Notices by Michael Porter (michaelporter@ottawa.place)

@NanoRaptor Good communication isn’t about getting ideas out of your head, it’s about getting them into others’.

From my teacher perspective - “Yes, I taught the material. But did they *learn* it?”

@SuperMoosie @NanoRaptor Yup, it’s a process. But it’s made easier if the person trying to convey an idea gives some consideration as to how it will be received in the first place.

Too often I see people ticking the “I got it out of my head” box, without making sure the “This is understandable to people who are not me” box is ticked, too.

Not to mention the “I made it easy for the other person to receive the message” aspect. Perfect everyday example - sending a message in an attachment to an email instead of just putting the message in the text of the email.

@mina @photovotary @RickiTarr To those people who value having been hit as a child, I would ask, “Did it work?”

I was an impulsive, adventurous kid. I got into fights, I stole stuff, I broke stuff, I set stuff on fire… I got spanked a *lot*!

I remember many, many times that I did things that were punished with a spanking.

I *don’t* remember thinking, even *once*, “I’d better not do this, I’m going to get spanked!”

I *do* remember conversations:
- The one where my mom talked to me about my experiment with smoking when I was nine. No spanking, just a good argument against it, in terms that made sense to me at the time.
- The one where she sat me down with some pamphlets from the fire department (I was playing with matches and so forth) and talked about her fears for the consequences of my fascination with flame.
- The ones that reminded me of the value of treating other people with respect, love, and empathy.

Spanking, even by caring, compassionate parents that were clearly trying to guide their children to do the right thing, didn’t work. I never felt any kind of resentment against my parents. After the fact, I fully agreed that whatever I had done warranted the punishment. I suppose it helped that my father would always come and talk to me, after I had had a chance to think about it. He would make it clear that it was only about my actions, and not indicative of any lack of love for me. The punishment was compartmentalized nicely.

Oddly, I’m thankful for that lesson, because it guided my own parenting. I realized that *my* urge to spank my kids was all about me, acting rash in the moment, as opposed to any kind of effective strategy to mold young minds. I could only imagine I would feel regret in the aftermath, and not achieved anything other than the possible resentment of me by my kids. To be clear, *I* never felt that resentment for my parents. But I did notice it wasn’t an effective deterrent.

Maybe it works for kids that are less impulsive than I was. But I think those kids would be even more receptive to a conversation than I was. Maybe try that instead.

@RickiTarr Not impossible, but definitely at odds with our view of ourselves:

More than 99.8% of the mass of the solar system is the Sun. Jupiter is about 2/3 of the remainder. We are a rounding error.

tl;dr: What's your recommendation for a good Apple-ecosystem Mastodon app?

#macOS and #iOS users - It's time for me to revisit my choice of Mastodon apps. The one I'm using is completely dropping the ball when it comes to working with the system spellcheck and text replacement stuff. I'm constantly editing posts after seeing errors that *should* have been highlighted as I type.

The one thing that Mona has that I didn't see in other apps was the ability to group like notifications, so I get one "these people liked your post" message as opposed to a bunch of individual ones. It seems like such a no-brainer that I assume the other apps have that, too, now?

#Mastodon #macOS #iOS

@nilsskirnir @GutterPoetry @Remittancegirl @murdoc @Profpatsch @DarkAthena @johnnyprofane1 @bmacDonald94 @actuallyautistic @actuallyadhd I imagine ADHD diagnosis has increased for similar reasons that ASD diagnoses did. Greater awareness and acceptance, transfer from other diagnoses.

e.g. This paper on the increase in autism diagnoses:

RESULTS. The average administrative prevalence of autism among children increased from 0.6 to 3.1 per 1000 from 1994 to 2003. By 2003, only 17 states had a special education prevalence of autism that was within the range of recent epidemiological estimates. During the same period, the prevalence of mental retardation and learning disabilities declined by 2.8 and 8.3 per 1000, respectively. Higher autism prevalence was significantly associated with corresponding declines in the prevalence of mental retardation and learning disabilities. The declining prevalence of mental retardation and learning disabilities from 1994 to 2003 represented a significant downward deflection in their preexisting trajectories of prevalence from 1984 to 1993. California was one of a handful of states that did not clearly follow this pattern.

CONCLUSIONS. Prevalence findings from special education data do not support the claim of an autism epidemic because the administrative prevalence figures for most states are well below epidemiological estimates. The growing administrative prevalence of autism from 1994 to 2003 was associated with corresponding declines in the usage of other diagnostic categories.

https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/117/4/1028/70958/The-Contribution-of-Diagnostic-Substitution-to-the

@CatsOfYore I feel validated 😄

@zleap @fzimper @petergleick Yup, just a blink of an eye in the big scheme of things.

But to get back to the point, evidence indicates that Native Americans were on the continent many thousands of years before Europeans arrived.

@fzimper @zleap @petergleick The timelines change a bit, as new evidence comes to light, but I think the *routes* are generally agreed on. North America was populated between 10 000 and 20 000 years ago by folks coming across a land bridge from Asia. And, go back far enough, we originate in Africa.

The map below is from

https://geo.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Oceanography/Oceanography_101_(Miracosta)/02:_Evolution_of_Life_Through_Time/2.27:_Evolution_of_Humans_and_the_Rise_of_Modern_Civilization

@david_whitney @gemelliz Too good 😄

#AltText:
A newspaper TV listing, with apicture of Donald Trump in profile. Text below reads:

4pm, BBC One/ STV
President Trump: The Inauguration
After a long absence, The Twilight Zone returns with one of the most ambitious, expensive and controversial productions in broadcast history. Sci-fi writers have dabbled often with alternative history stories - among the most common is the "What If The Nazis Had Won The Second World War" setting - but this huge interactive virtual reality project, which will unfold on TV, in the press, and on Twitter over the next four years, sets out to build an ongoing alternative present.
The story begins in a nightmarish version of 2017 in which huge sections of the US electorate have somehow been duped into voting to make Donald Trump president.
It sounds far-fetched, and it is, but as it goes on it becomes more and more chillingly plausible. Today's feature length opener concentrates on the gaudy inauguration of President Trump, and the stirrings of protest and despair surrounding the ceremony, while pundits speculate gravely on what lies ahead. It's a flawed piece, but a disturbing glimpse of the horrors we could stumble into, if we're not careful.

All the recent news about Meta has me determined to start some serious arm-twisting with my family.

Can anyone point me to a good, non-paywalled summary of the crap they are engaging in? Something I can pass along to non-tech types?

Also, I suspect this won't have the most satisfactory answers, but what are the easy alternatives for those non-techy types?

Facebook → ?
Instagram → ?
WhatsApp → ? (Signal? The big trick with these is that you need your intended message recipient on the same platform, too, no?)

I'm going to be at a big family dinner in a few weeks... might be a good time to get the message out to the group, so they can coordinate.

Any help/advice is appreciated!

#meta #SocialMedia #LGBTQIA #DeleteFacebook #Facebook

@johncarlosbaez It sounds like the word "surface" is being used in almost a mathematical sense here, as opposed to a physical surface. Aside from the boundary you've described, is there some way that a probe (or an astronaut with a very good A/C system in their suit 😄) would notice this surface?

I've always found it interesting how gases and fluids seem to form abrupt boundaries. I'm thinking of the photosphere and chromosphere, here. In terms of solar wind and the outer reaches of the solar system, the description of the heliosphere always reminded me of the hydraulic jump that you see in the kitchen sink.

https://www.sciencealert.com/role-of-surface-tension-not-gravity-hydraulic-jump

@Nazani @dyckron Pro tip - If the driver in front of you is making shadow puppets on their ceiling, your high beams are on…

@dyckron Ah, sadly, this article confirms one thing I was afraid of–that older eyes are more sensitive to the glare.

But it ignores an exacerbating issue, that of cars that automatically lower high beams if oncoming light is detected. That feature does nothing for pedestrians - I am often blinded by high beams when I'm out on a walk with the dog at night. It's made me very tempted to take my blindingly-bright bike light with me to fight back...

The fact that so many drivers seem clueless as to how their headlights work (e.g. those with high beams on while driving in the city, or those that don't realize that daytime running lights are for the, you know, *daytime*) doesn't help, either.

@dalias @DavidM_yeg @stephanie That doesn't make sense on its surface - that a large group of people that had to complete 10 to 12 years of post-secondary education turns out to be mostly composed of creeps and scammers. On the other hand, you also have a country in which tens of millions of people voted for Trump, and he won the popular vote. Yikes.

Still, hard to accept your premise. I don't deny that there will be some in it for the money, and only that. But the vast majority? That sounds too much like other generalizations, like "Those who can't do, teach" or "Unionists are a bunch of commies" – I would encourage some evidence in support of your claim. That said, the U.S. spends twice as much on health care as anyone else, and doesn't get as good results in general, so 🤷♂️

Also, disclaimer, of sorts - I'm not American, so have no experience with the system that has developed there. The last time I was in a hospital, receiving general anesthesia, I didn't see a single bill for anything. All expenses were handled by the province, and all I had to do was show my health card, establishing that I was a resident.

Related, I've heard several times of people getting screening colonoscopies under general anesthesia in the States, which does make me wonder. Totally unnecessary, and definitely more expensive in terms of staffing, monitoring, and recovery.

@DavidM_yeg @stephanie I think I got distracted while replying, sorry. I'm not disagreeing with you, just adding some nuance. Let me clarify what I was thinking.

The thing that occurred to me is that any large group of people (in this case I'm thinking of the anesthesiologists)* will have outliers that make poor choices. So this small group, or the belief that such a group exists, is dictating the policies of Blue Cross, which in turn punishes the patients. There might be a very small number of fraudulent claims actually being made by anesthesiologists, justifying (in the minds of the insurer) the policy.

I have this blue-sky belief that if we lived in a society that didn't allow people to amass unreasonable amounts of wealth at the expense of others, less of this would happen.

I don't think I'm anywhere near the list of wealth-hoarders, but I am holding on to some money on the off chance that someone in the family gets sick, or suffers a setback, and I'll want to help them. If we had a society that just took care of people, regardless of economic standing, I wouldn't have to do this, and that money could be put to far better use.

Also, I don't think bean-counters should be given the power to determine what's medically necessary.

*Not picking on anesthesiologists, I think any large group will have its share of jerks. I used to belong to a large group, teachers, most of which are very hard-working and conscientious. But I ran into a few people that clearly picked the wrong profession.

I have determined that the object in the "risk of explosion" safety symbol does not obey conservation of area.

I will not be taking questions at this time.

#BreakfastActivities #WHMIS #GHS #LabSafety #ADHD

@markarayner I feel like the “enter“ key should be one of these:

@georgetakei “Okay, now that we have that out of the way…”

Just heard a reference to this E. O. Wilson quote on Jon Stewart's podcast (https://overcast.fm/+ABIv5SBB5XI):

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”

Yup. Our godlike tech is manipulating those Paleolithic emotions, and our medieval institutions are not capable of doing anything about it...

#CanPoli #OnPoli #USpol