Hopkins (Johns, not Anthony)

OK, unlike AP, I don't watch TV series --except perhaps the old The Shield, because it was aired late at night.

But last night,incidentally, I was glued before the telly watching the third episode of Hopkins --they have six one-hour episodes out of 1500 hours footage.

It turns out that I like that reality show, named after a hospital in Baltimore, in which the doctors were actually pretty relaxing when playing god like doing a heart transplantation surgery. After all, that's their daily jobs and you can't expect one to be tensed in everyday's work, no?

And the scenes in surgery room were beautifully bloody.

And where is the economics, the moral of the story? Nothing. It's just a funny conversation with a customer relation officer good TV show.

SmackDown

I'm sorry for that kid who died after an injury from a smackdown match with his friends. Also for other injured kids everywhere, regardless of what they just saw on tv: wrestling, cartoon, or crappy 'sinetron'.

But banning SmackDown? Give me a break.

When your kid gets injured trying to practice what he saw on tv, it's not your tv's fault (or the producer's, or the station's, for that matter). It's yours. When your kid gets kicked by another kid who happens to get the idea from tv, it's not the tv's fault, it's that kid's parents'. So, go sue them irresponsible parents.

If you want compensation from a tv station for a damage you think caused by it, the tv station should also demand compensation from you if your kid learns good stuff from its other programs or shows. If you say, no, you have paid your due every month, I'd say OK, the damage has also been deduced from that payment. Fair, no?

Well, now you're calling me a Lativi protector? Get this: I don't give a damn to that company. I don't even like SmackDown. It's totally stupid. A display of a bunch of airheads bumping into each other with silly chicks walking around. Here's what I would do: turn off the tv. Watch House MD, CSI, Lost, or Grey's Anatomy -- while my kid (if I had one) is sleeping...

Wait, I got an idea. While people are banning SmackDown (and Lativi), I'm gonna play it here in the Café. Big screen. Who says I don't have business sense?

SmackDown

Does internet connect or separate people?

This is a spin-off from my earlier posting on the Police's "Message in the Bottle." Actually, I wanted to comment on Roby's comment. But since this may be a different subject, I guess it's worth being posted as a new entry.

Roby argued that internet (blog, friendster etc.) might connect people. But at the same time it could also create alienation. This reminds me of a similar but different discussion on whether internet makes people from different groups (professions, political ideology, hometown etc.), or even segregate them more?

In the social capital discussion, Robert Putnam raised the concept of 'bonding' and 'bridging' social capital. Another thing he rasied in "Bowling Alone" (2001) was the declining trend in the of civic and community engagement in the U.S., partly because of TV. But other people challenged his argument by pointing that people may still engage in civic activties by other means. Town meeting, rally, petition may still exists but people now can do it through online petition, email communcation, blogging etc. So internet can be a source for 'bridging' social capital.

But internet can also be a source for 'bonding' social capital that segregate different groups of people. This paper shows how it can happen in science. Suppose A and B is are economists, but live in two geographically separate places. A has two colleagues, C and D, who are non-economists but live in the same area with A. Consider the world when communication was still difficult. A will interact more with C and D, which imply the possibility of a cross-disciplinary collaboration.

But because of the revolution in communication technology, A can now easily interact with his or her fellow economist, B. So economists will be more likely to talk only with economist, reducing the possibility of cross-disciplinary interactions. In the authors' language, internet will "Balkanize science."

Well, we could still argue otherwise. Because of communcation, economists who tend to group together can have more access to their non-economists colleagues. At the end, the conclusion can happen in both ways.

Social network

In defense of ... television

I confess, I always have a mixed feeling when I hear parents blame television for their children's bad grades in school. Something tells me this can be right and wrong at the same time. If memory serves, my childhood was full of tv-watching, far exceeded today's standard for children. But I wasn't the dumbest in the class. I know many friends who still remember perfectly the characters from movies or series we watched when we were kids. And they did well in classes. Of course this should not be for generalization. Today, many school kids are forbidden to watch tv more than 2 hours a day (poor them...). Some of them make good grades, some not. Some go to school at 7am and came back home at 7pm ("You'd better take this course and that course, not watching tv" -- moms say). Ask them calculus, and you'll be ashamed.

So, the best I dare to conclude about the effect of tv on children is: it's ... inconclusive.

Fortunately, some people have time to think about it more seriously. Here is their paper. Below is the abstract:

We use heterogeneity in the timing of television's introduction to different local markets to identify the effect of preschool television exposure on standardized test scores later in life. Our preferred point estimate indicates that an additional year of preschool television exposure raises average test scores by about .02 standard deviations. We are able to reject negative effects larger than about .03 standard deviations per year of television exposure. For reading and general knowledge scores, the positive effects we find are marginally statistically significant, and these effects are largest for children from households where English is not the primary language, for children whose mothers have less than a high school education, and for non-white children. To capture more general effects on human capital, we also study the effect of childhood television exposure on school completion and subsequent labor market earnings, and again find no evidence of a negative effect.

But, speaking of tv, of course we should think about what actually is shown on that thing. Because that might make a big tilt on the conclusion. If your kids grow up watching Discovery Channel rather than MTV, probably they will have better grades (so far as school gives more weight to science than to fashion or music).

Everyday's Choices