Hasta La Gadget!

I attended Duke University. And I loved Dean Smith. Perhaps only those who have spent significant time on that storied stretch of Tobacco Road will know how remarkable a thing that is to say.

Since Dean Smith’s passing at the age of 83 on Saturday, the testimonials and accolades have come in at an inspiring rate and with awe-inspiring praise bordering on adoration. We are, it would seem, in the presence of a secular saint.

Smith’s great cross-town rival, Mike Krzyzewski, referred to his friend as one of the greatest coaches in any sport, ever, and as a man whose loss to us can never be compensated. Michael Jordan referred to him not just as a mentor, but as a second father.

We have also learned some remarkable things about this remarkable man’s activities off of the basketball court. What is still more remarkable is how little of this was known before now. When Dean Smith arrived in Chapel Hill, N.C. in 1958, both the town and the state were racially segregated. This came as some surprise to the man from Kansas. A man who had grown up in the church, Smith consulted with his pastor and the two agreed that Smith and one of his fellow parishioners who was black would go together to a local lunch counter and essentially dare the establishment not to serve them.

They were served. And so began the de-segregation of Chapel Hill, to be followed by the far more public sit-ins in Greensboro, N.C. two years later. Smith was an entirely unknown assistant coach at the time; he could have been arrested, or fired, or worse.

It was a quiet determination of conscience that matched the quiet determination of his coaching. He was quiet about what he did, what he had done. When asked about these events many years later (it was 1981) by sportswriter and his close personal friend, John Feinstein, Smith expressed dismay that Feinstein even knew the story. When Feinstein told him that his pastor had relayed the story, Smith characteristically said that he wished he had not. “But this is something to be proud of,” Feinstein pressed. “You should never be proud of doing the right thing,” Smith answered, “you just should do the right thing.” And that was that.

The University of North Carolina’s mascot is the Carolina “Tar Heel.” This refers to a nickname given by Robert E. Lee to a North Carolina regiment that refused to retreat or surrender and scolded fellow soldiers from other regiments who had been tempted to do so. “God bless the Tar Heel boys,” the General quipped. The name, like their heels, stuck.

Dean Smith had landed in a part of the country where that history and that legacy were still very much alive. Over the course of the next 40 years, he was to transform that place as much as he would transform the game of basketball.

I would like to suggest that there is a closer connection between those two transformative practices, and that Dean Smith’s formation in sport was at least as determinative as his formation in the church had been. Put more pointedly, the sports arena was itself a form of church.

To make good on that strange-sounding claim, I turn to one of the finest books ever written about sports, C LR James’s Beyond a Boundary. The book was published in 1963, just one year after Trinidad had won its independence; given James’ long involvement in the movement for West Indian independence, the book is a cautionary tale of sorts. Without the requisite virtues, James believed, no revolution could succeed for long.

The story told in Beyond a Boundary is the story of an ambitious and highly talented young man, a colonial subject, but one who thought himself and aspired to be British. They were two eminently British, and eminently imperial, institutions that radicalized the young CLR James: Victorian novels and the game of cricket.

James was addicted to the game, and since a cricket match can last for days, it takes real commitment to play and to spectate. James did both. He graduated in 1918, played for a league team from 1919 to 1932, then reported on the game from 1933 to 1938. He appreciated the subtle artistry of cricket, the choreography which pitted a bowler against a batsman, the way personality and character were intimately tied to success and failure.

When the West Indian team was scheduled to play a match in England, James was mystified to discover that the captain of the West Indian team had been selected and that its most gifted black batsman had been passed over for a less talented white player. “I adhere stubbornly to my juvenile ethics,” James tells us, “that the captain should not be [a black or white] man but the best man” (135).

The stakes of such games are high: to beat the empire at its own game is a vast achievement. But the West Indian team seemed to care about looking more like the imperial center than the colonial periphery… and James’s identity crisis was born in that moment.

In short, the practices of cricket and of close reading radicalized CLR James. He took the rules of the game seriously, off the pitch and on it. To fail to live up to the code of honor of the game was, to him, almost unthinkable. The British empire failed this test, and so too would some of his fellow revolutionaries.

James’ radicalization through cricket first drew him to be a Marxist critic of economic injustice and later to be a post-colonial critic of imperialism. While the experience of the West Indian cricket team had made him aware of race, and of his own blackness, it was a 15-year sojourn in the United States, from 1938 to 1953, that made him aware of a more virulent form of segregate color-consciousness. He would not be consumed by this, but he never forgot it.

The time in the U.S. bore other lessons for James. He quickly came to see that he was far more similar to his British than to his American friends. Americans raged at the umpires of sporting events, something he had vowed never to do (James admitted that he’d cheated wildly in school as a child, but on the field of play, never). His American friends raged at racism, but in unproductive and vicious ways. Most of all, James felt that the Americans he met had no sense of loyalty to a team, or a school, or much of anything. And so when a cheating scandal broke out in college basketball, James broke with the whole show, and promptly returned to Trinidad… where he began working on West Indian independence, and on this book.

There was a close connection between the two.

James published his only other major book in 1938. This was The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, his landmark historical study of the rebellion of enslaved people on the island of Hispaniola that resulted in the birth of the independent state of Haiti. Clearly, his interest in Caribbean independence movements was lifelong. And just as clearly, James understood the strange confluence of race, religion and politics in any complex social movement.

He broke with Soviet-style Marxism in 1940 when Stalin made his pact with Hitler. He left the U.S. in 1953, just one year before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, and just five years before Dean Smith went to North Carolina.

More significant than Supreme Court decisions, to James, was the game of cricket. Virtue enacted on the field of play were enacted in the realm of politics too.”‘The Case for West Indian Self-Government’ and ‘It isn’t cricket’ had come together at last and together had won a signal victory” (241). James was to break with many of his independence-minded colleagues over questions of tactics and vicious compromises similar to the ones the Trotskyites had made. A revolution without virtue was no revolution, just a moral perpetuation, more of the same.

The whole thing hinges on a simple idea, but like most simple things the moral reach of a simple idea can be long. The rules matter. They matter whether you are oppressed or not; they matter whether you win or lose. To violate the rules in order to win would be to strip the victory of its value. That is as true for a revolutionary as it is for a cricketer. To cheat is quite literally to fail to understand the nature of the game and its value (or values). “Cricket had plunged me into politics long before I was aware of it” (65), James concludes.

Most of the book is a spirited catalogue of the greatest players James ever saw or studied: the great bowler George John, the great batsman George Headley, and Learie Constantine who excelled at both. Fully one quarter of the book is an encomium to one man, W.G. Grace, the Babe Ruth of British cricket. “Grasp the fact that a whole nation had prepared the way for [W.G. Grace],” James observes, “and you begin to see his stature as a national embodiment” (170). “Cricket was a religion and W.G. stood next to the Deity” (165).

We have heard similar encomia for Dean Smith this week; his stature is quite literally an embodiment of the game he loved.

James’ reasons for writing in this way are complex. On the one hand, he was participating in the Renaissance and Humanist essayist’s tradition of teaching through exemplary persons. A virtue is, only as it is displayed in action. James was also attempting to explain the unique thrill and moral passion that sports can inspire. He wishes, then, for us to understand how a game can produce forms of greatness.

James admired the Olympics just as he admired cricket was shocked to note that so few intellectuals took the Games seriously. Sport, James knew, is organized, ritualized, and subtly choreographed social activity. It’s very much like religion, that way. The Olympic religious festivals in Greece were a magnet for everything else–the philosophy, the politics, even the art.

What the Olympics was to ancient Greece, cricket was to the British empire in the 19th century, and what the modern Olympics became in the twentieth. Athletes and umpires all swear a sacred oath; cheating is quite literally the blasphemy that would undo the game.

For many young men around the world, sport is as crucial a source of moral formation as it is physically liberating. CLR James thought nothing of cheating at school, but the cricket pitch was sacred to him. Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, insisted that his revival had simply been one piece of a life-long work: education reform. Athletes learn discipline, learn to appreciate excellence–the excellence of a performance, and not just their own. Athletes learn how to lose. Athletes learn that winning is not valuable at all costs. Athletes learn how to recognize when a game, or a career, is over. These are not small things to learn.

And that is why Dean Smith matters so very much.

There is far more to Dean Smith’s legacy than 879 basketball victories, an Olympic gold medal victory in 1976, two Division I National Championships and an astonishing 11 Final Four appearances. There is the far-from-simple virtue of a life well lived. Comprehending that fact–what it entails, and how such things are to be measured–is why sport matters. In the hands of a coach with the gifts of Dean Smith, sport is not just an arena for transcendent performance and the thrill of spectacle; it is quite literally a school of virtue.

Here is how James understood it:

“The aesthetics of cricket demand first that you master the game, and, preferably, have played it, if not well, at least in good company. And that is not the easy acquisition outsiders think it to be” (207n1).

In Dean Smith, then, we witnessed far more than mastery of a game. He was one of the most remarkable moral teachers this game has ever produced. And he produced it, always, by creating good company.

Louis A. Ruprecht Jr.
Georgia State University

Having a premature baby is heartbreaking. It’s scary and hard and sad and isolating and traumatic, and something that no one deserves to experience. But preemie parents know something that others don’t. They know that, even despite all the pain and struggle and tears and sleepless night, having a premature baby is still really, really wonderful.

Preemie moms know loss. The loss of the dream of a healthy pregnancy, of a big, pregnant belly and a fat, crying baby, and the experience they thought they were going to have that was going to look like everyone else’s. They know fear and helplessness, wanting so desperately to help their children and take away their pain, wishing they could do anything to make sure they’d come home with them when this was all over. They know what it’s like to imagine their futures and those of their children and know that maybe it will be much harder than they ever imagined.

But they also know other things.

They know what it’s like to look at an impossibly tiny baby with paper-thin skin and eyes that can’t yet open, attached to machines and IV lines, and still honestly feel overwhelming love, still honestly believing they are the most beautiful being that ever existed.

They know what it’s like to find joy in the tiniest milestones, like little weight gains, or moving onto CPAP, or wearing clothes (finally!) for the first time.

They know what it’s like to sit and cuddle their babies skin-to-skin for hours on end, hooking themselves up to hospital breast pumps no matter how much they hate it because it’s one of the most important things they can do to help their children grow.

They know what it’s like to love someone so much that they would give anything to see them healthy and happy.

They know what it’s like to realize, finally, that it doesn’t really matter if their children have learning disabilities or motor issues or vision problems, or if they take forever to learn to walk — or even if they never learn — because as long as their children live, they’ll figure the rest out.

They know that no matter how frustrated they may get when their children cry or yell or throw things or climb on something they aren’t supposed to climb on, there’s still a part of them remembering the time when their children’s lungs weren’t strong enough to cry, and when they didn’t know if they’d ever yell or throw things or climb.

They know that every milestone, whatever it looks like and whenever it’s reached, is a celebration.

There is a lot of variation in preemie outcomes, and some parents have it easier or harder than others. Some will struggle more and have a more complicated road to travel. But the one thing they know for sure — the one thing that the doctors and nurses and family and friends, and all the other moms and dads of the world can’t truly ever understand — is that when they look at their children (their perfect, gorgeous, amazing children) they see warriors, babies who have fought harder and overcome more than anyone could possibly have imagined, and that getting to be their parents is the best, most incredible thing that could have ever happened to them.

Having a premature baby might be one of the hardest things that has ever happened to them. But it might just be one of the best, too.

You’ll love the crunch of the lettuce, the slightly saltiness of the soy sauce and the ever so sweet richness of the hoisin sauce and ginger in these tasty wraps. They make a great appetizer or light main course lunch or dinner. Each wrap has only 62 calories, 2 grams of fat and 2 Weight Watchers POINTS PLUS.

Prep Time: 20 minutes

Cook Time: 15 minutes

Ingredients for Wraps:

1 pound ground chicken or ground turkey

8 scallions, white and green part chopped

1 (8oz) can water chestnuts, drained, rinsed and chopped fine

1 red bell pepper, chopped fine

¼ cup reduced-sodium soy sauce

2½ tablespoons hoisin sauce, see shopping tips

1 tablespoon ginger (from a jar) or fresh grated ginger

1 tablespoon water

2 teaspoons sesame oil

1 large head butter lettuce, wash, dried and leaves separated

Ingredients for Dipping Sauce:

¼ cup reduced-sodium soy sauce

2 tablespoons seasoned rice vinegar

1 tablespoon sugar

½ tablespoon ginger (from a jar) or fresh minced ginger

1 teaspoon sesame oil

½ teaspoon garlic (from a jar) or fresh minced garlic

Instructions

1. In a large pan, brown the ground chicken over medium-high heat, breaking up the pieces. Pour into a colander, in the sink and drain fat. Return chicken to pan. When cool enough to handle, break up the chicken pieces until minced.

2. Add the scallions, water chestnuts, red pepper, soy sauce, hoisin sauce, ginger, water and sesame oil. Cook for a few minutes until the scallions and red pepper are soft. Keep warm.

3. In a small bowl, add all the dipping sauce ingredients and mix well.

4. To assemble each chicken wrap: Spoon about ⅓ cup of chicken filling onto one lettuce leaf and roll it up, if desired. Serve with dipping sauce on the side. This sauce is quite strong. You’ll only need 1 teaspoon of sauce per wrap. You can also set up the components on individual plates and serve family style. Let everyone make their own wrap.

Makes about 16 lettuce wraps

Shopping Tips
To save time. I like to use ginger, in a jar, and garlic, in a jar. Both can be found in the produce section of the supermarket.

Hoisin sauce can be found in the Asian section of most supermarkets.

Weight Watchers (old points) 1 for 1 lettuce wrap
Weight Watchers POINTS PLUS 2 for 1 lettuce wrap

SKINNY FACTS: for 1 lettuce wrap with 1 teaspoon dipping sauce
62 calories, 2g fat, 8g prot,, 4g carbs, 1g fiber, 405mg sodium, 2g sugar

Note:
1. The nutrition facts were calculated on Spark People.com.
2. The Weight Watchers POINTS were calculated on CalculatorCat.com.

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There is a lot of discussion around UI and UX. Countless times we’ll see “UI/UX” written in job postings, mentioned in meetings, etc., as if they are interchangeable, or as if they are one and the same. But what does that even mean?

A UX designer friend of mine was telling me of a meeting they were in the other day.

Executive: “We need to address the UI/UX.”
UX Designer: “What do you mean? The underlying user flows, or the visual elements, or what exactly?”
Executive: “I mean the UI/UX, this button should be naturally on the left – where I would expect it to be.”

Of course, we will not go into the executive that says “I” too much here, as that is a whole other post… but people talking about UI and UX as if they are one and the same seems to now be a pretty standard situation.

Let’s clear up a common misunderstanding; UI does not equal UX. There… I said it. People may see UX as Interface Design but it is not that alone.

If you have a job listed as UI/UX, you need to ask yourself exactly what is it that you expect that person to do? While some designers may play both roles, especially in a very small company, it is worth remembering that each role requires different skills, and people that can do both well are very hard to find. I know several visionary experience designers who are exceptional at understanding their user base, but couldn’t put together a visual design to save their lives and, I know amazing UI designers that put together great interfaces, but have no clue how to conduct usability testing. And that is just fine. It is the reason why both roles exist and are not the same. A quick search on Indeed.com returned 6570 jobs for “UX designer” which included everything from User Experience Designer/Developer to Interaction Designer, UX Engineer, UX Architect and, of course, the favorite — UI/UX Designer. This can certainly be incredibly confusing for people new to UX design, or aspiring to be UX designers.

Is this role really responsible for both the UI and UX components of a solution? More importantly, can the same person actually do both well enough for a product to be successful? Especially given that each requires enough time and effort as to be a job within itself. To answer this, let’s take a look at what each role actually involves.

Experience Design: Incorporates the consideration of every aspect of a user’s interaction with an entity. It evokes all their senses triggering a perception of the entity’s meaning and value, as well as forging an emotional connection with it. UX can be used in the design of any medium — a service, a website, an application, an event etc. It encompasses many disciplines such as cognitive science, computer science, design, human factors and psychology. A UX designer also works with many other business functions such as marketing, communications, design, architecture and support to ensure that the experience is cohesive all the way through from start to finish.

UI Design: The goal of user interface design is to make a user’s interaction with an entity as simple and efficient as possible, aiding them to accomplish their goals. It combines visual design, interaction design and information architecture to present an experience to a user.

UI is very clearly an incredibly important part of UX design… It is not, therefore, synonymous with, but a key part of UX.

This being said, there are clearly skill sets that pertain to each discipline when you are recruiting for a UI designer and a UX designer, and both of these roles are equally as important to your success. Various companies use different descriptions and titles, but there are definitely some trends emerging in the types of skills these two roles require.

UI usually pertains to applications or web sites, but let’s expand on this to the experience of anything. UI could be called the “presentation layer”; the layer that the user sees and interacts with. This is also true with the “presentation layer” of how a workplace looks, how a restaurant looks, how a hotel looks. It is in the positioning, the alignment, the colors and the way it all makes you feel when you see it and use it.

The fundamentals of UX design typically used in software and product can also be taken into the physical world. For example, whether designing an application or a physical world experience, designers can consider Norman’s three levels of cognitive processing.

Visceral
This is the immediate reaction we have to something. It is the reaction of our senses, for example, the things we see and hear before we have even had a significant level of interaction. Think back to when you last saw an app for the first time and immediately liked it, or walked into a restaurant and immediately felt good about it as it looked great and had a fantastic smell of deliciousness in the air. This immediate reaction to our sensory inputs is what makes us instantly decide what is good or bad. Think of the impact of this. As a designer you should always strive to make sure that your user has a positive reaction at this stage.

Behavioral
This is where usability and interaction play a role. It is about the functions that are being performed — what does the product or solution actually do? Is it easy for the user to complete the actions they need to? Are they comfortable performing these actions? Here, designers should focus on how easily a user is able to understand the functions, the usability and the physical feel of the solution.

Reflective
This is a very powerful level of processing accessed through memory. It is the meaning the user associates to a product, solution or experience that makes them come back for more. Only by associating meaning can a user find true value in an experience.

A good experience designer should be able to think through and design the end-to-end experience for anything. This means utilizing a team which would include a specialist in the presentation layer for that particular experience, whether that is an interior designer or an Application Designer.

The way in which people emotionally connect with the experience will come from a variety of aspects, such as what they see and hear before, during and after their interaction. For example:

• Viewing marketing and online reviews presenting the experience before the user experiences it for themselves.
• How support or help is received in an error situation — be that an error on a website, or the wrong food being served in a restaurant.
• How easy it is to use — how easy is it to order your food, or purchase that product?
• How natural and comfortable it feels.
• … the list continues.

The key can be found in ensuring that the UX is designed end-to-end from a core understanding of the user through to design and delivery, whereas the UI is the presentation designed to expose the power of that design process underpinning the UX for the user. Combined, UI and UX are the two different aspects that literally define the success of your product.

I still remember the excitement my wife and I felt when we saw the first glint of enamel poking through our son’s gums when he was still in diapers.

He had teeth.

Like most first-time parents, we found that every tiny event in Benny’s life became a huge event in ours.

We deliberated way too long over tiny toothbrushes. Was the handle too big? Were the bristles soft enough?

And then there was the toothpaste issue.

Should we go without toothpaste and only use water for a while? Perhaps baking soda was a good first step? What about fluoride toothpaste?

Being typical Americans, we were going to protect Benny’s pearly whites with all our might.

My, how our concern has grown beyond our own son’s grin.

In 2010, we returned to Guatemala where five years earlier we had adopted Benny. On a trip that year with a humanitarian organization, we volunteered at a dental clinic at a community center outside of Guatemala City.

My duty at the clinic was to teach children how to brush their teeth. Many had never brushed their teeth before.

In the United States, more than eight out of every 10 children ages 2 to 17 have visited a dentist in the last year.

But these Guatemalan children had never even held a toothbrush! Already they were showing signs of periodontal disease. In the United States, most people don’t show signs of gum disease until they are in their 30s and 40s. These children were only 8, 9, 10 years old …

In Guatemala, according to a study by the Pan American Health Organization, 97 percent of school-age children have cavities and 96 percent have early signs of periodontal disease because of high sugar intake, poor dental hygiene, a poor health delivery system and a weak public health structure.

Dental health problems are not limited to Guatemala, of course. In most developing countries around the world, more than 90 percent of cavities go untreated. In comparison, only 8 percent of U.S. children ages 6 to 11 have untreated decay.

We all know what happens when dental problems are not treated. There’s pain, which can be unbearable at times. The pain can disrupt eating, sleeping, playing and learning. That doesn’t even touch on the self-esteem problems children can have if they have rotted or missing teeth.

The memories of my visit to the dental clinic in 2010 have never left me. It was because of that trip that my wife and I started a buy-one, give-one company, Smile Squared. We wanted to try and do something to help the children we met.

And others like them around the world, including here in the United States.

We are happy to say that since 2011, Smile Squared has donated more than 110,000 toothbrushes in all 50 U.S. states and in 24 countries worldwide.

This National Children’s Dental Health Month, we are so thankful for the many people who have helped us along the way, and more importantly, who have helped the children.

We appreciate the customers who have bought our toothbrushes, retailers like Walmart that have sold our toothbrushes and nonprofit partners that have traveled the globe and placed our toothbrushes in the hands of children who may have never gripped one before.

Children like the ones we met in Guatemala, who deserve to lead healthy lives and flash toothy grins just like our Benny.