Things They Should Invent: car alarm that goes off if a child is left in a car seat

Recently in the news, there have been a number of cases of babies and toddlers dying after being forgotten in a car on a hot day.  This makes me think they should invent something to alert parents if they walk away from the car with the kid still in the baby seat.

Some of the media coverage (can't seem to google up the exact article) mentioned that there are some alerts that work with smartphones, but those depend on the parent having a smartphone and having the app installed and the smartphone being on and charged.  If your battery's dead, or you've turned off your phone for a meeting, or it's just at the bottom of your purse and you're in a noisy environment, you might fail to notice the alert.

I propose something simpler and more immediate:  if the car is turned off, there is weight in the carseat, there is no weight in the driver's seat, and all the doors are closed, the annoying horn-honking car alarm goes off.  (Proposed added bonus feature: rather than the usual horn honky car alarm sound it produces the sound of a baby crying.)

The advantage of this model is it draws attention to the car, even if it for some reason it fails to attract the parent's attention.  I know people generally disregard and curse out the source of car alarms, but someone walking past might take a peek in, and if the car is parked somewhere staffed, the staff might notice.  This increases the chances that someone will notice the baby's presence and intervene.

Ideas for how this could be engineered: cars could have a built in attacher thingy for baby seats (baby seats have to be physically attached to the car by more than just a seatbelt. The ones I've seen are attached by a bolt-like thing behind the back seat.)  The attacher thing recognizes when a car seat is attached (the same way the seatbelt detector detects when the seatbelt is fastened) and then there could be a weight detector in the seat of the car (maybe there could be a button to press to "zero" it to an empty baby seat).  The car would therefore know when there's a baby seat present and when the baby seat is occupied.

The other advantage of this model is it wouldn't require any proactiveness or diligence on the part of the parents.  If it doesn't occur to the parents to take precautions against accidentally leaving the baby in the car, the car will do so anyway, much like how some cars already warn you if your seatbelt isn't done up or if you've left the lights on.

"Required field must not be blank"

Lately, when I type up a blog entry, I've been getting an error message "Required field must not be blank".  Through trial and error, I've determined that the required field is the title field.  In other words, Blogger has made post titles mandatory.

Problem: Blogger also will not permit us to save posts unless we have typed something in the title field.  Which is problematic, because I like to write my titles last, after the whole post is composed. Yesterday I started writing a good post that required some precise choice of language and some careful composition.  I didn't finish it last night (not unusual for more mindful posts) so I clicked Save. I got a "This page is asking you to confirm that you want to leave - data you have entered may not be saved" error, but I knew I'd just clicked save so I told it to go ahead and navigate away.  And then, this morning, my careful work was all gone!

Dear Blogger:  If you're going to require titles to post (which strikes me as completely unnecessary, BTW), there's no need to require a title to save a draft.  The draft is, by definition, not finished.  It's okay if it doesn't have all the required elements.  In fact, it will save you a small amount of storage space if you don't force people to fill out a field they don't need to fill out just yet.

Edited to add: I've just discovered that the post body field is not a required field, just the post title.  That's a wee bit ridiculous...

The choreography of conversation when not everyone understands the language

From David Eddie: 

Every spring my mother-in-law arrives from Europe. While she stays in her own home we see her often, usually for meals and then a four-day visit to the cottage with us. Although she speaks English very well, she seems to feel we should all be learning her language and accommodating her, to the point that she will often speak her language at these meals. So instead of saying “pass the butter” which is hardly a complicated matter in English, she will revert to her own language and then she hooks in my husband and they begin talking and no one has a clue what they are saying. I know it’s a power grab so she can control the conversation and cut me out but my husband is afraid to stand up to her because she has quite a temper, and because he says that at 78 you get to do what you want to. This causes untold friction in my family and, judging from the number of mixed marriages in Canada, for many other families, I am sure. Is it rude to speak a foreign language in front of people who don’t understand?

My credentials: I was born into a bicultural family, where some family members don't speak the local language very well, and still others choose to talk among themselves in the heritage language despite being functionally bilingual. I am fluent in the local language, but for most of my life I understood nary a word of the heritage language.  (I understood it as a toddler as well as a toddler understands anything, then lost it when I began school and started learning it in adulthood, but I'm still nowhere near fluent and can  follow along only sporadically.)  So I grew up immersed in this situation, but nearly always as a unilingual party who didn't understand half of what was being said.

In this capacity, I propose that the best approach is for the husband to translate the conversation for his wife.  He doesn't have to do every single word, he can just say "Mum's asking about our vacation, so I'm telling her the story about the elephant and the guy with the hat." If his mother's receptive English really is fluent, perhaps he can even respond to her in English so his wife can follow along, and his wife can participate in the conversation too. Then when his mother responds in the heritage language, he can translate her statements.

While all this is happening, the wife should feel free to participate in the conversation in English even if she doesn't understand every word that's being said.  For example, after the husband says "I'm telling her the story about the elephant and the guy with the hat," the wife could chime in with "And make sure you tell her what the weather was like that day!" - regardless of whether he's already told her that part. 

As an added bonus, if the mother can in fact express herself in English as easily as LW thinks she can, she will naturally begin using more English in this context.  It might be to speed things up, but it quite often even happens through normal code-switching patterns.

This will achieve the same result but make the mother feel like it was her idea, all without having to have an awkward conversation trying to convince her not to converse with her child in the language in which she naturally converses with her child.

Journalism wanted: how on earth do fish die in a flood??

Mentioned in passing in an article about the exciting adventure of Calgary zookeepers trying to rescue giraffes from a flood with hippos the loose:

On Tuesday, several of 140 dead tilapia that zoo staff couldn’t save were still scattered on the muddy, wet floor of the giraffe and hippo building. Six piranhas and at least two of the zoo’s 12 peacocks also died in the flooding.

Tilapia and piranhas are fish!  How on earth do fish die in a flood???

It says they're scattered on the floor, which suggests that the water receded and left them behind.  Is that normal?  Does that mean that fish in the ocean have to follow the water when the tides move?  Why didn't the force of the water pull them along?

In any case, you can't just mention in passing that fish died in a flood and not explain.  It's a great big question mark, even if it's not nearly as exciting as rescuing giraffes from hippo-infested waters.

"What do you think you can do about it?"

From Carolyn Hax:

Dear Carolyn:

My second-grade son was upset yesterday because his best friend at school told him to toughen up (my son was crying over something) and also told him he was not one of his best friends anymore. What do I say to my son?

 Carolyn's answer starts with:

Next time — since they’re both probably over this already — it’s hard to go wrong with a 1-2 plan of acknowledging his feelings — “I can see you’re really upset, I’m sorry,” plus hug — and directing him to come to his own way of dealing with it: “What do you think you can do about it?” 

I've heard this parenting advice before - that you should ask kids "What do you think you can do about it?" - and it seems unhelpful to say the least.  My own mother has tried it on me (one of those times when you can tell your parent totally read something in an article), and I just found it infuriating.  If I had any remotely productive ideas what to do about it that I hadn't tried already, I'd be trying them!

I think this is even worse to say to a child, because when parents ask children leading questions like that, it quite often implies that the parent thinks the child is supposed to know what to do.  I'm old enough to be his mother, and I don't even have any idea what he should do.  Sitting here in adulthood, we have the luxury of saying "Okay, you're welcome to leave then," but that doesn't work when you're a kid and it's more difficult to function in the classroom and the playground when you don't have someone present whom you can claim as your best friend.  Actual friendship aside, the social logistics of school require having people you can call friends. (This is something I keep meaning to blog about but haven't gotten around to yet.)

I've seen Carolyn Hax give this advice to parents before, and I think it's even worse coming from an advice columnist.  The kid doesn't know what to do, so he goes to his parent.  The parent doesn't know what to do, so they write to an advice columnist.  And the advice columnist tells the parent to ask the kid?  How is that useful?

At this point, people usually ask me "Well, what advice do you expect her to give?  Do you have any better ideas?"  First of all, advice columnists (for whom this is their whole job) should be able to give better, more effective advice that gets better results than anything I could ever think of.  The fact that I don't know the solution doesn't mean an advice columnist wouldn't be able to come up with one, just like the fact that I can't make my hair stay curled doesn't mean that a hairdresser wouldn't be able to.

But, more importantly, advice columnists get a lot of letters.  If the columnist can't come up with a solution to one of the problems, they should run another letter where they can come up with a solution to the LW's problem rather than taking up valuable column inches being one of these people and telling the person who asked for help in the first place to think of the answer themselves.

Google's "unnatural link" detector is broken

I recently had a comment from a webmaster of a site I had linked to (who appears to check out as a real person) asking me to remove the link because they'd been hit by an "unnatural link penalty" from Google due to their being linked from my blog.

I did some googling around, and discovered that the "unnatural link penalty" is intended to reduce the page rank of websites that have spam posts linking to them, to render that kind of spamming useless.

The problem is, my link wasn't spam.  My link was a natural link in the truest sense of the word.

I'm not going to link to the post in question because apparently it causes trouble for this person's business, but it was one of my posts from during the financial crisis, where I was trying to figure out money-related stuff.  One aspect of what I was talking my way through would vary greatly from person to person, so I provided a link to an online financial calculator so everyone could calculate their own number for themselves.

This was absolutely natural.  I'm just a regular person who writes about what's on my mind. I was writing out my train of thought, partway through my train of thought I realized that everyone would have a different number and it was complex to calculate, so I googled up an existing online calculator and provided a link.  This is the very purpose of hyperlinks dating back to the earliest days of hypertext.  I had no interest in the particular business I linked to, they were just the first googleable result providing that particular kind of calculator.

The thing is, this is the very basis of Google's PageRank system - that people will link to thinks that are useful to them.  Google Webmaster Tools support says:

The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it.

The site I had linked to had created relevant content that was useful to me and valuable to my readers, so I linked to it.  And now they're apparently being penalized for it.  Why?  Because I'm a blog?  Because there are people who use blogs for spam?  I don't even know.

From a purely algorithmic point of view, Google should be able to tell that I'm a human being, not a spambot.  My blog has been around a lot longer than most spam blogs have.  I don't update on any particular schedule.  My posts vary greatly in length and nature.  Quite a few of my posts have no links in them whatsoever.  I change my template every so often, and there are posts with the word "template" in them around the time of these template changes.  There's a twitter feed in my right-hand column, and it's updated on no particular schedule with the majority of tweets not containing any links.

On top of all that, Google owns Blogger.   I'm sure they have access to information that will show them that I delete spam posts, I have drafts of posts in my drafts folder, and I hardly ever make scheduled posts.  They could probably also see that I use the account I blog with here to comment on other blogs.  That's not the behaviour of a spambot!

I know there has been a lot of blogger spam lately, but you have a system where a website creates useful content, a blogger thinks "That's just what I need!" and links to it, and then the website gets punished for this, your system is broken.  Google needs to fix this!

Things They Should Invent: tell the neighbourhood what movie they were filming after they finish filming there

I'm pretty sure they're shooting a movie in my neighbourhood.  I've seen movie-ish pylons and trucks and trailers, and some lighting and camera equipment standing around with people milling about.  I think they might even have redecorated the smelly alley.  (Although there were also about half a dozen cop cars there, one of which said "Forensics", so it's possible it was in fact a crime scene.)

The internet won't tell me what they're filming, and there's no indication on site.  Which makes sense - if you're filming something with big stars in it, you want to keep it quiet so people don't flock to your location and swarm around seeking autographs.

But it would be nice to let us know after the fact.  And it could even be used to promote the movie!  What if they distributed a little note to residences and businesses in the area saying something along the lines of:

Dear Neighbours,

Thank you for your patience and understanding while we used your neighbourhood to film Awesome Movie, starring Big-Name Actor and New Up-And-Comer. Watch for us in theatres in summer 2014, when you'll be able to see your neighbourhood in the zombie apocalypse scene and the big dance number!

It would assuage curiosity, create goodwill, and probably lead a certain percentage of people who receive the note to go see the movie even if they wouldn't have otherwise. 

Building a Better Senate redux

I previously blogged some ideas for improving the Senate, building on the advantages of the existing model by making it less partisan.

While reading this article (although not directly related to its content), I came up with a simpler way to do the same thing.

First, we make senators non-partisan.  They can't be members of a party, they don't identify themselves as "Conservative senators" or "Liberal senators", there are no Senate party caucuses.  They're just senators.

Then comes the important part: government of the day cannot appoint any senators who are or have ever been members of its political party (or any of that party's predecessors).  It can appoint people who are or have been members of other political parties, it can appoint people who have never been a member of any political party, but it can't appoint from its own party.

Possible corollary, depending on what percentage of the people who are good senate candidates have ever been members of political parties: each government must appoint a minimum number of senators who are or have been been a member of another political party.  I can see pros and cons of this.

But, either way, it would be the political equivalent of having one sibling cut the cake and another choose the slice.

Zap2it vs. TV Guide online TV listings

For as long as I can remember, I've been using zap2it.com as my primary TV guide.  They could be customized to my TV provider so they'll tell me what's on the channels I actually get and they tell me the actual channel number (unlike the TV listings in the newspaper, where they say it's on channel 5 in the listings and then I have to look it up in the chart to see that channel 5 is really channel 6 on my TV).

However, Zap2it's advanced search function recently stopped working, which makes it significantly less useful to me.  For example, as you may have noticed, I'm an Eddie Izzard fan, so I like to know when Eddie's going to be on TV.  So I'd use Zap2it's advanced search function to search for "Izzard" under "Cast & Crew", and I'd get a list of every program Eddie's in for the next two weeks.  In the absence of this function, I'd have to either look up every single entry on Eddie's IMDB page separately (which is a wee bit inconvenient) or miss opportunities to see Eddie on TV (which cramps my style).

Fortunately, it turns out TVGuide.com's listings aren't powered by Zap2it (as many TV listings are), and they have celebrity-specific listings (like this) that fulfill the function for which I'd previously been using Zap2it's advanced search (and with a much nicer interface too - TV Guide lists every appearance in chronological order, whereas Zap2it would only list the titles of the shows the performer appears in, and I'd have to click on each one to see when it's on.)  However, I've noticed a variety of pros and cons of each system:

- TV Guide lets you add movies, or even celebrities (which basically means anyone with an IMDB entry - Jane Austen is in there), to your watchlist, whereas Zap2it only lets you add TV shows.  This means that, on Zap2it, if I want to watch The King's Speech, I need to search for it every couple of weeks to see when it's on, while on TV Guide I can just add it to my list and they'll let me know.

- TV Guide's celebrity pages also show you episodes of TV shows that have that celebrity in it, whereas Zap2it's show you every episode of any TV show that has that celebrity in it.  For example, Wil Wheaton has been in a few episodes of Big Bang Theory.  If I look him up on TV Guide, it will show only the episodes of Big Bang Theory in which he appears.  However, if I look him up on Zap2it, it will show Big Bang Theory as a whole, even if the episodes he appears in aren't airing any time soon.

- Unfortunately, TV Guide's watchlist is set up so that it only shows you the next instance of each list item, which is problematic when the item added is a celebrity, who may appear in multiple movies or TV shows. So if Eddie's in one show tomorrow morning and another tomorrow afternoon, the watchlist will only show me the one he's in tomorrow morning (unless I click through to his individual page).  But it will still show me the next airing of King's Speech even if it's a week from now.  In comparison, Zap2it's "My Calendar" function is set up like a calendar, and tells me which things are on each day. (Unfortunately, it's only limited to TV shows, not movies or celebrities or other search results.)

- TV Guide allows you to add as many channels as you want to your "favourites", so you can have a grid that consists of all the channels you get.  Zap2it limits you to 100 (which is frustrating when you get more than 100 channels but nowhere near all the channels).  Note to Zap2it: it's not about wanting to watch my "favourite" channels, it's about what's on the channels I get in my cable package. If I just wanted to watch my favourite channel, I'd turn the TV on to that channel.

- However, TV Guide's watchlist shows you what's on all the English-language channels offered by your cable provider, even if you've meticulously set up your favourite channels list.

- The problem is the "English-language" part - TV Guide doesn't show non-English channels (even if they're part of a basic cable package) in those celebrity-specific page.  If Eddie is on a French channel, I'll never know unless I try to deliberately search for the French title of everything he's ever been in.  Note to TV Guide: some people who speak English do speak non-English languages too!

- Another advantage of TV Guide's watchlist is there's a checkbox that says "New Airings Only", so you can only see episodes that aren't reruns.  This is useful if you're interested in  new episodes of the Simpsons, for example, but don't want to be informed of every single rerun.

- A disadvantage of TV Guide in general is it doesn't show the end times of programs in search results - you have to look them up in the grid.  This is particularly annoying for movies.  It will tell you that the runtime of a particular movie is 120 minutes and it will tell you that the movie is on a 9:00, but it won't tell you whether it's on from 9:00-11:00 or 9:00-12:00.  As we all know, such things do vary because of editing for television and commercial breaks.

- I think both systems could use a more robust category function.  Zap2it used to have a particularly good one, where one of the categories was Fitness.  So I used this to find exercise programs on TV (my preferred method of exercising).  But they later eliminated the category.  (When I switched to Rogers I started using my on-screen guide for this, but lately it's less useful because they're putting entirely too many things in the Fitness category, like reality shows about people giving birth and programs about alternative medicine, so I have to click on every unfamiliar title to see if it is in fact a fitness show.)

Currently I'm using Zap2it's calendar and basic search results primarily but TV Guide's more advanced search results and celebrity pages.  I'd probably switch back to using Zap2it exclusively if they reinstated the advanced search function and let us add movies, celebrities, and search results (i.e. anything with Star Trek in the title rather than having to add each Star Trek separately) to the calendar.  I'd probably switch to TV Guide exclusively if the watchlist was truly chronological, if they included non-English channels in search results, and if they included program end times in search results.

I'm glad that the two systems complement each other and mostly fill in each other's gaps, but it would be awesome if one of the sites (or both, or a third, completely new site) could add the features it's missing so it meets all the needs I've listed here.

Machine translation FAIL

One of the things I like to test translation software with is formal French complimentary closings.  French uses long, gorgeous, wordy passages where we'd just say "sincerely" in English, so it's useful to determine whether the software recognizes the function of the text.  I was recently demonstrating this, and got the following result (click to embiggen):

For those of you who don't read French, the phrase input here is a French complimentary closing, appropriate to a formal business letter. With the exception of one serious error, the English is a reasonable literal translation.

There are two problems here, one macro and one micro.

The macro problem is that the French is a complimentary closing, and the English is not.  English complimentary closings are things like "Sincerely," or "Yours truly," and that's how this sentence should be translated.  The actual words don't matter; the message is "This is to indicate that I am ending the letter in the prescribed letter, and the next thing you see will be my signature."

And the micro problem is that, on a word-for-word level, it translated the French "Madame" (i.e. Ms. or Ma'am) with the English "Sir", thereby addressing the recipient as the wrong gender.  Not only is this clearly unacceptable, it's something even the most simplistic machine translation should be able to handle. Even if an individual text in their corpus got misaligned, they should have some mechanism to recognize that "Sir" is not the most common translation of "Madame". Even a calque of the French ("Madam") would be a better translation than "Sir", which is a sure sign of a particularly bad translation. I'm quite surprised to see this happening in 2013.

Happy birthday, same-sex marriage, happy birthday to you!

Today is the 10th anniversary of the legalization of same-sex marriage in Ontario!

I've already blogged the best tribute I can write to it here.

Dog euthanization ethics

In the Toronto Star's ethics column, a reader wrote in pondering the ethics of euthanizing a dog whose medical bills have become prohibitive.

I'm not going to presume to rule on the question itself, but I take issue with a couple of things in the columnist's answer:

The real question is: Is it ethical to spend so much money — and put yourself in debt — to keep a dog alive?

The answer is no.

I don't think you can go so far as to say it's not ethical, even if you can't afford the money.  It may be ill-advised, but ill-advised spending isn't unethical.  Mr. Gallinger previously wrote that Chief Theresa Spence's hunger strike is perfectly ethical, because we're allowed to make self-sacrifices for what we consider to be a good cause.  If sacrificing one's own health is permissible, surely sacrificing one's finances is equally permissible!

But you still have to pay for housing and food, so where would this six grand come from? Money you might otherwise give to help other human beings?

OK, I take back what I said about sunshine listers. Regardless of economic status, anyone with an extra six grand does far more good spending on starving kids, AIDS research, a cure for cancer — rather than a dog unable to discern the difference between kibbles and a baseball.

Again, spending money in a way that does less good than it possibly could isn't unethical. At best, it's suboptimal, as are many things in life.  Holding people to the standard that spending money in ways that don't optimally help other people is unethical would be untenable.  It would even make charitable donations to all but the single most optimal charity unethical!

I'm not a person who would say that you must never euthanize a pet or must prolong its life über alles - I'm pro-euthanasia even to the extent that I want to it be available to me and those I care about - but you should be able to make a solid argument for why it's not unethical to euthanize in a particular case without fudging the definition of "unethical".

Also, I'm surprised that neither the columnist nor the letter-writer got into the question of trying to find another home for the dog.  If you're so uncertain about putting the dog down that you're writing to an advice columnist, why not post on Craigslist "Free to a good home: awesome doggie with an unfortunate habit of eating balls and then requiring expensive surgery" and see if you get any takers?  Worst case, you've still got the same decision to make, but you can feel better about having explored every possible avenue.

Why board up houses when you're going to tear them down anyway?

A group of houses on my street have been bought by a developer who plans to tear them down to build condos.  I have no objection to that - it's a highrise neighbourhood.  However, they've boarded up the windows of the houses, which makes them look run down and derelict and creates a dead zone on the street.  (This is particularly frustrating since they hadn't even submitted their development application to city hall when they started boarding the houses up, so they created this dead zone without making any progress towards renewal.)

Why would you board up houses that you're going to tear down anyway?  Are you worried that someone will break in and start wrecking them before you can start wrecking them yourself?  Why not just put plain solid white cheap blinds/curtains in the window (or even board them up on the inside with a piece of wallboard or something else white) so they won't look so conspicuously abandoned to passers-by?  That would actually probably reduce the likelihood that people would mess around with them - if you see a house with the blinds closed and no one going in or out at that exact moment, you assume someone is home and just not going in or out at that exact moment.  You'd have to pay close attention and perhaps even stake it out to notice that it's empty, whereas the boards make it look abandoned from a distance.

I don't care that they're tearing down houses or that they want to build a big condo tower, but I really resent that they're doing this in a way that makes it look so empty and abandoned.  My neighbourhood feels very safe at all hours of the day and night, and this is because it's alive. There are people walking around, going in and out of homes and shops and restaurants.  When I'm walking around alone after dark, if I ever feel unsafe, I can duck into any of the many businesses that are still open or even into another residential building if I can manage to follow someone in.  If a bad guy is following me, they don't know where I might be going, which door might have witnesses behind it who are expecting me.  But these boarded-up houses are clearly not where I'm going.  They clearly don't have someone inside waiting for me.  They're just a dead zone that doesn't contribute to the life of the street.

Why go to all the trouble of boarding up the houses and making them look derelict when you could just do nothing and leave them looking unremarkable?

Diluting shredded paper

They make paper shredders that shred paper to different sizes, and the smaller it shreds the paper, the more expensive the paper shredder.  Presumably this is because it would be harder to reassemble the paper if it's shredded smaller.

I find myself wondering if you could also make it more difficult for someone who wanted to reassemble the paper by diluting the shredded paper.  What if only 10% of the paper you shredded was important documents that actually needed to be shredded, and 90% of it was random unimportant documents?

What if you physically mixed up the shredded paper before dumping it in recycling?  What if you put shredded paper from the same batch of shredding in multiple recycling containers?

Before I owned a paper shredder, I'd rip up sensitive documents and put parts of them (usually the parts with my name) in with my kitchen garbage.  I figurde if someone is going to dig through the dumpsters and try to reassemble my documents, I can at least make it as unpleasant as possible.  What if you put a portion of the shredded paper in the green bin?  (Apparently paper in the green bin is allowed - my parents use newspapers to line their organics garbage can, then throw the whole piece of newspaper in the green bin with the garbage enclosed.)

I don't know if the additional security gained from doing any of these things would be worth the effort, but it's fun to think of ideas.

Lesen auf Deutsch

I'm currently reading a book in German (Der Knochenmann by Wolf Haas, published in English as The Bone Man - no spoilers please, I'm only partway through).  This is noteworthy because I haven't done any long-form reading in German in 13 years, and even then German has always been a difficult language for me to read.  When I was in school, I'd be sitting there with my dictionary looking up every single word I don't understand, then using my grammar rules to decode how the elements in the sentences relate to each other.

But I was surprised to discover that now it's much faster going!  Not because I understand more German, but because I seem to know intuitively which parts I don't need to understand.  Based on the words I do understand and my knowledge of how a novel works, I can tell "Okay, this is a soccer game, these few paragraphs are describing gameplay, anything I don't understand is soccer-related, no need to look stuff up." So I skim over those paragraphs with little understanding except that the local team won and the goaltender was awesome, and don't reach for my dictionary until we're back into the main plot.

Similarly, I find I'm not analyzing the grammar to figure out how the elements in a sentence relate to each other.  I'm thinking "How would these elements relate to each other logically?" and only digging down to the grammar if the logical interpretation doesn't make sense in context.

Surprisingly, this works!  I looked up an English excerpt to make sure I haven't missed anything important, and I haven't! Everything I glossed over contained exactly what I expected it to! It could be I missed a gun on the mantlepiece, I don't know yet, but worst case I'm surprised by the ending rather than seeing it coming like I usually do in mysteries.

I think this is all a result of translation brain.  When you're translating, you have to render not the words per se, but rather the truth of what the text is saying.  The vast majority of the time, it doesn't matter whether the author of the text used a word that translates as "however" or "moreover", what matters is whether the relationship between the two ideas in question is "however" or "moreover".  (I've always thought fill in the blank exercises for linking words would be useful for translation students.)  It doesn't matter that the source text used the pluperfect, what matters is which tense most accurately represents the idea being expressed in the target language.

So after 13 years of thinking this way (coincidentally, the same amount of time since I last read in German - my last German class was the year before my first translation class), I seem to have developed intuition for which unknown words or syntax is ripe with meaning and which parts will end up saying exactly what I'd expect them to say.

So why isn't it acceptable to submit the same paper for multiple courses?

From The Ethicist:

When I was in college, I’d sometimes write a single paper that would satisfy assignments in more than one course. For instance, I once wrote a paper on how “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” expressed satire; I submitted it for assignments in both my poetry course as well as my completely separate satire course. I did not disclose this to either professor. When I share this with people, half call the practice cheating, and the other half call it genius. My niece told me it would certainly be grounds for expulsion at her college. In my mind, I was adding a level of intellectual complexity to my studies. Was this an ethical practice, or was I cheating?

The all my universities made it quite clear that this is not allowed, but I've never understood why. It's your own work, so why does it matter if you've done the work a little earlier before the deadline than perhaps they anticipated? 

Some people in the comments thread suggested that it's because schools want you to do a certain amount of work to get your degree, but I don't think that's actually the case. You get your course credits, and by extension your degree, by demonstrating mastery of certain material or skills. They evaluate this mastery through projects and exams, but the amount of work you put in is irrelevant.  If you can knock off an A+ term paper in half an hour, you have clearly mastered the material and deserve your A+.  Conversely, if you do the standard amount of work - even if you do twice the standard amount of work - but still can't produce a paper that meets the standards for a passing mark, you haven't mastered the material and don't get to pass. If you can prove to both professors that you have mastered the material of their respective courses by turning in the same piece of work, the fact remains that you've mastered the material.

Other commenters suggested that a single paper could not possibly meet the needs of two assignments, and, before we even get into the question of ethics, would need to be rewritten from the other perspective to be suitable for the other course.  This may well be true, but that doesn't make it a question of academic ethics.  If a student chooses to submit a project that doesn't meet the project requirements as perfectly as perhaps it could, they'll get a lower mark.  Voilà, natural consequences.  No need to bring the code of ethics into it.  

The professor who taught my humanities gen. ed. course, an older, bearded, sweater-wearing gent who called male students by their surnames and female students "Miss Surname", had a policy that you can go to the washroom whenever you wanted during the exam, unescorted.  His reasoning was that if you can find answers in the washroom, more power to you.  His exams were designed so students have to analyze and to make cogent arguments supporting their point - things you can't put on a crib sheet.

Similarly, the attitude should be if you can reuse work, more power to you.  If schools want to discourage this, perhaps they need a more robust anti-requisite system, or more stringent academic standards, or a system that permits students to test out of courses where they've already mastered the material. But if you have two courses that are asking students to submit similar assignments to prove similar bodies of knowledge, then there's no reason not to permit them to do the same work.  And manipulating the academic code of ethics to ban this so they don't have to address flaws in the curriculum is kind of, well, inethical.

Analogy for why you don't need to give up your stuffed animals

I previously blogged about how when I was a kid I thought I'd need to give up my very favourite stuffed toy just because none of the adults around me used stuffed toys, but once I grew up I realized that you don't ever need to give them up, even if you don't need to use them any more.

Today my shower gave me an analogy:

As we grow up and grow older, we need our parents'  help less and less.  When we're well into adult life, sometimes months or even years go by when we don't need their help at all.

But we don't respond to this development by murdering them, or by casting them off on an ice floe to die.  We respond by leaving them mostly to their own devices while we handle our own problems without interrupting their well-deserved retirement. But (as long as they're still alive) we still retain the option of going to them if we need their help.

Dr. Morgentaler

When Dr. Morgentaler was awarded the Order of Canada, I wrote:

What astounds me about Dr. Morgentaler is he had no particular reason to become an abortion activist. It didn't affect him personally, he was older when he got into it (late 40s, if I remember correctly), no one would have noticed if he hadn't done anything. No one would have said "Hey, you, Mr. middle-aged holocaust-survivor doctor man, why aren't you loudly and publicly performing a controversial medical procedure for which you could be sentenced to life in prison?" If he had just quietly gone about his family practice, no one would have cared. But he stepped up

In a discussion of the age at which people learned about abortion, I wrote:

I learned how pregnancy happens around the age of 8 or 9, I reached menarche at 10, and I learned (on a theoretical level, fortunately) that rape exists at 10 as well.  So, starting at the age of 10, I had a quietly ever-present fear of being forced to gestate my rapist's baby, and hadn't the slightest clue that pregnancies could be terminated.  (I was thinking solely in terms of a rapist because I was still years away from being able to even imagine wanting to have sex voluntarily, even in a distant and hypothetical future.)

Several years later, I read something (I don't remember if it was an article or a work of fiction) where a girl who was pregnant thought that if she skipped rope for hours and hours, she'd have a miscarriage.  (I don't remember if she actually tried it or if it actually worked.)  This was my first exposure to the idea that miscarriage could be induced.  I was relieved to learn that such a thing might be remotely possible, and started brainstorming other ways to force myself to miscarry so I wouldn't have to gestate my rapist's baby.  I considered the possibility of simply stopping eating and drinking, thinking that if it didn't cause a miscarriage it would at least kill me, and, by extension, also gave some thought to suicide as a solution.  I was probably under the age of 16 when this happened

I didn't know that at the time, but my 10-year-old self needn't ever have worried about having to gestate her rapist's baby.  Because Dr. Morgentaler stepped up, long before I knew such things existed, I - and millions of others like me - have no reason to lie awake at night pondering whether starvation would be sufficient to induce miscarriage or whether self-harm would be necessary.

Help write the next New Rules: Natural Consequences Edition!

I have a series of posts called New Rules: Natural Consequences Edition, in which I propose natural consequences rules for various behaviours that really should have consequences.

There's one behaviour for which I really would like to introduce natural consequences, but I haven't been able to think of anything yet.  That behaviour is:

Lying to people about their own thoughts, feelings, motivations, or experiences.

This is probably my greatest pet peeve, so I want to give it a really good consequence.  But nothing is coming immediately to mind.  Any ideas?

Living in the future

Sometimes, when I'm walking down the street, I look around and imagine what a person from the past would think of what I'm seeing and doing and experiencing.  What would look familiar to them and what would look impenetrable to them?  Which changes would they think are a miracle and which ones would they think are a tragedy?  How would this live up to their expectations for the year 2013?  Would they be disappointed by the lack of flying cars, or amazed at the computing power in our handheld devices?

So I was walking down the street, thinking these kinds of thoughts, and I saw a Future Shop.

And I found myself wondering what people from the past would think of the fact that, in the future, we have a Future Shop! 

It seems like something out of a mid-20th-century scifi B-movie, doesn't it?  "I need a new space phone.  Better go to the future shop!"

When you add in the mid-20th-century retroish vertical signs on some of the urban locations (like this one) it almost comes across as something created in the 1950s in an attempt to fit into the future as imagined in that era. (Even though the internet tells me it was founded in the early 80s, and most stores don't have those retroish signs - they seem to be used where the stores open right onto the sidewalk instead of into a parking lot as they do in most big box locations.)

Evoluent Mouse-Friendly Keyboard

I was having some mousing-related ergonomic issues, so I went and bought the Evoluent Mouse-Friendly Keyboard.

Ergonomically, it does the job fantastically.  I started using it in mid-March (and started working at home in April) and haven't had any ergonomic owies whatsoever!

My only complaint is I really wish the spacebar extended about a centimetre further to the right.  In the existing configuration, the right edge of the space bar lines up with the space between the J and K keys, which means that my right thumb lands right on the very end of the spacebar.  (Unfortunately, my Grade 9 typing class, which I took for an easy A as I already knew how to type, drilled into me the habit of using only my right thumb for the spacebar, so using my left thumb greatly slows me down and creates hilarious typos.)  I understand that the abbreviated spacebar is a result of trying to cram all the assorted crt-alt-delete-insert-windows keys into the bottom row so the keyboard doesn't need extra columns for all those keys like you have in a standard keyboard

One thing that hasn't caused any problems but seems a bit worrisome is that the keys are very shallow and the mechanisms seem kind of delicate.  This means that if a crumb gets into the keyboard, you can feel it under the key right away and it's more likely than with a standard keyboard to interfere with typing.  This is good in some ways, because you can detect and remove crumbs immediately rather than having them accumulated like they do in deeper keyboards, but it always seems like the keys are so delicate that something might snap when I'm prying them off.  Nothing has snapped yet, so I have no empirical evidence supporting this claim, but it is a general feeling I get. I will update this if anything actually goes wrong, so if I haven't updated it's just me being paranoid so far.

However, it does have a one-year warranty, and it seems to have completely eliminated the sporadic ergonomic issues I was previously experiencing, so even if it turns out it is more fragile than other keyboards, I'd say it's still worthwhile overall.  (Although I'd still very much prefer that it be made to last.)

How to study the impact of gender imbalance on future generations.

I previously came up with the idea that they should study how gender imbalance (in this case, resulting from heavy wartime losses of the male population) affect future generations.

I think I have an idea about how one might actually study this.

For pre-21st-century wars, compare countries with heavy military losses with countries with heavy civilian losses. The US and Canada, for example, did not have combat happening within their country.  So we would have lost a greater proportion of men, whereas countries like Germany and France and Poland would probably have had more gender-balanced losses.

So if someone wanted to study this phenomenon, they could look at military and civilian death tolls, put countries in order of postwar gender imbalance (perhaps with the help of postwar censuses), and then look at various outcomes over the course of generations.

Things They Should Invent: multiple customizable email alerts

I have visual and audible email alerts for both my personal and my work email.  In general I'd rather have the alerts than not, but what I'd really like is to get alerts only for emails that are important.

For example, in my personal email, I'd like to get alerted about personal communications from family and friends, ebay auctions that I've won or been outbid on, and anything from my banks, my apartment building, or my condo that require immediate action.  I don't need to get alerted about "Here's our newsletter!" or "Sign this petition!" or "This is to confirm that you made the paypal purchase that you made literally 2 seconds ago."  I'll look at those things later, but I don't need to interrupt what I'm doing to look at them.

Similarly, in my work email, I'd like to get alerted about new assignments, emails from clients, and specific personal communication from my team.  I don't need to be alerted about "Here's the employee newsletter!" or "This is just to let you know that I will be away Friday." Again, I'll look at them later, but they don't require my immediate attention.

Gmail has a function where they automatically mark certain email threads as more important, and it works reasonably well if you put in the effort to train it (I did briefly and was happy with the rate at which it was learning, but then I got lazy and stopped using it.)  So why not pair this up with Gmail Notifier so it notifies you only when you get an email that meets "important" criteria?  Or perhaps give you a different kind of beep for the more important emails?

Outlook allows you to create all kinds of finicky rules, so why not allow you to create rules defining what kind of alert the program gives you?  You could tell it to give you the "important" alert if you get an email from certain senders or in reply to an email that you yourself have sent.  If you can convince your colleagues to use good subject lines, you could get one kind of alert for "FYI" emails and another for "For Action" emails.

Properly implemented, this would allow people to have all the benefits of email alerts with none of the disadvantages.  So why don't we have it already?

Thoughts from advice columns

My husband and I are preparing our wills. We have two adult children: a daughter who is more successful than we are, and a son, who has been down on his luck for years. He also has three young children to educate. Everyone, including our lawyer and close friends, tells us that we should leave our money to them in equal shares to avoid hurt feelings. But that doesn’t seem right. Our son needs the money. Still, we don’t want to hurt our daughter. What would you do?

An option would be to leave everything to your grandchildren, perhaps in trust for their education if you should pass away when they're still underage.  This would be perfectly just, it would (if you die relatively soon) spare your son the expense of educating his children, and it would help mitigate any negative impact for the children of having a father who is down on his luck. If the daughter should have children, they'd inherit too, but if she doesn't I can't imagine a more-successful-than-her-parents childless auntie begrudging her nieces and nephews an inheritance from their less-successful-than-her grandparents, unless she's the sort of person to begrudge anything and everything, in which case you're no worse off.

Dear Miss Information,

I dated a guy about two years ago pretty seriously, and at the time we were on track to be engaged. Blah blah blah, it ended really badly. We haven't spoken since, even though I found out through mutual friends that he has been asking about me for months if not years. Finally, that has died down, and we've both moved on with our lives, I think. Here's the problem: I'm now dating a woman (oh, I'm a girl, if that wasn't already clear.) She and I are really happy together. I guess I've always identified as "bi," but it never came up when I was dating the guy. So this isn't that surprising to me, but apparently it is to him. I think one of our mutual friends told him I'm with Anna now, and supposedly he's been really freaked out about it.

A very close mutual friend is getting married in about a month, and my girlfriend is coming as my plus-one. I know he will be there with his new girlfriend (The friends who told me he was freaked out also filled me in that he's dating someone from his work), and I want to avoid hurting him further. How do you tell someone, "I'm gay now, but I wasn't when I was with you"? And really, we haven't spoken in about two years, so how much responsibility do I even need to take for "letting him down gently"? I'm just really, really, REALLY dreading this wedding because of having to see this ex. What do I do?

 (This letter is from the Miss Information column in Nerve.  The column itself is fine, but Nerve sometimes has NSFWish ads and pictures around the column text.  You can see the original here, or see a fully SFW version in CF Abby here.)

Anyway, as to the actual question, I think if I were in the guy's position, I'd find it something of a relief if it turned out the person I love who left me did so because they had come to the realization that they wanted a same-sex relationship.  That would make me confident, more than anything else I could possibly imagine, that it wasn't anything I did wrong and that there wasn't any diligence on my side that could have saved the relationship.

Individuals can face criminal charges when they pose as nurses or policemen. But what about people posing as meteorologists? A B.S. in meteorology is a science degree. But many broadcast meteorologists are not meteorologists at all; they hold a mail-order certificate offered by some schools instead. Is it ethical for TV stations to give just anyone the title “meteorologist”? NAME WITHHELD

Before we even get into the question of whether a certificate from an education institution should be completely disregarded as credientials, I don't think anyone is actually under the impression that the people on TV are actually doing the forecasting.  Weather forecasts are made using data from Environment Canada (or, since this is a US column, whatever the US equivalent is), and then they either reiterate the Environment Canada forecast or input the data into their own computer model that they bought from somewhere.  The people on TV are just reading the forecast, and I don't think anyone thinks otherwise.

Talking to children

Introducing myself to babies

The first time I met my new baby cousin (technically my first cousin once removed - his mother is my cousin) I formally introduced myself.  I told him my name, explained how we're related, and told him that I'm very pleased to meet him and hope we can become friends.  My parents laughed at me for doing this, but I do it anyway because it only seems polite.  I see part of my role as a non- parental adult as modeling normal and healthy interpersonal interactions for kids, and the normal adult world, people don't just walk up to you and start touching you apropos of nothing.  I figure I should do my bit to normalize this standard of behaviour.

I'm cheering for my baby cousin.  I want him to grow up to be strong and smart and happy, and have an easier and more pleasant life than I have.  It's possible that I might not always like Baby Cousin.  He's going to grow up to be a little boy, and little boys aren't my very favourite demographic.  At various points in his life, he might think farts are funny or think an appropriate response to the presence of a spider is to keep it in a jar as a pet, all of which is the kind of behaviour I prefer to avoid.  But even if I do end up not liking him for a period of time, I will still be cheering for him.

My baby cousin has many many adult cousins (his mother and I have 12 mutual cousins, and she also has cousins that aren't related to me, plus his father has his fair share of cousins as well), and I'm absolutely certain that all of us are cheering for him, as are his grandparents and great-grandparents and great-aunts and great-uncles and the other random people in this new family's orbit. If he finds himself in the same room as an adult by virtue of that adult's relationship with his parents, that adult will be cheering for him.

My parents also have many many cousins.  I met quite a few of them at various family events when I was a kid, but I didn't understand who they were.  I don't know if it wasn't explained to me or I just didn't retain it, but I didn't understand that they were my parents' cousins the same way my cousins are my cousins.  I didn't understand who they were or why they were talking to me - they just felt like strange grownups, so I was wary of them the way I'm normally wary of strange grownups.  The thought never once crossed my mind that they might be cheering for me.  Why would they be?  They're just strange grownups.

But maybe if some of them had taken a moment to speak to me directly and tell me their name and how we're related,  to shake my hand and tell me they're happy to see me, maybe I would have felt that I was in the safe presence of loving adults rather than surrounded by strangers.

Elevator buttons

One thing I've learned from living in highrises is that small children love to push elevator buttons! You can push them and they light up and they make the whole elevator move!  So I play along.  If I find myself in an elevator with a small child, I ask them if they can do me an enormous favour and push the button I need for me.  Then I thank them for being helpful.

I don't claim any child development knowledge beyond having been a child and basically I'm doing this because it entertains me.  But I'm wondering whether or not it's actually a good idea.

On the positive side, I'm engaging them as human beings in their own right rather than talking over their heads to their parents, I'm modelling "please" and "thank you" and general polite discourse, and, of course, I'm giving them an opportunity to press more buttons!

On the negative side, perhaps it's a bit condescending to gratuitously give someone a job to do that I can just as easily do myself on the assumption that they'll enjoy doing my menial tasks. (I've been in situations where I suspect people were doing that to me during my adult life, and I didn't appreciate it.) And, on top of that, I am a stranger. I know children do have to learn to interact with strangers and I am a harmless stranger so perhaps I'm a good person to for them to practise on (although I shouldn't go barging into interactions on the assumption that I'm harmless - I must continue to recognize that I'm a stranger), but I'm not sure if I should be setting the precedent that they should be doing unnecessary favours for strangers just because it amuses the stranger.

I've encountered kids who were absolutely delighted when I asked them to press a button for me, but that doesn't mean it's right.  My child-self would have wanted to curl up in a ball and hide, but that doesn't mean it's wrong.

Things They Should Invent: needs-based telecommunications technology funding for seniors

As I've mentioned before, I'm watching my grandmothers age and deteriorate and become more dependent on their children and caregivers.  And, as I watch this happen, I'm thinking about how I'm going to handle the same situation without anyone to take care of me.  And one thing that strikes me is that I could handle it better in some respects because I'm comfortable with technology.  If I couldn't manage grocery shopping for myself, I could order from grocery gateway.  If I couldn't remember to take my meds, I could set up a series of alerts.  My grandmothers aren't up on using today's technology, so they're dependent on their children to do these things.

However, it's not just interest and technological aptitude that keeps them from using technology, it's also cost.  My grandmothers retired in the 1980s, calculating their expenses based on expenses that existed in the 1980s.  They couldn't have anticipated the eventual need for $40 a month for internet or a data plan, plus the major capital investment of a new computer or device every few years.  Even if they'd be interested, they probably couldn't afford it.

If retirement still exists when I'm a senior, the same thing will probably happen to me.  If I retire when I'm in my 60s, I couldn't possibly budget for the evolution and cost of technology over the next 30 to 40 years.  (And if retirement doesn't still exist when I'm a senior, I'll have to hoard money even more because I have to assume 20 years of incompetence based on my family history of Alzheimer's, so I won't be able to afford to keep up to date.)

So I propose that all senior citizens should get a needs-based financial supplement of some sort (a discount or a rebate or free services or something) to keep them in up-to-date telecommunications technology, by which I mean both devices and data/internet plans. I don't have specific dollar amounts in mind at the moment, but the funding should be enough that it's an absolute no-brainer to keep up to date.

I also think the program should start at age 65, even though 65-year-olds are perfectly capable of keeping themselves up to date if they have any interest in doing so.  The reason for this is that elders seem to lose their ability to learn new things as they deteriorate and lose their faculties.  They need to form habits and keep current before they start losing their faculties, so they can coast along on their existing knowledge once they lose the ability to learn.   For example, my one grandmother lost the ability to learn about 10 years ago.  If she had computer skills that were current to 2003, she wouldn't be able to  use an iphone, but she could still order her groceries online. 

I'm sure it would be an expensive program, but it would help keep people living in their own homes and independently for longer.  By any standard, tech is cheaper than housing.

A better way to schedule preventive medical care?

Today my doctor told me that pap smears are no longer included in annual physicals.  This isn't the thing where pap smears are now once every three years, it means that they're apparently now considered a completely different test.  Because doctors aren't allowed to bill for more than one issue per appointment, this means that if I want an annual physical and a pap smear, I have to make two appointments.  Apparently OHIP is kind of cracking down on multiple issues in one appointment, and auditing doctors to make sure they don't treat patients for what they weren't booked in for.

I was googling around the idea, and apparently the intention is to cut back on the tests and examinations done during annual physicals because they've found that the tests have little to no benefit for healthy people.   Apparently studies have found that the people who diligently go in for annual physicals tend to be a healthy demographic for whom the tests don't turn up anything because they're healthy. Meanwhile, the less healthy people are already going into the doctor regularly for all their various health problems, so there's little benefit to a schedule physical this month if they just saw the doctor last month and are going to see the doctor again next month.

Which I'm fine with.  Because I don't actually want an annual physical.  Or a pap smear.  What I actually want is my birth control pills.

For my entire on-the-pill life, an annual physical and/or pap smear has been the gauntlet I have to run to get my birth control prescription renewed.  This doctor books physicals far in advance, which I didn't know at the beginning, so I called when I had a month of birth control left and was told it would be six to eight weeks.  When I told them I was running out of birth control, they booked me in for an appointment, where they gave me a three month prescription and then scheduled me for a physical, which I had to have before I could get a whole year's worth.

I don't think this is unique to my doctor.  At various times I've read discussions about whether birth control pills should be available over the counter, and in them doctors have said one of the reasons they like them to be prescription is it gets a sizeable proportion of their patients in for their annual physicals.  (You may remember we discussed how 1/3 of all Canadians use prescription contraception.)

Without getting into the (important) question of whether a physical is in fact necessary for birth control, this gave me a broader idea of how they can make the health system much more user friendly for patients and doctors.

Step 1:  Completely abolish annual physicals
Step 2:  Completely abolish the one issue per appointment rule
Step 3:  Create a system where whenever you come into the doctor for a specific issue, you also get all the preventive tests and examinations you're due for, based on your specific medical situation, and any other care your doctor feels you need.

So, in my case, I'd call the doctor when I'm running low on birth control pills.  The receptionist (perhaps with the assistance of a computer program designed to track these things) would see that it's been 12 months since I had blood work so I should probably get it done again, but it's only been 34 months since I had a pap smear so I'm not due for that.  Then it would book appointment length accordingly.  (Perhaps it could also add some extra time to the appointment if the patient hasn't been to the doctor in X months.) 

The doctor then sees me to renew my birth control pills, and also offers all the tests and examinations for which I'm overdue, and offers any other care that he feels would be appropriate.  And I am permitted to decline tests and care that are unrelated to the birth control pills and still receive my pills.

This will make things easier for the patient.  No more having to keep track of your preventive care schedule and call the doctor and make the right kind of appointment.  You just call the doctor when you need to go to the doctor, and they'll give you all the care you need, not just for this one issue but for everything.

It will also make things easier for the doctor.  You treat the patient in front of you for everything they need treating for, without worrying about whether it falls under the issue for which they made the appointment.  You can use your professional judgement without worrying about administrative matters.

And it will save the health system a little bit of money by creating a scenario where patients get their preventive tests and examinations sometime after their due, rather than right on the button of when they're due.  The current system normalizes coming in every 12 months for various examinations.  But if it's 12 months plus whenever the patient has an issue for which they need to see the doctor, some patients will be coming in after 14 months, some patients will be coming in after 2 years.  The healthier the patient, the bigger the interval between when they come in.  But it's self-selecting, so the patients are still getting care whenever they request care.

Of course, doctors can still have patients with chronic issues or high risk factors come in on a regular basis for monitoring.  And they'd still have the option of influencing the frequency with which patients come in with the length of the prescription they issue.

This leaves the question of whether anyone would slip through the cracks.  Under this model, anyone who wants to see the doctor for a specific issue will see a doctor when that specific issue arises.  Anyone with a chronic issue or high risk factors or complex needs who needs regular monitoring will get regular monitoring as required by their doctor. Anyone who takes medication on a regular basis will see the doctor whenever they need their prescription renewed. 

So that leaves people who don't have any specific issues for periods of over a year, don't have any ongoing medications, and don't have any conditions that need monitoring, as well as people who don't go to the doctor when they have an issue they need to go to the doctor for.

I think the people who don't go to the doctor when they have an issue aren't going to go for preventive annual physicals, so this wouldn't affect them.  So that just leaves people who don't have any specific reason to go to the doctor during periods of over a year.  Things They Should Study: is there anyone who's healthy enough to fall into this group but unhealthy enough that they have something just waiting to be caught by their annual physical?

A tale of two Google searches

1.  I had a song stuck in my head, but I didn't know the words.  It dated back to childhood, most likely from Sharon, Lois & Bram, and the lyrics as I remembered them were "My mother need to tell me that you omungowah."

Clearly, I had misheard it or was misremembering it, and was jamming a bunch of phonemes together to make "omungowah".  And whatever the omungowah really was, it was probably the crucial word in googling up this song.

Expecting nothing, I started typing my mother need to tell me that you omungowah into Google, and before I even got to the omungowah, the suggestion feature gave me "My mother didn't tell me that you go mango walk".  Which is exactly the song I was looking for!   Well done Google!

 (Here's an example of the song, although I have no idea what the source is.)

2.  In 2009, they had a public art project where people could stand on an empty plinth in London's Trafalgar Square and do whatever they wanted for the audience of whoever happened to be in Trafalgar Square and as a live real-time webcast audience.  In the middle of one of these plinth performances, Eddie Izzard finished his marathons, also in Trafalgar Square, and the crowd and cheering of his marathon finish interrupted one of the performances and distracted the camera operator.

I was looking for this video, so I googled eddie izzard plinth. Not only did Google not find the video, but it gave me one of those despised "Results for similar searches."  And the "similar search" that it proposed was eddy izzard!

Yes, they not only eliminated the key search term, they introduced a spelling error!  (Interestingly, the results for eddy izzard were Eddie Izzard's website, IMDB page and wikipedia entry, all of which spelled his name correctly.)

It seems like Google's algorithms missed a few crucial points. First of all, "Eddie" is a far more common spelling than "Eddy". How do they end up "correcting" away from the more common (and correct) spelling?

Second, Eddie is a celebrity with an unusual surname, which means that a disproportionate number of instances of the word "Izzard" on the recorded internet will have the word "Eddie" next to them.  Surely their concordance function should have figured this out - at least enough not to change what I entered!

And third, if your search contains something general (a celebrity's name) and something specific (the word "plinth"), the specific thing is probably there for a reason.  It is in no way helpful to completely eliminate the specific and give the user only general information about the celebrity!  If Google is going to insist on using this "Results for similar searches" function, they should use synonyms of the most specific search term, or use words that correlate with the specific search term ("Trafalgar" might have been helpful, for example.)

How is it possible that Google could fuck up this badly while still being capable of finding my "omungowah"?

(The video of Eddie Izzard finishing this marathons in Trafalgar Square and interrupting the plinth performance can be found at 31 minutes here.)

The many benefits of working from home

- I go to bed later, wake up later, start work earlier, and finish work earlier.  I've had a minimum of seven hours' sleep every night since I started working at home, and about 40% of the time I wake up naturally.

- I wake up at a time that is after sunrise year-round. I finish work at a time that is before sunset year-round.

- When I need to step away from a text or take a mental break, I can exercise. I have exercised 25 days out of the last 30, whereas when I'm going into the office I normally end up exercising only 2 or 3 times a week despite my intention to exercise every day.

- You know how I get inspiration in the shower?  When I need inspiration, I can have a shower!!!

- I can eat when I'm hungry.  When I'm working at the office, I feel the need to eat breakfast before I leave so I won't be hungry in the office, then to eat lunch during my lunch break because if I don't I won't have a chance to eat until after work.  When I'm at home I can eat whenever I want.  So I eat when I'm hungry, and exactly as much as I'm hungry for.

- Because I'm using things like exercise and showering as my work breaks, I no longer have a massive to-do list to get done before I go to work.  There's no inkling of stress or racing the clock.  I just boot up and sign on right at the start of my work day, and I still get all my morning stuff plus my work done before I need to actually leave the apartment.

- I enjoy peace and quiet, without having to hear other people's chitchat.  But, at the same time, I don't have to be quiet.  I can read my texts aloud when I need help focusing.  I can orate. I can sing. I can spout off profanity when my computer doesn't work.  I'm an auditory learner, so it's quite helpful to have access to this dimension.

- My stress level is zero the vast majority of the time.  This one time a client used a pun and my stress level went up to 2, but then I had a shower and figured out what to do with the pun so my stress level went back down to zero.

- I feel like a part of the neighbourhood.  Out my window, I see the rhythms of the day, kids going to and from school, the schedules of the mailman and couriers, my building's cleaning people.  There a lady who goes to this little parkette in a wheelchair, then gets out of the wheelchair and walks around and around the parkette, obviously working very hard to regain her walking or retain what mobility she has left.  She didn't show up for a couple of days, and I started worrying.  But then she came back.

- Speaking of the mailman and couriers, when I have something delivered, it's now no inconvenience whatsoever even if it comes by UPS!  I had a Dell technician come to look at my computer, and it was no trouble whatsoever.  When I'm at home, couriers and repair people can come by whenever.  I can do my work while I wait on hold with a bank.  If I need to make a phone call that includes personal financial information or the name of a gynecological procedure, I don't need to worry about being overheard.

- I don't feel the need to wear makeup while working at home or while doing errands in my immediate neighbourhood (unless they're fashion-related), so my skin gets to rest.  And, when I do go out in makeup, I look better because I've only been wearing it since just before I left the apartment, not since early in the morning.

- When I was in university, on days when I didn't have work or class I'd wake up, shower, make coffee and sit down at the computer, and the next thing I'd know it would be 4 pm and I'd still be in my bathrobe and hadn't accomplished a thing, which I found depressing.  When I'm working at home, some days I am in fact still in my bathrobe at 4 pm.  However, I have completed a full day of paid work, so there's no need to feel guilty or unaccomplished.

New Rules: Natural Consequences Edition IV

(Previous editions can be found here.)

Inspired by Sir Anthony Strallan on Downton Abbey and by the boyfriend of the first letter-writer here:

8.  If someone deprives you of something with the excuse "You can do better", (without taking into consideration whether you actually can do better, or whether you want whatever it is they consider to be "better"), you're allowed to deprive them of something.

So if the person you love pulls a Sir Anthony on you and abandons you with the excuse "You deserve better than me", you can say "Okay, you deserve better than cheese.  You aren't ever allowed to eat cheese again."

Reversing the glass analogy

In a common English figure of speech, someone who "thinks the glass is half full" is an optimist, and someone who "thinks the glass is half empty" is a pessimist.

As I've mentioned many times before, I'm a pessimist.  This means I tend to expect things to turn out terribly.  An employer didn't hire me, so I expect that I'll never be able to get a job.  A person was mean to me, so I expect that everyone ever will be mean to me.  I saw a bug, so I expect that everywhere I ever live will be infested.  I can never see any good reason why things wouldn't turn out worst case scenario, so that's what I expect.

However, things don't always turn out as poorly as I expect.  Sometimes I get a job.  Sometimes people are nice to me.  Sometimes there aren't any bugs.  And this always makes me very pleasantly surprised.

I was recently in a conversation where I was talking about something that turned out better than I expected (it was about the joys of adulthood, and how when I was a kid I had no idea that the problems of childhood would go away in adulthood), and an interlocutor said to me "You're really a glass half full person, aren't you?"

My first thought was to deny it because I am intrinsically pessimistic, but then I realized in this particular situation, I was seeing the glass as half full.  But that's only because I was expecting it to be empty.

Meanwhile, my interlocutor's child-self was expecting adulthood to be all glamorous and awesome and it turned out to be mundane.  So they saw the glass as half empty.  But that's only because they were expecting it to be completely full.

Maybe the figure of speech should go the other way around?

Are children really unfamiliar with pregnancy?

I was very surprised to see that some people thought the word "pregnant" shouldn't be used in an elementary school yearbook for fear that the kids might ask what it means.  My experience was that children were familiar with pregnancy essentially because they were children.

When you are born, your parents are, by definition, part of the cohort that's getting pregnant and having babies.  It's therefore very likely that many of the adults around you - your parents' friends and siblings and cousins - are also at this stage of life.  This means that there's a good chance that within the first few years of your life, one or more babies will be born to the people around you.  It might even be your own younger sibling!

And it's most likely that your parents will explain the concept of the new baby to you.  They won't just one day go "Hey, look, a baby!"  They'll probably tell you that Mommy or Auntie Em is pregnant, which means she's going to have a baby.  And they'll probably even tell you the baby is growing in her belly so that's why her belly is getting fat.

And if this doesn't happen to you, it will probably happen to one of your friends, who will then announce to you "I'm going to have a baby brother and he's growing in my mommy's tummy!"

Myself, I don't remember a time when I didn't know what the word "pregnant" meant.  My first cousin was born when I was 1.5, and my sister was born when I was a few months short of 3. I have memories of the cousin being a baby and I have memories where I knew that my mother was going to have a baby, but I don't ever remember actually learning what "pregnant" means.  For as long as I've known, it's just meant that a baby is growing in a mommy's belly.  It didn't seem sexual or adult (because I didn't know what sex was), it was just a point of fact.

So I'm very surprised that parents would think that elementary school children need to be protected from the concept of pregnancy.  In my corner of the world, children were familiar with pregnancy by virtue of the demographic realities of being children.

Receiving welfare while on a terrorist watch list

From Snopes, one of the accused Boston marathon bombers had apparently received welfare benefits while on a terrorist watch list

I'm rather surprised at the tone of outrage, because it seems to me that continuing existing welfare payments to someone you want to watch is a good way to help keep track of them.

 It means they have to tell you where they live.  It means you'll know at least some of their banking information, either from direct deposit or from them cashing cheques, and with bank records and stuff you might be able to track what else they're doing with their money.  It means they have a strong incentive to be where they told you they'll be at least once a month.  If you're trying to track them physically, you can stake out their mailbox on the day that cheques arrive, or track where the debit card affiliated with their bank account is used to get a sense of their usual haunts.  If your jurisdiction has social workers monitoring or assisting welfare recipients, you've got a known person who is not a criminal associate but has spoken to them regularly and perhaps asked them some more personal questions.  Plus, the fact that they're receiving government benefits might lead them to led their guard down - they might think "Surely they wouldn't be paying me welfare if they thought I was a terrorist!" 

In contrast, if you discontinue their benefits, they know you're watching them.  They now have no incentive to ever be where they told you they are, or to maintain any bank accounts that the government knows about.  It also decreases their overall contact with public authorities, and increases their incentive to earn money through illegal means, which might put them in touch with a broader range of criminal element.

All in all, from a purely strategic viewpoint, I'd say it's worth the pittance.

Why not have books in solitary confinement?

From a Toronto Star article about solitary confinement (emphasis mine):

The woman she saw that day looked humiliated and defeated, Pate says, adding seclusion is “complete sensory deprivation.”

“It’s no wonder so many people develop bizarre behaviours and mental health issues when they’re in those conditions, because where else can you go, but into your mind?

Whether it’s called seclusion, isolation, segregation, “therapeutic quiet” or solitary confinement, lawyers at the Ashley Smith inquest representing Elizabeth Fry, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Smith family say the terms amount to the same thing: a prisoner locked in a bare room with no stimulation and basically no interaction with others.

But, later in the article:

a Corrections Canada spokesperson said segregation is used as a last resort for the shortest period of time necessary to manage the serious risk posed by an inmate’s association with other inmates.

If the stated problem is the inmate's association with other inmates (either to protect the solitary confinement person from the others, or to protect the others from the solitary confinement person), then there's no reason not to give them a couple of books.

If the inmate is in solitary for their own protection, there's no reason to deny them something to pass the time.  If they have mental health issues, it would help keep them from getting stuck in their head.

Even if you feel they don't deserve sympathy or entertainment, good could still be achieved by giving them reading material that reinforces the goals of their correctional plan.  In addition to educational materials, they could be provided with works of fiction that address the themes that correctional programs are trying to teach.  It would also make things easier from an inmate management point of view - the most entertaining thing available to them would involve sitting quietly.

Right now we have a system where inmates who shouldn't be near other inmates are locked into a room to go, quite literally, stir-crazy.  Put a few books in the room, and you've turned it into a system where best case they're working towards their correctional goals without interruption or negative influences, and worst case they're quietly passing the time.

Gambling and positive thinking

The following is a quote from page 264 of The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg.  As usual, any typoes are my own.

In 2010, a cognitive neuroscientist named Reza Habib asked twenty-two people to lie inside an MRI and watch a slot machine spin around and around. Half of the participants in Habib's experiment were “pathological gamblers” — people who had lied to their families about their gambling, missed work to gamble, or had bounced checks at a casino — while the other half were people who gambled socially but didn’t exhibit any problematic behaviors. Everyone was placed on their backs inside a narrow tube and told to watch wheels of lucky 7s, apples, and gold bars spin across a video screen. The slot machine was programmed to deliver three outcomes: a win, a loss, and a “near miss,” in which the slots almost matched up but, at the last moment, failed to align. None of the participants won or lost any money. All they had to do was watch the screen as the MRI recorded their neurological activity.

“We were particularly interested in looking at the brain systems involved in habits and addictions,” Habib told me. “What we found was that, neurologically speaking, pathological gamblers got more excited about winning. When the symbols lined up, even though they didn’t actually win any money, the areas in their brains related to emotion and reward were much more active than in nonpathological gamblers.

“But what was really interesting were the near misses. To pathological gamblers, near misses looked like wins. Their brains reacted almost the same way. But to a nonpathological gambler, a near miss was like a loss. People without a gambling problem were better at recognizing that a near miss means you still lose.”

Two groups saw the exact same event, but from a neurological perspective, they viewed it differently. People with gambling problems got a mental high from the near misses— which, Habib hypothesizes, is probably why they gamble for so much longer than everyone else: because the near miss triggers those habits that prompt them to put down another bet. The nonproblem gamblers, when they saw a near miss, got a dose of apprehension that triggered a different habit, the one that says I should quit before it gets worse.

The mindset that makes the problem gambling problematic sounds an awful lot like positive thinking, doesn't it?

Things They Should Invent: check supermarket stock and prices online

My mother's Loblaws has Macintosh apples, but mine doesn't.  This means, should my current source of Macs dry up, I may be able to find them at another Loblaws, but it isn't a certainty.  Since I'm now on tokens, I don't much fancy the idea of running around the city in search of the kind of apples I like. 

Why can't I do a search on supermarkets' websites to see which locations have Macintosh apples in stock?  Unlike practically every other retailer, supermarkets' websites don't even have the items the chain sells and the prices, to say nothing of individual store stock.

A computerized database of stock must exist because they've used scanning check-outs for decades, so surely they have scanny check-in of inventory as well at this point.  Why not just put it online where we can find it?

Laptop batteries: WTF?

I'm very frustrated by the mixed messages I'm getting about laptop batteries.

My recent computer troubles turned out to be due to my battery being dead (which involved a weird and roundabout diagnosis!).  All three Dell techs I spoke to in the process told me that you shouldn't keep your laptop plugged in all the time (which I normally do because most of the time I'm using it at my desk), you should instead allow your battery to discharge fully and then recharge it.

However, Dell's laptop battery FAQ says this is unnecessary and the battery will behave nicely even if you leave it plugged in all the time.  But their Alienware battery FAQ says the opposite. 

I did start charging and discharging the battery once I got my new battery, but I find it very inconvenient. I also noticed that there's a "Disable Battery Charging" setting, so I was wondering if using this setting and leaving my computer plugged in would save my battery from any negative effects of having it fully charged and still plugged in.  I asked Dell's twitter account, but they directed me back to the FAQ that said this was unnecessary.  And this right after they posted the Alienware FAQ that said the opposite.  (My computer isn't an Alienware, but I believe it has the same kind of battery.)

I also had the idea of just taking the battery out completely and using the laptop on AC power only until I need to move it.  One of the Dell techs I talked to told me this would work, another told me it wouldn't work.

The internet contains arguments supporting and opposing every possible approach, including things like "maintain a battery charge of 70% at all times" or "take your battery completely out of your laptop for normal operations, but discharge and recharge it once a month." All of these arguments can be found from credible sources and backed up by scientific explanations.  I could write a paper with quality citations in support of any possible approach to battery management.

And I still haven't the slightest idea which approach is actually correct.

My intention when writing this blog post was to put the question out to my readership, but that will just be more sensible people giving soundly-reasoned explanations on the internet.  I seriously don't know what to do.

Opinions are welcome, even though I'm tired of opinions.  I'm particularly interested in:

- What is your own battery management approach, and what kind of battery lifespan do you get?  (By "battery lifespan" I don't mean "how long until your battery drains and you have to recharge it?", I mean "how long until you have to buy a new battery?")

- Would using the "disable battery charging" function while leaving the battery in the computer and the AC adapter plugged in eliminate whatever harm might potentially be caused by leaving the AC adapter plugged in when the battery is fully charged?

- Any experience with just taking the battery out?

Update:  I have since learned that the "disable battery charging" function gets better battery lifespan.

More information please

Mentioned in passing in an article about the 65th anniversary of Israel:

Nor will many of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jews participate in the celebrations. They regard the establishment of the Jewish state ahead of the advent of the Messiah, who alone can and will redeem his people, as an affront to God.

So if they think it's an affront to God, why do they live there?

Things They Should Invent: private bath facilities in long-term care homes with controlled access to water

Apparently many long-term care homes have private washrooms with a toilet and sink in the residents' rooms, but bathing facilities are in a separate room down the hall. The reason for this is allegedly that many residents are unable to bathe themselves safely, and, if they had bathing facilities in their own rooms, residents who can't bathe themselves safely but have cognitive impairments might attempt to bathe themselves anyway and end up hurting themselves.

However, I think not having your own bathroom is a bit less dignified and needlessly lowers your quality of life.  You have to walk down the hall in a bathrobe carrying your toiletries in a bucket rather than just walking into your own private bathroom.  I know, we all did this in university, but in adult life we become accustomed to a greater level of privacy and dignity, and I don't think it's right to take this away from our elders.

Proposed solution: every room in a long-term care room has a full private bathroom, complete with bathing facilities.  However, the bathing facilities require a key to turn on the water.  It could be an actual key, or one of those magnetic beep cards like we have on office security passes, or some other sort of tangible object.  Staff members whose job involves bathing residents would have a key to the bath water.  Residents who are competent to bathe themselves safely would have a key to the bath water.  Residents who are not competent to bathe themselves safely would not.

This way, all residents would get to enjoy the privacy and dignity of a private bathroom, while still controlling access to the slippery, fall-inducing environment of bathing facilities to those who can handle it or situations where there is proper supervision.