Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2018 August

# 07 Aug 2018, 10:37AM: New York State Licensed Driving Schools: I have a driver's license but rarely drive, and the longer I go without practice, the more I think I ought to get some lessons in before getting back on the road. I'd like to feel more comfortable driving so I can share the work on long car trips, rent a car for hiking or activist work, and so on. So I decided to get some lessons from a driving school. I saw one in my area advertises itself as registered with New York State Department of Motor Vehicles as a driving school, and thought I may as well do my due diligence and check the accuracy of that claim.

Well, New York State DMV does regulate and certify driving schools and driving instructors; a driving school needs a license to sell instruction. Hella requirements and forms.

But there's no public list of driving school licensees. The NYS DMV provides a DMV-Regulated Facilities search on its site, for car repair shops, auto dealers, etc., but that does not include licensed driving schools. And the site lists providers of the in-classroom Point and Insurance Reduction Program (PIRP), in case you seek that. But I want behind-the-wheel lessons, not PIRP.

Short-term solution which I eventually found, and am sharing for future readers: you can call the NYS DMV's Bureau of Driver Training Programs (DTP) at (518) 473-7174, and ask them about a specific driving school (name and address), and they can verify whether it's licensed, and how long it's been licensed.

Long-term solution: I filed a Freedom of Information Law request for the list of licensed driving schools and I nominated that list in a dataset for New York's Open Data portal.

(More a daydream than any kind of solution: signing up to take a New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission-authorized behind-the-wheel course meant for New York City taxi drivers!!! Why half-ass my "get more confident as a driver" journey?!)

Update as of 7 Feb 2019: The DMV completed my FOIL request and provided a 36-page list of licensed driving schools!

# 13 Aug 2018, 12:38PM: Foreign Key: I was born and raised in the US. I speak English natively and fluently, with a US accent.

A few times, in face-to-face, oral conversation, US-born colleagues or strangers have said something that reveals they assume I am an immigrant. I always found this bewildering; can't they hear my accent? In one case, last year, someone (a white person with a US accent) heard me say I was American, and replied "But your accent" -- the first time I'd ever experienced someone just making up a perceived Indian accent in my speech.

Turns out this happens frequently. Linguists in the US published research about it as early as 1992, and replicated findings, including in the piece "Code Switch" mentions. (Thanks to The League of Nerds for the bibliography that led me to the research papers NPR was citing.) From Okim Kang & Donald Rubin's "Reverse Linguistic Stereotyping: Measuring the Effect of Listener Expectations on Speech Evaluation":

In [reverse linguistic stereotyping], the speaker's language pattern is not the trigger to stereotyping processes but rather their object. In RLS, attributions of a speaker's group membership cue distorted perceptions of that speaker's language style or proficiency. Thus, Rubin and colleagues (see review in Rubin, 2002) have repeatedly documented that when listeners mistakenly believe they are listening to a nonnative speaker of English (NNS), they report hearing highly accented speech, and their listening comprehension significantly declines.

Well, at least now I know. Probably a ton of people have made this assumption over the years and I just never knew. And it'll probably keep happening; it's not like I'm going to start waving my long-form birth certificate around at the beginning of every meeting, party, and presentation. Bleh. Yet another thing.