Mary Printz, 1923-2009

Mary Printz, whose work at an answering service inspired the musical Bells Are Ringing (and its "Susanswerphone"), has died:

When clients dialed PLaza 2-2232, the agency's number for many years, they knew they could count on discretion and, when required, innovation. Some messages were routine — at least in the world in which Mrs. Printz's clients moved — involving little more than having the service tell the chauffeur to be at such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time.

Others required quick thinking. There was the time, for instance, that Mrs. Printz took a frantic call from Noël Coward, recalled her husband, Bob Printz, in a telephone interview on Friday:

"Mary," Mr. Coward cried, "Marlene has just had a bottle of Scotch and is finished with it, and it's Sunday; I don't have any more. What'll I do?"

Mary Printz, an Ear for the Famous, Dies at 82 (New York Times)

In 1956, Mrs. Printz started her own answering service, Belles Celebrity Secretarial Service. As Belles' owner, she made a cameo appearance in the July 6, 1969 New York Times article "Phone Users Dial FRustration, Too," about problems resulting from "a sharp rise in telephone traffic":

"Telephone service is the worst I've seen it since 1956," Mrs. Printz complained. "There's just no way I can estimate how much business I've lost."

Belles used what the article calls "the troubled PLaza 8 exchange."

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Musical-comedy pencils

"Ambercroombie & Flitch"

That's one of twenty-three ways to be cool, a page's worth of inspiration at The Daily What. Another way: "Irony."

(via notebookism)

[Links are gone.]

I, an aardvark

It was a value-added shopping experience.

[Photograph by Rachel Leddy.]

David Frauenfelder on fear and spending

David Frauenfelder at Breakfast with Pandora suggests that even as we cut back on expenses, we must also cut back on fear. I like the way he puts it:

Though no one's job is perfectly safe, if we all decide we must have two years' of savings in the bank before we spend again, eventually no one will have a job except the security guard at the bank.

[Apologies to David: I have corrected my misspelling of his last name in this post.]

Orange juice book

From an interview with Alissa Hamilton, author of the forthcoming book Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice:

What isn't straightforward about orange juice?

It's a heavily processed product. It's heavily engineered as well. In the process of pasteurizing, juice is heated and stripped of oxygen, a process called deaeration, so it doesn't oxidize. Then it's put in huge storage tanks where it can be kept for upwards of a year. It gets stripped of flavor-providing chemicals, which are volatile. When it's ready for packaging, companies such as Tropicana hire flavor companies such as Firmenich to engineer flavor packs to make it taste fresh. People think not-from-concentrate is a fresher product, but it also sits in storage for quite a long time.

*

So parse the carton for us. For example, what is the phrase "not from concentrate" really about?

In the '80s, Tropicana had a hold on ready-to-serve orange juice with full-strength juice. Then this new product, reconstituted orange juice, started appearing in supermarkets. Tropicana had to make decisions. Storing concentrate is much cheaper than full-strength juice. The phrase "not from concentrate" was to try to make consumers pay more for the product because it's a more expensive product to manufacture. It didn't have to do with the product being fresher; the product didn't change, the name simply changed. Tropicana didn't want to have to switch to concentrate technology.

Q&A with Alissa Hamilton (Boston Globe)

Dirty February

Grass, mud, leaves, afternoon.

It is, as Jane Austen says in Mansfield Park, "the dirty month of February."

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

Ways to anger professors

Useful advice for students, from Lynn F. Jacobs and Jeremy S. Hyman:

Nine Ways to Get on Your Professor's Bad Side (U.S. News & World Report)

The only item I'd take exception to is no. 9: "Plagiarize in super obvious ways." True, blatant plagiarism won't endear a student to a professor. But crafty, sly plagiarism is much, much worse, in part because its discovery may call for a significant investment of professorial time. Blatant plagiarism in contrast is merely pathetic, as its perpetrator assumes the professor to be a co-conspirator in cluelessness, someone who won't recognize the details of diction and syntax that so often make plagiarism instantly clear. Jacobs and Hyman's no. 5 — "Seem really stupid" — already covers blatant plagiarism.

A better no. 9: Be honest.

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How to e-mail a professor

Counting dropouts

Looking at my town's high school's 2007–2008 "report card" this morning, I see an overall graduation rate of 88.8% (62.1% for economically disadvantaged students) and a dropout rate of 3.1%. How to account for the missing 8.1%? I don't know. But a 2008 New York Times article makes clear that accurate numbers for graduation and dropout rates have been difficult to come by, with widespread undercounting of dropouts. Why? No Child Left Behind made possible a variety of ways to calculate graduation rates:

In 2001, the year the law was drafted, one of the first of a string of revisionist studies argued that the nation's schools were losing more students than previously thought.

Jay P. Greene, a researcher at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research organization, compared eighth-grade enrollments with the number of diplomas bestowed five years later to estimate that the nation’s graduation rate was 71 percent. Federal statistics had put the figure 15 points higher.

Still, Congress did not make dropouts a central focus of the law. And when states negotiated their plans to carry it out, the Bush administration allowed them to use dozens of different ways to report graduation rates.

As an example, New Mexico defined its rate as the percentage of enrolled 12th graders who received a diploma. That method grossly undercounts dropouts by ignoring all students who leave before the 12th grade.

The law also allowed states to establish their own goals for improving graduation rates. Many set them low. Nevada, for instance, pledged to get just 50 percent of its students to graduate on time. And since the law required no annual measures of progress, California proposed that even a one-tenth of 1 percent annual improvement in its graduation rate should suffice.

Daniel J. Losen, who has studied dropout reporting for the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, said he once pointed out to a state official that, at that pace, it would take California 500 years to meet its graduation goal.

"In California, we're patient," Mr. Losen recalled the official saying.

States Data Obscure How Few Finish High School (New York Times)

In 2008, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings began requiring states to use a common formula to calculate dropout and graduation rates. Read more:

U.S. to Require States to Use a Single School Dropout Formula (New York Times)

NEDAwareness Week

[Click to enlarge and read.]

NEDAwareness Week 2009: February 22-28

Things to Do (.pdf download, 112KB)
National Eating Disorders Association
NEDAwareness Week

No dropping out

These words must have made some younger viewers sit up straight. From President Barack Obama's address tonight to a joint session of Congress:

[D]ropping out of high school is no longer an option. It's not just quitting on yourself, it's quitting on your country — and this country needs and values the talents of every American.