A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
Why I love Corporate America #472: A sign outside our local Five Guys proclaims “hand-spun milkshakes.”
We walked in and found… an apparently conventional milkshake machine. We asked one of the crew what it all meant. “It’s exactly the same as a milkshake at McDonald’s,” he explained.
Full post, including commentsA neighbor has a boisterous young adult 80-lb. Golden-Poodle mix who is kept confined to the kitchen (so that he doesn’t mess up the house/shed) and walked for about one hour per day. I ran into her in the woods the other day. Her dog was beyond excited to see and play with Mindy the Crippler and, of course, knocked over our 2-year-old a couple of times (he also tried to pull down said 2-year-old by his hood). She said that the beast was barking at night and she was going to put him on Prozac, at the vet’s recommendation, to calm him down at home and also for an upcoming kennel stay while the family goes to Europe.
This got me wondering if Medication Nation has reached our canines. Kids that are energetic and don’t want to sit still for six hours per day in school are put on meds, right? Now we’re doing the same thing to dogs? I wonder if this dog would be fine if he had 2-3 hours of daily exercise and full access to the house/family.
Full post, including commentsHarvard puts up signs in the Yard apparently welcoming anyone who can pay $73,600/year:
[“Wherever you are from… You are home.” — lifted from Burning Man?]
Actually the offer is more generous than initially apparent because Harvard promises free tuition, room, and board for children from any family earning less than $65,000 year (source).
Is there a clear path for almost anyone to get a free ride through Harvard? Harvard doesn’t ask for a birth certificate, right? There is no public record of who has a U.S. passport, right? So anyone who is admitted to Harvard can say “I am an undocumented immigrant.” At that point Harvard cannot ask for any authoritative financial forms. The applicant can simply say “I don’t know what my parents’ immigration status is and I would feel uncomfortable asking for their IRS 1040 returns.”
https://college.harvard.edu/i-am-undocumented-am-i-still-eligible-financial-aid says
If you are undocumented you are eligible for financial aid from Harvard. Harvard makes no distinction based on citizenship in the financial aid process or in the amount of aid for which students are eligible. Undocumented students do not need to file a FAFSA since they are not eligible to apply for federal aid.
Readers: What do you think? There are procedures for proving that one is documented, e.g., producing a passport. But there is no procedure for proving that someone is undocumented. Is there then a clear path to free tuition, room, and board?
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The Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock, described in the “Sites that are really programs” chapter of my 1990s book on web development, is broken because the attempt to grab a price from Yahoo Finance now results in “It has come to our attention that this service is being used in violation of the Yahoo Terms of Service. As such, the service is being discontinued. For all future markets and equities data research, please refer to finance.yahoo.com.” (they paid Marissa Mayer that they couldn’t afford to respond to a few quote requests per day anymore?)
What’s a good source for getting stock quotes in a simple format designed to be read by a computer program? I would want at least MSFT and BTC-USD.
Full post, including commentsFrom a Facebook friend: a helpful list of 10 things to talk about on a first date. Some excerpts:
The good news is that there is a correct answer to each of these questions!
Full post, including commentsAccording to “New York attack: What do we know about Akayed Ullah?” (BBC):
White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said Ullah entered the US on an F43 visa.
This means he was the child of someone with an F41 visa, which is available to people who are the “brother or sister of a US citizen at least 21 years old”.
The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission told CNN that Ullah held a taxi driver’s licence from March 2012 to March 2015.
The Inspector General of Police in Bangladesh, AKM Shahidul Haque, said Ullah had no criminal record in Bangladesh.
In light of the Port Authority bombing that he perpetrated, it seems safe to say Mr. Ullah’s life in the U.S. didn’t turn out well either for him or for us, but what was the best case scenario for native-born Americans? Mr. Ullah’s education and skills were presumably appropriate to the taxi-driving job that we expect to be eliminated by robots. Mr. Ullah settled in a city that most Americans regarded as already overcrowded when he immigrated.
[Mr. Ullah was a law-abiding citizen in Bangladesh, according to the BBC, so he likely would have been better off staying there.]
Readers: What is the theory that drove us to welcome Mr. Ullah?
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What could be more awesome than Jack Kilby’s 1958 integrated circuit, which led to the microprocessors in our desktop computers and smartphones?
Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked says that our Silicon Age is not, in fact, awesome for humans:
Addictive behaviors have existed for a long time, but in recent decades they’ve become more common, harder to resist, and more mainstream.
Millions of recovering alcoholics manage to avoid bars altogether, but recovering Internet addicts are forced to use email. You can’t apply for a travel visa or a job, or begin working, without an email address. Fewer and fewer modern jobs allow you to avoid using computers and smartphones. Addictive tech is part of the mainstream in a way that addictive substances never will be.
Smartphones rob us of time, but even their mere presence is damaging. In 2013, two psychologists invited pairs of strangers into a small room and asked them to engage in conversation. To smooth the process, the psychologists suggested a topic: why not discuss an interesting event that happened to you over the past month? Some of the pairs talked while a smartphone sat idle nearby, while for others the phone was replaced by a paper notebook. Every pair bonded to some extent, but those who grew acquainted in the presence of the smartphone struggled to connect. They described the relationships that formed as lower in quality, and their partners as less empathetic and trustworthy. Phones are disruptive by their mere existence, even when they aren’t in active use. They’re distracting because they remind us of the world beyond the immediate conversation, and the only solution, the researchers wrote, is to remove them completely.
In 2000, Microsoft Canada reported that the average human had an attention span of twelve seconds; by 2013 that number had fallen to eight seconds. (According to Microsoft, a goldfish, by comparison, has an average attention span of nine seconds.) “Human attention is dwindling,” the report declared. Seventy-seven percent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds claimed that they reached for their phones before doing anything else when nothing is happening. Eighty-seven percent said they often zoned out, watching TV episodes back-to-back. More worrying, still, Microsoft asked two thousand young adults to focus their attention on a string of numbers and letters that appeared on a computer screen. Those who spent less time on social media were far better at the task.
What are we doing with our short attention spans?
How long do you think the average office email goes unread? I guessed ten minutes. The truth is just six seconds. In reality, 70 percent of office emails are read within six seconds of arriving. Six seconds is less time than it’s taken you to read this paragraph so far, but it’s long enough for the average worker to disrupt whatever he’s doing to open his email program and click on the incoming email. This is hugely disruptive: by one estimate, it takes up to twenty-five minutes to become re-immersed in an interrupted task. If you open just twenty-five emails a day, evenly spaced across the day, you’ll spend literally no time in the zone of maximum productivity.
… the average schoolchild aged between eight and eighteen years spends a third of her life sleeping, a third at school, and a third engrossed in new media, from smartphones and tablets to TVs and laptops. She spends more time communicating through screens than she does with other people directly, face-to-face. Since the turn of the new millennium, the rate of non-screen playtime fell 20 percent, while the rate of screen playtime increased by a similar amount.
Children are especially vulnerable to addiction, because they lack the self-control that prevents many adults from developing addictive habits. Regulated societies respond by refusing to sell alcohol and cigarettes to children—but very few societies regulate behavioral addictions. Kids can still play with interactive tech for hours at a time, and they can still play video games as long as their parents will allow. (Korea and China have flirted with so-called Cinderella laws, which prohibit children from playing games between midnight and six in the morning.)
What is addiction anyway?
Addiction originally meant a different kind of strong connection: in ancient Rome, being addicted meant you had just been sentenced to slavery. If you owed someone money and couldn’t repay the debt, a judge would sentence you to addiction. You’d be forced to work as a slave until you’d repaid your debt [see some of the material within Post-Divorce Litigation for the modern equivalent!]. This was the first use of the word addiction, but it evolved to describe any bond that was difficult to break. If you liked to drink wine, you were a wine addict; if you liked to read books, you were a book addict. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with being an addict; many addicts were just people who really liked eating or drinking or playing cards or reading. To be an addict was to be passionate about something, and the word addiction became diluted over the centuries.
Inbox Zero also explains why workers spend a quarter of their days dealing with emails, and why they check their accounts, on average, thirty-six times every hour. In one study, researchers found that 45 percent of respondents associated email with “a loss of control.” This from a mode of communication that barely existed until the twenty-first century.
Fortunately America is packed with psychologists who can treat us, right? Hilarie Cash, a PhD clinical psychologist, started a treatment center for game-addicted young people and then was surprised at their behavior:
“Our guys get sidetracked, and they develop intimacy disorders. They don’t have the skills to bring sexuality and intimacy together. Many of them turn to pornography instead of forming real relationships, and they never seem to understand true intimacy.” Cash referred to “our guys” because the center no longer admits women. “For four years we admitted women, but we had to revise our policy after a number of patients ignored the ‘no physical intimacy’ rule. We had many more male applicants in those days, so we decided to stop taking women. Now, with the rise of non-violent casual and social gaming, there are almost as many female applicants. We may have to reconsider our policy.”
What can a parent do?
It’s far easier to prevent people from developing addictions in the first place than it is to correct existing bad habits, so these changes should begin not with adults, but with young kids. Parents have always taught their children how to eat, when to sleep, and how to interact with other people, but parenting today is incomplete without lessons on how to interact with technology, and for how long each day.
How about a company?
[Daimler]’s one hundred thousand employees can set incoming emails to delete automatically when they’re on vacation. A so-called mail on holiday assistant automatically emails the sender to explain that the email wasn’t delivered, and suggests another Daimler employee who will step in if the email is urgent. Workers come back from their vacations to an inbox that looks exactly as it did when they left several weeks ago.
More: read Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked
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Full post, including commentsHow did Facebook destroy the audience for the public Internet? Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked is a good place to start looking for answers:
Thirty-seven years after Zeiler published his results [on pigeons, in 1971], a team of Facebook web developers prepared to unleash a similar feedback experiment on hundreds of millions of humans. Facebook has the power to run human experiments on an unprecedented scale. The site already had two hundred million users at the time—a number that would triple over the next three years. The experiment took the form of a deceptively simple new feature called a “like” button. Anyone who has used Facebook knows how the button works: instead of wondering what other people think of your photos and status updates, you get real-time feedback as they click (or don’t click) a little blue-and-white thumbs-up button beneath whatever you post. (Facebook has since introduced other feedback buttons, so you’re able to communicate more complex emotions than simple liking.) It’s hard to exaggerate how much the “like” button changed the psychology of Facebook use. What had begun as a passive way to track your friends’ lives was now deeply interactive, and with exactly the sort of unpredictable feedback that motivated Zeiler’s pigeons. Users were gambling every time they shared a photo, web link, or status update. A post with zero likes wasn’t just privately painful, but also a kind of public condemnation: either you didn’t have enough online friends, or, worse still, your online friends weren’t impressed. Like pigeons, we’re more driven to seek feedback when it isn’t guaranteed.
Facebook was a great idea (from the Winklevoss twins, now Bitcoin billionaires), but it didn’t become a super-addictive idea until the Like button, according to the author of this book. Why do people love this so much?
Social confirmation, or seeing the world as others see it, is a marker that you belong to a group of like-minded people. In evolutionary terms, group members tended to survive while loners were picked off, one by one, so discovering that you’re a lot like other people is deeply reassuring. When people are deprived of these bonds, they experience a form of pain so severe that it’s sometimes called “the social death penalty.”
How can people break free of Facebook addiction? The authors suggest saying “I don’t use Facebook” rather than “I can’t use Facebook,” but mostly putting a dog’s shock collar on yourself: Pavlok. Another idea is to use Facebook through an interface that hides all of the metrics: a Demetricator.
How powerful is gamification?
[Ian] Bogost demonstrated the power of gamification with a social media game called Cow Clicker. He designed Cow Clicker to mimic similar games, like FarmVille, which had dominated Facebook for many months. The game’s objective was simple: click your cow during critical periods and you’ll earn virtual currency known as mooney. Cow Clicker was supposed to satirize gamification, but it was a smash hit. Tens of thousands of users downloaded the game, and instead of playing once or twice, they played for days on end. At one point, a computer science professor sat atop the leaderboard with a hundred thousand mooney. Bogost updated the game with new features, adding awards for reaching certain milestones (such as the Golden Cowbell for one hundred thousand clicks), and introducing an oil-coated cow to commemorate the BP oil spill. He claimed that Cow Clicker’s success was a surprise, but really it embodied many of the traits that made other games addictive: Werbach and Hunter’s points, badges, and levels.
… and it will only get worse:
Behavioral addiction is still in its infancy, and there’s a good chance we’re still at base camp, far below the peak. Truly immersive experiences, like virtual reality devices, have not yet gone mainstream. In ten years, when all of us own a pair of virtual reality goggles, what’s to keep us tethered to the real world? If human relationships suffer in the face of smartphones and tablets, how are they going to withstand the tide of immersive virtual reality experiences? Facebook is barely a decade old, and Instagram is half that; in ten years, a host of new platforms will make Facebook and Instagram seem like ancient curiosities.
More: read Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked
Full post, including comments“My Generation Thought Women Were Empowered. Did We Deceive Ourselves?” (nytimes) is a 71-year-old woman’s tale of suffering at the hands of men in the workplace:
When I started out in journalism in the 1970s, … My first job was at the London bureau of a prominent international wire service. When I walked in the newsroom, the all-male staff gaped at me as if I were an oasis in a desert. … I felt lonely, in need of a friend. I suppose this is why I responded when one reporter began to engage me in conversation. My hopes rose — until I felt the hand slowly sneaking up my thigh. I dispatched him with an elbow in the torso. And the guy who grabbed my butt the next day got a swift back kick into the kneecap and a couple of four-letter words.
When you get older, gender discrimination gets easier, somewhat predictable and sometimes even funny. But it doesn’t stop — even if you’ve published four books and had a long journalism career. When my last book came out, I was interviewed by a certain talk show host, before he was stripped of his job because of gross sexual misconduct charges. I had hardly opened my mouth before he fell asleep. During the rest of the interview, he kept nodding off while the camera judiciously avoided him. When I left the studio, he had popped awake for his new guests. I saw him waving his hands enthusiastically while speaking with two high-powered male journalists.
I herald this latest female generation for their courage in revealing their humiliations for the chance to change society. We, the earliest female newswomen, were tough, ambitious, even cocky about our talent, but over the years, our self-confidence was often irreparably harmed. Our generation might have been smart, but there was much we just didn’t get. Grateful to win a place in the hierarchy of power, we didn’t understand the ways that gender degradation still shaped our work lives.
Suppose that young female readers of the New York Times assume that this story is representative of women’s experiences in the workforce, i.e., humiliation, groping, and irreparable harm. Why would a rational woman then choose to enter the workforce?
Now that everyone can agree that “news” is more about promoting an agenda of some kind, can we infer that the NYT’s agenda is to discourage American women from working?
Full post, including commentsHere’s some good news for Jet A suppliers: “U.S. Put 92 Somalis on a Deportation Flight, Then Brought Them Back” (nytimes). From the article:
Ninety-two Somali citizens were flown out of the United States under orders of deportation on Thursday, but their plane never made it to Somalia. The flight landed in the West African country of Senegal and, facing logistical problems, was rerouted back to the United States.
In an emailed statement on Friday, the agency said it was notified that a relief flight crew was “unable to get sufficient crew rest due to issues with their hotel in Dakar,” so the aircraft and detainees spent time parked at the airport there. It added that “various logistical options were explored, and ultimately ICE decided to reschedule the mission to Somalia and return to the United States with all 92 detainees.”
What about the notoriously efficient Germans? “Pilots stop 222 asylum seekers being deported from Germany by refusing to fly” (Independent):
Pilots have stopped 222 deportations of asylum seekers from Germany by refusing to take off with them on board.
Many of the pilots refused to take control of flights taking people back to Afghanistan, where violence is still rife following years of war and occupation by Western forces.
Some of the flights belonged to Lufthansa and its subsidiary, Eurowings.
The decision not to carry a passenger, was ultimately down to the pilot on a “case-by-case decision”, Lufthansa spokesman Michael Lamberty…
German publication RBB24 quoted a Lufthansa pilot who did not want to be identified as saying pilots would normally refuse to take off if a potential deportee answers “no” when asked if they want to take the flight.
“We have to prevent anyone from being freaked out during the flight, and we have to protect the other passengers as well,” the pilot reportedly said.
Pilots can face disciplinary measures if they refuse to fly on moral grounds.
Lufthansa Group spokesman Helmut Tolksdorf told RBB24 that he was not aware of “any case where one of our pilots has refused to take them for reasons of conscience”.
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