The concept of “Breakable Toys” speaks to the need for a developer to practice using their new tools. The best form of practice is trial and error. But it’s maybe not the best idea implement your most extreme experiments on your team’s shared code base.
I came across the idea of having personal “Breakable Toys” in Apprenticeship Patterns. The solution is to build simple projects in parallel to your main line of work. Work out a simpler version of complex features and recreate it. Build, break and fix: your wacky experiments won’t get in the way of your team’s work.
Here’s the link to Apprenticeship Patterns. Start with the Pattern List, click to the challenge you’re facing. Go ahead, you’re welcome.
Yes, it can entertain you and be useful. But when the power runs out, it’s dead weight to your aching back.
A phone?
Yes, it can be useful but can effectively occupy your attention only if you’re listening to audio via headphones.
All things must end one day. My phone ends in 72 hours, when it succumbs to an exhausted battery.
An eReader?
It will bring one book or your library with you. It will bring your Aeon articles with you when you’re miles from internet (10,000m up), thanks to Pocket (all hail).
Its battery will easily get you though a two-week trip. Even using Sudoku and Word Scramble.
Using the backlight may stunt that lifeline.
But it’s worth being able to read under the covers without a flashlight.
Best,
An ebook convert
P.S. Pocket (all hail) is not on any eReader, just on Kobo. So this ode to the low-tech is really mostly applicable to my experience with a much-loved Kobo Aura. And I do carry a phone with me when travelling. Find one with a battery lasting more than a day and you may not have to be that airport wall-hugger. Or just turn yours off.
Children waiting for inoculations in Australia, October 1946.
Vaccinations are the community’s best defence against preventable communicable diseases. As the problem continued to grow, health practitioners and a concerned public drew attention to the issue of people who do not vaccinate. However, our default response as a society was confrontation, which backed dissenters into the corner which they continue to vigorously defend.
What’s the Real Problem
The strategy to call-out and challenge the mental fitness of those we label “anti-vaxxers” has, surprisingly, not worked well. Several reasons come to mind, which are very well summarized by Hank Green and the great people at SciShow (4 minutes 55 seconds in). If we are to successfully promote good public health practices, we need to first understand the problem.
The rise of people and children infected by diseases is a consequence of the problem. More people are getting sick because fewer people are vaccinated. But what is the cause of a falling vaccination rate?
The choice to not vaccinate is the problem. Solutions must focus on changing the outcome of this choice. Those who choose not to vaccinate do so for different reasons. A recent study sorted them into 4 broad groups, based on the source of their decision.
4 Types of Non-Vaccinators
1. Confidence: This group is comprised of individuals who have incorrect knowledge that distorts their perceived risk of immunization and weakens their trust in vaccinations.
2. Complacency: Those in this group are not concerned that the diseases to be vaccinated against pose a real danger and so do not care about immunization.
3. Convenience: These are individuals who lack sufficient willpower to vaccinate or face the inconvenience of cost and travel.
4. Calculation: This group includes people who have apparently evaluated the pros and cons of vaccination and have rationalized not vaccinating.
Now we understand a wee bit about the perspective of non-vaccinators. Excellent. Instead of berating them on the result of their perspective, i.e. the decision to not vaccinate, let’s think about influencing the perspective itself. Can we do something about this?
Fixing the Real Problem
Do not verbally attack anti-vaxxers. For starters, using the term “anti-vaxxer” is a bad idea and will immediately put someone on the defensive. Not unexpected, as the term is intended to be derogatory.
If you find it difficult to understand why a person may be dismissive of inoculation, I’d suggest reading “I thought all anti-vaxxers were idiots. Then I married one” by Adam Mongrain. It gave me much needed perspective and probably helped me keep some of my friends.
Choosing the Right Strategy
For each type of decision-maker the same paper suggested strategies to convince them otherwise. Contrary to what we may think, the Confidence group actually comprise a minority of the non-vaccinators and are difficult to engage. This insight suggests that health promotion efforts are best applied towards the Complacency, Convenience and Calculation groups.
The Convenience group faces barriers to accessing vaccines. The solution here is straight-forward and possible with improved public policy. The system must make it easier to get vaccinated, either with compensation for time or improving access to healthcare.
While waiting for policy to pass through bureaucracy, individual practitioners can try their own methods. Have people agree to inoculations ahead of time and you’ll find that commitment amounts to motivation. Reminders over the phone or text messages will help. This is much like telling a friend how you’ll be quitting smoking and asking them to check-in on you later.
The Complacency group includes young parents who have not experienced deadly outbreaks of disease and are understandably not worried enough to value inoculation. Tell them about outbreaks in the past. Explain how vaccines so reduced the danger from communicable diseases that we no longer remember to fear them today, even though many are still around.
Children waiting for inoculations in Australia, October 1946.
The Calculation group are on the whole rational people who are resisting vaccination after having received misleading information. Give them clear and reliably sourced information about inoculation. Show them the likelihood of infection and explain how vaccinating themselves also helps protect their community. Trust them to factor better information into their decision.
It’s Not a Silver Bullet, But…
As much as I’d rather not raise the idea of a one-size-fits-all solution in context of a behavioural public health issue, we should be aware of a strategy that’s likely to work and can be called on easily when needed.
Give people with anti-vaccination attitudes factual information about the dangers of communicable diseases. Written or recorded anecdotes from parents of children who had contracted diseases can be effective. If you can’t get hold of any, show visual examples of the danger. Google public domain pictures of a child with measles or rubella. Photos showing the consequences of infection can appeal to the same protective instinct that created a misinformed fear of vaccines.
This method was tested by another recent study that successfully changed attitudes by making people appreciate the consequences of failing to vaccinate their children. They used information we can all access through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website.
The method works better than attempts to debunk vaccination myths and so may be the best strategy when engaging people in the Confidence group. They are the most difficult to persuade when attempts to counter their scientific beliefs may entrench them even further.
And, Remember
Vaccinations are a choice. Nobody anticipated that people would begin choosing to refuse vaccines because they never experienced the horrifying alternative. Their society had achieved a level of immunity that allowed most people to live their lives without seeing a large-scale outbreak of deadly communicable disease. In the past fear of death, or worse, was enough for everyone to get a vaccine the moment it became available.
I don’t think that mandatory inoculation is a long-term solution. Our community should have achieved a level of independent and rational decision-making. They are able to choose the correct solution. Holdouts must understand the danger to which they expose themselves, their children and their community. If aggressively pursuing combative verbal arguments is enough to entrench people in their mistaken beliefs, imagine the scale of fear and mistrust if vaccinations were involuntary. No, the solution must be more elegant, it must be more human.
There are many reasons people choose to be on that side of the discussion. Giving them real information and letting them make their own decision is the only way to both solve the problem and build on the fabric of society. This is the best solution available to us.
While taking a break to tidy up my living space, I was listening to a podcast. It was “The Afterlife Of A T-Shirt” by NPR’s Planet Money.
Planet Money describes itself as:
“…a joint project of NPR and This American Life, which focuses on coverage of the global economy. Imagine you could call up a friend and say, “Meet me at the bar and tell me what’s going on with the economy.” Now imagine that’s actually a fun evening. That’s what we’re going for at Planet Money.”
This episode was hugely enjoyable, with the hosts narrating story of used clothing leaving the U.S. (world’s biggest exporter of used clothes, first new fact of the day!) towards their next stage of life. New clothes are made, shipped and then bought. After they’re used, their owners get rid of them. But where do they go next? It’s important to understand the lifecycle of the things we use, I think, to make good decisions as sustainable humans. That the clothes could become stuffing for toys, rags for cleaning things or even vintage clothing (a real money spinner) is in a way reassuring, because now I know they don’t go straight into landfills.
The written word, the emerging web and trusting in diversity.
Does the written word hold power?
Ok, it’s not power per se, it’s authority. An experiment of interesting design has found that written words can empower authority.
Children were given the choice of following verbal instruction or instruction that originated in written word. Children who couldn’t yet read were indiscriminate. But Corriveau’s team found that once children are literate, “they rapidly come to regard the written word as a particularly authoritative source of information about how to act in the world.”
In my own opinion there is now a large quantity of hearsay masquerading as fact, so I must hope this is not entirely a bad thing.
Light rail train platforms in Bangkok, Thailand, with gateways bedecked in digital advertisement. Source: Manil
A behemoth of a slideshow but only in number of slides. Each is colourful and concise, peering into the variety of ways internet is used today. The manner in which developing populations have harnessed the internet has leap-frogged its purpose in developed regions. A conversation I had with my expatriate friend who recently visited from Shanghai illustrated one reason why.
According to him, smartphone usage is not skewed towards younger populations as it tends to be in other places. Being older is an insufficient reason to abstain because the internet is now heavily relied on for daily commerce and communication. Also, more trust in online services allows people to purchase more freely. The caveat being that once that trust is lost, it is much more difficult to recover.
So does diversity help to build trust or destroy it? While usually an excellent topic to trot out for animated dinner discussion in support of multicultural societies, the jury is in and…
On its own diversity was not enough. “(J)ust to live side-by-side in the same community” is insufficient, however when combined with meaningful face-to-face interaction, it’s a recipe for trust.
Jump-starting the immune system, abdominal fat and how we get tall.
It’s all in the enzymes:
Researchers are developing techniques besides the usual by figuring out how to stimulate the body’s immune response to disease, resulting in reduced lag time and (possibly) prolonged defensive response.
Material I acquired as part of a Health Psychology class convinced me that abdominal fat, the type that pads the space between our organs, is especially dangerous. The article linked below gives some background and advice on what to do about it. Hint: improve physical activity and watch portion size.
The visceral type of fat is in the abdominal region, surrounding the organs. Source: StemBook.org
The last time I was part of a group discussing physical development and by extension height, the major point seemed always to be nutritional access. Turns out it’s nutrition and sanitation. When infected with disease, nutrients will be diverted as “growth takes a back seat to keeping the heart and organs functioning”. If disease is common enough these diversions can be prolonged enough to visibly affect growth.
Electric cars, social psychology and the minimum wage.
Electric vehicles:
Seen at Granville Island, Vancouver.
Following Tesla’s ongoing success, the electric vehicle market is looking to get more crowded. Competing interests were attempting to take control of Fisker Automotive, which has now gone to Wanxiang which is a China-based multinational car parts manufacturer.
An analysis of girls’ performances in school chess tournaments identified a trend that girls lost more often to boys than was expected, given their skill ratings and those of their prior opponents.
A lack of female role models sometimes leads to potentially damaging stereotype threats, one that is best remedied earlier on. If the threat can be resolved before adulthood girls will better maximise their potential.
While it’s too late for Walmart to shake off its public image of a “exploitative employer” at the lower income brackets, other firms can still enact pre-emptive policies. The clothing retailer GAP committed to increase minimum wages within the next 11 months across its umbrella that includes Old Navy and Banana Republic.
An electric vehicle itself may be zero-emissions but what about the fuel source? This question could undermine the appeal of electric vehicles, unless policies are already in place to account for these shortcomings.
Source: Tennessee Valley Authority
The measure to remember is the CO2 emissions per unit distance traveled, even if it was not directly emitted by the car! If a hypothetical Tesla Model S travels 1 km using energy that emitted 5 g of CO2 by its generation (in a fossil-fuel power station) then it is less “green” than another hypothetical Honda Civic that emitted 3 g of CO2 burning diesel on its own.
The above may be the case in China, Tesla’s newest and largest target market where the bulk of energy is generated using coal-fired power stations. In contrast, a Model S charged using the power grid in Norway where Tesla’s newest iteration recently became the best-selling car, has a lower CO2 footprint because hydroelectricity is the primary source of power in the Scandinavian kingdom.
According to the paper by Babaee and friends (link below) the crucial element to reducing air pollution are policy mandates to limit carbon dioxide emissions. Continuing with the example, Norway has strict policies levying additional charges based on emissions resulting in electric cars having a price advantage which contributed to the appeal of the Model S and other electric and low-emission vehicles. Until other places do the same, incentive discrepancies will continue to exist.
The Model S displayed on Tesla's Canadian regional site
Tesla entered the automotive market in 2006 with a car no sane person would buy: a shiny electric car of the future tied to charging stations that barely existed. They had to adopt a strategy more familiar to the technology industry than that of run-of-the-mill car-makers. If no sane person would buy it, who would they target?
Enter the Tesla Roadster. All-electric and all of US$128,500. With a high-end product aimed at the luxury sports-car niche, Tesla waited for the consumer market in electric vehicles to mature. It paid off. Tesla spent the time developing a car that targeted a lower price point. The Tesla Model S, released in 2012, is currently priced at US$65,000 thanks to U.S. federal tax credit. Its next model, code-named BlueStar, will be a $30,000 car targeting the mass-market. At this price range, low-end BMWs and the rest of the usual choices are going to look a comparative joke.
The Model S displayed on Tesla’s Canadian regional site
And why not?
An incident on the 14th of January this year was a source of many chuckles. The U.S. National Highway Safety Administration released two recalls related to problems that could cause fires. One was from Tesla Motors and the other from GM. Owners of 370,000 General Motors vehicles will need to take time out of their day to turn in their cars and pickups at dealerships’ for updates. In Tesla’s case, 29,222 happy owners got their fixes over-the-air, a la Apple iPhone software upgrades.
Of course, this sort of fix is limited to software problems. However it does indicate two things: 1) Tesla is getting things right, more so than an established player like General Motors, and 2) Electric cars, once a source of derision due to unreliability and infeasibility, are no longer the butt-end of the joke.
Market sentiment agrees. Barely one year ago, Tesla share price was at US$39. Today it’s US$196. Now if Elon Musk’s hints about a new plant in China hold any promise, Tesla will find that its planned entry into the potentially lucrative Chinese market propels that value even higher just that much faster.
