social/relationships

Leaving aside the (in my opinion) sorta sappy music, and the (pretty low-key) corporate sponsorship, this made me quite happy.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Check out the site wherethehellismatt.com for more details.

In celebration of the ruling on gay marriage in California, here is a list (which I found here and traced back to here from here which evidentally got it from a forum...sorry I can't attribute the original author) expressing why this is actually a big problem.

1. Being gay is not natural. Real Americans™ always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.
2. Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.
3. Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.
4. Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn’t changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can’t marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.
5. Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Britany Spears’ 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.
6. Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn’t be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren’t full yet, and the world needs more children.
7. Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.
8. Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That’s why we have only one religion in America.
9. Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That’s why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.
10. Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven’t adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.

Seriously—big congratulations to you gay and lesbian folks out there in California, and here's hoping this starts a big wave of change across the nation. Cheers!

I just felt like this was the right thing for me just now. Here ya go.

Thank you Centripetal Notion.

...to Davis Square, that's why I've not been posting so much. Sorry about the lag.

Prepare for me to post a collection of recently discovered interesting things starting...now!

I've always theorized (with only sparse anecdotal evidence) that one's name has a significant effect on who one becomes. Now I've found an article that more solidly analyzes the idea that our names determine or affect our behavior in some way, and affect how we are perceived and treated. Some effects are clearly disturbing:

When resumes were mailed out in response to job postings, with typical black and white names randomly assigned to resumes of various sorts, the black-named applicants got 33 per cent fewer responses, even from self-described equal opportunity employers (Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004). In order to achieve the same interest as would be generated simply by changing the name to a white one, a black-named applicant needs an additional eight years of job experience. So far, then, it would seem that, whatever gains there may be in pride and group identity, there is a serious cost in employment prospects.

...but other qualities are more whimsical:

Moving to whole names, it appears that Louis will tend to live in St. Louis, and Mary in Marysville, and that this effect, applying also to surnames, is not likely to be due entirely to parents naming children after their location, but to implicit preferences for one’s own name, and variants of it (Pelham et al., 2003).

Fascinating. Those poor French people.

This is one of the funniest and strangest and most disturbing things I've read in a long time.

Same with those mindless teenyboppers who go to the Hickory Farms store, and then take double samples of fruitcake and cheeselog, you warn them that they will be charged with a felony(grand theft), and that if they attempt to fight and run, they will be, unfortunately, first tazered, and if they continue to resist violently with intent to maim, then wounded.

More reason not to join social networking sites: How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free.

This article doesn't even get to the core of the badness in my paranoid brain though: What are the possible implications of allowing a site or any number of sites access to a coordinated list of your friends and associates? What are the privacy implications, and what happens if a more fascistic government takes control and demands the records of one of these companies? What if the company goes under and the sleazy execs sells the data to even sleazier execs who then mine the data for all it's worth to sell you stuff and sell your data to other companies? I'm sure I'm not even touching the surface, frankly.

My recommendation, and what I'm trying to implement myself: control your own data. Use client-side applications as much of the time as possible (i.e. read your mail with Thunderbird on your own machine with mail hosted by a smaller ISP vs. logging into a web site to do so...still problematic but there are also good hosts out there who are into these political/economic issues too), sign up for as few memberships as possible online (check out http://www.bugmenot.com/), don't sign into any Google services when you are searching, don't sign up for any social networking sites, chatting on major services is problematic...don't trust big corporations (or small ones) to do the right thing with your data. They don't love you, they just want money.

I'm not so great at putting my own advice into practice yet, and it's counter to the trend in the biz, but I'm realizing it's where we need to go. Please give it some thought. I'm not just being a luddite here; I've been working as a web developer and sysadmin for almost a decade and I know how incompetent and unscrupulous people can be.

I found this great article on how to defeat verbal intimidation on Consumerist today: The Art of Verbal Intimidation : Learn it and fight back!

For example (I've added the quotations to make things more clear):

I once witnessed a perfect example of this from a work colleague who had a verbal attack instigated towards him by a senior manager. As the manager elevated his voice to declare dominance, my work friend simply said:

"I understand the concern. Though I do think you’re being very emotional right now. Let’s talk about this once you’ve had a chance to calm down."

The anger in the manager’s eyes grew ten-fold. In a desperate attempt to appear dominant, the manager further raised his voice and responded:

"No! We’re talking about this now!"

To which my colleague stood up, and responded softly:

"I will talk to you, but I will not let you shout at me. You are my boss and I respect you, but you are not my mother."

I've had a lot of problems in the past dealing with this sort of verbal intimidation, so it's always nice for me to receive a reminder of the right way to behave in these sorts of situations. Upon examination, it becomes clear that the most effective strategy is also the most dignified, compassionate, and manages to maintain one's confidence and composure.

...is that New Yorkers are within a unique social group wherein the five moral "primary colors" as suggested by Steven Pinker in his recent NY Times piece The Moral Instinct—harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity—are present in a bizarre configuration unknown by other cultural groups in this country, and perhaps the entire world.

Furthermore, I believe that we have a readily accessible dataset that will make analysis and verification of this thesis trival. I offer for your examination selections from Overheard in New York:

Putting Me in the Lead for Valedictorian. Booyah!

Nerdy white boy whose homework just blew away in the wind: Dang!

Ghetto girl: Looks like you ain't doin' yo' math homework tonight, nigga!

--7 train

and

I Heart New York (A Short Story)

Wheelbette (editorial: that is, a "bimbette" in a wheelchair): Excuse me, sir -- do you have the time?

Guy: Shut up.

--26th & 6th

and

Actually, in Trenton, You Do

Tourist: Is this the 1:13 to Trenton?

Suit: No.

Tourist: Oh, well, where is that?

Suit: Are you just, like, picking track numbers and hoping for the best? Go read the screen, you dumbass.

Tourist: You don't have to be rude.

Suit: You don't have to be stupid.

--NJ Transit

and I'm sure there are more.

You decide. That is, assuming you can figure out what I'm talking about. Go read the article, you dumbass.

Does that make sense? I was having trouble wording the headline. Basically, Carol Dweck's research suggests that how you conceive your talents has an effect on how well you are able to achieve goals which utilize those talents. If you can understand your talents as being mutable rather than fixed, it seems to be the case that you can achieve more:

Beliefs about intelligence affect mental performance.

This rings true for me. I've always believed that I could learn anything I set my mind to, and I've achieved a lot with that mindset. I also make it clear in the classes I teach at Parsons that your level of comprehension has nothing to do with whether you are "good at code" or not, or whether you've done well at math or science in the past, or any other excuse you can think up: it's about working hard and finding the right way to understand the concepts. Not everyone understands things in the same way, and this isn't just a feel-good cliché, it is absolutely true. This is critically important to understand if you want to get past your barriers to learning.