I Hope My Daughter Questions Everything

Excited to share my first blog post on Kveller.com:

I Hope My Daughter Questions Everything
By Shira Fischer 

My 3-year-old daughter already knows the difference between dairy and meat.She saw our delight the first time she asked us if a meal was chalavi (dairy) or besari (meat) and now she can even choose the right silverware. She doesn’t yet understand all the details–but she knows there’s a difference. Yesterday we even went to the next level and discussed pareve (neither dairy nor meat), too.
Through these recent conversations, I’ve realized how much about our world must seem completely arbitrary to her, with names and categories she has to just accept–and she’s slowly learning to do so. No pajamas during the day–but no dresses at night. Why? 

Read the rest here:
http://www.kveller.com/blog/parenting/i-hope-my-daughter-questions-everything/

My new Inbox

I got my Inbox invite today (Gmail’s new format for email, for those who haven’t been waiting for their chance to check it out).

First of all, no, sorry, I can’t see how to issue an invite. But the good news for those who want in is that I just requested an invite on the site, and it came quickly, so sign up yourself!

In the meantime, my brief review: I was excited to try it, and the interface is pretty, but feature-wise, I’m underwhelmed. It basically pre-labels your email into its own categories (Promos, Forums, Updates, Social, Finance), which are not necessarily the categories I’d use (what’s Forums? And why are AMA and JAMA in updates, but Dana-Farber and AMIA in Forums?), so that’s just filters. It then groups them together so that you can view similar messages and handle them together. That is nice and probably more efficient (even more efficient would be to just check email less often each day), but it’s not revolutionary.

A message can be pinned, meaning it will stay in the inbox and not be archived when you sweep everything away. Thus the mindset is to help you clear out your inbox each day, just saving pinned things, rather than most people’s default of just leaving everything in the inbox. Still, it’s a cosmetic difference: some people use read/unread for this, or starred/unstarred. Of course, changing the default is likely to make more people archive the messages they don’t need, but I’m quite good about archiving messages I’m done with, so everything in my Gmail inbox is new or a to-do (“pinned,” in the new lingo), so this doesn’t add much for me.

There’s also the option to add to-do items to the inbox. This makes sense as many people use their email as a todo list. Still, without the fancy features of a real todo program, most people will still need something else for lists that need priorities and tags and other kinds of organization.

Lastly, there is the new option to swipe a message to have it return later to your inbox. This is the greatest and only really new feature. For those who haven’t used it before, the idea is that it keeps you from rereading and reconsidering messages you can’t manage yet, while ensuring they don’t get lost before you need them. But many have used such a feature before: Boomerang does this nicely, though it doesn’t work well on the mobile format, and they limit you to a certain number of deferred messages unless you subscribe. Mailbox does this exceptionally well on mobile, and I’ve been using it as my main iPhone mail program for a while. They recently came out with a desktop version which I haven’t fully adoption since it doesn’t quite integrate with Gmail enough. But now Gmail seems to be stealing their main feature, and I feel guilty whenever the big guy takes the creative idea from the smaller one. I guess Mailbox isn’t suffering—Dropbox bought them, so they’re okay—but there’s a pride in not being purely inside a single provider camp, a la Farhad Manjoo’s advice to “Buy Apple’s hardware, use Google’s services, and buy Amazon’s media,” which is what I already do. I’m not ready to give up Mailbox yet (I’m still nervous about managing my mail in Inbox, since an X in Inbox just closes the message, while on Mailbox the X deletes it), but Inbox might manage to convince those people who use their inbox as a todo list and who have a lot of mail from going elsewhere to manage it; it might keep them in a pure Google world.

Away from home

When you’re away for two and a half months from home, you learn a lot of things about yourself and your family. Some are quite meaningful and/or disturbing: how much time do you actually want to spend with your toddler every day, or the best time of day to have a real conversation with your spouse. Others may seem mundane but are also revelatory: how much laundry detergent do you use in two and half months? How much shampoo? (Answers: a lot more than I thought, and less than I expected). I know which parts of the kitchen I never touched and which clothes I never wore.

Memory is also relative to place and context. My knowledge of this operation is of course better than the last two Gaza ones because I was here, but I may also remember other things better because I’m not at home. For example, I’ll probably remember the date of the Malaysian airplane crash or remember Robin Williams’ death better than some other celebrity because it happened this summer. I’ll remember that the time D first wore nail polish or H first went swimming were summer 2014. Going away divides life up into units that don’t exist at home, for good or bad. This has been studied, of course, to maximize test preparation, with some studies recommending taking practice exams in the room where the real test will be held. But I think it’s an argument for variation in life: change your location and change not just your luck but what you remember, which is really how you perceive the world.

Another ceasefire ending

It’s our second to last week in Israel and we’re at the end of another ceasefire. This one was five days, long enough that I stopped checking Israeli news obsessively and occasionally looked at other sections of the New York Times. But now as midnight approaches, I’m checking Ynet again and that feeling of tension is welling up inside me. They say there might be a deal that was just signed, but there’s no reason to trust Hamas, and I’m bracing myself for more rockets. In the end, either way, most of our summer here will have been during a war. Of course it changed things, though we never considered leaving. In fact, while one friend from Boston emailed me to see whether the I thought she should bring her small children to Israel for their scheduled vacation, heard much more of the opposite: both Americans and Israelis who are glad to be in Israel during the conflict. Israelis felt like if they left, they’d be betraying those who were risking their lives to defend them and their fellow citizens, and Americans like me who felt that there is little we could do from abroad, while by just being here, we might be able to offer support to Israelis and raise awareness back home. In any case, we are still here, but I wish it could have been different.

Jerusalem pictures

Flowers and a hidden courtyard in Jerusalem.

What's it like over there?

Everyone is asking what it’s like to be in Israel these days, during this operation, this war.

In some ways, it’s crazy. I was out with my brother the night the kidnapped boys’ bodies were found. Every store had the news on and everyone was discussing it. People were crying as they ignored customers and just watched the TV. There was a sense that whatever happened next was going to be bad all around, that this ending was only a beginning of something much worse. And that was true. But since then, I have not seen that kind of communal focus, and as this “operation” continues, people check the news all the time, discuss the situation, feel depressed, but must they go on with their lives.

So despite the war, and despite the craziness, Jerusalem feels wonderfully alive. Playgrounds are full of kids and it seems like every third woman is pregnant. Religious and secular mix, as do Arabs and Jews, on buses and in restaurants and throughout the city, though I definitely notice at times that I am the only mom on the playground without a head covering. Posters advertise the opera and theatre and special markets happening throughout the summer. Delicious smells waft from the numerous restaurants that cover the landscape.

One evening, we met friends at the new First Train Station. The fake sandy “beach” was closing down, but we caught the end of a volleyball game. Kids were climbing on structures and riding around on big tricycles and clambering up a rock-climbing wall. Adults were dancing to jazz and swing music in the open plaza. We fingered delicate jewelry and eccentric headbands at the artist’s stands. It did not feel like were in the midst of a war.

All around Jerusalem, there is building and improvement. The old train tracks have been converted to a wonderful long trail with bike lanes and running space. The train is finally running smoothly and the combination of the train and the conversion of downtown streets to pedestrian walkways has successfully decreased the car traffic and increased the foot traffic in the area. The open-air market, always full by day, is also now popular at night among a younger crowd who listens to loud music while dining on a variety of cuisines. Begin Road, or route 50, the new highway in Jerusalem, makes it easy and painless to get in and out of the city, and they have even improved the signage. These improvements (combined with Waze, an app developed in Israeli that allows drivers to share information about traffic and accidents), make it an easily navigable city.

Of course, there have been air raid sirens. Four in Jerusalem so far, but almost all in the first week. We feel like we have it easy compared to the south, of course, or the “merkaz,” the center, around Tel Aviv, where there are sometimes multiple ones a day.

We traveled north last week. It didn’t seem like the right time to take a vacation, with people risking their lives to defend the country and people suffering air raid sirens all the time. But we needed a break and wanted a family vacation. While Jerusalem is relatively quiet, it was nice to get away from the worry of rockets and sirens. But as we were leaving, we heard about a stone-throwing attack on route 2 on the coast, and about sirens are going off in the northern Galil, but during the day, away from the news and focusing on the pool, it felt like a real break.

That was, until we started talking to people. At Hamat Gader, we saw a family swimming and looking totally without concern. But when we spoke, we quickly learned that they haven’t been home for three weeks. They live in Kfar Maimon, a moshav near Gaza, and they have no safe room. The mother told me she can’t have her three little girls there, so they’ve been traveling from grandparents to friends to hotels. She wants to go home, but she knows that would be irresponsible.

Many tourist sites were offering free or discounted admission for residents of the south. Everyone is suffering from the decreased tourist activity because of the situation—our hotel offered an across-the-board discount hotel offered 25% off for Operation Protective Edge. Vacation during a war is cheaper, I guess.

And now back in Jerusalem, another two Arab boys attacked violently by young Jewish Israelis. Stories of cars being burnt in West Jerusalem neighborhoods because they had Israeli flags flying on them. I don’t like to talk about a cycle of violence, because I think that suggests that both sides in this conflict are equally implicated and equally violent. But I do think there’s a cycle of hate, and the more the conflict goes on, the more each side feels justified in their hate, becomes more extreme in their statements, and raises more children into a culture of hatred. How can we stop that cycle?

So here I am, in a shady, beautiful Jerusalem café, feeling safe and comfortable, listening to the people around me discuss the Iron Dome protecting us from rockets.

Adaptive innaccuracy

While on a recent run (!), I was listening to the well-done Sipur Yisraeli podcast, which is modeled after the PRI radio show This American Life. One section talked about the human ability to estimate or predict ability. When people registering for a course are asked to estimate whether they will be in the top 5% of the class, they do a relatively good job— not perfect (some say they will and don’t; some say they won’t and do)—but not much more than 5% answer yes. However, when they ask whether student expected to be in the top half of the class, which should happen to about half of the folks, 70-80% said yes. Is this over-estimation? The same happened when people were asked to estimate how other people saw them in terms of attractiveness and intelligence—people all overestimated their appeal to the people they knew. One group, however, saw things more accurately: those who were depressed. In other words, understanding one’s limitations is associated with actual inability to function. So that 70-80% is adaptive. Apparently people wouldn’t sign up for a class if they thought they weren’t going to do better than average. We have to be overly optimistic or we wouldn’t do anything. Arrogance, or poor statistical ability, is, in some cases, desirable.

Keeping the peace

Cross-posted from http://skillvolunteerisrael.org/2014/07/22/small-contribution-keeping-peace/

            Last week, I found myself herding autistic elementary school students at a school I’d never been to before into a bomb shelter—for practice.

            That wasn’t exactly what I expected to be doing that morning. I am spending the summer in Israel with my family on a mini-sabbatical, and between finishing old projects and starting some new ones, I carved out a little time for volunteering. Through friends and connections (the way things work in this small country), I learned about the Yad Hamoreh school, home to a unique program for medium-to-low functioning autistic children integrated with regular track children. They always need extra hands on board, especially Hebrew speakers, so Wednesday morning, I was scheduled to volunteer at the school.

            Tuesday night, though, there was an air raid siren in Jerusalem. Hamas rockets were headed toward the city.

            I have lived in Jerusalem during dangerous times. In 2001-2002, buses and restaurants were regularly blown up, and people were afraid to travel by bus or to even sit in cafés. In 2006, during the second Lebanon war, Jerusalem was a relatively safe, and strangers from the north came to stay in my grandmother’s apartment, seeking refuge. But Tuesday was my first tzeva adom—Color Red warning. Terrorists in Gaza had successfully created rockets capable of reaching as far as Jerusalem, and they had begun shooting at the city. Never mind the fact that there are many Arabs in Jerusalem, Christians and Muslim alike. Never mind the historical and religious sites for so many religions. These rockets were targeting us and aiming to kill.

            As the siren wailed and we realized what it was, my husband and I grabbed our sleeping children and headed to the “safe space” in my husband’s aunt and uncle’s apartment. We ended up spending the night, rather than driving home and risking a siren while on the road (safety protocol requires exiting the car, lest it be hidden blowup, and laying by the side of the road, none of which we found appealing with two small sleeping children). In the morning, still shaken by the experience, we headed home, cleaned up, and got the kids to daycare, and then I headed to Yad Hamoreh.

            In a bright, colorful classroom, I slowly met the fifth graders. First E, curled up on a chair. She understands English better than Hebrew because her parents are American, but she doesn’t speak almost at all, and when she does, it’s mostly to herself. Y is very affectionate, but teachers are worried that his propensity for enthusiastically touching friends and strangers alike will not serve him well and are working with him on who to touch and when. G can recognize some letters and vowels, but it’s hard to get him to stay focused enough to read more than a word or two. M hasn’t been doing well lately and spends a lot of time trying to do damage to the classroom and her classmates. Teachers expertly distract her, move hazards, and stand guard, but in a room of needy kids, she needs a full-time person standing near her to keep her from hurting others or herself. L’s body is covered in scars that I understood were self-inflicted by too much scratching. How does one protect a child from himself? So there we were, 5 or 7 kids, and, depending on volunteers and activity, at times as many as 5 adults, helping them through their day. I followed the class to music and sports and art, each activity customized for the needs of the children.

            At noon came the emergency drill. Exercises like these were taking place across the country, in schools and daycares and camps, as children prepared for the very real threat of a rocket landing on their school or park or home. The guidelines are not complicated. The Home Front Command has advertisements on the radio and TV in case you haven’t been paying in attention. In Jersualem, you have 90 seconds to get to shelter. (Obviously, those closer to the source have less time. In Sderot, where they have 15 seconds to get to shelter, and the sirens go off all the time, kids just spend their days in safe spaces, since there is no way they could get everyone in safely.) Bomb shelters are the safest place to be. Mamads (safe spaces, or specially reinforced rooms within newer apartments) are also considered safe. If you don’t have time to reach or access to one of those, try to get to a space with only internal walls and no windows. If you’re on the top floor, go down a few, since you don’t want the roof falling on you. Stairwells are considered good options as well.

            Of course, few of the kids at Yad Hamoreh can understand the guidelines or the reason for them. We explained simply that we had to go to the library and promised they could read books there. However, due to summer renovations, it ended up that the library, a reinforced safe space, wasn’t open, and we led the kids further downstairs, into another large shelter. We didn’t have enough adults to hold everyone’s hands, but the teachers knew who needed to be gently tugged along and who could independently follow the crowd and we were thus able to keep our class together. The room was crowded but air-conditioned and the mood was boisterous. Teachers congratulated the kids on getting there in a short time, though I wasn’t sure if we really made it in less than 90 seconds, given the confusion and semi-controlled chaos. Once everyone was seated, another teacher asked me to position myself strategically in the line of sight between M and the girl in the other class whose long hair she loves to pull. I stood there until we were dispatched back to our classrooms. My small contribution to keeping the peace.

In Jerusalem cafes during a war

People keep asking me what it's like here in Jerusalem. How is our sabbatical/mini-vacation now that there are air raid sirens and war? I don't have any easy answers—just a collection of little moments.

• At my husband's aunt’s, where we heard our first siren. We decided to stay the night rather than drive home in the dark. The uncle kept flipping the TV between the news and the World Cup.
• Five days later. Running with my daughter in my arms to the safe room at the home of friends. With grandparents, kids, and neighbor's children, too, we were 14 in a small bedroom. My daughters are too young to understand, but the voice of the house looked out the window and expertly discussed whether iron Dome would intercept the rocket. We didn't hear a boom.
• Reading jokes online about the booms. Who heard a boom? Was that boom just my pregnant friend sitting down? Is it too early to turn anti-missile explosions fart jokes? Apparently not.
• At the playground with our daughters screeching happily on the swings. They are blissfully unaware of what’s going on and are just concerned about their next serving of Bamba. I go back and forth between enjoying the moment and thinking about what I would do—where I could take them for protection—if we heard a siren.
• Talking to my dear cousin whose step-son was just called up to the reserves. He spoke passionately about how even if there is a loss of Israeli soldiers, destroying the tunnels is necessary to prevent future huge attacks, killing many civilians. This is necessary to protect lives. Also on the line, the young soldier's mother doesn't sound as sure.
• Reading two mornings later about an attempted attack on a kibbutz by 13 infiltrators who came through just such a tunnel. My cousin is proved right. It’s still not clear why they didn’t attack when they had the chance—they may have been waiting for the chance to attack soldiers. Two Israeli soldiers dead in the resulting battle.
• Sitting in a café in Jerusalem, drinking an iced coffee, and able to briefly imagine that all is ok in the world.
• Coming back to my phone after being away for 20 minutes and being informed by my red alert application that there have been five sirens in various places in the South.
• Hearing very religious language from not very religious people. Hearing very violent language from people who consider themselves religious.
• Reading how the Israeli army warns Palestinians to leave their homes for their own safety. But so many of them have nowhere to go. Hundreds of Palestinian deaths.
• Hearing from our daycare teacher that her brother-in-law was called up. They're not telling her mother-in-law yet, so that she won't worry.

So far these moments don't add up to a total feeling. Just living in the tension.

Running for office!

I'm delighted to be running for Town Meeting in my hometown of Brookline. If you're a Brookline voter, elections are on May 6! If you live in Precinct 11, I'd like to ask for your vote! And everyone everywhere, get involved (at least, if you agree with me!)


What I sent the League of Women Voters about myself:

Question 1:  What are the top two critical issues in your precinct and/or the Town and how would you address them? 

Brookline has much to be proud of in its strong community, urban living, and education system, and these should continue to be areas of focus. I’d like to expand the work TM has done on environmental sustainability by continuing to support efforts towards reducing energy waste and increasing use of alternate energy sources. I’d also like to see Brookline lead in public health, making it easy for people to eat well, be active, and access preventative as well as therapeutic health care.

Question 2:  Biographical data

Shira Fischer, MD, PhD, is a proud graduate of Brookline High School. After living in Israel and Washington, DC, she returned to Massachusetts for graduate school and is completing a postdoctoral informatics fellowship at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She works in health care policy. www.shirafischer.com

In which I link to something I wrote elsewhere . . .

My first post on Jewschool! I wrote about accepting wisdom even from people you disagree with.

If you're interested in the context, first read
Ethan Tucker's post on gender and tefillin
Aryeh Klapper's critique

and if you'd like,

Raphael Magarik's critique of the above

and Aryeh Klapper's response

Haikus

1.
Bedtime process is
Finished. Or just started? Time
Will tell us shortly.

2.
Going to bed now
Or in a few hours after
Whining tons? We'll see.

Two forty-five PM

Last week, I attended a wonderful meeting on a local campus very relevant to my work in medical informatics. It was well-organized and interesting and I am glad I went. However, there was one major issue.

I'm not naming the meeting, as I don't want to unfairly point fingers at this specific conference or its fantastic team of organizers; unfortunately, they are no worse than many of the conferences (or courses, or online webinars) I have been to this year. But until things change, I think we have to talk about it.

Here's what happened. There was an array of speakers and panels changing every 45 minutes. Speaker after speaker, panel after panel, the meeting continued. The day proceeded. We broke for a delicious lunch and networking. We returned to the amphitheater for another session. And another. But it wasn't until 2:45 pm that a woman finally appeared on the stage. The meeting started at 8 am, but there were no women speaking, presenting, appearing, until almost seven hours later. And I don't want to sound snarky, but I’ll the woman who did appear two hours after lunch was not an expert or a professor. She spoke competently and confidently about her work, but she was a recent college graduate representing a company on the one industry-related panel of the day -- and the three others on her panel were all men. Only at 3:30 was there a female full-fledged expert in the field speaking to the room. The first, and the last, through the end of the day.

The room was not all male. While informatics, computer science, and data science have a higher percentage of men than women, there are more women in medicine overall these days, and there are plenty of women doing exciting things in these fields. The room contained many of them. Yet in ten hours of presenters, we heard from one.

The one time I got up to ask a question, a few men were called on before me. I stuck it out, channeling Sheryl Sandberg, and then the moderator looked at the two last people raising their hands and said to the other gentleman, "Let's let the lady go first." I felt like he'd missed the point twice: picking man after man when he chose questioners, and then pointing out that I was a woman when he finally got to me.

Conference organizers: please think about whether you're fully representing the field when you invite speakers. Who are the best speakers you've heard? And who might be the best who you haven't yet heard from?

We've come a long way. But we have further to go.