一些設計師朋友，去信政府求租，一查之下己經滿座租滿了，不知公信力第一報說的無人七成是什麼道理？還有的是公信力第一報有沒有先好好研究創意產業園是怎樣運作，以一種十分膚淺的手法去提出指控文化工作者浪費公眾資源，五元一尺是平是貴也應要比較一下同區和其他區的斤租金水平。香港主流傳媒不尊重和不喜愛文化是現况，不可一日改變，但新聞尊業操守是十分重要，公信力第一報這樣粗糙的採訪手法，何來公信力？當然又可以大大聲以傳煤監督的理由，去找新闐來做。 新聞自由是應該建基於新聞專業的操守，香港傅媒最近十多年是走火入摩，狗仔八卦，小報扮大報，大報小報化，起題要激要爆，用字充滿語言暴力，沒有分守也沒有修養！記者採訪手法沒深度，先有結論再找方法去"証明"，公信力透明度自由民主都是利用。過年時份沒太大新聞，要弄些大新聞也許是原因，但太過份了。公信力第一報變第尾了。
20090215
義氣與正義
中國人的義氣觀念和西方的正義很不一樣，三國的義氣是建立是人和人的關係，我和你是朋友的話，你做好事壞事也要支持到底，朋友被剎就要好像張飛那樣不顧一切的去復仇，這是來自三國演義的一種義氣觀，也影響著中国人的行為價值，尤其是以義氣制約著低下階層的道德價值，中国幾千年從來沒有出現像西方那樣的”法律”制度，社會不同階層有著不同的制約系統，知識分子的儒，低下階層的義，其實就算是革命一百年後的中國，儒和義仍然是管冶中國的價值系統，就算是有了全民投票民主制度的台灣，人民的價值行為也沒有進入一種法冶的正义觀念，一切都回歸到一些义氣觀念。其實義氣觀念好像很祟高，但背後也只是一種利益交換，沒有什麼原則可言。原則是可以隨時改變，但關係才是永遠不能改變。正義正正是關係的相反，大義滅親在西方是正常之事，但放在中國社會那是非常沉重的一件事，在新中国皇幸制度沒有了士大夫沒有了地主沒有了，但老中国的關係價值系統仍然存在，所以中國仍然是一種封建制度，因為個体的行為仍然是被關係制度控制，我們需要反思的是在這種價值系統下，是不是真的能夠推動西方式的民主和法冶？中國式的民主和法冶又應該怎樣在關係文化中發展？
中國人的義氣觀念和西方的正義很不一樣，三國的義氣是建立是人和人的關係，我和你是朋友的話，你做好事壞事也要支持到底，朋友被剎就要好像張飛那樣不顧一切的去復仇，這是來自三國演義的一種義氣觀，也影響著中国人的行為價值，尤其是以義氣制約著低下階層的道德價值，中国幾千年從來沒有出現像西方那樣的”法律”制度，社會不同階層有著不同的制約系統，知識分子的儒，低下階層的義，其實就算是革命一百年後的中國，儒和義仍然是管冶中國的價值系統，就算是有了全民投票民主制度的台灣，人民的價值行為也沒有進入一種法冶的正义觀念，一切都回歸到一些义氣觀念。其實義氣觀念好像很祟高，但背後也只是一種利益交換，沒有什麼原則可言。原則是可以隨時改變，但關係才是永遠不能改變。正義正正是關係的相反，大義滅親在西方是正常之事，但放在中國社會那是非常沉重的一件事，在新中国皇幸制度沒有了士大夫沒有了地主沒有了，但老中国的關係價值系統仍然存在，所以中國仍然是一種封建制度，因為個体的行為仍然是被關係制度控制，我們需要反思的是在這種價值系統下，是不是真的能夠推動西方式的民主和法冶？中國式的民主和法冶又應該怎樣在關係文化中發展？
20090208
京都的安靜
胡恩威
日本朋友告诉我京都是分手后一个人旅游的地方, 治疗情伤也好, 又或者是单身一个人体会一个人的安静, 安静是京都的。就是在人头涌涌的市中心,也是安安静静的。大大小小的寺院和老店,一个人安安静静在看在听在喝一杯茶一杯热热的咖啡。冬天下雪的时候,由东京出发坐火车看着那些雪那些布满白雪的大山小山,在阳光下这些白色的雪显得特别的白,像在梦境里面的白。慢慢穿过一条又一条黑暗的山洞, 一个又一个美丽的白雪山景。最后到了那个完全不像京都的京都火车站。这个八十年代带点后现代风格的京都火车站, 有点像日本科幻卡通片的太空基地, 一个很大很大的空间,也是非常安静的火车站。京都的下雪有时比樱花更美丽,在房间里面看着那些白白的飘雪散落在那个小小的庭园里面,安静地读书也好,脑海空无一物的感受那种白色的安静. 京都的木屋小旅馆, 泡泡热水浴, 安静地呼吸着.打开小窗,零下的空气和热水的空气形成了一层又一层的白烟,飘着飘着。 樱花三月的京都的热闹也是安静的,在那些小河旁边的樱花之树, 在布满一个山头的樱花开遍.不同的樱花之色,粉红,浅浅白里透红的红, 风吹着花在舞动,遍山的樱花和树和风在静静的呼吸,找一个山头去看更一个山头的樱花。 安静的京都.
胡恩威
日本朋友告诉我京都是分手后一个人旅游的地方, 治疗情伤也好, 又或者是单身一个人体会一个人的安静, 安静是京都的。就是在人头涌涌的市中心,也是安安静静的。大大小小的寺院和老店,一个人安安静静在看在听在喝一杯茶一杯热热的咖啡。冬天下雪的时候,由东京出发坐火车看着那些雪那些布满白雪的大山小山,在阳光下这些白色的雪显得特别的白,像在梦境里面的白。慢慢穿过一条又一条黑暗的山洞, 一个又一个美丽的白雪山景。最后到了那个完全不像京都的京都火车站。这个八十年代带点后现代风格的京都火车站, 有点像日本科幻卡通片的太空基地, 一个很大很大的空间,也是非常安静的火车站。京都的下雪有时比樱花更美丽,在房间里面看着那些白白的飘雪散落在那个小小的庭园里面,安静地读书也好,脑海空无一物的感受那种白色的安静. 京都的木屋小旅馆, 泡泡热水浴, 安静地呼吸着.打开小窗,零下的空气和热水的空气形成了一层又一层的白烟,飘着飘着。 樱花三月的京都的热闹也是安静的,在那些小河旁边的樱花之树, 在布满一个山头的樱花开遍.不同的樱花之色,粉红,浅浅白里透红的红, 风吹着花在舞动,遍山的樱花和树和风在静静的呼吸,找一个山头去看更一个山头的樱花。 安静的京都.
20081228
首届中国建筑传媒奖揭晓
http://epaper.nddaily.com/A/html/2008-12/28/content_671214.htm
http://www.nddaily.com/cama/default_2858.shtml
94岁高龄的建筑师、教育家冯纪忠获杰出成就奖,最重要奖项爆冷由甘肃一小学夺取
日期：[2008年12月28日] 版次：[AA10] 版名：[城事] 稿源：[南方都市报] 网友评论：条
本报讯全场近400名观众多次起立，向一位94岁的长者一再鼓掌致敬，这是在中国建筑传媒奖现场出现的一幕。12月27日晚7点30分时，由本报和南都周刊举办的首届中国建筑传媒奖颁奖典礼在深圳举行。经过一年的筹备，两个月的提名和评选，最终五项大奖全部揭晓。其中，青年建筑师奖由标准营造团队获得；居住建筑特别奖则颁发给广东南海的土楼公社；组委会特别奖由台湾建筑师谢英俊获得；94岁高龄的建筑师、教育家冯纪忠获得杰出成就奖；压轴的最佳建筑奖大爆冷门，甘肃庆阳的毛寺生态实验小学夺魁。南方报业传媒集团副总编辑江艺平为获奖者颁奖。
甘肃一小学捧走最重要奖项
首届中国传媒建筑奖的口号为“走向公民建筑”，所以此次提名、获奖的团队、个人、建筑都无一例外地表现出关注民生，力图在现代化的居住建筑中找回更多公民权益的特点。
本次颁奖礼的最重要奖项———最佳建筑奖，共有三个作品入围。包括：台湾9·21地震教育园、甘肃庆阳毛寺生态实验小学、香港湿地公园。最终由于香港建筑师吴恩融、穆钧设计的毛寺生态实验小学爆冷，最终捧走大奖。
穆均在致获奖感言时表示，在学校设计的过程中，建筑师并没有去追求所谓的时尚、夸张的形式或任何以自我为中心的设计意念，只是想建一所学校。
而最令现场400多位嘉宾感动的是，毛寺生态实验小学校长带来的那句话：“从现在开始学校不再需要烧煤来取暖，省下来的钱可以为孩子们多买新书。”穆均说：“今天越来越多的建筑师已将目光从光鲜的都市阶层转向极需关注的社会弱势群体。中国建筑传媒奖的设立便是其最好的证明。”
台湾建筑师谢英俊在接受记者采访时说：“最佳建筑奖是本次评奖的最大亮点，它恰如其分地体现了大奖的宗旨和价值取向。可以说，入围的作品都达到了很高的水准，毛寺生态实验小学则属于‘高难度’的设计，外表质朴，规模小，跨度大，就地取材，体现高科技，低技术，使得当地农民也参与到施工当中。放在中国当代的建筑设计中，可以说颠覆了一般的惯性。这个结果非常恰当，也让我很激动。
冯纪忠让现场无比感动
94岁高龄的建筑师、教育家冯纪忠亲自到场领得杰出成就奖，亦成为本次颁奖礼的最大亮点。在主持人宣布冯纪忠获奖时，台下400多名观众集体起立鼓掌，向这位中国建筑界的泰斗致以敬意。
冯纪忠在轮椅上发表了自己的获奖感言。他说：“我领取这个奖，不是为我个人领取的，也是替和我同时代，有着共同思想、价值观的建筑师来领取这个奖。我年纪大了，现在做的工作少了，这是对我前半生工作肯定。我深知我做得还不够。”
冯纪忠老先生也发表了自己对于公民建筑的理解，他认为所有的建筑都应该是为公民服务的，建筑师在进行设计创作时候，更要时刻提醒自己，有责任为改善百姓的生活条件而努力。
首届传媒建筑奖共设有五个奖项目，除了终身成就奖、最佳建筑奖外，其他三个重量级奖项，青年建筑师奖由标准营造团队获得；居住建筑特别奖则颁发给广东土楼公社；组委会特别奖由台湾建筑师谢英俊获得。
标准营造团队的代表在发言时，以年轻人特有的方式表达了自己的建筑理念，他说：“我们对追随和模仿现在流行的大师不感兴趣，对于成为山寨版的库哈斯不感兴趣，对形式上的抄袭和模仿会感到羞耻而不是感到沾沾自喜，对于以建筑设计为工具、追求利益为目的的人有一定的反感。”这正与本次大奖的精神不谋而合。
由都市实践设计的土楼公社则因为致力于关注改善低收入人群居住的环境，而受到评委的一致认可。台湾建筑师谢英俊在四川地震后，赶赴灾区，全力投入灾后重建，并将自己在台湾十多年的经验带到四川，由此获得了组委会特别奖。南方都市报执行总编辑庄慎之出席典礼。
主办方观点
中国建筑传媒奖是侧重建筑的社会评价的奖项。从社会的层面评价建筑，关注建筑的社会意义和人文关怀，是该奖项由南方都市报这样的大众媒体发起的意义所在，也是南方都市报“致力于做公民意识的启蒙者，公民社会的推动者”的办报宗旨的具体体现。
在中国建筑传媒奖之前，中国还没有一个从建筑的社会意义和人文关怀来评价建筑的奖项。中国建筑传媒大奖的举办，将填补这一空白。我们有理由相信，超前的意识及认真的态度，能使这个奖项成为国内最有影响力的建筑奖。
———庄慎之，南方都市报执行总编辑
光荣榜
最佳建筑奖———毛寺生态实验小学
颁奖词：毛寺生态实验小学，它结合地形条件，使用地方材料，营造出丰富、自然的室内外空间环境，并在自然通风采光，保温和粪便处理等方面独具匠心，用适用技术达到了节能和环保的要求。另外，当地工匠的营造，传统技艺和现代设计的结合，也使这个并非引人注目的建筑实践有了积极的社会意义，为新农村建设提供了一个范例。
居住建筑特别奖———土楼公舍
颁奖词：为今日中国城市中低收入人群设计廉租房，将“新土楼”植入当代城市，利用城市快速发展过程中遗留下来的闲散土地建造，试图探索出中国中低收入人群的居住解决之道。作为一种解决快速城市化进程中大量人口迁入产生的居住问题的实践，土楼公舍有积极的社会意义，其内部社区空间的营造具有人文关怀精神。但“土楼”是否能成为一种理性的定式？内封闭式的圆形设计是否会导致使用者与城市互动方面的脱离？还有高密度居住状态下容易产生的相互干扰问题，这些也是值得思考和有待观察的。
杰出成就奖———冯纪忠
颁奖词：冯纪忠先生，是我国著名的建筑师和建筑教育家，是中国现代建筑的奠基者，也是中国城市规划专业的创始人。虽然冯先生的著作和设计作品并不多，但他的论文《空间原理》和设计作品“上海松江方塔园”，却代表了那个时代中国建筑的一种新文人建筑思想和设计理念，其深邃的建筑哲学思想融入建筑教育和文化传播系统中，对当代中国建筑发展具有深远的影响，其意义不可低估。
青年建筑师奖———标准营造事务所（团队）
颁奖词：标准营造，中国目前最优秀的设计团队之一。标准营造的实践超越了传统的设计职业划分，其在一系列重要的设计研究和实践的基础上，发展了在历史文化地段中进行景观与建筑创作的特长和兴趣。标准营造尊重基层、隐藏自我、注意环保的设计理念，在当下社会值得褒扬和肯定。
组委会特别奖———谢英俊
颁奖词：谢英俊，为最具社会关怀之建筑师，以为弱势族群争取居住权及协助其自力造屋为职志之建筑师，为建筑师投入非营利性公共服务工作及关怀社会之典范。汶川地震后，大陆建筑师试图在重建中有所作为，然由于民居设计经验和“入世”经验不足，多半途而终。唯台湾建筑师谢英俊携台湾“9·21”地震重建之经验，积极联系各重建官方、民间组织，以及海内外赞助企业，迅速建立重建工作小组，进驻震区，实地考察和开展大面积重建工作。谢英俊的重建团队长期居住在灾区，实地展开调查和设计，并以重建模式推广为己任，是值得特别关注和奖励的。
声音
“所有的建筑都应该是公民建筑”
“公民建筑是建筑，其他的建筑如果不是为公民服务、作为公民的声音，它就不是建筑。”当满头白发、坐着轮椅的冯老用略微颤抖的声音说出这句话时，台下观众自动全场起立、掌声满堂。
冯纪忠已有94岁高龄，是在家人的陪同下坐着轮椅来到的现场，大会颁给他“杰出成就奖”。这位我国著名的建筑师和建筑教育家、中国现代建筑的奠基者、中国城市规划专业的创始人，在领奖台上一再强调“所有的建筑都应该是公民建筑”，他说：“在我工作当中，我的理念，我所坚持的，其实现在自问就是公民建筑，凡是不是公民建筑的东西我都加以批评或者不满意。我们要认识这个问题，现在得这个奖，我就更加肯定了公民建筑不只是建筑，而是整体的建筑，整体建筑是什么？是整个自然界我们所接触到的都包含在内。”
“我们对形式上的抄袭和模仿会感到羞耻”
“我们对追随和模仿现在流行的大师不感兴趣，对于成为山寨版的库哈斯不感兴趣，对形式上的抄袭和模仿会感到羞耻而不是感到沾沾自喜……”获得青年建筑师奖的标准营造团队代表此番表白，赢得台下一片击掌赞同。
在走向公民建筑的主题之下，此次建筑传媒大奖的青年建筑师们对其自身定位和社会责任多有思考和探讨，标准营造团队代表说出了他们的理想：“我想我们代表一些年轻人，希望给建筑一个更干净的动机，用更平常的心态，认认真真地为普通的老百姓创造建筑的年轻人。”
（更多报道敬请留意12月30日，中国建筑传媒奖颁奖特刊，及中国建筑传媒奖官方网站。）
本版采写：本报记者 赵磊 左娟
本版摄影：本报记者 陈以怀
http://epaper.nddaily.com/A/html/2008-12/28/content_671214.htm
http://www.nddaily.com/cama/default_2858.shtml
94岁高龄的建筑师、教育家冯纪忠获杰出成就奖,最重要奖项爆冷由甘肃一小学夺取
日期：[2008年12月28日] 版次：[AA10] 版名：[城事] 稿源：[南方都市报] 网友评论：条
本报讯全场近400名观众多次起立，向一位94岁的长者一再鼓掌致敬，这是在中国建筑传媒奖现场出现的一幕。12月27日晚7点30分时，由本报和南都周刊举办的首届中国建筑传媒奖颁奖典礼在深圳举行。经过一年的筹备，两个月的提名和评选，最终五项大奖全部揭晓。其中，青年建筑师奖由标准营造团队获得；居住建筑特别奖则颁发给广东南海的土楼公社；组委会特别奖由台湾建筑师谢英俊获得；94岁高龄的建筑师、教育家冯纪忠获得杰出成就奖；压轴的最佳建筑奖大爆冷门，甘肃庆阳的毛寺生态实验小学夺魁。南方报业传媒集团副总编辑江艺平为获奖者颁奖。
甘肃一小学捧走最重要奖项
首届中国传媒建筑奖的口号为“走向公民建筑”，所以此次提名、获奖的团队、个人、建筑都无一例外地表现出关注民生，力图在现代化的居住建筑中找回更多公民权益的特点。
本次颁奖礼的最重要奖项———最佳建筑奖，共有三个作品入围。包括：台湾9·21地震教育园、甘肃庆阳毛寺生态实验小学、香港湿地公园。最终由于香港建筑师吴恩融、穆钧设计的毛寺生态实验小学爆冷，最终捧走大奖。
穆均在致获奖感言时表示，在学校设计的过程中，建筑师并没有去追求所谓的时尚、夸张的形式或任何以自我为中心的设计意念，只是想建一所学校。
而最令现场400多位嘉宾感动的是，毛寺生态实验小学校长带来的那句话：“从现在开始学校不再需要烧煤来取暖，省下来的钱可以为孩子们多买新书。”穆均说：“今天越来越多的建筑师已将目光从光鲜的都市阶层转向极需关注的社会弱势群体。中国建筑传媒奖的设立便是其最好的证明。”
台湾建筑师谢英俊在接受记者采访时说：“最佳建筑奖是本次评奖的最大亮点，它恰如其分地体现了大奖的宗旨和价值取向。可以说，入围的作品都达到了很高的水准，毛寺生态实验小学则属于‘高难度’的设计，外表质朴，规模小，跨度大，就地取材，体现高科技，低技术，使得当地农民也参与到施工当中。放在中国当代的建筑设计中，可以说颠覆了一般的惯性。这个结果非常恰当，也让我很激动。
冯纪忠让现场无比感动
94岁高龄的建筑师、教育家冯纪忠亲自到场领得杰出成就奖，亦成为本次颁奖礼的最大亮点。在主持人宣布冯纪忠获奖时，台下400多名观众集体起立鼓掌，向这位中国建筑界的泰斗致以敬意。
冯纪忠在轮椅上发表了自己的获奖感言。他说：“我领取这个奖，不是为我个人领取的，也是替和我同时代，有着共同思想、价值观的建筑师来领取这个奖。我年纪大了，现在做的工作少了，这是对我前半生工作肯定。我深知我做得还不够。”
冯纪忠老先生也发表了自己对于公民建筑的理解，他认为所有的建筑都应该是为公民服务的，建筑师在进行设计创作时候，更要时刻提醒自己，有责任为改善百姓的生活条件而努力。
首届传媒建筑奖共设有五个奖项目，除了终身成就奖、最佳建筑奖外，其他三个重量级奖项，青年建筑师奖由标准营造团队获得；居住建筑特别奖则颁发给广东土楼公社；组委会特别奖由台湾建筑师谢英俊获得。
标准营造团队的代表在发言时，以年轻人特有的方式表达了自己的建筑理念，他说：“我们对追随和模仿现在流行的大师不感兴趣，对于成为山寨版的库哈斯不感兴趣，对形式上的抄袭和模仿会感到羞耻而不是感到沾沾自喜，对于以建筑设计为工具、追求利益为目的的人有一定的反感。”这正与本次大奖的精神不谋而合。
由都市实践设计的土楼公社则因为致力于关注改善低收入人群居住的环境，而受到评委的一致认可。台湾建筑师谢英俊在四川地震后，赶赴灾区，全力投入灾后重建，并将自己在台湾十多年的经验带到四川，由此获得了组委会特别奖。南方都市报执行总编辑庄慎之出席典礼。
主办方观点
中国建筑传媒奖是侧重建筑的社会评价的奖项。从社会的层面评价建筑，关注建筑的社会意义和人文关怀，是该奖项由南方都市报这样的大众媒体发起的意义所在，也是南方都市报“致力于做公民意识的启蒙者，公民社会的推动者”的办报宗旨的具体体现。
在中国建筑传媒奖之前，中国还没有一个从建筑的社会意义和人文关怀来评价建筑的奖项。中国建筑传媒大奖的举办，将填补这一空白。我们有理由相信，超前的意识及认真的态度，能使这个奖项成为国内最有影响力的建筑奖。
———庄慎之，南方都市报执行总编辑
光荣榜
最佳建筑奖———毛寺生态实验小学
颁奖词：毛寺生态实验小学，它结合地形条件，使用地方材料，营造出丰富、自然的室内外空间环境，并在自然通风采光，保温和粪便处理等方面独具匠心，用适用技术达到了节能和环保的要求。另外，当地工匠的营造，传统技艺和现代设计的结合，也使这个并非引人注目的建筑实践有了积极的社会意义，为新农村建设提供了一个范例。
居住建筑特别奖———土楼公舍
颁奖词：为今日中国城市中低收入人群设计廉租房，将“新土楼”植入当代城市，利用城市快速发展过程中遗留下来的闲散土地建造，试图探索出中国中低收入人群的居住解决之道。作为一种解决快速城市化进程中大量人口迁入产生的居住问题的实践，土楼公舍有积极的社会意义，其内部社区空间的营造具有人文关怀精神。但“土楼”是否能成为一种理性的定式？内封闭式的圆形设计是否会导致使用者与城市互动方面的脱离？还有高密度居住状态下容易产生的相互干扰问题，这些也是值得思考和有待观察的。
杰出成就奖———冯纪忠
颁奖词：冯纪忠先生，是我国著名的建筑师和建筑教育家，是中国现代建筑的奠基者，也是中国城市规划专业的创始人。虽然冯先生的著作和设计作品并不多，但他的论文《空间原理》和设计作品“上海松江方塔园”，却代表了那个时代中国建筑的一种新文人建筑思想和设计理念，其深邃的建筑哲学思想融入建筑教育和文化传播系统中，对当代中国建筑发展具有深远的影响，其意义不可低估。
青年建筑师奖———标准营造事务所（团队）
颁奖词：标准营造，中国目前最优秀的设计团队之一。标准营造的实践超越了传统的设计职业划分，其在一系列重要的设计研究和实践的基础上，发展了在历史文化地段中进行景观与建筑创作的特长和兴趣。标准营造尊重基层、隐藏自我、注意环保的设计理念，在当下社会值得褒扬和肯定。
组委会特别奖———谢英俊
颁奖词：谢英俊，为最具社会关怀之建筑师，以为弱势族群争取居住权及协助其自力造屋为职志之建筑师，为建筑师投入非营利性公共服务工作及关怀社会之典范。汶川地震后，大陆建筑师试图在重建中有所作为，然由于民居设计经验和“入世”经验不足，多半途而终。唯台湾建筑师谢英俊携台湾“9·21”地震重建之经验，积极联系各重建官方、民间组织，以及海内外赞助企业，迅速建立重建工作小组，进驻震区，实地考察和开展大面积重建工作。谢英俊的重建团队长期居住在灾区，实地展开调查和设计，并以重建模式推广为己任，是值得特别关注和奖励的。
声音
“所有的建筑都应该是公民建筑”
“公民建筑是建筑，其他的建筑如果不是为公民服务、作为公民的声音，它就不是建筑。”当满头白发、坐着轮椅的冯老用略微颤抖的声音说出这句话时，台下观众自动全场起立、掌声满堂。
冯纪忠已有94岁高龄，是在家人的陪同下坐着轮椅来到的现场，大会颁给他“杰出成就奖”。这位我国著名的建筑师和建筑教育家、中国现代建筑的奠基者、中国城市规划专业的创始人，在领奖台上一再强调“所有的建筑都应该是公民建筑”，他说：“在我工作当中，我的理念，我所坚持的，其实现在自问就是公民建筑，凡是不是公民建筑的东西我都加以批评或者不满意。我们要认识这个问题，现在得这个奖，我就更加肯定了公民建筑不只是建筑，而是整体的建筑，整体建筑是什么？是整个自然界我们所接触到的都包含在内。”
“我们对形式上的抄袭和模仿会感到羞耻”
“我们对追随和模仿现在流行的大师不感兴趣，对于成为山寨版的库哈斯不感兴趣，对形式上的抄袭和模仿会感到羞耻而不是感到沾沾自喜……”获得青年建筑师奖的标准营造团队代表此番表白，赢得台下一片击掌赞同。
在走向公民建筑的主题之下，此次建筑传媒大奖的青年建筑师们对其自身定位和社会责任多有思考和探讨，标准营造团队代表说出了他们的理想：“我想我们代表一些年轻人，希望给建筑一个更干净的动机，用更平常的心态，认认真真地为普通的老百姓创造建筑的年轻人。”
（更多报道敬请留意12月30日，中国建筑传媒奖颁奖特刊，及中国建筑传媒奖官方网站。）
本版采写：本报记者 赵磊 左娟
本版摄影：本报记者 陈以怀
Playwright Harold Pinter's last interview reveals his childhood love of cricket and why it is better than sex
* Andy Bull
* guardian.co.uk, Saturday 27 December 2008 00.05 GMT
Harold Pinter, who died on Tuesday, gave his last interview to Andy Bull, of the Guardian, on a subject very dear to the playwright's heart: cricket. Here we publish the interview for the first time
"I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing that God created on earth," Harold Pinter once said, "certainly greater than sex, although sex isn't too bad either." No harm, then, that the game should be the subject of his last interview, given in late October at his home in London. His health failing, Pinter was in nostalgic mood, recalling a childhood in Hackney, east London, during the blitz and his time as an evacuee. "I first watched cricket during the war. At one point we were all evacuated from our house when there was an air raid. We opened the door and our garden, with this large lilac tree, was alight all along the back wall. We were evacuated straight away. Though not before I took my cricket bat.
"I used to get up at five in the morning and play cricket. I had a great friend who is still going – he lives in Australia – called Mick, Mick Goldstein. He used to live around the corner from me in Hackney, and we were very close to the River Lea, and there were fields. We walked down to the fields; there'd be nobody about – it would really very early in the morning, and there would be a tree we used as a wicket. We would take it in turns to bat and bowl; we would be Lindwall, Miller, Hutton and Compton. That was the life."
Pinter's study was heavy with the clutter of a cricket fan. On one wall was an oil portrait of himself, wearing whites, knocking a drive away to the leg side. The shelves creaked under his cricket library, including all 145 editions of the Wisden Almanack. On the mantelpiece were photographs and memorabilia of the Gaieties, the wandering club side of which Pinter was captain, and, when he gave up playing, chairman. Downstairs, on the wall was a framed copy of WG Grace's autograph.
His favourite, though, was the England great Len Hutton. He first saw him as an evacuee in Yorkshire. "I was sent for a brief period to Leeds, and I went to see some kind of game up at Headingley. I caught Len Hutton, who wa s on leave from the army. I fell in love with him at first sight, as it were. I became passionate about Yorkshire because of Hutton really. It is my great regret that I could have met him, but I was too shy."
Cricket was not in Pinter's family. His father did not play. "I learned about the game at Hackney Downs Grammar. We used to play a lot. A lot of my colleagues at the time were very, very keen on cricket. We felt so intensely about it. I remember going to Lord's, walking through Regent's Park on my way, one early evening. And coming away from Lord's there was another schoolboy, in uniform, and he saw me, and said: "Hutton's out!" I could have killed him. Really. It was very important to me that I was going to see Hutton. So, you see, I have golden memories."
His playing days lapsed after childhood and did not resume until he had a family of his own. "I didn't start playing again until the 60s. I took my son, who was then about nine, to school for nets and I watched him be coached. I suddenly thought 'well why don't I have a net myself?' I hadn't played since school you know, but the next week I got some whites and started to have some coaching from a fellow called Fred Pelozzi, a cricketer of Italian descent but he was a cockney actually, and he was a bloody good player.
"And after a few weeks he said 'why don't you come and play for the club I play for?' So I said 'OK'. I went out for my first game for Gaieties [batting] at I think No 6. He was the only fellow I knew, they were all new to me, and a fellow bowled the first ball at me, and I hit it plumb in the middle of the bat, really a beautiful shot. Straight back to the bowler, who caught it. So I was out first bloody ball. That was my first introduction to Gaieties. But I carried on playing for them, and eventually I became captain."
It was cricket's endless potential for narrative, the games within a game, that appealed most. "Drama happens in big cricket matches. But also in small cricket matches," he said. "When we play, my club, each thing that happens is dramatic: the gasps that follow a miss at slip, the anger of an lbw decision that is turned down. It is the same thing wherever you play, really."
He had been looking forward to seeing England play Australia next summer. "I don't watch as much professional cricket as I used to, because I'm not moving very well these days, but I used to do a lot of it. And there is nothing better really. I had a piece of very good fortune three years ago and I managed to get a box at Lord's. I was there to see South Africa last year, and I shall certainly be there next year to see the Ashes.
"I don't know whether it is the same game these days. But I have a number of step-grandchildren, three boys. And they think of nothing else but cricket. They play cricket in the snow. So it is still very much alive actually. I think the facilities have been denuded, and there are now all the other beguilements of sport, and this obsession with bloody football. But my grandchildren still they get up at five in the morning and play cricket, just as I did myself.
"Cricket, the whole thing, playing, watching, being part of the Gaieties, has been a central feature of my life."
* Andy Bull
* guardian.co.uk, Saturday 27 December 2008 00.05 GMT
Harold Pinter, who died on Tuesday, gave his last interview to Andy Bull, of the Guardian, on a subject very dear to the playwright's heart: cricket. Here we publish the interview for the first time
"I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing that God created on earth," Harold Pinter once said, "certainly greater than sex, although sex isn't too bad either." No harm, then, that the game should be the subject of his last interview, given in late October at his home in London. His health failing, Pinter was in nostalgic mood, recalling a childhood in Hackney, east London, during the blitz and his time as an evacuee. "I first watched cricket during the war. At one point we were all evacuated from our house when there was an air raid. We opened the door and our garden, with this large lilac tree, was alight all along the back wall. We were evacuated straight away. Though not before I took my cricket bat.
"I used to get up at five in the morning and play cricket. I had a great friend who is still going – he lives in Australia – called Mick, Mick Goldstein. He used to live around the corner from me in Hackney, and we were very close to the River Lea, and there were fields. We walked down to the fields; there'd be nobody about – it would really very early in the morning, and there would be a tree we used as a wicket. We would take it in turns to bat and bowl; we would be Lindwall, Miller, Hutton and Compton. That was the life."
Pinter's study was heavy with the clutter of a cricket fan. On one wall was an oil portrait of himself, wearing whites, knocking a drive away to the leg side. The shelves creaked under his cricket library, including all 145 editions of the Wisden Almanack. On the mantelpiece were photographs and memorabilia of the Gaieties, the wandering club side of which Pinter was captain, and, when he gave up playing, chairman. Downstairs, on the wall was a framed copy of WG Grace's autograph.
His favourite, though, was the England great Len Hutton. He first saw him as an evacuee in Yorkshire. "I was sent for a brief period to Leeds, and I went to see some kind of game up at Headingley. I caught Len Hutton, who wa s on leave from the army. I fell in love with him at first sight, as it were. I became passionate about Yorkshire because of Hutton really. It is my great regret that I could have met him, but I was too shy."
Cricket was not in Pinter's family. His father did not play. "I learned about the game at Hackney Downs Grammar. We used to play a lot. A lot of my colleagues at the time were very, very keen on cricket. We felt so intensely about it. I remember going to Lord's, walking through Regent's Park on my way, one early evening. And coming away from Lord's there was another schoolboy, in uniform, and he saw me, and said: "Hutton's out!" I could have killed him. Really. It was very important to me that I was going to see Hutton. So, you see, I have golden memories."
His playing days lapsed after childhood and did not resume until he had a family of his own. "I didn't start playing again until the 60s. I took my son, who was then about nine, to school for nets and I watched him be coached. I suddenly thought 'well why don't I have a net myself?' I hadn't played since school you know, but the next week I got some whites and started to have some coaching from a fellow called Fred Pelozzi, a cricketer of Italian descent but he was a cockney actually, and he was a bloody good player.
"And after a few weeks he said 'why don't you come and play for the club I play for?' So I said 'OK'. I went out for my first game for Gaieties [batting] at I think No 6. He was the only fellow I knew, they were all new to me, and a fellow bowled the first ball at me, and I hit it plumb in the middle of the bat, really a beautiful shot. Straight back to the bowler, who caught it. So I was out first bloody ball. That was my first introduction to Gaieties. But I carried on playing for them, and eventually I became captain."
It was cricket's endless potential for narrative, the games within a game, that appealed most. "Drama happens in big cricket matches. But also in small cricket matches," he said. "When we play, my club, each thing that happens is dramatic: the gasps that follow a miss at slip, the anger of an lbw decision that is turned down. It is the same thing wherever you play, really."
He had been looking forward to seeing England play Australia next summer. "I don't watch as much professional cricket as I used to, because I'm not moving very well these days, but I used to do a lot of it. And there is nothing better really. I had a piece of very good fortune three years ago and I managed to get a box at Lord's. I was there to see South Africa last year, and I shall certainly be there next year to see the Ashes.
"I don't know whether it is the same game these days. But I have a number of step-grandchildren, three boys. And they think of nothing else but cricket. They play cricket in the snow. So it is still very much alive actually. I think the facilities have been denuded, and there are now all the other beguilements of sport, and this obsession with bloody football. But my grandchildren still they get up at five in the morning and play cricket, just as I did myself.
"Cricket, the whole thing, playing, watching, being part of the Gaieties, has been a central feature of my life."
20081227
Most Likely to Succeed
How do we hire when we can't tell who's right for the job?
by Malcolm Gladwell December 15, 2008
Effective teachers have a gift for noticing—what one researcher calls "withitness."
On the day of the big football game between the University of Missouri Tigers and the Cowboys of Oklahoma State, a football scout named Dan Shonka sat in his hotel, in Columbia, Missouri, with a portable DVD player. Shonka has worked for three National Football League teams. Before that, he was a football coach, and before that he played linebacker—although, he says, "that was three knee operations and a hundred pounds ago." Every year, he evaluates somewhere between eight hundred and twelve hundred players around the country, helping professional teams decide whom to choose in the college draft, which means that over the last thirty years he has probably seen as many football games as anyone else in America. In his DVD player was his homework for the evening's big game—an edited video of the Tigers' previous contest, against the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers.
Shonka methodically made his way through the video, stopping and re-winding whenever he saw something that caught his eye. He liked Jeremy Maclin and Chase Coffman, two of the Mizzou receivers. He loved William Moore, the team's bruising strong safety. But, most of all, he was interested in the Tigers' quarterback and star, a stocky, strong-armed senior named Chase Daniel.
"I like to see that the quarterback can hit a receiver in stride, so he doesn't have to slow for the ball," Shonka began. He had a stack of evaluation forms next to him and, as he watched the game, he was charting and grading every throw that Daniel made. "Then judgment. Hey, if it's not there, throw it away and play another day. Will he stand in there and take a hit, with a guy breathing down his face? Will he be able to step right in there, throw, and still take that hit? Does the guy throw better when he's in the pocket, or does he throw equally well when he's on the move? You want a great competitor. Durability. Can they hold up, their strength, toughness? Can they make big plays? Can they lead a team down the field and score late in the game? Can they see the field? When your team's way ahead, that's fine. But when you're getting your ass kicked I want to see what you're going to do."
He pointed to his screen. Daniel had thrown a dart, and, just as he did, a defensive player had hit him squarely. "See how he popped up?" Shonka said. "He stood right there and threw the ball in the face of that rush. This kid has got a lot of courage." Daniel was six feet tall and weighed two hundred and twenty-five pounds: thick through the chest and trunk. He carried himself with a self-assurance that bordered on cockiness. He threw quickly and in rhythm. He nimbly evaded defenders. He made short throws with touch and longer throws with accuracy. By the game's end, he had completed an astonishing seventy-eight per cent of his passes, and handed Nebraska its worst home defeat in fifty-three years. "He can zip it," Shonka said. "He can really gun, when he has to." Shonka had seen all the promising college quarterbacks, charted and graded their throws, and to his mind Daniel was special: "He might be one of the best college quarterbacks in the country."
But then Shonka began to talk about when he was on the staff of the Philadelphia Eagles, in 1999. Five quarterbacks were taken in the first round of the college draft that year, and each looked as promising as Chase Daniel did now. But only one of them, Donovan McNabb, ended up fulfilling that promise. Of the rest, one descended into mediocrity after a decent start. Two were complete busts, and the last was so awful that after failing out of the N.F.L. he ended up failing out of the Canadian Football League as well.
The year before, the same thing happened with Ryan Leaf, who was the Chase Daniel of 1998. The San Diego Chargers made him the second player taken over all in the draft, and gave him an eleven-million-dollar signing bonus. Leaf turned out to be terrible. In 2002, it was Joey Harrington's turn. Harrington was a golden boy out of the University of Oregon, and the third player taken in the draft. Shonka still can't get over what happened to him.
"I tell you, I saw Joey live," he said. "This guy threw lasers, he could throw under tight spots, he had the arm strength, he had the size, he had the intelligence." Shonka got as misty as a two-hundred-and-eighty-pound ex-linebacker in a black tracksuit can get. "He's a concert pianist, you know? I really—I mean, I really—liked Joey." And yet Harrington's career consisted of a failed stint with the Detroit Lions and a slide into obscurity. Shonka looked back at the screen, where the young man he felt might be the best quarterback in the country was marching his team up and down the field. "How will that ability translate to the National Football League?" He shook his head slowly. "Shoot."
This is the quarterback problem. There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they'll do once they're hired. So how do we know whom to choose in cases like that? In recent years, a number of fields have begun to wrestle with this problem, but none with such profound social consequences as the profession of teaching.
One of the most important tools in contemporary educational research is "value added" analysis. It uses standardized test scores to look at how much the academic performance of students in a given teacher's classroom changes between the beginning and the end of the school year. Suppose that Mrs. Brown and Mr. Smith both teach a classroom of third graders who score at the fiftieth percentile on math and reading tests on the first day of school, in September. When the students are retested, in June, Mrs. Brown's class scores at the seventieth percentile, while Mr. Smith's students have fallen to the fortieth percentile. That change in the students' rankings, value-added theory says, is a meaningful indicator of how much more effective Mrs. Brown is as a teacher than Mr. Smith.
It's only a crude measure, of course. A teacher is not solely responsible for how much is learned in a classroom, and not everything of value that a teacher imparts to his or her students can be captured on a standardized test. Nonetheless, if you follow Brown and Smith for three or four years, their effect on their students' test scores starts to become predictable: with enough data, it is possible to identify who the very good teachers are and who the very poor teachers are. What's more—and this is the finding that has galvanized the educational world—the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast.
Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year's worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half's worth of material. That difference amounts to a year's worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a "bad" school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You'd have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you'd get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.
Hanushek recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what even a rudimentary focus on teacher quality could mean for the United States. If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality. After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers. But there's a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like. The school system has a quarterback problem.
Kickoff time for Missouri's game against Oklahoma State was seven o'clock. It was a perfect evening for football: cloudless skies and a light fall breeze. For hours, fans had been tailgating in the parking lots around the stadium. Cars lined the roads leading to the university, many with fuzzy yellow-and-black Tiger tails hanging from their trunks. It was one of Mizzou's biggest games in years. The Tigers were undefeated, and had a chance to become the No. 1 college football team in the country. Shonka made his way through the milling crowds and took a seat in the press box. Below him, the players on the field looked like pieces on a chessboard.
The Tigers held the ball first. Chase Daniel stood a good seven yards behind his offensive line. He had five receivers, two to his left and three to his right, spaced from one side of the field to the other. His linemen were widely spaced as well. In play after play, Daniel caught the snap from his center, planted his feet, and threw the ball in quick seven- and eight-yard diagonal passes to one of his five receivers.
The style of offense that the Tigers run is called the "spread," and most of the top quarterbacks in college football—the players who will be drafted into the pros—are spread quarterbacks. By spacing out the offensive linemen and wide receivers, the system makes it easy for the quarterback to figure out the intentions of the opposing defense before the ball is snapped: he can look up and down the line, "read" the defense, and decide where to throw the ball before anyone has moved a muscle. Daniel had been playing in the spread since high school; he was its master. "Look how quickly he gets the ball out," Shonka said. "You can hardly go a thousand and one, a thousand and two, and it's out of his hand. He knows right where he's going. When everyone is spread out like that, the defense can't disguise its coverage. Chase knows right away what they are going to do. The system simplifies the quarterback's decisions."
But for Shonka this didn't help matters. It had always been hard to predict how a college quarterback would fare in the pros. The professional game was, simply, faster and more complicated. With the advent of the spread, though, the correspondence between the two levels of play had broken down almost entirely. N.F.L. teams don't run the spread. They can't. The defenders in the pros are so much faster than their college counterparts that they would shoot through those big gaps in the offensive line and flatten the quarterback. In the N.F.L., the offensive line is bunched closely together. Daniel wouldn't have five receivers. Most of the time, he'd have just three or four. He wouldn't have the luxury of standing seven yards behind the center, planting his feet, and knowing instantly where to throw. He'd have to crouch right behind the center, take the snap directly, and run backward before planting his feet to throw. The onrushing defenders wouldn't be seven yards away. They would be all around him, from the start. The defense would no longer have to show its hand, because the field would not be so spread out. It could now disguise its intentions. Daniel wouldn't be able to read the defense before the snap was taken. He'd have to read it in the seconds after the play began.
"In the spread, you see a lot of guys wide open," Shonka said. "But when a guy like Chase goes to the N.F.L. he's never going to see his receivers that open—only in some rare case, like someone slips or there's a bust in the coverage. When that ball's leaving your hands in the pros, if you don't use your eyes to move the defender a little bit, they'll break on the ball and intercept it. The athletic ability that they're playing against in the league is unbelievable."
As Shonka talked, Daniel was moving his team down the field. But he was almost always throwing those quick, diagonal passes. In the N.F.L., he would have to do much more than that—he would have to throw long, vertical passes over the top of the defense. Could he make that kind of throw? Shonka didn't know. There was also the matter of his height. Six feet was fine in a spread system, where the big gaps in the offensive line gave Daniel plenty of opportunity to throw the ball and see downfield. But in the N.F.L. there wouldn't be gaps, and the linemen rushing at him would be six-five, not six-one.
"I wonder," Shonka went on. "Can he see? Can he be productive in a new kind of offense? How will he handle that? I'd like to see him set up quickly from center. I'd like to see his ability to read coverages that are not in the spread. I'd like to see him in the pocket. I'd like to see him move his feet. I'd like to see him do a deep dig, or deep comeback. You know, like a throw twenty to twenty-five yards down the field."
It was clear that Shonka didn't feel the same hesitancy in evaluating the other Mizzou stars—the safety Moore, the receivers Maclin and Coffman. The game that they would play in the pros would also be different from the game they were playing in college, but the difference was merely one of degree. They had succeeded at Missouri because they were strong and fast and skilled, and these traits translate in kind to professional football.
A college quarterback joining the N.F.L., by contrast, has to learn to play an entirely new game. Shonka began to talk about Tim Couch, the quarterback taken first in that legendary draft of 1999. Couch set every record imaginable in his years at the University of Kentucky. "They used to put five garbage cans on the field," Shonka recalled, shaking his head, "and Couch would stand there and throw and just drop the ball into every one." But Couch was a flop in the pros. It wasn't that professional quarterbacks didn't need to be accurate. It was that the kind of accuracy required to do the job well could be measured only in a real N.F.L. game.
Similarly, all quarterbacks drafted into the pros are required to take an I.Q. test—the Wonderlic Personnel Test. The theory behind the test is that the pro game is so much more cognitively demanding than the college game that high intelligence should be a good predictor of success. But when the economists David Berri and Rob Simmons analyzed the scores—which are routinely leaked to the press—they found that Wonderlic scores are all but useless as predictors. Of the five quarterbacks taken in round one of the 1999 draft, Donovan McNabb, the only one of the five with a shot at the Hall of Fame, had the lowest Wonderlic score. And who else had I.Q. scores in the same range as McNabb? Dan Marino and Terry Bradshaw, two of the greatest quarterbacks ever to play the game.
We're used to dealing with prediction problems by going back and looking for better predictors. We now realize that being a good doctor requires the ability to communicate, listen, and empathize—and so there is increasing pressure on medical schools to pay attention to interpersonal skills as well as to test scores. We can have better physicians if we're just smarter about how we choose medical-school students. But no one is saying that Dan Shonka is somehow missing some key ingredient in his analysis; that if he were only more perceptive he could predict Chase Daniel's career trajectory. The problem with picking quarterbacks is that Chase Daniel's performance can't be predicted. The job he's being groomed for is so particular and specialized that there is no way to know who will succeed at it and who won't. In fact, Berri and Simmons found no connection between where a quarterback was taken in the draft—that is, how highly he was rated on the basis of his college performance—and how well he played in the pros.
The entire time that Chase Daniel was on the field against Oklahoma State, his backup, Chase Patton, stood on the sidelines, watching. Patton didn't play a single down. In his four years at Missouri, up to that point, he had thrown a total of twenty-six passes. And yet there were people in Shonka's world who thought that Patton would end up as a better professional quarterback than Daniel. The week of the Oklahoma State game, the national sports magazine ESPN even put the two players on its cover, with the title "CHASE DANIEL MIGHT WIN THE HEISMAN"—referring to the trophy given to college football's best player. "HIS BACKUP COULD WIN THE SUPER BOWL." Why did everyone like Patton so much? It wasn't clear. Maybe he looked good in practice. Maybe it was because this season in the N.F.L. a quarterback who had also never started in a single college game is playing superbly for the New England Patriots. It sounds absurd to put an athlete on the cover of a magazine for no particular reason. But perhaps that's just the quarterback problem taken to an extreme. If college performance doesn't tell us anything, why shouldn't we value someone who hasn't had the chance to play as highly as someone who plays as well as anyone in the land?
Picture a young preschool teacher, sitting on a classroom floor surrounded by seven children. She is holding an alphabet book, and working through the letters with the children, one by one: " 'A' is for apple. . . . 'C' is for cow." The session was taped, and the videotape is being watched by a group of experts, who are charting and grading each of the teacher's moves.
After thirty seconds, the leader of the group—Bob Pianta, the dean of the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education—stops the tape. He points to two little girls on the right side of the circle. They are unusually active, leaning into the circle and reaching out to touch the book.
"What I'm struck by is how lively the affect is in this room," Pianta said. "One of the things the teacher is doing is creating a holding space for that. And what distinguishes her from other teachers is that she flexibly allows the kids to move and point to the book. She's not rigidly forcing the kids to sit back."
Pianta's team has developed a system for evaluating various competencies relating to student-teacher interaction. Among them is "regard for student perspective"; that is, a teacher's knack for allowing students some flexibility in how they become engaged in the classroom. Pianta stopped and rewound the tape twice, until what the teacher had managed to achieve became plain: the children were active, but somehow the class hadn't become a free-for-all.
"A lesser teacher would have responded to the kids' leaning over as misbehavior," Pianta went on. " 'We can't do this right now. You need to be sitting still.' She would have turned this off."
Bridget Hamre, one of Pianta's colleagues, chimed in: "These are three- and four-year-olds. At this age, when kids show their engagement it's not like the way we show our engagement, where we look alert. They're leaning forward and wriggling. That's their way of doing it. And a good teacher doesn't interpret that as bad behavior. You can see how hard it is to teach new teachers this idea, because the minute you teach them to have regard for the student's perspective, they think you have to give up control of the classroom."
The lesson continued. Pianta pointed out how the teacher managed to personalize the material. " 'C' is for cow" turned into a short discussion of which of the kids had ever visited a farm. "Almost every time a child says something, she responds to it, which is what we describe as teacher sensitivity," Hamre said.
The teacher then asked the children if anyone's name began with that letter. "Calvin," a boy named Calvin says. The teacher nods, and says, "Calvin starts with 'C.' " A little girl in the middle says, "Me!" The teacher turns to her. "Your name's Venisha. Letter 'V.' Venisha."
It was a key moment. Of all the teacher elements analyzed by the Virginia group, feedback—a direct, personal response by a teacher to a specific statement by a student—seems to be most closely linked to academic success. Not only did the teacher catch the "Me!" amid the wiggling and tumult; she addressed it directly.
"Mind you, that's not great feedback," Hamre said. "High-quality feedback is where there is a back-and-forth exchange to get a deeper understanding." The perfect way to handle that moment would have been for the teacher to pause and pull out Venisha's name card, point to the letter "V," show her how different it is from "C," and make the class sound out both letters. But the teacher didn't do that—either because it didn't occur to her or because she was distracted by the wiggling of the girls to her right.
"On the other hand, she could have completely ignored the girl, which happens a lot," Hamre went on. "The other thing that happens a lot is the teacher will just say, 'You're wrong.' Yes-no feedback is probably the predominant kind of feedback, which provides almost no information for the kid in terms of learning."
Pianta showed another tape, of a nearly identical situation: a circle of pre-schoolers around a teacher. The lesson was about how we can tell when someone is happy or sad. The teacher began by acting out a short conversation between two hand puppets, Henrietta and Twiggle: Twiggle is sad until Henrietta shares some watermelon with him.
"The idea that the teacher is trying to get across is that you can tell by looking at somebody's face how they're feeling, whether they're feeling sad or happy," Hamre said. "What kids of this age tend to say is you can tell how they're feeling because of something that happened to them. They lost their puppy and that's why they're sad. They don't really get this idea. So she's been challenged, and she's struggling."
The teacher begins, "Remember when we did something and we drew our face?" She touches her face, pointing out her eyes and mouth. "When somebody is happy, their face tells us that they're happy. And their eyes tell us." The children look on blankly. The teacher plunges on: "Watch, watch." She smiles broadly. "This is happy! How can you tell that I'm happy? Look at my face. Tell me what changes about my face when I'm happy. No, no, look at my face. . . . No. . . ."
A little girl next to her says, "Eyes," providing the teacher with an opportunity to use one of her students to draw the lesson out. But the teacher doesn't hear her. Again, she asks, "What's changed about my face?" She smiles and she frowns, as if she can reach the children by sheer force of repetition. Pianta stopped the tape. One problem, he pointed out, was that Henrietta made Twiggle happy by sharing watermelon with him, which doesn't illustrate what the lesson is about.
"You know, a better way to handle this would be to anchor something around the kids," Pianta said. "She should ask, 'What makes you feel happy?' The kids could answer. Then she could say, 'Show me your face when you have that feeling? O.K., what does So-and-So's face look like? Now tell me what makes you sad. Show me your face when you're sad. Oh, look, her face changed!' You've basically made the point. And then you could have the kids practice, or something. But this is going to go nowhere."
"What's changed about my face?" the teacher repeated, for what seemed like the hundredth time. One boy leaned forward into the circle, trying to engage himself in the lesson, in the way that little children do. His eyes were on the teacher. "Sit up!" she snapped at him.
As Pianta played one tape after another, the patterns started to become clear. Here was a teacher who read out sentences, in a spelling test, and every sentence came from her own life—"I went to a wedding last week"—which meant she was missing an opportunity to say something that engaged her students. Another teacher walked over to a computer to do a PowerPoint presentation, only to realize that she hadn't turned it on. As she waited for it to boot up, the classroom slid into chaos.
Then there was the superstar—a young high-school math teacher, in jeans and a green polo shirt. "So let's see," he began, standing up at the blackboard. "Special right triangles. We're going to do practice with this, just throwing out ideas." He drew two triangles. "Label the length of the side, if you can. If you can't, we'll all do it." He was talking and moving quickly, which Pianta said might be interpreted as a bad thing, because this was trigonometry. It wasn't easy material. But his energy seemed to infect the class. And all the time he offered the promise of help. If you can't, we'll all do it. In a corner of the room was a student named Ben, who'd evidently missed a few classes. "See what you can remember, Ben," the teacher said. Ben was lost. The teacher quickly went to his side: "I'm going to give you a way to get to it." He made a quick suggestion: "How about that?" Ben went back to work. The teacher slipped over to the student next to Ben, and glanced at her work. "That's all right!" He went to a third student, then a fourth. Two and a half minutes into the lesson—the length of time it took that subpar teacher to turn on the computer—he had already laid out the problem, checked in with nearly every student in the class, and was back at the blackboard, to take the lesson a step further.
"In a group like this, the standard m.o. would be: he's at the board, broadcasting to the kids, and has no idea who knows what he's doing and who doesn't know," Pianta said. "But he's giving individualized feedback. He's off the charts on feedback." Pianta and his team watched in awe.
Educational-reform efforts typically start with a push for higher standards for teachers—that is, for the academic and cognitive requirements for entering the profession to be as stiff as possible. But after you've watched Pianta's tapes, and seen how complex the elements of effective teaching are, this emphasis on book smarts suddenly seems peculiar. The preschool teacher with the alphabet book was sensitive to her students' needs and knew how to let the two girls on the right wiggle and squirm without disrupting the rest of the students; the trigonometry teacher knew how to complete a circuit of his classroom in two and a half minutes and make everyone feel as if he or she were getting his personal attention. But these aren't cognitive skills.
A group of researchers—Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard's school of education; Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth; and Robert Gordon, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress—have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master's degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom. Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications—as much as they appear related to teaching prowess—turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans.
Another educational researcher, Jacob Kounin, once did an analysis of "desist" events, in which a teacher has to stop some kind of misbehavior. In one instance, "Mary leans toward the table to her right and whispers to Jane. Both she and Jane giggle. The teacher says, 'Mary and Jane, stop that!' " That's a desist event. But how a teacher desists—her tone of voice, her attitudes, her choice of words—appears to make no difference at all in maintaining an orderly classroom. How can that be? Kounin went back over the videotape and noticed that forty-five seconds before Mary whispered to Jane, Lucy and John had started whispering. Then Robert had noticed and joined in, making Jane giggle, whereupon Jane said something to John. Then Mary whispered to Jane. It was a contagious chain of misbehavior, and what really was significant was not how a teacher stopped the deviancy at the end of the chain but whether she was able to stop the chain before it started. Kounin called that ability "withitness," which he defined as "a teacher's communicating to the children by her actual behavior (rather than by verbally announcing: 'I know what's going on') that she knows what the children are doing, or has the proverbial 'eyes in the back of her head.' " It stands to reason that to be a great teacher you have to have withitness. But how do you know whether someone has withitness until she stands up in front of a classroom of twenty-five wiggly Janes, Lucys, Johns, and Roberts and tries to impose order?
Perhaps no profession has taken the implications of the quarterback problem more seriously than the financial-advice field, and the experience of financial advisers is a useful guide to what could happen in teaching as well. There are no formal qualifications for entering the field except a college degree. Financial-services firms don't look for only the best students, or require graduate degrees or specify a list of prerequisites. No one knows beforehand what makes a high-performing financial adviser different from a low-performing one, so the field throws the door wide open.
"A question I ask is, 'Give me a typical day,' " Ed Deutschlander, the co-president of North Star Resource Group, in Minneapolis, says. "If that person says, 'I get up at five-thirty, hit the gym, go to the library, go to class, go to my job, do homework until eleven,' that person has a chance." Deutschlander, in other words, begins by looking for the same general traits that every corporate recruiter looks for.
Deutschlander says that last year his firm interviewed about a thousand people, and found forty-nine it liked, a ratio of twenty interviewees to one candidate. Those candidates were put through a four-month "training camp," in which they tried to act like real financial advisers. "They should be able to obtain in that four-month period a minimum of ten official clients," Deutschlander said. "If someone can obtain ten clients, and is able to maintain a minimum of ten meetings a week, that means that person has gathered over a hundred introductions in that four-month period. Then we know that person is at least fast enough to play this game."
Of the forty-nine people invited to the training camp, twenty-three made the cut and were hired as apprentice advisers. Then the real sorting began. "Even with the top performers, it really takes three to four years to see whether someone can make it," Deutschlander says. "You're just scratching the surface at the beginning. Four years from now, I expect to hang on to at least thirty to forty per cent of that twenty-three."
People like Deutschlander are referred to as gatekeepers, a title that suggests that those at the door of a profession are expected to discriminate—to select who gets through the gate and who doesn't. But Deutschlander sees his role as keeping the gate as wide open as possible: to find ten new financial advisers, he's willing to interview a thousand people. The equivalent of that approach, in the N.F.L., would be for a team to give up trying to figure out who the "best" college quarterback is, and, instead, try out three or four "good" candidates.
In teaching, the implications are even more profound. They suggest that we shouldn't be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don't track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession needs to start the equivalent of Ed Deutschlander's training camp. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated. Kane and Staiger have calculated that, given the enormous differences between the top and the bottom of the profession, you'd probably have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher. That means tenure can't be routinely awarded, the way it is now. Currently, the salary structure of the teaching profession is highly rigid, and that would also have to change in a world where we want to rate teachers on their actual performance. An apprentice should get apprentice wages. But if we find eighty-fifth-percentile teachers who can teach a year and a half's material in one year, we're going to have to pay them a lot—both because we want them to stay and because the only way to get people to try out for what will suddenly be a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive the winnowing a healthy reward.
Is this solution to teaching's quarterback problem politically possible? Taxpayers might well balk at the costs of trying out four teachers to find one good one. Teachers' unions have been resistant to even the slightest move away from the current tenure arrangement. But all the reformers want is for the teaching profession to copy what firms like North Star have been doing for years. Deutschlander interviews a thousand people to find ten advisers. He spends large amounts of money to figure out who has the particular mixture of abilities to do the job. "Between hard and soft costs," he says, "most firms sink between a hundred thousand dollars and two hundred and fifty thousand dollars on someone in their first three or four years," and in most cases, of course, that investment comes to naught. But, if you were willing to make that kind of investment and show that kind of patience, you wound up with a truly high-performing financial adviser. "We have a hundred and twenty-five full-time advisers," Deutschlander says. "Last year, we had seventy-one of them qualify for the Million Dollar Round Table"—the industry's association of its most successful practitioners. "We're seventy-one out of a hundred and twenty-five in that élite group." What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?
Midway through the fourth quarter of the Oklahoma State–Missouri game, the Tigers were in trouble. For the first time all year, they were behind late in the game. They needed to score, or they'd lose any chance of a national championship. Daniel took the snap from his center, and planted his feet to pass. His receivers were covered. He began to run. The Oklahoma State defenders closed in on him. He was under pressure, something that rarely happened to him in the spread. Desperate, he heaved the ball downfield, right into the arms of a Cowboy defender.
Shonka jumped up. "That's not like him!" he cried out. "He doesn't throw stuff up like that."
Next to Shonka, a scout for the Kansas City Chiefs looked crestfallen. "Chase never throws something up for grabs!"
It was tempting to see Daniel's mistake as definitive. The spread had broken down. He was finally under pressure. This was what it would be like to be an N.F.L. quarterback, wasn't it? But there is nothing like being an N.F.L. quarterback except being an N.F.L. quarterback. A prediction, in a field where prediction is not possible, is no more than a prejudice. Maybe that interception means that Daniel won't be a good professional quarterback, or maybe he made a mistake that he'll learn from. "In a great big piece of pie," Shonka said, "that was just a little slice." ♦
How do we hire when we can't tell who's right for the job?
by Malcolm Gladwell December 15, 2008
Effective teachers have a gift for noticing—what one researcher calls "withitness."
On the day of the big football game between the University of Missouri Tigers and the Cowboys of Oklahoma State, a football scout named Dan Shonka sat in his hotel, in Columbia, Missouri, with a portable DVD player. Shonka has worked for three National Football League teams. Before that, he was a football coach, and before that he played linebacker—although, he says, "that was three knee operations and a hundred pounds ago." Every year, he evaluates somewhere between eight hundred and twelve hundred players around the country, helping professional teams decide whom to choose in the college draft, which means that over the last thirty years he has probably seen as many football games as anyone else in America. In his DVD player was his homework for the evening's big game—an edited video of the Tigers' previous contest, against the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers.
Shonka methodically made his way through the video, stopping and re-winding whenever he saw something that caught his eye. He liked Jeremy Maclin and Chase Coffman, two of the Mizzou receivers. He loved William Moore, the team's bruising strong safety. But, most of all, he was interested in the Tigers' quarterback and star, a stocky, strong-armed senior named Chase Daniel.
"I like to see that the quarterback can hit a receiver in stride, so he doesn't have to slow for the ball," Shonka began. He had a stack of evaluation forms next to him and, as he watched the game, he was charting and grading every throw that Daniel made. "Then judgment. Hey, if it's not there, throw it away and play another day. Will he stand in there and take a hit, with a guy breathing down his face? Will he be able to step right in there, throw, and still take that hit? Does the guy throw better when he's in the pocket, or does he throw equally well when he's on the move? You want a great competitor. Durability. Can they hold up, their strength, toughness? Can they make big plays? Can they lead a team down the field and score late in the game? Can they see the field? When your team's way ahead, that's fine. But when you're getting your ass kicked I want to see what you're going to do."
He pointed to his screen. Daniel had thrown a dart, and, just as he did, a defensive player had hit him squarely. "See how he popped up?" Shonka said. "He stood right there and threw the ball in the face of that rush. This kid has got a lot of courage." Daniel was six feet tall and weighed two hundred and twenty-five pounds: thick through the chest and trunk. He carried himself with a self-assurance that bordered on cockiness. He threw quickly and in rhythm. He nimbly evaded defenders. He made short throws with touch and longer throws with accuracy. By the game's end, he had completed an astonishing seventy-eight per cent of his passes, and handed Nebraska its worst home defeat in fifty-three years. "He can zip it," Shonka said. "He can really gun, when he has to." Shonka had seen all the promising college quarterbacks, charted and graded their throws, and to his mind Daniel was special: "He might be one of the best college quarterbacks in the country."
But then Shonka began to talk about when he was on the staff of the Philadelphia Eagles, in 1999. Five quarterbacks were taken in the first round of the college draft that year, and each looked as promising as Chase Daniel did now. But only one of them, Donovan McNabb, ended up fulfilling that promise. Of the rest, one descended into mediocrity after a decent start. Two were complete busts, and the last was so awful that after failing out of the N.F.L. he ended up failing out of the Canadian Football League as well.
The year before, the same thing happened with Ryan Leaf, who was the Chase Daniel of 1998. The San Diego Chargers made him the second player taken over all in the draft, and gave him an eleven-million-dollar signing bonus. Leaf turned out to be terrible. In 2002, it was Joey Harrington's turn. Harrington was a golden boy out of the University of Oregon, and the third player taken in the draft. Shonka still can't get over what happened to him.
"I tell you, I saw Joey live," he said. "This guy threw lasers, he could throw under tight spots, he had the arm strength, he had the size, he had the intelligence." Shonka got as misty as a two-hundred-and-eighty-pound ex-linebacker in a black tracksuit can get. "He's a concert pianist, you know? I really—I mean, I really—liked Joey." And yet Harrington's career consisted of a failed stint with the Detroit Lions and a slide into obscurity. Shonka looked back at the screen, where the young man he felt might be the best quarterback in the country was marching his team up and down the field. "How will that ability translate to the National Football League?" He shook his head slowly. "Shoot."
This is the quarterback problem. There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they'll do once they're hired. So how do we know whom to choose in cases like that? In recent years, a number of fields have begun to wrestle with this problem, but none with such profound social consequences as the profession of teaching.
One of the most important tools in contemporary educational research is "value added" analysis. It uses standardized test scores to look at how much the academic performance of students in a given teacher's classroom changes between the beginning and the end of the school year. Suppose that Mrs. Brown and Mr. Smith both teach a classroom of third graders who score at the fiftieth percentile on math and reading tests on the first day of school, in September. When the students are retested, in June, Mrs. Brown's class scores at the seventieth percentile, while Mr. Smith's students have fallen to the fortieth percentile. That change in the students' rankings, value-added theory says, is a meaningful indicator of how much more effective Mrs. Brown is as a teacher than Mr. Smith.
It's only a crude measure, of course. A teacher is not solely responsible for how much is learned in a classroom, and not everything of value that a teacher imparts to his or her students can be captured on a standardized test. Nonetheless, if you follow Brown and Smith for three or four years, their effect on their students' test scores starts to become predictable: with enough data, it is possible to identify who the very good teachers are and who the very poor teachers are. What's more—and this is the finding that has galvanized the educational world—the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast.
Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year's worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half's worth of material. That difference amounts to a year's worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a "bad" school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You'd have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you'd get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.
Hanushek recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what even a rudimentary focus on teacher quality could mean for the United States. If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality. After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers. But there's a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like. The school system has a quarterback problem.
Kickoff time for Missouri's game against Oklahoma State was seven o'clock. It was a perfect evening for football: cloudless skies and a light fall breeze. For hours, fans had been tailgating in the parking lots around the stadium. Cars lined the roads leading to the university, many with fuzzy yellow-and-black Tiger tails hanging from their trunks. It was one of Mizzou's biggest games in years. The Tigers were undefeated, and had a chance to become the No. 1 college football team in the country. Shonka made his way through the milling crowds and took a seat in the press box. Below him, the players on the field looked like pieces on a chessboard.
The Tigers held the ball first. Chase Daniel stood a good seven yards behind his offensive line. He had five receivers, two to his left and three to his right, spaced from one side of the field to the other. His linemen were widely spaced as well. In play after play, Daniel caught the snap from his center, planted his feet, and threw the ball in quick seven- and eight-yard diagonal passes to one of his five receivers.
The style of offense that the Tigers run is called the "spread," and most of the top quarterbacks in college football—the players who will be drafted into the pros—are spread quarterbacks. By spacing out the offensive linemen and wide receivers, the system makes it easy for the quarterback to figure out the intentions of the opposing defense before the ball is snapped: he can look up and down the line, "read" the defense, and decide where to throw the ball before anyone has moved a muscle. Daniel had been playing in the spread since high school; he was its master. "Look how quickly he gets the ball out," Shonka said. "You can hardly go a thousand and one, a thousand and two, and it's out of his hand. He knows right where he's going. When everyone is spread out like that, the defense can't disguise its coverage. Chase knows right away what they are going to do. The system simplifies the quarterback's decisions."
But for Shonka this didn't help matters. It had always been hard to predict how a college quarterback would fare in the pros. The professional game was, simply, faster and more complicated. With the advent of the spread, though, the correspondence between the two levels of play had broken down almost entirely. N.F.L. teams don't run the spread. They can't. The defenders in the pros are so much faster than their college counterparts that they would shoot through those big gaps in the offensive line and flatten the quarterback. In the N.F.L., the offensive line is bunched closely together. Daniel wouldn't have five receivers. Most of the time, he'd have just three or four. He wouldn't have the luxury of standing seven yards behind the center, planting his feet, and knowing instantly where to throw. He'd have to crouch right behind the center, take the snap directly, and run backward before planting his feet to throw. The onrushing defenders wouldn't be seven yards away. They would be all around him, from the start. The defense would no longer have to show its hand, because the field would not be so spread out. It could now disguise its intentions. Daniel wouldn't be able to read the defense before the snap was taken. He'd have to read it in the seconds after the play began.
"In the spread, you see a lot of guys wide open," Shonka said. "But when a guy like Chase goes to the N.F.L. he's never going to see his receivers that open—only in some rare case, like someone slips or there's a bust in the coverage. When that ball's leaving your hands in the pros, if you don't use your eyes to move the defender a little bit, they'll break on the ball and intercept it. The athletic ability that they're playing against in the league is unbelievable."
As Shonka talked, Daniel was moving his team down the field. But he was almost always throwing those quick, diagonal passes. In the N.F.L., he would have to do much more than that—he would have to throw long, vertical passes over the top of the defense. Could he make that kind of throw? Shonka didn't know. There was also the matter of his height. Six feet was fine in a spread system, where the big gaps in the offensive line gave Daniel plenty of opportunity to throw the ball and see downfield. But in the N.F.L. there wouldn't be gaps, and the linemen rushing at him would be six-five, not six-one.
"I wonder," Shonka went on. "Can he see? Can he be productive in a new kind of offense? How will he handle that? I'd like to see him set up quickly from center. I'd like to see his ability to read coverages that are not in the spread. I'd like to see him in the pocket. I'd like to see him move his feet. I'd like to see him do a deep dig, or deep comeback. You know, like a throw twenty to twenty-five yards down the field."
It was clear that Shonka didn't feel the same hesitancy in evaluating the other Mizzou stars—the safety Moore, the receivers Maclin and Coffman. The game that they would play in the pros would also be different from the game they were playing in college, but the difference was merely one of degree. They had succeeded at Missouri because they were strong and fast and skilled, and these traits translate in kind to professional football.
A college quarterback joining the N.F.L., by contrast, has to learn to play an entirely new game. Shonka began to talk about Tim Couch, the quarterback taken first in that legendary draft of 1999. Couch set every record imaginable in his years at the University of Kentucky. "They used to put five garbage cans on the field," Shonka recalled, shaking his head, "and Couch would stand there and throw and just drop the ball into every one." But Couch was a flop in the pros. It wasn't that professional quarterbacks didn't need to be accurate. It was that the kind of accuracy required to do the job well could be measured only in a real N.F.L. game.
Similarly, all quarterbacks drafted into the pros are required to take an I.Q. test—the Wonderlic Personnel Test. The theory behind the test is that the pro game is so much more cognitively demanding than the college game that high intelligence should be a good predictor of success. But when the economists David Berri and Rob Simmons analyzed the scores—which are routinely leaked to the press—they found that Wonderlic scores are all but useless as predictors. Of the five quarterbacks taken in round one of the 1999 draft, Donovan McNabb, the only one of the five with a shot at the Hall of Fame, had the lowest Wonderlic score. And who else had I.Q. scores in the same range as McNabb? Dan Marino and Terry Bradshaw, two of the greatest quarterbacks ever to play the game.
We're used to dealing with prediction problems by going back and looking for better predictors. We now realize that being a good doctor requires the ability to communicate, listen, and empathize—and so there is increasing pressure on medical schools to pay attention to interpersonal skills as well as to test scores. We can have better physicians if we're just smarter about how we choose medical-school students. But no one is saying that Dan Shonka is somehow missing some key ingredient in his analysis; that if he were only more perceptive he could predict Chase Daniel's career trajectory. The problem with picking quarterbacks is that Chase Daniel's performance can't be predicted. The job he's being groomed for is so particular and specialized that there is no way to know who will succeed at it and who won't. In fact, Berri and Simmons found no connection between where a quarterback was taken in the draft—that is, how highly he was rated on the basis of his college performance—and how well he played in the pros.
The entire time that Chase Daniel was on the field against Oklahoma State, his backup, Chase Patton, stood on the sidelines, watching. Patton didn't play a single down. In his four years at Missouri, up to that point, he had thrown a total of twenty-six passes. And yet there were people in Shonka's world who thought that Patton would end up as a better professional quarterback than Daniel. The week of the Oklahoma State game, the national sports magazine ESPN even put the two players on its cover, with the title "CHASE DANIEL MIGHT WIN THE HEISMAN"—referring to the trophy given to college football's best player. "HIS BACKUP COULD WIN THE SUPER BOWL." Why did everyone like Patton so much? It wasn't clear. Maybe he looked good in practice. Maybe it was because this season in the N.F.L. a quarterback who had also never started in a single college game is playing superbly for the New England Patriots. It sounds absurd to put an athlete on the cover of a magazine for no particular reason. But perhaps that's just the quarterback problem taken to an extreme. If college performance doesn't tell us anything, why shouldn't we value someone who hasn't had the chance to play as highly as someone who plays as well as anyone in the land?
Picture a young preschool teacher, sitting on a classroom floor surrounded by seven children. She is holding an alphabet book, and working through the letters with the children, one by one: " 'A' is for apple. . . . 'C' is for cow." The session was taped, and the videotape is being watched by a group of experts, who are charting and grading each of the teacher's moves.
After thirty seconds, the leader of the group—Bob Pianta, the dean of the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education—stops the tape. He points to two little girls on the right side of the circle. They are unusually active, leaning into the circle and reaching out to touch the book.
"What I'm struck by is how lively the affect is in this room," Pianta said. "One of the things the teacher is doing is creating a holding space for that. And what distinguishes her from other teachers is that she flexibly allows the kids to move and point to the book. She's not rigidly forcing the kids to sit back."
Pianta's team has developed a system for evaluating various competencies relating to student-teacher interaction. Among them is "regard for student perspective"; that is, a teacher's knack for allowing students some flexibility in how they become engaged in the classroom. Pianta stopped and rewound the tape twice, until what the teacher had managed to achieve became plain: the children were active, but somehow the class hadn't become a free-for-all.
"A lesser teacher would have responded to the kids' leaning over as misbehavior," Pianta went on. " 'We can't do this right now. You need to be sitting still.' She would have turned this off."
Bridget Hamre, one of Pianta's colleagues, chimed in: "These are three- and four-year-olds. At this age, when kids show their engagement it's not like the way we show our engagement, where we look alert. They're leaning forward and wriggling. That's their way of doing it. And a good teacher doesn't interpret that as bad behavior. You can see how hard it is to teach new teachers this idea, because the minute you teach them to have regard for the student's perspective, they think you have to give up control of the classroom."
The lesson continued. Pianta pointed out how the teacher managed to personalize the material. " 'C' is for cow" turned into a short discussion of which of the kids had ever visited a farm. "Almost every time a child says something, she responds to it, which is what we describe as teacher sensitivity," Hamre said.
The teacher then asked the children if anyone's name began with that letter. "Calvin," a boy named Calvin says. The teacher nods, and says, "Calvin starts with 'C.' " A little girl in the middle says, "Me!" The teacher turns to her. "Your name's Venisha. Letter 'V.' Venisha."
It was a key moment. Of all the teacher elements analyzed by the Virginia group, feedback—a direct, personal response by a teacher to a specific statement by a student—seems to be most closely linked to academic success. Not only did the teacher catch the "Me!" amid the wiggling and tumult; she addressed it directly.
"Mind you, that's not great feedback," Hamre said. "High-quality feedback is where there is a back-and-forth exchange to get a deeper understanding." The perfect way to handle that moment would have been for the teacher to pause and pull out Venisha's name card, point to the letter "V," show her how different it is from "C," and make the class sound out both letters. But the teacher didn't do that—either because it didn't occur to her or because she was distracted by the wiggling of the girls to her right.
"On the other hand, she could have completely ignored the girl, which happens a lot," Hamre went on. "The other thing that happens a lot is the teacher will just say, 'You're wrong.' Yes-no feedback is probably the predominant kind of feedback, which provides almost no information for the kid in terms of learning."
Pianta showed another tape, of a nearly identical situation: a circle of pre-schoolers around a teacher. The lesson was about how we can tell when someone is happy or sad. The teacher began by acting out a short conversation between two hand puppets, Henrietta and Twiggle: Twiggle is sad until Henrietta shares some watermelon with him.
"The idea that the teacher is trying to get across is that you can tell by looking at somebody's face how they're feeling, whether they're feeling sad or happy," Hamre said. "What kids of this age tend to say is you can tell how they're feeling because of something that happened to them. They lost their puppy and that's why they're sad. They don't really get this idea. So she's been challenged, and she's struggling."
The teacher begins, "Remember when we did something and we drew our face?" She touches her face, pointing out her eyes and mouth. "When somebody is happy, their face tells us that they're happy. And their eyes tell us." The children look on blankly. The teacher plunges on: "Watch, watch." She smiles broadly. "This is happy! How can you tell that I'm happy? Look at my face. Tell me what changes about my face when I'm happy. No, no, look at my face. . . . No. . . ."
A little girl next to her says, "Eyes," providing the teacher with an opportunity to use one of her students to draw the lesson out. But the teacher doesn't hear her. Again, she asks, "What's changed about my face?" She smiles and she frowns, as if she can reach the children by sheer force of repetition. Pianta stopped the tape. One problem, he pointed out, was that Henrietta made Twiggle happy by sharing watermelon with him, which doesn't illustrate what the lesson is about.
"You know, a better way to handle this would be to anchor something around the kids," Pianta said. "She should ask, 'What makes you feel happy?' The kids could answer. Then she could say, 'Show me your face when you have that feeling? O.K., what does So-and-So's face look like? Now tell me what makes you sad. Show me your face when you're sad. Oh, look, her face changed!' You've basically made the point. And then you could have the kids practice, or something. But this is going to go nowhere."
"What's changed about my face?" the teacher repeated, for what seemed like the hundredth time. One boy leaned forward into the circle, trying to engage himself in the lesson, in the way that little children do. His eyes were on the teacher. "Sit up!" she snapped at him.
As Pianta played one tape after another, the patterns started to become clear. Here was a teacher who read out sentences, in a spelling test, and every sentence came from her own life—"I went to a wedding last week"—which meant she was missing an opportunity to say something that engaged her students. Another teacher walked over to a computer to do a PowerPoint presentation, only to realize that she hadn't turned it on. As she waited for it to boot up, the classroom slid into chaos.
Then there was the superstar—a young high-school math teacher, in jeans and a green polo shirt. "So let's see," he began, standing up at the blackboard. "Special right triangles. We're going to do practice with this, just throwing out ideas." He drew two triangles. "Label the length of the side, if you can. If you can't, we'll all do it." He was talking and moving quickly, which Pianta said might be interpreted as a bad thing, because this was trigonometry. It wasn't easy material. But his energy seemed to infect the class. And all the time he offered the promise of help. If you can't, we'll all do it. In a corner of the room was a student named Ben, who'd evidently missed a few classes. "See what you can remember, Ben," the teacher said. Ben was lost. The teacher quickly went to his side: "I'm going to give you a way to get to it." He made a quick suggestion: "How about that?" Ben went back to work. The teacher slipped over to the student next to Ben, and glanced at her work. "That's all right!" He went to a third student, then a fourth. Two and a half minutes into the lesson—the length of time it took that subpar teacher to turn on the computer—he had already laid out the problem, checked in with nearly every student in the class, and was back at the blackboard, to take the lesson a step further.
"In a group like this, the standard m.o. would be: he's at the board, broadcasting to the kids, and has no idea who knows what he's doing and who doesn't know," Pianta said. "But he's giving individualized feedback. He's off the charts on feedback." Pianta and his team watched in awe.
Educational-reform efforts typically start with a push for higher standards for teachers—that is, for the academic and cognitive requirements for entering the profession to be as stiff as possible. But after you've watched Pianta's tapes, and seen how complex the elements of effective teaching are, this emphasis on book smarts suddenly seems peculiar. The preschool teacher with the alphabet book was sensitive to her students' needs and knew how to let the two girls on the right wiggle and squirm without disrupting the rest of the students; the trigonometry teacher knew how to complete a circuit of his classroom in two and a half minutes and make everyone feel as if he or she were getting his personal attention. But these aren't cognitive skills.
A group of researchers—Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard's school of education; Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth; and Robert Gordon, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress—have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master's degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom. Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications—as much as they appear related to teaching prowess—turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans.
Another educational researcher, Jacob Kounin, once did an analysis of "desist" events, in which a teacher has to stop some kind of misbehavior. In one instance, "Mary leans toward the table to her right and whispers to Jane. Both she and Jane giggle. The teacher says, 'Mary and Jane, stop that!' " That's a desist event. But how a teacher desists—her tone of voice, her attitudes, her choice of words—appears to make no difference at all in maintaining an orderly classroom. How can that be? Kounin went back over the videotape and noticed that forty-five seconds before Mary whispered to Jane, Lucy and John had started whispering. Then Robert had noticed and joined in, making Jane giggle, whereupon Jane said something to John. Then Mary whispered to Jane. It was a contagious chain of misbehavior, and what really was significant was not how a teacher stopped the deviancy at the end of the chain but whether she was able to stop the chain before it started. Kounin called that ability "withitness," which he defined as "a teacher's communicating to the children by her actual behavior (rather than by verbally announcing: 'I know what's going on') that she knows what the children are doing, or has the proverbial 'eyes in the back of her head.' " It stands to reason that to be a great teacher you have to have withitness. But how do you know whether someone has withitness until she stands up in front of a classroom of twenty-five wiggly Janes, Lucys, Johns, and Roberts and tries to impose order?
Perhaps no profession has taken the implications of the quarterback problem more seriously than the financial-advice field, and the experience of financial advisers is a useful guide to what could happen in teaching as well. There are no formal qualifications for entering the field except a college degree. Financial-services firms don't look for only the best students, or require graduate degrees or specify a list of prerequisites. No one knows beforehand what makes a high-performing financial adviser different from a low-performing one, so the field throws the door wide open.
"A question I ask is, 'Give me a typical day,' " Ed Deutschlander, the co-president of North Star Resource Group, in Minneapolis, says. "If that person says, 'I get up at five-thirty, hit the gym, go to the library, go to class, go to my job, do homework until eleven,' that person has a chance." Deutschlander, in other words, begins by looking for the same general traits that every corporate recruiter looks for.
Deutschlander says that last year his firm interviewed about a thousand people, and found forty-nine it liked, a ratio of twenty interviewees to one candidate. Those candidates were put through a four-month "training camp," in which they tried to act like real financial advisers. "They should be able to obtain in that four-month period a minimum of ten official clients," Deutschlander said. "If someone can obtain ten clients, and is able to maintain a minimum of ten meetings a week, that means that person has gathered over a hundred introductions in that four-month period. Then we know that person is at least fast enough to play this game."
Of the forty-nine people invited to the training camp, twenty-three made the cut and were hired as apprentice advisers. Then the real sorting began. "Even with the top performers, it really takes three to four years to see whether someone can make it," Deutschlander says. "You're just scratching the surface at the beginning. Four years from now, I expect to hang on to at least thirty to forty per cent of that twenty-three."
People like Deutschlander are referred to as gatekeepers, a title that suggests that those at the door of a profession are expected to discriminate—to select who gets through the gate and who doesn't. But Deutschlander sees his role as keeping the gate as wide open as possible: to find ten new financial advisers, he's willing to interview a thousand people. The equivalent of that approach, in the N.F.L., would be for a team to give up trying to figure out who the "best" college quarterback is, and, instead, try out three or four "good" candidates.
In teaching, the implications are even more profound. They suggest that we shouldn't be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don't track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession needs to start the equivalent of Ed Deutschlander's training camp. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated. Kane and Staiger have calculated that, given the enormous differences between the top and the bottom of the profession, you'd probably have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher. That means tenure can't be routinely awarded, the way it is now. Currently, the salary structure of the teaching profession is highly rigid, and that would also have to change in a world where we want to rate teachers on their actual performance. An apprentice should get apprentice wages. But if we find eighty-fifth-percentile teachers who can teach a year and a half's material in one year, we're going to have to pay them a lot—both because we want them to stay and because the only way to get people to try out for what will suddenly be a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive the winnowing a healthy reward.
Is this solution to teaching's quarterback problem politically possible? Taxpayers might well balk at the costs of trying out four teachers to find one good one. Teachers' unions have been resistant to even the slightest move away from the current tenure arrangement. But all the reformers want is for the teaching profession to copy what firms like North Star have been doing for years. Deutschlander interviews a thousand people to find ten advisers. He spends large amounts of money to figure out who has the particular mixture of abilities to do the job. "Between hard and soft costs," he says, "most firms sink between a hundred thousand dollars and two hundred and fifty thousand dollars on someone in their first three or four years," and in most cases, of course, that investment comes to naught. But, if you were willing to make that kind of investment and show that kind of patience, you wound up with a truly high-performing financial adviser. "We have a hundred and twenty-five full-time advisers," Deutschlander says. "Last year, we had seventy-one of them qualify for the Million Dollar Round Table"—the industry's association of its most successful practitioners. "We're seventy-one out of a hundred and twenty-five in that élite group." What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?
Midway through the fourth quarter of the Oklahoma State–Missouri game, the Tigers were in trouble. For the first time all year, they were behind late in the game. They needed to score, or they'd lose any chance of a national championship. Daniel took the snap from his center, and planted his feet to pass. His receivers were covered. He began to run. The Oklahoma State defenders closed in on him. He was under pressure, something that rarely happened to him in the spread. Desperate, he heaved the ball downfield, right into the arms of a Cowboy defender.
Shonka jumped up. "That's not like him!" he cried out. "He doesn't throw stuff up like that."
Next to Shonka, a scout for the Kansas City Chiefs looked crestfallen. "Chase never throws something up for grabs!"
It was tempting to see Daniel's mistake as definitive. The spread had broken down. He was finally under pressure. This was what it would be like to be an N.F.L. quarterback, wasn't it? But there is nothing like being an N.F.L. quarterback except being an N.F.L. quarterback. A prediction, in a field where prediction is not possible, is no more than a prejudice. Maybe that interception means that Daniel won't be a good professional quarterback, or maybe he made a mistake that he'll learn from. "In a great big piece of pie," Shonka said, "that was just a little slice." ♦
December 19, 2008
2008: The Year in Politics
Here are some highlights from this year’s political writing in The New Yorker.
These rival conceptions of the Presidency—Clinton as executive, Obama as visionary—reflect a deeper difference in how the two candidates analyze what ails the country.
—“The Choice,” by George Packer (January 28, 2008)
One evening this past fall, Barack Obama's Presidential campaign went to Newark, bringing together the two leading figures of what might be called the Oprah Winfrey wing of the Democratic Party. At a downtown rally, the task of firing up the crowd and introducing the candidate fell to Cory Booker, Newark's thirty-eight-year-old mayor, who is Obama's most prominent backer in New Jersey.
—“The Color of Politics,” by Peter J. Boyer (February 4, 2008)
Recently, I spoke with a number of conservatives about their movement. The younger ones—say, those under fifty—uniformly subscribe to the reformist version. They are in a state of glowing revulsion at the condition of their political party.
—“The Fall of Conservatism,” by George Packer (May 26, 2008)
When I asked why he moved to Miami, Stone quoted a Somerset Maugham line: “It’s a sunny place for shady people. I fit right in.”
—“The Dirty Trickster,” by Jeffrey Toobin (June 2, 2008)
Obama seems to have been meticulous about constructing a political identity for himself. He visited churches on the South Side, considered the politics and reputations of each one, and received advice from older pastors. Before deciding on Trinity United Church of Christ, he asked the Reverend Wright about critics who complained that the church was too “upwardly mobile,” a place for buppies.
—“Making It,” by Ryan Lizza (July 21, 2008)
A nose-holding base does not often deliver election victories, but few evangelicals could imagine what McCain might say or do, with any degree of authenticity, that could excite the base.
—“Party Faithful,” by Peter J. Boyer (September 8, 2008)
Recently, people in Ohio have told me that voters there have started to shift toward Obama. Gabe Kramer, of the S.E.I.U., said that, after the first Presidential debate and amid the financial crisis, union members seemed to find Obama’s ideas and manner more persuasive than before. But even if Obama wins he will still have to overcome the deep skepticism of struggling Americans.
—“The Hardest Vote,” by George Packer (October 13, 2008)
How our votes are counted is, generally, a product of twentieth-century technology. (My precinct uses an optical scanner invented in the nineteen-sixties.) It really is patches all the way down. In places—like the Electoral College—the patchwork gets pretty shoddy.
—“Rock, Paper, Scissors,” by Jill Lepore (October 13, 2008)
Biden said that the best model for him is Lyndon Johnson, who, before serving as John F. Kennedy’s Vice-President, was the Majority Leader of the Senate, and who, even in the Kennedy White House, tried to remain something of a Senate man.
—“Biden’s Brief,” by Ryan Lizza (October 20, 2008)
Palin also learned that a number of prominent conservative pundits would soon be passing through Juneau, on cruises sponsored by right-leaning political magazines. She invited these insiders to the governor’s mansion, and even led some of them on a helicopter tour.
—“The Insiders,” by Jane Mayer (October 28, 2008)
In early June, Senators Chuck Hagel and John McCain met in Hagel’s office on Capitol Hill. McCain, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, considered Hagel—a fellow-Republican and the senior senator from Nebraska—among his closest friends in Congress.
—“Odd Man Out,” by Connie Bruck (November 3, 2008)
Much of the Obama campaign was consumed with making the candidate look Presidential.
—“Battle Plans,” by Ryan Lizza (November 17, 2008)
“Change has come to America,” Obama declared, and everyone in a park remembered until now as the place where, forty summers ago, police did outrageous battle with antiwar protesters knew what change had come, and that—how long? too long—it was about damned time.
—“The Joshua Generation,” by David Remnick (November 17, 2008)
Keywords
* Chicago;
* Connie Bruck;
* David Remnick;
* Election;
* George Packer;
* Jane Mayer;
* Jeffrey Toobin;
* Jill Lepore;
* Obama;
* Peter J. Boyer;
* Politics;
* Ryan Lizza;
* Year in Review
Posted by The New Yorker
In
* 2008: The Year in Review
2008: The Year in Politics
Here are some highlights from this year’s political writing in The New Yorker.
These rival conceptions of the Presidency—Clinton as executive, Obama as visionary—reflect a deeper difference in how the two candidates analyze what ails the country.
—“The Choice,” by George Packer (January 28, 2008)
One evening this past fall, Barack Obama's Presidential campaign went to Newark, bringing together the two leading figures of what might be called the Oprah Winfrey wing of the Democratic Party. At a downtown rally, the task of firing up the crowd and introducing the candidate fell to Cory Booker, Newark's thirty-eight-year-old mayor, who is Obama's most prominent backer in New Jersey.
—“The Color of Politics,” by Peter J. Boyer (February 4, 2008)
Recently, I spoke with a number of conservatives about their movement. The younger ones—say, those under fifty—uniformly subscribe to the reformist version. They are in a state of glowing revulsion at the condition of their political party.
—“The Fall of Conservatism,” by George Packer (May 26, 2008)
When I asked why he moved to Miami, Stone quoted a Somerset Maugham line: “It’s a sunny place for shady people. I fit right in.”
—“The Dirty Trickster,” by Jeffrey Toobin (June 2, 2008)
Obama seems to have been meticulous about constructing a political identity for himself. He visited churches on the South Side, considered the politics and reputations of each one, and received advice from older pastors. Before deciding on Trinity United Church of Christ, he asked the Reverend Wright about critics who complained that the church was too “upwardly mobile,” a place for buppies.
—“Making It,” by Ryan Lizza (July 21, 2008)
A nose-holding base does not often deliver election victories, but few evangelicals could imagine what McCain might say or do, with any degree of authenticity, that could excite the base.
—“Party Faithful,” by Peter J. Boyer (September 8, 2008)
Recently, people in Ohio have told me that voters there have started to shift toward Obama. Gabe Kramer, of the S.E.I.U., said that, after the first Presidential debate and amid the financial crisis, union members seemed to find Obama’s ideas and manner more persuasive than before. But even if Obama wins he will still have to overcome the deep skepticism of struggling Americans.
—“The Hardest Vote,” by George Packer (October 13, 2008)
How our votes are counted is, generally, a product of twentieth-century technology. (My precinct uses an optical scanner invented in the nineteen-sixties.) It really is patches all the way down. In places—like the Electoral College—the patchwork gets pretty shoddy.
—“Rock, Paper, Scissors,” by Jill Lepore (October 13, 2008)
Biden said that the best model for him is Lyndon Johnson, who, before serving as John F. Kennedy’s Vice-President, was the Majority Leader of the Senate, and who, even in the Kennedy White House, tried to remain something of a Senate man.
—“Biden’s Brief,” by Ryan Lizza (October 20, 2008)
Palin also learned that a number of prominent conservative pundits would soon be passing through Juneau, on cruises sponsored by right-leaning political magazines. She invited these insiders to the governor’s mansion, and even led some of them on a helicopter tour.
—“The Insiders,” by Jane Mayer (October 28, 2008)
In early June, Senators Chuck Hagel and John McCain met in Hagel’s office on Capitol Hill. McCain, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, considered Hagel—a fellow-Republican and the senior senator from Nebraska—among his closest friends in Congress.
—“Odd Man Out,” by Connie Bruck (November 3, 2008)
Much of the Obama campaign was consumed with making the candidate look Presidential.
—“Battle Plans,” by Ryan Lizza (November 17, 2008)
“Change has come to America,” Obama declared, and everyone in a park remembered until now as the place where, forty summers ago, police did outrageous battle with antiwar protesters knew what change had come, and that—how long? too long—it was about damned time.
—“The Joshua Generation,” by David Remnick (November 17, 2008)
Keywords
* Chicago;
* Connie Bruck;
* David Remnick;
* Election;
* George Packer;
* Jane Mayer;
* Jeffrey Toobin;
* Jill Lepore;
* Obama;
* Peter J. Boyer;
* Politics;
* Ryan Lizza;
* Year in Review
Posted by The New Yorker
In
* 2008: The Year in Review
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)