Author: palmer

Battle School

If you are or were a smart kid, or are someone who deals with smart kids, and haven’t read Ender’s Game, your education is incomplete.  It’s a science fiction book, but don’t let that scare you; I’m not a scifi person either.  The book centers around a kid named Ender, who’s 6-12 years old in the span of the book.   Ender has been selected based on his precocious brilliance to train to be one of the elite future commanders for the defense of Earth and humanity against the obligatory Evil Alien Race.   He’s is sent off to Battle School, an elite program located up in the asteroid belt, for training.   Battle School has classes and books and the like, but the center of the school is The Game.

The Game is where 11 and 12 year old generals lead armies of 40 of their younger peers in laser-tag like mock battles against the other armies in a zero gravity environment.   Its purpose is to produce leaders, and the Game does just that.  It’s real, applied learning, unlike books and lectures.  It’s a competition, which kids understand; it’s about pride, status.   Rank and standings are tracked and known by all.  If you’re good at The Game, you’re good at life.   These results are immediate, unlike “you’ll get into college someday.”

However, the main purpose of the Battle School shifts during the course of the novel.   The Game used to train officers; but now, the fleet needs its commander.  And that’s Ender.  So the teachers of the school start messing with the Game; they throw him unfair challenges; they ruin the balance and fairness in order to make sure Ender turns out to be the singular commander they need.  Everything and everyone else is sacrificed to that end.

Some of the teachers protest.  They dislike that the sanctity of the competition is being ruined; that the unfairness of it is going to destroy the order of the known universe.  They defend the Game for its own sake, and forget the purpose of it.  They, too, live for the competition, the standings, and want to know exactly who is the biggest badass among the 11 year olds under their watch.  And when you read it, you completely believe it, that adults could also be caught up in the Game itself enough that they forget the ultimate purpose the Game is meant to serve, even when that purpose is a matter of humanity’s very survival.  It’s utterly believable that the Game’s trappings could obscure its purpose among otherwise intelligent adults.

You believe it even more if you’re a debate coach.

Where am I?

I fell into the world of forensics and debate through the narrowest of chances.   My hometown has never heard of forensics, nor have any adjoining towns, nor have any towns that adjoin them.   Debate and forensics is not a high priority for the curriculum in Massachusetts; and so, with some exceptions, only a few wealthy high schools have programs.   My hometown is one of the poorest in the state, and my family was typical of it; working class in a town where working class jobs don’t pay well, or often.

However, I slid through the cracks, upwards.   I was the token scholarship kid, first in middle school, and then thereon to prep school, and then to the Ivy League.     My prep school, lacking the traditional Saturday classes, is the only one in New England that competes in forensics and debate as we know it.   So I had an opening into our world.   Even still, I attended no invitational tournaments, and camp was entirely out of the question.   There’s only a rough sort of equality when you’re among the casual rich; scholarships to private school will cover the tuition, but the full incidental costs — which nobody there thinks much about — were too crushing for my family to bear; scholarship types thus get, at best, a partial experience.

In the end I had a good run.   I did debate in the non-rigorous prep school league for a couple years, and then extemp in my senior year.   I qualified for NCFL and NFL, though I didn’t break at either.   I did all right at NFL in supplementals.   That’s my claim to fame as a competitor.

So I took a look at lddebate.org last night, after Cruz’s characteristically unsubtle pleading that some discussion be conducted there.   What I found (which has nothing to do with Cruz’s un-subtlety, an endearing trait) is rather disturbing.   One debater suggested that LD move to two topics year; a bunch of people registered agreement for reasons that can be charitably described as serving narrow interests at the pinnacle of debate.   Ernie, bless him, called them on it, but got hurt feelings and confusion in reply.   One of the troubles of being an elite, and being surrounded with your peers, is that you don’t notice the effects of it; a fish cannot see the water.

Debate perfection, which many strive for, is exclusionary by nature.   Debate perfection, increasing the quality of the rounds, is behind the drive for case disclosure, different topics, longer terms for each topic, and so on.   If your aim in running debates is to produce masterful, elegant, well researched and well thought out debate rounds, then you’re going to be an exclusive activity.   You’ll exclude first students who aren’t hard enough workers, or whose talents are in different areas.   Debate is hard, and that’s fair enough; you do have to have some interest and talent in it.

But the harder you make it, the more likely you’ll also exclude kids who can’t be excellent debaters because of what they are, not who they are.   Students who can’t afford camp.   Students who have to work a job to support themselves or their families, and don’t have time to cut cards all day.   Students who won’t travel and see the circuit.

Debate, as a competitive activity, tends to consume all available space and time.   Students who engage in the preparation arms war do so because of their dedication to the activity, which is good; but they do so as the result of the luxury of time, a commodity they don’t appreciate.   Poorer students, even if they find themselves in a school with an active and well funded debate team, have more demands on their time.   Wealthy students tend to have busy lives that are aimed at enriching them and their college chances; poorer students have busy lives aimed at survival.   They have to work.   They have to watch younger siblings.   They clean their own houses and do their own laundry.   Cook their own meals.   Save for college.   And they do it without a car, without a computer (in my day) and without much help.

I had only a few of those demands, but even still, at prep school, I had to keep my grades up, to continue to justify the “diversity” I was supposed to bring to the school for their money.   I felt I had to work harder and achieve more to go to the same colleges as my peers.   I couldn’t sacrifice grades to debate, like a lot of debaters do.   I worked during school, at the snack bar — just for spending money, luckily for me.   But there sure weren’t any rich kids working the snack bar just for spending money alongside me.   Summertime was for mowing the lawn, wandering through woods, swimming and watching reruns on TV, not traveling through France and attending high powered academic camps.

OK, maybe I had better summers than most, come to think of it.   But the rest remains.

Making debate better means making debate harder.   If the amount of time and research required to simply be competitive is more than anyone with those kinds of life pressures can put in, then a lot of people who might benefit from debate are classed out from the start.   A poorer kid might be natively intelligent, might have a decent amount of general knowledge, and may be able to come up with great persuasive arguments in little time, perhaps better than anyone else.   An LD with case lists, fewer topics, exhaustive literature searches, and large prep-outs doesn’t have room for that kid to succeed.

It doesn’t have room, in other words, for Chris Palmer.   Not me, individually; I don’t   speak off the cuff all that well.   I mean the next Chris Palmer; the kid who’s now 14 in Fitchburg or a place like it, who might just get a shot to compete because he goes to school in a place not much like Fitchburg.   The one who stays in Fitchburg already has no entry.   If time and money required spiral upwards, the private school Chris Palmer isn’t going to be able to play, either.

Perhaps limits are in order.   My high school’s athletic conference restricted practice time; you can’t run practices for your team outside of that sport’s season; you can’t practice more than a certain number of hours in a day.   Students who want to go pro someday — there were a few — must do so outside of the leagues.     These rules undoubtedly reduce the quality of the game play.   However, they push students into other sports, and keep players from dedicating their whole lives to a sport.   They allow more casual players access to the educational opportunity provided by being on a sports team, by preventing them from being crushed.   The purpose of a school sports program isn’t — or shouldn’t be — to produce the next crop of players for MLB or the NFL, it’s to educate.   Limits on season time and practice time enforced that goal.

If   school sports programs can put limits on their programs to achieve educational goals, why not debate?   In debate the case for accessibility over perfection is even more clear cut; no one is going to get a $20 million contract to go debate professionally, even if they develop the perfect 1AR.   Debate develops a lot of generally helpful skills, but is not an end in itself; it’s not clear to me that you learn much more by winning the TOC than by simply being decent.   So why narrow the appeal of debate in pursuit of perfection, by ratcheting up the evidence arms war?   Shouldn’t we be attempting to limit the scale, controlling even the best participants with healthy limits?

But again, we’re an aristocracy.   In sports, adults are in charge, and — most of the time — govern their activity to preserve students’ health, and the educational value of their programs.   In debate, we don’t have grown-ups in charge.   The distinction between a coach and a competitor is more fuzzy in debate than in sports: coaches don’t run for soccer players, but they do think and write for debaters.   That skews incentives.  A lot of the adults think like competitors.

Beyond that, we don’t, arguably, have anyone in charge. It’s also hard to legislate limits on the sort of academic activity that happens alone, at home, which is debate’s hallmark.   The community’s power to limit behavior that even a large majority finds abhorrent, such as evidence falsification, has proven woefully inadequate.   As long as judges will vote for something — judges who are not much past competing themselves, mostly — it’s all fair game.  Our aristocracy is loose and lawless; no formal governance exists, just the power of pull and influence.   Thus Poland once was doomed.   We’re not well set up to act collectively for the students’ good, especially over the better students’ short term desires and selfish objections.

But at the very least, we can try to avoid making it worse.   Right now, we have various proposals, put forward by those at the pinnacle of the activity, which would make that pinnacle just a little steeper and harder to climb.   If they succeed, LD will lose programs, and students who could learn a lot from the activity will be shut out.   Eventually, this event will be narrowed down to a solid core of those willing to learn all kinds of skills that are not useful outside of the narrow confines of rarefied debate — when do you think you’re going to have to spread after graduation? — simply to pay the price of admission to the confines of circuit debate.

And they’ll leave behind the Chris Palmers.

PF is not the answer.   PF’s other flaws make it a dubious event at best.   The rules and format of PF were consciously dumbed down.   Accessibility didn’t have to mean shortening an event to pointlessness, and including shouting matches, but we’re stuck with it now.   But even if PF were perfect for what it is,  educational equality is not served by telling people on the outs “Here you go, we made a special playground for People Like You to play in; just please don’t bother us in the big kids’ area too much.”   PF gets treated by LD tournaments the way LDers complain they get treated by Policy tournaments: poorly, without respect or dignity.   It’s classic segregation.   Plus, PF will likely go in the same direction.   As long as our governance structure is the way it is, the foxes rule the henhouse and any debate event will become a speed and evidence arms war, no matter its starting point.

We also have the kritik, and oh how I love the K sometimes.   It does introduce the kind of batshit insane creativity I enjoy, and does give the little guy a way around a massive evidence dump.   Hell, I’m the guy who put together a K in PF last year — PF rules ban Ks, but also unwisely define the K as something that is not quite the K, a crack through which our cases slipped.   But running the K over and over doesn’t sustain one much.   You learn a body of critical literature that is of limited life utility compared to the direct literature on an LD topic.   Furthermore, there’s only so far a K focused program could go in LD, given that the K is viewed, correctly, as not really being what debate is about.   Once you start talking about natural limits to how far a program could go, defined by resources and time and not by talent and intelligence; well, you’ve hit the elitism barrier again.

Everyone believes in equality, until achieving equality starts negatively affecting one’s own life.     When you talk about racial equality, who doesn’t go along with it and nod?   But when you talk about taxing white communities heavily enough to bring educational services in black communities up to parity — well, hold on there Marx, let’s not be extreme here.   How else could racism and vast gaps in equality of opportunity exist in a country so apparently dedicated to ending both?

Ultimately I find innovations that aim to improve the quality of debate to be uncompelling.   Today’s debates are not more deep, rich and interesting than those of ten years ago, despite a decade of such innovation.   They’re simply faster; they have more evidence, but they’re not smarter.   The limiting factor behind debate quality is not structure, it’s the competence of   bright 18 year olds.   Structure can limit accessibility, but in a debate, quality boils down to the debater.

Furthermore, high school isn’t about elegance, and perfection; not in football, not in debate.   I’d argue that once you’ve gotten really good at something in high school, it’s time to quit.   The purpose of school is to improve students, not given them a forum for showing off; educational programs are perfectly planned when you master the skills taught just as you graduate.   If you get there early, that’s great; but realize you’re wasting your time if you keep at it — unless you’re doing so to help others learn faster than they would without you around.   Schools aiming for demonstrated perfection aren’t doing their jobs very well.

Little wonder then that circuit debate gets little traction with school systems.   Its value is not accessible, not just to administrators, but a lot of other forensics kids and coaches too.   Educators aren’t interested in seeing one kid who can whip up a sublime counterplan; they judge an activity by what it offers the bulk of their students.   Modern circuit LD, sadly, offers very little.   And I feel like most of the changes under discussion would make it even less relevant to the many students who live within boundaries of time and money.

An LD topic lasting six months gives an advantage to those who have access to deep research: journals and resources not readily available to the general public, such as Lexis and JStor, and specialized avenues for knowledge, like the dad who knows an economics professor at MIT.     It helps to have a coach or two who can use an adult mind to come up with twists and angles on the topic most high schoolers wouldn’t see right away.   A diversity of cases will win out in a long haul debate; the kid who can’t generate them will lose.   A debate topic that lasts only one round, on the other extreme, wouldn’t make for debates with as much deep understanding, perhaps — but it would help students with a breadth of general knowledge, which can be garnered freely by using Google, paying attention and reading a lot.   There’s not much that money can do to give you that advantage.   And that’s why I was an extemper, not a debater; that’s extemp in a nutshell, a ground where Chris Palmers thrive.

I don’t think LD topics should cycle round by round. But I do think that movement towards longer topic periods would exclude folks. The Jan/Feb topic already lasts half the year, to the detriment of locals and the betterment of the TOC. I tend to believe that case lists would do the same, but the jury is still out; but I do fear that the decision on them will be made without really considering the damage to equality that case lists do. If case lists do indeed increase the research burden, and raise the barrier to entry for LD, I don’t think that’ll be weighed on whether to use them. We don’t have a mature decision making body that would be the gatekeeper on it.

I’ve been on the edge of getting back into LD, but this dynamic makes me flinch.   Why give up time and energy to benefit a community that would exclude the high school me?   Why should I volunteer and run good bid tournaments for an event that won’t accept my cousins or nephews and nieces when they’re in high school?   If there’s no room in this world for the next Chris Palmer, why does this Chris Palmer do so much work for it?

And is Ernie asking himself that same question?   Is anyone else from the same background?

Someday, they may all answer “No, it’s not worth it anymore.”

And LD will be poorer and thinner still.

Net Neutrality

I’m intrigued that Menick believes that the proposed LD topic about net neutrality is interesting, but lacks depth, and doesn’t entail any broad implications about society. I disagree, and since when we disagree and bicker people apparently love to watch, I figured I’d do the world the favor (?) of writing it up and airing it in public.   That’s the genteel thing to do, isn’t it?

Granted, this topic may be exactly in my wheelhouse, and would let me pull all kinds of awful stunts like writing cases based on obscure internet routing protocols that I know in my dayjob and precious few other debatefolk have even heard of.   (I wouldn’t.)   It’s also badly worded; it talks of internet neutrality, which is a phrase that means nothing, instead of the actual term of art which is net neutrality. If the topic is selected, I fear that phrase will become the ship that launched a thousand Ks. I gather the shift to internet from net is because the folks in the committee hadn’t heard of the term net neutrality, and felt it needed explaining.   Of course, I don’t feel a resolution should explain itself; that’s what research is for.   Half second with Google would have done the trick.   Worded like it is, the selfsame Google search still yields results, but not as good — and I’m sure some kid somewhere will be confused when those results all refer to Net Neutrality and not this “internet neutrality” thing in the topic, and go off the deep end.

What is net neutrality?   Well, a network, generally speaking, is composed of two elements.   You need nodes or endpoints by which humans interface with it.   And you need connectors between the nodes, which make sure the right node is connected to the right other node.     To do so, a network has to have intelligence somewhere within it; that is, either the nodes or the connectors (or both) need to know what’s being sent out over the network and what’s being listened to, and how it’s supposed to get between node A and node B.

A critical question of network design is where the intelligence to run the network lives.   The phone system in this country is a network where all the intelligence lives in the connectors.   In the old days, a human operator actually physically connected your wire to the phone you wanted to call; eventually that was automated so that your phone sent a request to an automated operator by means of the phone number you dialed.   However, the phone network permits only one type of traffic, sound.   Furthermore, the information about how to link two phones is entirely in the connectors; your phone itself didn’t know how to do anything except make the request.   So it’s a smart network with dumb, single-purpose nodes.

The internet is organized on the opposite principle.   The connectors in computer networks are called routers — and yes, your home wireless connector is a router.   Routers are very stupid; they only know how to do one thing, which is to take data of any kind that gets sent to them and push that data closer to its intended destination.   The data hops from router to router, until it finally lands on the computer it’s destined for.   The content of the data doesn’t matter; the router never looks inside the data to see what it is; it only cares about the address the data is intended for.     The computers on either end are wholly responsible for encoding and decoding the data into a form — email, website, etc — which you can use.   Thus, the Internet is a dumb, single purpose network with smart, multi-purpose nodes

The telephone network is a controlled network; it can only be put to uses approved in advance by the phone company — who usually charge for the privilege: note the humble text message, which costs an absurd amount of money for a very small amount of data.   The phone company can control phones in yet more sinister ways, such as listening to your calls or forbidding you to call certain people, both of which are illegal — or permit governments to do so, which is legal under ever widening circumstances.

However, a dumb network doesn’t know what traffic you’re sending over it.   The data type doesn’t matter to the dumb network.   It’s the computers’ job to send, receive and interpret the data, not the router’s.   So as long as two computers can understand a given type of data, it’s fair game.   Furthermore, a given type of data doesn’t cost anything more than any other type to send — unlike text messages, which cost a lot more per bit than voice calls do.

The phone network has been around for a century; while the mainstream Internet is barely a decade old.   However, far more innovations and applications are based on the Internet than phones.   To build a new phone application, you have to convince a small set of highly conservative monopolists to let you onto Their network.   If you want to create an Internet protocol for a new and novel use, you simply buy a commodity internet connection; your provider doesn’t know or care what you’re sending across it; only your audience’s computers need to know.   Thus, the barriers to entry for new applications are minimal on a dumb network, so new applications we have aplenty: email, the Web, instant messaging, filesharing, and finally VOIP, which threatens to replace the phone network itself.

A dumb network is a neutral network, which is our current status quo.   A non-neutral network would be aware of the type of data being sent across it, not simply its origin and destination.   Some kinds of traffic would be prioritized over others, usually because the purveyors of that content paid for that priority.     Other kinds of traffic might be banned altogether.     In general, the Internet would become more like the phone network; you might need prior approval from a small band of monopolists to get a new application or data type through to your end users.   The days of the small disruptive application that destroys an existing, powerful industry might well be over; the phone networks could pay ISPs to cut off Skype; filesharing would be cut off by payments from Hollywood.

The Internet today is not totally neutral.   China regulates the flow of traffic in and out of the country, in ways that are easily circumvented but nonetheless are effective in dampening the free flow of information there.   Within the US, DSL providers are regulated like phone networks, and must not regulate the free flow of traffic, but cable and fiber internet providers are not regulated the same way, and are free to shape network traffic as they please.   Verizon DSL must allow you to go to Comcast’s website, but Comcast can legally make visits to Verizon’s website very slow, or fail altogether.   Cable companies therefore could shape traffic at any time, and some propose to do so; but as yet they haven’t begun, at least not publicly.   So our network is functionally, at least, neutral.

An open network is a freewheeling world, where innovation mixes with danger.   Net neutrality enshrines the rights of small disruptive companies to threaten established monopolies.   Skype may destroy landline phone companies.   Google Voice sends free text messages over my existing data plan, which shaved $15 off my monthly phone bill.     It can come with what are arguably harms, at least to some people.   For instance, file sharing removes the teeth from a government granted monopoly on content, which means the market for content is now competitive; in a competitive market, the cost of an item is driven towards to the marginal cost; which in the case of digital information is zero.   Thus, the death of newspapers and music recording stores.   A neutral network encourages creativity, which is economically efficient, but with that creativity comes creative destruction, which may or may not be socially useful.

A neutral network, however, is a difficult to maintain.   Netflix cannot pay for the privilege of streaming its movies to you in a priority manner, making interruptions less frequent and the quality better.   A few highly active users can swamp a neutral network segment to the detriment of others.   Without some form of traffic shaping, costs and therefore prices may rise faster than otherwise.   Therefore, if a neutral network and a non-neutral one were in an open market competition, it’s likely the non-neutral one would win out; it’d be cheaper, feature higher quality video streaming, and at the end of the day, the average citizen isn’t that subversive, and likely wouldn’t care about the lost potential for future disruptive technologies.   Therefore, a net neutrality regime is necessarily coercive to all ISPs; whose right to regulate and manage their networks as they see fit is curtailed.

Socially, the presence of network neutrality ensures a vibrant and subversive public sphere.   The Admiral wonders who the Thoreau of network neutrality is; my nomination at the moment is Al Gore, whose book The Assault on Reason (Amazon) should be the first stop of anyone thinking about the Internet’s influence on society.   Gore’s thesis is that the internet is valuable to society because it furthers multi-party communication.   The previous dominant media for public discussion were television and major print publications.   Both are one-way; a very few people, all belonging to a certain class, are anointed to spread their view of what is true and important to the masses.   Those unwashed masses are unable to communicate so easily, either with each other or upwards.   The result is a discourse that resembles feudalism, where the Lords and Ladies tell the people what said Lords and Ladies feel the people should know — and exclude knowledge that would harm said Lords and Ladies as a whole.

Power tends to minimize and ridicule positions they find dangerous; note how much Dennis Kucinich is mocked for “crazy ideas” that actually find vast public support in polling.     The point is to make folks being exploited or controlled feel alone: if someone is angry about an issue, but thinks they’re alone in their anger, they’re less likely to take action than if they knew that millions of others are angry, too.   Marx calls this “class consciousness” specifically within the economic sphere; Habermas — upon whom Gore relies a great deal — calls it “the public sphere”.

Since the advent of the neutral Internet, governments and regimes are having a much harder time keeping their shenanigans out of public view.   Companies and governments have had to grow responsible and accountable to storms of rage on the internet, where before quick coverups would do.   The Consumerist produces a prodigious amount of content out of publicly shaming companies with poor customer service into doing right by their customers.   Airlines feel it when people hit Twitter when they’re being held on the tarmac; Oprah felt it when she tried, to her fans’ ire, to brush aside the fact that she’d selected a faked memoir for her Book Club.   And, of course, Wikileaks‘s recent Afghanistan disclosures tore the covers off an often neglected war in a way that parallels the Pentagon Papers.   Gore believes that as the salary, station in life, and therefore viewpoint of most national media journalists has grown to more closely match those in power than an average citizen, the traditional top-down media have lost their teeth and watchdog role.   Thus it’s Wikileaks, not the Washington Post, that has delivered the Afghan War’s Pentagon Papers.   In a very short time, the internet itself has become the public sphere.   Net neutrality threatens to bring all that under central control, and thus squash it out.   Elites are very effective at quashing dissent and openness when given proper tools and a quiet room to work in.

However, extremist and terrorists of various stripes have laptops, too.   Their information can waft through the Internet’s flotsam undetected and alone.   Far flung extremist groups can connect up and find common cause on the unprotected internet.   Net neutrality means you must accept all traffic as it comes, and route it as it wishes.   Even if net neutrality legislation explicitly calls out exceptions for the purposes of law enforcement and security, the fundamental design of a neutral network would probably make such enforcement impossible.   So Al Qaeda can use a neutral network more easily to send encrypted communications and instructions worldwide; neo-Nazi groups can use it to find each other and share data on how to organize and further their agendas.   Thus far, these groups have proven to be rather un-savvy with computer technology and encryption, but surely that won’t last forever.   Also, the assumption that an active public sphere with wide public participation necessarily will lead to good outcomes isn’t necessarily true.   The neutral network is surely a necessarily ingredient to the Tea Party movement, after all.

So the question of net neutrality is a choice, between a more top-down, controlled, stable and safer world where a small group of people can shape and limit the public sphere to their liking, or a more turbulent, subversive and open world, where anyone can transfer data anywhere, be it information that brings down an oppressive or corrupt government, or information that brings down two very large buildings in the middle of Manhattan.

And you’re saying that topic lacks depth?

Potshot

I cannot rationally explain it, but the word “module” as applied to an educational unit bothers me to no end. It sounds like part of a spaceship.

Hi, Cruz!

Messing around

Some quick thoughts:

  • Today is the platonic ideal of a summer day.   High 70s, clear and breeze, the perfect temperature if you’re wearing shorts or if you’re wearing pants, scattered puffy clouds by day and none at night.   Right now I’m sitting on the deck watching the sunset and Venus shine in the west.     The weather can suck a lot in New England, but there’s nothing like these jewels of perfect days anywhere else.
  • Evidently there exists a band whose entire repertoire consists of songs about the lead singer’s breakup with my sister.   It’s knowledge like that that gives big brothers insomnia.
  • In the spirit of not letting anyone get too complacent, I’ve decided to start screwing around with Public Forum at the college tournaments more.   We’ll start with giving 4 minutes of prep time at Yale this year.   It was suggested by email and the reasons made a lot of sense to me, so here we go.   It’s clearly spelled out in the invitation and on the website, so I’m waiting to see how many people will react like it’s a Great Big Surprise.
  • Speaking of the sister, she’s in Vietnam at the moment.   If there’s a coup, chances are we can blame her.
  • I need to be better about staying in touch with friends.