Noise Control

Various signs had prompted me since long ago to ask numerous students: Is there a problem sleeping here? Is there too much noise at night? I was always assured there was no problem. Yet, apparently sleep-deprived students continued to be a common sight in the classroom, students routinely took naps in their rooms during the day, and on weekends many slept in til very late in the morning.

Then, finally, two girls visiting my room told me their roommates routinely stayed up til 3:00 or 4:00 AM laughing, joking, talking with visitors -- then slept in til around 10:00 AM. The two girls were trying to arrange a room change because they had to get up for 8:30 AM classes, but couldn't get to sleep at night because of the noise.

Now that pissed me off. In the cellphone wars, I strongly identify with the camp of the civilized (vs. the obnoxious). At the theatre or the movies in New York and Toronto, I have frequently been disturbed by chattering boors. Even restaurants are occasionally taken over by loudmouthed barbarians who take for granted that every diner in the place is there only to be a spectator to their dumb party.

Now here we had a school where inconsiderate knuckleheads were directly harming the education of their peers. I distributed a questionnaire in my classes to each of my 110 students:

ICB QUESTIONNAIRE

It has been suggested that some students cannot sleep well here because of noise late at night. The objective of this questionnaire is to find out if that is true.

This issue concerns me (Uriel), as a teacher, because you cannot work well, in your studies or any other endeavor, if you do not get enough sleep.

1. Are you disturbed by noise at ICB later than 11:30 PM? Y/N

2. Would you like ICB to introduce rules to stop the noise? Y/N

3. Some students sleep late in the morning and get up at 9:00 AM, 10:00 AM or later. These students presumably go to sleep around 2:00 AM or later. If they had to get up earlier in the morning, they would want to go to sleep earlier at night. Would you like ICB to introduce rules to require all students to get up at 7:00 AM? Y/N

4. Maybe ICB should require all students to perform morning exercises at 7:00 AM. How many days a week (Monday to Friday) would you like ICB to require students to do this? (Your answer should be 0 if you do not want this any day of the week; otherwise your answer should be 1 to 5.)

5. Maybe ICB should require all students who do not have classes at 8:30 AM to go to a classroom at that time to study by themselves. How many days a week (Monday to Friday) would you like ICB to require students to do this? (Your answer should be 0 if you do not want this any day of the week; otherwise your answer should be 1 to 5.)

Can anyone guess what several students answered to questions 4 and 5?

Yes indeed: "1 to 5."

It dawns on one after a while that some of the students here are Englishstically challenged. These students fell through a similar trap in one of my exams, where I posed an innocent question about Dr. Nira Schwartz, a former senior engineer on the antimissile team of TRW, a major defense contractor. Dr. Schwartz went public earlier this year with allegations that her employer had faked test results and had fired her when she protested:

Dr. Schwartz has made her charges in interviews and in newly unsealed documents filed with a federal district court in Los Angeles, where nearly four years ago she sued TRW. She seeks to recover for the government more than a half-billion dollars, some part of which a judge could award her as compensation....

Right or wrong, the investigations surrounding Dr. Schwartz's claims are shedding light on a contentious and secretive program. The Clinton administration has said it will decide this summer whether to proceed with an antimissile system meant to defend against warheads from so-called rogue states. Russia and other countries warn that such a decision could undermine a treaty limiting antimissile defenses that has served as a pillar of arms control.

Dr. Schwartz's charges have split the Defense Department. Some top officials defend TRW as innocent, and the Justice Department has so far declined to join her lawsuit. But a three-year inquiry by the Pentagon's Defense Criminal Investigative Service, which ended last August with no action, cited in its final report "numerous technical discrepancies" that "appear to warrant further review."

Moreover, former TRW employees back Dr. Schwartz. In an affidavit filed in connection with her suit, Roy Danchick, a retired senior engineer at TRW, said he had firsthand knowledge of TRW's "impermissibly manipulating" a study of the antimissile technology and "censoring the test data" so it appeared more successful than it was.

Dr. Schwartz's allegations center on TRW's certifying to the government that interceptors using its computer programs would succeed more than 95 percent of the time in picking out enemy warheads, even if they were hidden in a confusing blur of decoys in space. In fact, Dr. Schwartz said in court documents, the interceptors could do so only 5 to 15 percent of the time.

Her charges are coming to light now because many secret court filings have been unsealed at her request and she is seeking public support for her case.

[Excerpted from "Ex-Employee Says Contractor Faked Results of Missile Tests," NY Times, March 7, 2000.]

This is what's amazing about the U.S. We are talking about defense. How corrupt do you have to be to help a company like TRW treasonously betray the public for profit? Yet Schwartz's 4-year-old lawsuit is apparently being successfully frustrated, since she was at that point (last March) turning to the public for support. How many players must be in on the conspiracy?

Of course, this news article cannot conclusively confirm Schwartz's charges. But unless the facts it does report are wildly inaccurate, what do you think? How hard can it really be to ascertain the truth about the "numerous technical discrepancies" found by the Defense Criminal Investigative Service?

(An alternate explanation may be that this is part of a disinformation campaign aimed at protecting the program's secrecy.)

My exam question had asked: "In the business deal involved in this story, who was selling to whom? Who was Dr. Schwartz complaining about, the buyer or the seller? Was anyone dishonest in this business deal? Explain briefly."

Do you see the trap?

One student answered: "briefly is adj. meaning 'fast'".

Another wrote: "a kind of plane, it can be fight in the sky." (I'm guessing that was also a stab at defining that elusive word, "briefly.")

But back to my noise questionnaire. The results showed that 37% of freshmen were personally disturbed by noise later than 11:30 PM, and a shocking 74% wanted the college "to introduce rules to stop the noise."

The questionnaire had sought to assure anonymity by instructing: "Do not write your name or student # on your answer sheet." But presumably the proportion of students personally disturbed was closer to the 74% figure than to 37%, unless many wanted new rules for purely altruistic reasons.

Coincidentally, Meng happened to drop into one of my classes for an unannounced visit the same day they did the questionnaire. I gave him a copy, then passed him the pile of answer sheets to look through, after I'd collected them, while I went on to other things with the class.

He made the right noises, as always. He lauded my initiative, said this was a very serious problem, and declared he wanted to take action immediately.

We had a meeting that same night -- November 14 -- in which we decided to make all the students get up in the morning so they'd want to go to bed on time at night. 44% of freshmen had expressed support for this option. (Incidentally, the numbers for my pre-university students were generally lower, no doubt because they're not in a degree program and don't seem to be under much of a requirement to really do anything but kill time til their trip to the glorious West.)

Meng said the way to do this was for all teachers to take attendance in class (something I hadn't been doing, since I never wanted to coerce unwilling students to be present), with an escalating series of sanctions for truants.

But I saw a potential flaw in the plan: "Do all students have an early morning class?" If we instituted a system that only made 85% of students get up, we'd still have a problem with the other 15% sleeping in, carousing late at night, and disturbing the other students.

He assured me that all but about 10 students in special circumstances had morning classes every day.

So we went with that. Knowing from experience that it would never happen otherwise, I prepared attendance sheets for all the teachers, listing the students in the classes I knew about (pre-university and freshmen), with blanks for teacher name and date. This would be the model for Jim to follow in preparing similar attendance sheets for the only other students here, those in second year. And I posted a "Notice to All Students":

RE: NEW RULES

Numerous students have been disturbed by late-night noise at ICB. The recent questionnaire shows that 74% of freshmen, and 51% of pre-ICB students, want new rules introduced to stop the noise.

The only practicable way to deal with the noise problem is to require all students to get up on time in the morning (rather than sleeping late). 44% of freshmen and 28% of pre-ICB's want such rules.

Since it is important that students' living conditions be conducive to learning, ICB is responding as follows:

- All teachers have been instructed to record attendance in morning classes.

- Students marked absent will receive a warning.

- Upon three absences, students will be required to attend an interview with Mr. James Wu.

- If absences persist, ICB reserves the option of contacting the student's parents, cancelling the student's trip to study in the West, or altogether expelling the student from ICB.

But this was doomed from the start. One reason was that a certain ex-assistant of mine, let's call him Jim Wu (his real name), is the most indolent creature on the face of the earth. No attendance sheets were ever prepared for the second-year classes. No serious effort was made to get the various teachers to fill out the attendance sheets every day and to submit them centrally (rather than keep their own separate records), so admin could not learn of (and therefore could not act upon) truants. But most of all, Meng's assurance about our degree of coverage -- that we'd be getting all but 10 of the students on campus this way -- had of course been entirely false.

I pressed Jim to require students who didn't have morning classes to be present at some other place (e.g. a place where they could read and study) for attendance-taking in the morning. Many of the second-years, especially, did not have morning classes. He repeatedly promised to do this. A few days later, explaining inaction, he came up with a new lame excuse: he had no authority over the second-year students. That impelled me to get Meng involved again -- but it still never happened.

Meng did see to one change. He pulled me out of class for a minute one day to get my consent to changing class starting times from 8:30 AM to 8:00 AM. I had no problem with this personally if it helped bring about the needed change in the whole campus schedule. I gave him my OK but stressed: "It doesn't matter what time classes start -- the only important thing is that they start at the same time."

I see now that Meng was only seizing an opportunity to do something for somebody on a totally unrelated issue, involving the transport of morning teachers from their residences at the other campus. It had nothing to do with increasing the coverage of morning attendance-taking, and in fact did zilch to promote that goal.

The only effect here was that we now have a foolishly lengthy break -- nearly 3 hours -- between morning and afternoon classes.

My problem has always been that I'm what you call a true believer. On Wall St., I believed in writing computer programs that work. In a school, I believe in helping students get an education. These lofty things are never the goals of the people who've scrabbled their way to positions of power.

Incidentally, when I referred to Meng in explaining the new rules regarding attendance to the pre-university students, they seemed to have no clue who "Dean Meng" or "Mr. Meng" or "the boss of ICB" was.

"The man who first introduced me to you when I began here," I told them with some incredulity.

Blank looks.

I suddenly remembered I'd looked into a classroom the day before where four students, among them Zhang Di, were talking to Meng. They were in the front seats, he was standing right before them, and they were having an exchange.

I reminded Zhang Di of this. (It'd been the day before!) She remembered.

What's the man's name in Chinese, I asked her.

She didn't know the name, and she didn't know who he was!