Month: February 2016

I have an exclusive for you) Scanned Liz’s diary from Longfellow Middle School + comments explaining everything.

Read about the hallway passport, lesson system, dress code, and much more.

http://beinginamerica.com/2016/02/13/школьный-дневник-в-средней-школе-сша/

Morning jog 1 km. Ran into a rope stretched at eye level along the way.

In the USA, mail services handle literally everything: bills (utilities, internet, medical insurance, loan payments), bank statements, credit cards, licenses, vehicle registration documents (including metal plates), and online store purchases.

To better describe the postal industry, here are some numbers: the governmental USPS alone employs 617,254 people, of whom 78% are mail carriers. There are 211,000 vehicles across the country.

Here are some figures for JUST ONE day of mail service (from their official website):

* 223.7 million — revenue in dollars

* 151.8 million — employee salaries in dollars

* 512.8 million — number of letters and packages processed and delivered

* 21.3 million — average number of letters and packages PER HOUR

* 356,103— average number of letters and packages per minute

* 5,935 —average number of letters and packages per second

* 0 — state funding

For comparison, Russian Post employs just half as many people (about 312,000), and the number of letters and packages processed and delivered differs by a factor of 121 (one hundred twenty-one times!). Yet, USPS continues to operate with significant losses.

http://beinginamerica.com/2016/02/13/почта-в-сша/

“On Tuesday, February 16, Lisa will finally go to school. Longfellow Middle School – one of the best schools in our district. Rated 10 out of 10. Today, they explained to us in great detail what to expect at school. The education system is very different from ours. Starting with the fact that this school only has 7th and 8th grades. Over thirteen hundred kids!

The first thing that was shocking is the bell schedule. Classes start at 7:30 AM. The school bus will pick up Lisa at 6:51 AM at the stop. They told us to be there a few minutes early. If she misses the bus, parents must drive her to school. There is no bus for latecomers. It takes 15-20 minutes by car. By public transport, it takes an hour: 30 minutes by bus and 30 minutes on foot.

The length of the lessons at school varies. It could be 45 minutes, 46, 48, or 52. There are half-lessons of 26 minutes. How can a Russian child remember that the third lesson starts at 10:02 and ends at 10:48???? Breaks are 4 minutes! FOUR. With Lisa’s speed, it’s unreal to get from one classroom to another in that time. Moreover, you can’t take your backpack to lessons. When you come to school in the morning, you have to store it in a special locker and take only what’s necessary for the class. They explained that the school is too crowded with students carrying backpacks. So, in four minutes, you need to sprint to the locker, grab what you need for the next class, somehow stuff the unnecessary things back, close the locker so everything doesn’t fall out, and then run to the classroom. Who complained about breaks of 10-15 minutes in Russia? 🙂

In short, welcome! :)”

http://beinginamerica.com/

The Devil’s machine in the library: works like a microscope, you can zoom in a bit, or right down to the pixels

Police: Parents Arrested After Leaving Kids Home Alone (http://goo.gl/twv3ye)

You can’t leave kids at home here: neighbors can easily call the police, and here is a link to a story about an arrest.

Most states, with rare exceptions, do not regulate the age at which children can be left home alone. However, if something happens to the children, parents can face serious consequences. Child Protection Services (CPS) issue various recommendations on what age children can be safely left alone at home. For our Masha, it’s an hour and a half. But even for an hour and a half, it’s better not to leave them, unless you want to meet the police at your doorstep.

For our Masha it’s an hour and a half, but there are a ton of additional factors taken into account, like whether the child can find the parents on their own if needed (for example, if they work nearby). Generally, it’s the mothers who go clubbing or wander off while the child sleeps who get caught. In Russia, this is incomprehensible, as what to do with children when they come home from school at two in the afternoon and the parents are at work – the state does not answer.

Mom could go to jail for letting her son play outside alone (http://goo.gl/u4ZPYq)

A recent case too – they put in jail a mother because a four-year-old child was walking alone in the yard, reportedly 35 meters from the house, at an apartment complex’s children’s playground.

In Police State USA, Kids Playing Outside is a Crime: CPS to Mom “Don’t let them play outside (http://goo.gl/MboUAC)

Children here never play outside. Not even the relatively older ones. You might see kids walking home from the school bus, and rarely, 15-year-old teenagers alone in the mall. Anyone younger is kept at home or in school just in case.

There’s even a book for sale on Amazon, Dark Secrets Within Child Protective Services (http://goo.gl/xWxmsQ)

Some details in Russian on local forums (https://goo.gl/mfWs4L)

http://goo.gl/twv3ye

Liza’s New School

Facebook “dislikes” posts from external applications. It’s not written anywhere, but I can tell from the statistics and an experiment.

The experiment is as follows: I open two Facebook accounts. One is mine, and the other where I am marked as “close friends” (i.e., the feed includes 100% of my posts + there is an active notification when I write something).

Next, I make two status updates, one through posting on a WordPress blog, and the other in the classic way through the FB interface. In both cases, the posts appear on my page, marked as Public. On the second Facebook a) no notifications arrive about the posts from WordPress, b) my post from WordPress is not visible in the news feed. The classic post, however, works perfectly.

Maybe someone knows where the snag is?.. An option is to disassociate from FB and duplicate posts there and here too, but perhaps, there’s a checkbox somewhere that if checked, everything will work perfectly?

Interesting: http://mashable.com/2011/09/09/facebook-third-party-apps-study/#pEgXF0.xQOq5

Detailed response to Kostya’s comment on why I run a blog or write on Facebook. There’s a well-formed logic behind it.

Curiosity. Different people react differently to new things. Some don’t notice it at all, some notice, wonder, and then immediately switch to something else. But someone like me goes straight to Google to understand the reasons, the context, and to incorporate new knowledge into an existing system. This requires additional efforts and time, but it’s hard for a curious person to just drop the subject, it’s simply interesting. When you figure something out, it’s convenient to record and structure information in real time: besides posts in FB, I make use of various mind maps for this purpose, for example. Well, having figured it out, okay, but why write about it on Facebook after?.. And here it’s because it seems that a journalist still lives somewhere inside me. Since the information is there and it’s easy to share, pourquoi pas? Plus, the comments from friends are almost always very valuable. Example – various posts about traffic rules, national parks, all sorts of everyday stuff like American sockets or stores.

The second type of posts – just for lulz. The presence of such posts is usually explained by a very simple process of sharing something funny. If it required even a bit more effort (come home, download photos from the memory stick, process them) – there would be much less of that.

The third type of posts – photo albums for memory. Photography is one of my hobbies, and it’s nice for others to see good pictures, and I enjoy when they are well received or constructively criticized (then I learn and do better next time). Many are interesting to revisit, and Facebook is not the most inconvenient tool for this (although it has its own quirks – try deleting 50 erroneously uploaded photos en masse, for instance). Example – photographs from the Grand Canyon or sailing on the Kruzenshtern in the Baltic.

The fourth type of posts – public report of achievements or public commitment to achievements. This helps me not to give up on sports or music, even when there’s not enough time. Right now, I haven’t published anything from the drawings or my keyboard playing for several months. Either I don’t like the result, or simply don’t have the time. But someday there will be, for me it’s a motivator to move forward and find the time.

The fifth type of posts – when advice or help is needed in making a decision. I try to use this type of posts rarely and only when really needed. For my friends to see such posts at all, according to Facebook’s logic, all the above listed are needed.

Periodically, I share links – most often so as not to forget something interesting myself. Facebook finally implemented a search by posts, and if I need to return to something in the future, I find it faster in my own feed by some clues, keywords, than in the global internet.

http://beinginamerica.com/2016/02/07/почему-я-веду-блогпишу-в-фейсбук/

In America, discipline is paramount. If it’s stated that the zoo and parking lot close at 5 o’clock, then they close at 5 o’clock. Time: 5:05. By the way, the only car in the parking lot is ours 🙂

(Now all posts about America are written by eight hands on the site BeingInAmerica.com – thanks for the idea, @[734968816:2048:Vitaly Dubinin])

http://beinginamerica.com/2016/02/07/спустя-5-мин-после-закрытия-зоопарка/