Stations

This isn't a gas station. I stopped for cash, meat and milk to feed me and my workers, with money that never belonged to me.

And, I saw a girl in a sporty car, “Pretty in Pink” detailed on black, doing her eyelashes in the rearview. Lust passed her into the store front, and passed an old drunk man swimming in clothes slowly falling off, staggering as if under the sea. It was unclear whether he was going in or turning aside, or if he was simply carried by the tide, but I slid around him, hurried.

I paid the fee at the cash machine, taking extra cash due to the lowest available denomination and for general purposes. I grabbed my jug and sandwich, made quick chat, and stepped back out, almost tripping on the old drunk man who was now on all fours with his pants around his ankles.

In full stride, half the sandwich in my mouth already, opening the red and white gallon of milk and pulling out keys all at once, I heard through my ear buds a man with brown teeth. He'd pulled up in a pickup and called out through his rear window over red gas jugs, with a story about some place near, but not too near, that he called home but that he couldn't burn a line to with the gas he had.

With a glance to the sandwich in my hand, I reminded myself of the mountain of debt I was under and that I didn't even own the sandwich I ate, so I said, “Oh, Man, I don't have any money either.”

And, maybe this man substituted a cardboard sign for a story with red, plastic props. Maybe he drove around peddling his story out of his truck to feed a vice that cost his teeth and more. Or, maybe he staggered under a socioeconomic machine that fleeced his teeth. Or, maybe both and more. I don't know.

But, I knew the tooth I lost to the machine was in the back of my mouth, rather than the front. And, I knew that I had only dodged a petty lie by a technicality. And, I knew that I was an object of grace, and that here was my chance to be a subject of Grace. And, I knew that I could easily keep driving away and be just fine. And, I knew.

I stopped the truck and walked to the pump I'd thought the man with the brown teeth pulled up to. It wasn't his truck. I went inside. He wasn't there. Then, I spotted him pulling up to a far pump.

I walked to him, reaching into my pocket for a bill. He already knew. He feigned some resistance like I didn't need to put myself out, but I couldn't hear him at first because I hadn't removed my ear buds yet.

I said, “It never belonged to me anyway.”

He looked me in the eye and said, “God bless you.”

“You too.”

I turned back toward the truck and approached the girl, pretty in pink, still doing her makeup. Focusing on her, I almost tripped when I noticed the blood spattered on the sidewalk at my feet where the old drunk man had been down. He was nowhere to be seen now.

I continued, again in full stride to the truck, “This isn't a gas station; it's a tragedy station.”

(In)effective praise and the way we think about our thinkers: we're pretty fantastic, but watch how you say it*

Research over the last decade has changed the way teachers, parents, coaches and other professionals give praise. Telling students they are smart or gifted seems to negatively affect their performance, whereas praising their efforts and the processes they used to produce results seems to support achievement and create a mindset that promotes academic engagement.

However, I think applying this technique is most effective when integrated with its underlying principles, rather than as a singular trick of language to use in a mechanical sort of way. Before I get into that deeper nuance and my personal take on intelligence and development in this context, let me explain the overall distinction being made by this set of research.

"Many educators have hoped to maximize students' confidence in their abilities, their enjoyment of learning, and their ability to thrive in school by praising their intelligence. We've studied the effects of this kind of praise in children as young as 4 years old and as old as adolescence, in students in inner-city and rural settings, and in students of different ethnicities—and we've consistently found the same thing (Cimpian, Arce, Markman, & Dweck, 2007; Kamins & Dweck, 1999; Mueller & Dweck, 1998): Praising students' intelligence gives them a short burst of pride, followed by a long string of negative consequences." ("The Perils and Promises of Praise," Dweck)

This finding (largely championed by Carol S. Dweck) makes perfect sense to me when I look at my own fear- and ego-based experience as a "smart/gifted" kid, and when I look at my adult development toward a more useful mind-set. With my identity and worth connected to my intelligence, I developed bad habits to protect that identity. For example, I masked my ignorance in a number of ways, often by not asking questions. That habit developed into having difficulty developing questions or even recognizing when I had questions, masking my ignorance even from myself. (That piece of character is a hard one to shake to this day.) This combined with other related habits also outlined in the studies (e.g. avoidance of challenge) to produce academic decline and general maladjustment for quite some time.

What we are to do when praising others (and ourselves) is to focus our praise and evaluation on observable things rather than on some abstracted intrinsic nature. It's important to do so in a way that connects the results (e.g. a piano recital) to the person's process/effort, "It sounded like you worked hard on that piece." Simply praising the work leaves the connection to the individual open to interpretation. "That's a fine piece of work," could just as easily be received with a subtext of "because you're smart" as it could get the subtext "because you worked hard."

Giving praise in such a way frees people's identities, lowering the stakes. And, by connecting what they did to what they produced in the world and within themselves**, it demonstrates that they can substantially affect their learning and the world around them. It empowers people to engage in learning and practice -- to get behind the wheel of their own development.

This is the essence of the approach, a change in "mind-set" from thinking of intelligence/talent as something "fixed" which reveals itself, to thinking of intelligence/talent as something that grows and can be built by the individual. That message gets conveyed in the way we speak, and it can also be taught directly.

Dweck and others did a study demonstrating the effectiveness of directly teaching students this mind-set. They carried out an intervention in 7th-grade classes. The control group received instruction in study skills, time management and memory skills. The experimental group also learned about how their brains work and what they can do to make their brains grow. It worked. 

"The idea that their intellectual growth was largely in their hands fascinated them. In fact, even the most disruptive students suddenly sat still and took notice, with the most unruly boy of the lot looking up at us and saying, 'You mean I don't have to be dumb?'" ("The Perils and Promises of Praise," Carol S. Dweck)

Here's the nuance

Yes, when I talk about learning, skills, abilities, knowledge and so on, I try to use that approach -- to speak in terms of doing the work to gain and build what you want in life, rather than in fixed terms of being good or bad at something. It's not that I'm an educator or anything like that, but I think it is important to do for myself and others, to promote a healthy mind-set in the world. I see and hear people sort of stuck in themselves, with a rigid mind-set that has practically beaten them down. So, I try to use that way of speaking and praising.

However, the power of that "growth" mind-set is very much in the affirmation of how inherently amazing we actually are. So, I also speak and think in terms of the awesome gifts and capacities that we all have as human beings.

Consider everything that makes up a human infant (i.e. a body). We all start out mostly the same; those that are particularly different from the norm are still mostly like everyone else. As we grow up, we continue to be mostly the same as those within similar cultural contexts, and to a lesser degree, we are still mostly the same as those in different contexts. As a pithy teacher friend once said, we like to think we're all special snowflakes, but we aren't. That means, in a certain light, we might be about as amazing as our heroes/idols.

I don't mean to downplay the significance and value of diversity and opportunity, or to celebrate mediocrity -- at all. Some people are clearly better at certain things than others, gifted so to speak. But, the vast majority of what we think of as "natural" talents were in fact built over time through individual choices and efforts and through social/environmental factors, by strengthening muscles, reinforcing some neural pathways over others and so on.

In fact, the way our DNA works was once thought to be fixed and determined in the same way that intelligence and talent were thought of, but we now know that even the way our DNA expresses itself can be shaped by behavioral and environmental factors.

On the face of it, this sort of emphasis on social/environmental factors can seem deterministic, setting up a mindset of powerlessness in the same way as does praising an individual's inherent character. And, while social inequities are very real and worth addressing (and, redressing), what I am talking about here is individual mind-set, which is both socialized and self-directed. I find it excitingly empowering when the reality of "external" factors and our own efforts shaping us is framed in support of the reality that we humans are quite wonderful creatures capable of impressive changes, developments and diversities.

Perhaps how we use three overlapping concepts associated with what fashions an individual might be particularly salient here: nature, character and identity. Nature seems a fairly fixed mystique, as extrinsically thrust upon us as it is intrinsically rooted. Character is built, stable but malleable; identities can be fluid, rigid, unstable, overlapping, tricky -- quicksilver. I think these and other concepts play significant and valid roles in shaping our humanity. To which are we assigning different aspects of the self and experience? To what are we consigning ourselves and others?

Whether I am carving paths catered to my built-up strengths or working on improving my areas of weakness, I find comfort in the fact that I can choose to be what brings me joy rather than do what protects my ego, freeing up a lot of energy. In that spirit, I am neither compelled to shine nor afraid to shine, and, I can't say that I don't fear failure, but that fear is more healthy than not. We each probably have what it takes to get where we want; we just make choices about what we think is worth the work and sacrifice to get there from where we are, and about which paths are worth taking for their own sakes.

*This post was triggered by this post by Donald Miller. Reading his post brought me back to the excitement of my studies of pedagogy at The Evergreen State College.

**This is the basis of the scientific method, no? Science, having developed as the most adaptive way for our organism to understand the world thus far, is not surprisingly modeled on our biology, also having developed as the most adaptive way for our organism to be in the world thus far. So, it only follows that we should model our thinking and education on the scientific method. But, that is for another blog post.

New cyberscam a spin on old scam: two tips to avoid it

I started seeing a new style of phish over the last few weeks at my job where I scour the Internet for these types of threats. It is a slightly more sophisticated fake Google login page designed to steal your credentials. Gizmodo recently published an article about it, reiterating a Symantec blog post, but they may have slightly overstated the threat while missing some helpful hints to avoid falling for the scam.

For the average person, this new phish is a little more graphically convincing and tricky in the URL. But, it is essentially the same as those that came before it. Don't worry; just keep in mind two things that apply to all phish.

1) WHO. A link to the fraudulent page is usually sent in a lure email. The Gizmodo article makes a good point: if someone you don't know unexpectedly sends you a link, it's probably not legit.

The email may say you need to log in to your account to change settings, or to view a shared document (as in the case of the Google phish), or something along those lines. The sender's email address may appear legit because they spoofed it, but they were probably too lazy for that, I've noticed, so it's probably something dumb like accountverify@yahoo.com. (Most of the scammers who make these pages and stuff seem super lazy and sloppy; it's probably why they do what they do.)

Sometimes a company may actually use third-party services for shared documents, so you may need to verify with that company. This is rare, especially if you weren't expecting it.

One variation is that, instead of receiving an email, you may find links to login pages from other pages, pages where you wouldn't expect to find a link like that. Usually, these are just blogs trying to get traffic by offering links to legit login pages in a post on how to log in to your bank. While they are perhaps less-than-honorable sites, in that they offer no real value and muddy search engine results for ad revenue ("content farms"), they are not criminal. But, they could be, which leads us to the next point.

2) WHERE. Does the link go where it should? Just because the text you click looks legit, doesn't mean it actually goes to that address. Look at the URL.

The URL may be long and unclear on first glance, and it may contain the name of your bank or relevant key words somewhere in it. That can be sneaky, but it's a tip-off once you're savvy. Your bank's login page is not going to be at www.alpacasoncrack.com/herephishyphishyphishy/fake-login/secure.yourbank.com.php, nor will it be at login.yourbank.com.hobbitlovers.org. (The domains alpacasoncrack.com and hobbitlovers.org are surprisingly available at the time of this writing.)

If you hover over a link before clicking it, the real URL it points to will appear in the bottom of your screen. (Most, if not all, browsers will show the URL like this, but if your browser doesn't do this for you, get a new browser, or change your settings, or update it, or get an add-on or something.) If you do happen to click on it (which is a low risk if you have an antivirus program, so no worries, but do clear your cookies afterward), look in the address bar at the URL where you ended up. Some browsers will make it easier to spot the domain name by making its text black while the rest of the URL is greyed out in the address bar up top.

Also, the domain may even be your-bank.com, whereas your bank's domain is yourbank.com, but those variations have probably already been bought or blocked by your bank. UK banks actually use the hyphens on legit domains sometimes. I digress.

In the case of this newish Google phish (aka "parasite," depending on whom you ask and how you are lured to it), the fake login URL looks legit. Since it is actually a public document on Google docs, it is on docs.google.com. However, your Google account login is on accounts.google.com. That's a little trickier, but it still follows the same principle: the login page is not in the right place on the Internet.

If you're still unsure about whether you're on the right page, here is the simplest and only trick you really need: go find the real login page. Make sure it's on the same hostname (e.g. login.yourbank.com). Just for fun, you could enter fake credentials and see if it accepts, but remember that rejection is not proof it's legit.

There are all kinds of other things to check, such as where the form sends your login info, checking the whois etc. But, a lot of that stuff is mainly to help put together a case for taking the page down. If all you are concerned about is avoiding a scam, just remember what I told you. Do you trust the source? Is the login page where it should be? (Where is the login page?)

If you think you have found a fraudulent login page or email, alert the company it poses as (e.g. your bank). Forward the actual email to them with the full headers (see how here). Chances are they have hired a team dedicated to taking care of this sort of thing, like the awesome team I'm on: shameless IID plug.

Nanotech eats universe, everything else — cockroach rodeo ensues

Alright, it's about time. It's about time I post to my newly repurposed blog. To kick things off, I have a funny story to tell you, and I think you'll like it. But, first, I want to tell you about a series on artificial intelligence (AI) I'm working on for this blog.

A clinical psychologist, a day trader, a computer scientist and a hypnotist walk into a bar.

It's actually about AI, augmented intelligence (AugI) and optimized organic intelligence (OOI). Okay, I made those last two terms up, but just think of it like robots, cyborgs and superhumans. I'm using Forex trading as a way to explore the ideas.

So, you can apply AI principles to develop a program that trades for you based on complex algorithms (a process I am in the middle of, using MQL4, but I'll switch to MQL5 next), and you can approach it from the other end and figure out how to make the most of our fearfully and wonderfully developed bodies (most specifically our brains), perhaps leveraging some untapped natural capacities to trade like the dickens.

I'm busy (in my spare time, which is a relative term) studying the neurology of intuition, genetic algorithms and stuff. And, yesterday, as I was telling my buddy that that's what I was doing on that November Saturday in Alabama, this mammoth cockroach started running across the floor straight for the couch I was on.

"I don't think you're supposed to squish them." "Why, will it make them breed faster?"

They have large bugs here in Alabama. I recently arrived here from Olympia, WA, and I am not used to the bugs. (I say "arrived" because I'm not sure how long I'll be here. So, this may be a visit, an extended stay, a move. IDK, but that is another story.) I think I've seen like two cockroaches in my entire life.

I remember an East Coast real estate investor giving a presentation to a bunch of Pacific Northwesterners, and he was telling us that you can ask your exterminator to do a monthly visual check on your rentals since we'd have to hire one that often anyway. We were all like, "What? No, no, no, we don't have that problem here." But, yeah, over here in Alabama, you gotta fumigate, or your house will quickly be overrun with cockroaches and centipedes and stuff.

So, anyway a big-ass cockroach was making a b-line for me while I was talking to my pal about studying AI and stuff. (Okay, we weren't talking; we were chatting on Facebook.) I would have stomped it, but I was afraid it would turn its head and take my foot off at the ankle. Plus, I didn't want guts on my sock. So, I picked up the transformer box on my laptop cord and squished the beast with extreme prejudice just before he made it to the couch. I picked up the box, and the little bugger scurried under the couch anyway, leaving a pile of its own guts on the floor! WTF?!

The chat log looked something like this:

Me: I'm working on a blog series on AI and stuff today. But, it's a big project, and I want to come up with something else to post while I'm working on this.
Champ (that's what I call her): Oh yeah?
Me: yeah
Me: Also, big cockroaches.
Champ: Eeewwww!
Champ: Are you going to make AI cockroaches?
Champ: Oh! Make AI cockroaches that seek out and destroy real cockroaches!
Me: Sniperoaches...you're onto something.

Sniperoaches

The setting is the near future. Having solved all major problems with nanotech, and I mean all major problems (cancer, hunger, learning disabilities, those people who like to put the toilet paper roll on so it unrolls from the bottom etc. — all solved by nanotech), people started looking around for other uses for nanotech, common consumer uses.

Someone got the bright idea to make a nanomite for pest control, sniperoaches. These tiny robots would spread among a local population of cockroaches just enough to destroy all the roaches in a given vicinity. One box covered a 10th of an acre, and you could pick up a box at Walmart for $19,999.99, which is cheap in the near future. You'd simply open a box anywhere and the invisible little robots would go to work seeking and destroying cockroaches. When they found one, they would latch on and begin to replicate, using the materials of the roach itself to make new sniperoaches. The best part? No downside! There is no poison, no collateral damage, nothing but dead roaches.

Sniperoach designers knew the process had to be slow enough to allow roaches to take sniperoaches to other roaches. It also had to stop at some point before they drove roaches to extinction. Incidentally, everyone tried to believe roach extinction would theoretically be a bad thing, though there wasn't a single person who didn't feel a slight sense of peace and triumph at the thought, much like at the final crunch and squish under your twisting heel.

So, to avoid such a sweet oblivion, a built-in timer was set for the entire class of sniperoaches within one box. Opening the box started the timer in each sniperoach. Each new sniperoach created was given the same time left to live as the one that created it had left. So, if sniperoach A had 24 hours to live when it created sniperoach B, sniperoach B would have 24 hours left to live as well. In this way, all the sniperoaches generated from a single box would die at the same moment, and all the cockroaches within about a 10th of an acre would be dead too.

The rates of consumption and reproduction slowed over time as well to allow for an extended life cycle within a constrained area, to keep the roaches at bay. After the sniperoaches died, the roaches would start to return, and you just got another box, but that was no different than fumigation, just no side effects.

The clock stopped in a sleepy neighborhood in Alabama. The residents in one house hadn't seen a roach in a month. It was nice. If you were able to hear the white noise of sniperoaches working and cockroaches creeping, you would have heard neither. It was like someone turned off the TV. It was that perfect moment of a job complete before the work starts piling up again. Nothing. Not a single roach around the house. Not a single sniperoach. I mean, except, there was one, of course. Oh, but that wasn't supposed to happen. Oops.

These things basically cloned themselves. No sex. There were no genes to mix with a mate, producing a unique set of genes. No, they were identical, with only functioning parts and code (not unlike an organism, but not an organism). And, they were so simple and small, there really wasn't much room for change. Every part had it's purpose, and nothing could be done without. Such irreducable complexity and economy of design that there was no room for innovation.

Not unless you count the life-cycle timer. That was kind of unnecessary for the nanomite's functioning. And, one day one of them dropped the timer, oops, like the littlest ant that stopped to tie its shoe, the lonely little thing. It wasn't lonely for long. It ran like a dog off its leash down the block to the next roach-infested house and went to work killing roaches and reproducing. These new sniperoaches didn't have a death timer either.

In fact, remember that cleverly slowed rate of consumption and reproduction designed to extend the period of a roach free environment without extending the boundaries? Well, due to size constraints and such, the timer had been recruited for that task as well in quite the engineering feat akin to the evolution of flagella. There was no artificial limit to the rate at which these robots could consume and reproduce, so they went as fast as they could, naturally.

That happened to be pretty darn fast. By the end of the day, there were no cockroaches left in that little Alabama neighborhood. The next week, there were none in New York, if you can imagine that.

What happened next no one really knows, because it all happened so fast. Before they knew it, humans were extinct, and knowing went with them. That is an oddly obvious thing to say, if you think about it, "Before they knew it, humans were extinct." It kind of takes the immediacy out of the idiom...and it would be more accurate to say, "Before they could know it, humans were extinct." Anyhow, here's the best explanation people could imagine for what was going to happen.

Somehow drawing on the ruthless adaptability of the cockroach, other mutations occurred in the nanomites which allowed them to make meals of other critters. At the same time, they actually stopped eating cockroaches, at least not all of them. It was almost like they made deal with the Devil. I'm not sure which of the two is the Devil, but I'm pretty sure the cockroach sold us out.

They formed a symbiotic relationship. In a pinch, these new supernanomites could feed on cockroaches in order to spread more quickly across distances where there was nothing but cockroaches, but they would feed only to an extent so as not to bring the roach to extinction. In exchange, the nanomites actually slowed their consumption in the presence of cockroaches, allowing them to scavenge. (I know, right? Now the nanomites show restraint? The little cocksnipers.)

Another brilliant feature of the supernanomite was that as they added to their repertoire of the things they could eat, they became able to feed on other nanomites. At first, they would only feed on previous generations, those with more limited diets. This would recycle the materials of the older generation into the new expanded appetite — that's what a group of nanomites are called, an appetite, an appetite of nanomites. It would also allow their progeny to live on.

Of course, rival generations would arise around the world, as varied organic speciation around the world produced varied speciation within the nanomites. So, different subspecies of nanomite would simply eat one another, back and forth. Sometimes, one would go extinct, but that wasn't a problem, since either the things it had learned to eat were extinct anyway, or the victor generation of nanomites would simply learn to eat those things too. No biggie.

Yeah, so eventually there was no life on Earth, nothing organic at least, unless you count the roaches. So, the supernanomites turned on the planet itself. Then, they ate the galaxy, then the universe and then everything else. They ate time, so it's hard to say how long it took in all, but it didn't take long to finally destroy time. They ate space along with time, of course, so you can't really talk about how far they stretched.

Now — I can say "now" even though time is all eaten up because time was always a function of the present, not vice versa — now the extremely adaptive, omnivoracious, patricidally cannibalistic supernanomite has achieved an unimaginable homogenous, homeostatic hive. All it does is seek -- that, and ride cockroaches in the cockroach rodeo circuit. The cockroach rodeo is all the rage in the supernanomite hive, those crazy little cowboys.

That is the end.

Happy birthday Champ. :)

P.S. Frank Herbert is pretty neat.

Evergreen Bike Shop volunteer Peter volunteers at the Evergreen Bike Shop

            I followed Evergreen Bike Shop volunteer Peter around the shop during one of his weekly shifts. That day he continued working on a bike for his girlfriend’s brother and assisted someone who came to work on his bike.

            Since 1977, The Evergreen State College campus has hosted the Evergreen Bike Shop, a volunteer-run shop where people can work on their bikes or even build a bike out of spare parts. Bicyclists may store their projects at the shop as long as they work on it at least once every two weeks, otherwise the shop reclaims the parts.

            Bicyclists may find a number of basic and specialized tools, DIY manuals and free spare parts. The shop also sells some basic materials as needed.

            Aside from its basic hours of operation, which depend on volunteer schedules, the shop holds special events and meetings. Every Monday at 4 p.m., the shop hosts Lady and Trans Night, a “target-only” space. May 18, the shop sponsored the Mob Roll Alley Cat, a bike scavenger hunt through Olympia followed by a show and party.

           Those interested in volunteering may attend the weekly meetings 2-4 p.m. Wednesdays at the shop in Room 135 of the College Activities Building.

Review: stackoverflow

            Here is the obligatory review of stackoverflow. Look, if you are working on a project and come across a problem that you want some help on, go here. Someone else has quite possibly had the same problem, and someone has quite possibly helped them solve it on this site. If not, post your problem, and a bunch of bored programmers will solve it for you. Pretty neat, huh?

            The site is much like any other forum like this. You can search by question, by tag, or by text. Questions and answers are rated by users. Users create profiles and earn badges and reputation which gives more privileges and gives their votes more weight.

            As usual, the moderators try to get everyone to learn the rules and keep the discussions professional and on task. They also invite people to apply to help with the various tasks of managing the site. Stackoverflow is part of StackExchange, a network of similar sites for various areas of expertise.

Review: Google Developers University

            Google Developers UniversityConsortium presents a fairly comprehensive and emergent education program for anyone looking to master web development or simply expand their skill set — comprehensive in outline at least. I get the sense that it is curricula compiled by an information management specialist giant, not composed by educators per se.

            The well-organized site lists quite a number of offerings in three general categories: mobile, web development, and programming languages. The programming languages track leaves much to be desired, but the other two tracks appear to lead from a fairly introductory “classes” to advanced real-world application. The offerings range from free online videos or slideshows to university courses with tuition, to live webinars from any number of organizations.

            The free stuff sometimes is little more than a slideshow with no voice over, which makes little sense without the lecture it was designed to accompany. But, there are still some gems. I have selected this course from the University of Maryland on building Android apps to browse over the summer.

          Also, though many courses start off at a very introductory level, none of these are designed to build your knowledge from the ground up like Codecademy does. So, what you get out of Google Developers University depends on what you can put into it.

            As a site (or, subsite), it is well-organized and interactive. There is a forum area for collaboration, questions etc. But, mainly the content is well-regulated, which is good. It seems to be a good place for universities to attract students with “cutting edge” offerings. Also, there are some pretty cool applications available for developing and educational collaboration.