Ryan's Journal

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The Bridge - sunday, 2009-06-21 1537 (&)	last modified 2009-06-21 1641
Categories: Film
I watched The Bridge, a documentary consisting of interviews with the loved ones of those who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge in one calendar year. While the obvious solution to the immediate problem is to introduce a suicide barrier of some sort - something the bridge directors finally voted to do late last year - I have to wonder whether removing one tool from the set is going to have much of an impact. The spur of the moment crowd doesn't seem to be very large; the interviews all reveal long, troubled histories of mental illness. If the bridge is no longer available to them, they'll do their research and go somewhere else without barriers. What if no barriers were built and a permanent prevention squad was introduced? If so many suicidal people make a pilgrimage to the bridge, isn't it a rather rare opportunity to address the problem in one central place? The other question - with the bridge so accessible to Bay Area residents, how does it compare to their metropolitan suicide statistics? Will the net change them at all? The documentary also reveals how poorly equipped our society is to deal with mental illness, and even what deep social animosity there is to those who can't function "normally." While one goal of the documentary is clearly to get a barrier built to prevent such horror, the other intent is to get people to notice one another. In one harrowing scene, a photographer bodily pulls a young woman back over the railing. It's set up in such a way as to make you think he's going to keep shooting while she jumps. I am not a large media outlet, so I don't mind contravening the media ban on mentioning the tally. Based on reports of higher numbers in the past couple of years, the total is probably near 1350 over several decades. Build the barrier. Increase awareness.
Comments I vote for a pra... I vote for a praying prophetic prevention squad with angels descending & ascending again (Jacob's ladder) yining :) on June 21, 2009 11:48 PM You must login to leave a comment

Educational Bribery - monday, 2009-06-08 1558 (&)	last modified 2009-06-08 1559
Categories: Current Events
Do I trust the Post as a research institution? When they claim a nearly 40% improvement when children are paid for better test scores, does that figure hold up? I suspect it doesn't. A couple of disconnected flaws in the plan, aside from where the money is sustainably coming from (it's presently privately created and funded by Harvard's EdLabs - who should use some of their millions to hire a competent web designer). The streetwise kids are going to mug the high scoring kids on pay day. Other schemers would capitalize on their earning reputation by assisting their classmates for a percentage of the take. The pay scheme promotes creative cheating. The unspoken lesson is that the only things worth doing are those that pay, or that it's worth doing things you don't enjoy if you get money in exchange. Those are flawed messages regardless of age. Other streetwise kids are going to notice that $500 for hard work each year doesn't compare to the money you can get on the street - now why bother with school at all? EdLabs is releasing more literature on their research later. I look forward to seeing how critical objections are handled, but I think the decades-long results of this study are going to be much more interesting than one school year's worth of observation, and I hope they have it in their mandate to follow these kids and some of their unbribed peers into adulthood.
Comments Crazy So, they think they found a way to get the grades up but still haven't figured out how to get the students motivated to learn. I think the problem lies in modernist values with people desiring to determine the best - the creme-de-la-creme - and rank people according to a standard. Were it not for competition and the need to filter people out of certain societies, there would be no need for this type of school system that employs 'objective' standards of performance. The students themselves perceive the school as just that - a system and a mold - and adapt by making it easier for themselves, either by believing that that's the way to go and striving for approval or by tuning out and finding other ways of fitting in. They become objects, not subjects. If only teachers would - or had the liberty to - focus on the students themselves, their learning styles, and their abilities... My idea of an ideal education is more postmodern. I imagine it being a whole lot more fun were it unplanned and unorganized, say, the day starts out with a talk about water, which leads to learning about the properties of it (physics), then about the rivers and oceans (geography), the scarcity and proper stewardship of water (ecology), life living in water (biology), then going on a tangent, about sailing, wind, knots, and maybe even horsepower (and all that technical stuff I still have no knowledge of; physics, engineering, mechanics), then about all the countries you could visit that have ports and havens, how their geographical location helped (or did not help) their economy, other factors that deter an economy - lack of land justice, economic justice, poor climate, culture and world view, gender issues (politics, economy, sociology, religion, philosophy), and so on. The whole class as a community is involved and determine what to learn next, their curiosity being the drive and catalyst. Nothing is planned other than the determination to learn something new. I imagine tutors of princes being like that centuries ago... generalists and specialists at the same time. If you can't have a Renaissance Man in the classroom, why not have multiple specialists co-teach? Just some random thoughts. :) Kiona Rhee on June 11, 2009 12:36 PM It is of course ... It is of course an old idea that one might motivate behavior with rewards, and so it has been extensively tested. The data is clear that you can increase a behavior with the promise of a reward. Further it is well documented that this displaces other motivations[1] for the work. It so effective at doing so that one of the best ways[2] to supress a bad behavior is to pay for it and then remove the payments. The above a well known in the social sciences (except possibly naive branches of economics). Particularly in the education field, which makes me wonder who these people doing the research are. I see their mission statement says "We embrace untested, even "hertical" ideas and rigorously evaluate and reevaluate ..." Ah, I see - this is a branch of the Broad Foundation's efforts bring all the latest business management cultism into the schools. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Punished-Rewards-Trouble-Incentive-Praise/dp/0618001816 [2] http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Shoot-Dog-Teaching-Training/dp/1860542387 Ben Hyde on June 09, 2009 11:17 AM I'm a fan of eco... I'm a fan of economic behavior modification - particularly recent studies on quitting smoking. There's a poignant difference between parents taking kids out to their favorite ice cream parlor for doing well and the educational institution paying out cold, hard cash - in a word, love. It should be no surprise that primary and secondary education fail to inspire recognition in their pupils that learning is its own reward. Replacing caring, personal attention and self-motivation with money is a true modern American solution. Oh for the day when the best schools are also the ones that pay students the most for their grades. I'm more eager than ever to see this paper. Ryan Lee on June 09, 2009 10:10 PM You must login to leave a comment

eMusic Spam - monday, 2009-06-08 1537 (&)	last modified 2009-06-08 1537
Categories: Nerdy
In retrospect, it's easy enough to uncover that eMusic sells their user list to spammers. I've only just noticed it, oddly by way of a recent tide of totally blank emails. I used to give out a unique address for each one-off service to track who was being unethical about their contact lists and more easily shut down the influx of spam. Perhaps I'll get less lazy about restarting the practice. If it were easier to mint the address and easier to see which addresses were attracting spam, I'd do it more. Maybe I'll move on formalizing that infrastructure. I signed up for eMusic and used them for a day because Sony was cross promoting free downloads from them with new phones. That was not worth it. You still end up paying somehow. Good bye forever, eMusic, and good riddance.
Comments My System My email provider (FastMail.fm) allows you to turn your email address into a domain name and then use any user name you want as the local part of the email address. e.g. joeuser@example.com can receive email sent to any @joeuser.example.com. So when I have to enter an email address on a site I don't trust, I just use the site's domain name as the local part of the email address: 1800flowers.com@joesuer.example.com . No setup required, unless I have to send mail from* that address, which is sometimes necessary later to unsubscribe from their list. In that case I use the trick from this hint. I too had become lax about using this policy; after doing it for several years I found very few instances of someone selling my address to a spammer. In plenty of cases I got on a 'legitimate' mailing list I hadn't intended to sign up for, but these lists always respected unsubscribe requests. But recently I placed an order with 1800flowers.com and started getting mail from their affiliates. Fortunately I had used a custom address so I was able to track down the source of the new mailing list subscriptions. Unfortunately they have lots of affiliates, and the unsubscribe database is not shared. So far I've unsubscribed from mailing lists of four different affiliates; we'll see how many more are yet to come. Jesse Byler on June 16, 2009 07:44 PM That's an intere... That's an interesting way to approach the problem. Maybe I'll use something similar and make a catch all with a certain prefix or suffix in the username space. With the way dictionary spam attacks go, I'd be a bit concerned about the volume of spam attracted by a subdomain. But the larger point about enabling my laziness in creating those fake addresses is a good one, thanks for sharing the idea. I don't envision ever needing to send mail from these fake addresses, rare enough that should the need arise I can just flub it with pine. As for visualizing which address the spam goes to, maybe it's time to modify my Thunderbird setup a bit. I have high hopes for the extensibility of the next version of Thunderbird. Ryan Lee on June 22, 2009 01:55 AM You must login to leave a comment

Clark and Karen - saturday, 2009-06-06 0307 (&)	last modified 2009-06-06 0308
Categories: Daily Grind, Photography
I guess I take fewer photos at weddings these days; more socializing with people I see even less often. Congratulations, old friend. A handful more photos.
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Zelda: Twilight Princess - thursday, 2009-06-04 0449 (&)	last modified 2009-06-06 0321
Categories: Nerdy
I left off on Twilight a year ago when I packed up my life and moved into a car. I have a bit of a vertigo issue with first person games, so this game gave me some nausea troubles. The "enemy nearby" music also tended to give me some physical feelings of revulsion. I ultimately found the game a bit too much "I have to finish" and not enough "I really enjoy this story and want to see how it ends." Which, of course, means I had go back and pick it up. The contrived collection back story, picking up the fused shadow pieces, then collecting mirror shards, then collecting sky characters, then collecting sun orbs - it was too much of the same. Some of these challenges seemed too hard - you may rightly call me dumb for consistently missing the auto-targeting feature and thinking I had to manually aim all the time - and then too easy, because auto-targeting is a cop out. The boss fights ended up being no real challenge to solve, not even the final one, which really adds to the feeling of having to slog through and not to enjoy. When you know how to solve the puzzle and happen to be a year's worth of rusty at pulling it off, it's a bad experience. Wii Fit and Punch Out are on my radar, neither of them immersive games. I think I'll set the next one to be Ico 3, which is a PlayStation 3 game, a console I don't plan on owning. Some day I'll get to play it. It might take several years, much like the time it took me to get to rolling through Shadow of the Colossus. So, last gaming post for a few years.
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