Why Wikipedia is Awesome

From the Wikipedia article for the song Fishin' in the Dark by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band:

The premise of the song is a couple contemplating a late night fishing expedition. Specifically, the adventurers plan to make their way to a river and chart constellations in the full moon light. In the song, the tentative date for this excursion is set in the late spring to early summer.

This is a great example of a pseudo-scientific neutral point of view.

Facilitating True Student Engagement

Our students at Western Governors University have not always been successful in other attempts at college for a variety of reasons, some internal and some external. Regardless of the reason, many of our students come to us with two loads to carry: a history of failure and a preconceived model of college that does not match our model. Whether they have tried things that have not worked elsewhere or tried things that have worked elsewhere, that rarely translates directly into success at WGU.

What seems to work for the average new student starts with a thoughtful approach to deconstructing the walls of their current and past successes and failures. This deconstruction has to be with genuine concern for each individual student. They sense disingenuity.

Having listened in on calls with students, I can tell when there appears to be a real relationship with a student and when there is tension. As faculty members, our job is to reduce that tension, in terms of removing the extraneous cognitive load that blocks students' full participation in the learning process. I have seen faculty go into a meeting with a student already tensed up and ready for a fight. Ask any faculty member who their problem child is, and they'll list off a dozen problem children. There shouldn't be that many.

Imagine going into a meeting with fists at the ready only to be disarmed by anything from a heartwrenching to a heartwarming tale from the student that explains why they have been so problematic in the past. How much better would that situation be if we're the ones who kindly work through a student's façade and pulls out the same tale, along with their commitment to truly work through whatever they are facing?

Whether it's the first or fiftieth contact, when faculty go into a situation without preconceptions, doing the following will set up both student and faculty for success.

Practice active listening. Restate or paraphrase what was heard, perhaps using the phrases "what I hear you say" or "what I understand" to make it clear that you want feedback to ensure the message came across. This has two benefits: it ensures you understand what they said and it lets the other person know that you're consciously trying to understand what they're saying.

Remember what you talked about. Keep notes, whether on paper or a spreadsheet, of what you discuss. Ask about how those personal situations are progressing when you talk again next week. Refer back to a file you sent or something either of you committed to doing the previous week so they know you remember talking to them.

Give them just a little more than they asked for. Too much extra will confuse them and look like you just copied and pasted everything you had and doesn't leave anything for next time. Exactly what they asked for will meet expectations. But giving them a little more, whether that's answering what you know is the most common follow-up question before they ask it or giving them a call right as you receive their email, they know you're available for them and care about what is important to them. Explain the policy rather than just stating the policy, send a reminder email of what you discussed in your call, and so on.

Compliment more than you criticize. Put the criticism in a compliment sandwich. Find something nice to say, specific and relevant to the situation, explain what they could do better, and reassure them they have the skills to accomplish it.

Remember the real world. Make the examples you give when explaining a concept or process relate to something you know the student is familiar with from a place they work or used to work. When they don't like the case studies or homework instructions, remind them that their boss probably doesn't always give them perfect instructions either. Help them keep their eye on the prize, in thinking about what their next job or two will be after completing their degree by acting as if they already have the degree. WGU is giving them a model that is more like the real world than it is like the other colleges from which they had to drop out.

Ask for more. Is there anything that doesn't make sense? Do you have enough to keep you busy over the weekend? What else can I do for you? Don't stay confused for more than 20 minutes without calling me. Should we set up a follow-up appointment right now?

By actively listening, remembering what you talked about, giving more than is expected, being free with compliments, tying students' learning to what is to come, and ensuring you haven't left any questions unanswered, students will know they have the support of the faculty in whatever they are trying to accomplish. We may be one of the few who really give them complete support in their lives. Don't be their excuse to fail again but be their excuse to be a success. Oh, and these concepts work at any school, not just WGU; if you teach elsewhere, hopefully it's a place that cares enough about students that you would be recognized for doing this.

Wide Achiever or Highest Point of Contribution?

Two conflicting articles posted over the last few months, making their way around the internet:

The #1 Career Mistake Capable People Make

Capable people end up doing lots of projects well but are distracted from what would otherwise be their highest point of contribution which I define as the intersection of talent, passion and market. Then, both the company and the employee lose out.

Being able to do many things is important in many jobs today. Broad understanding also is a must. But developing greater discernment about what is distinctive about us can be a great advantage. Instead of simply doing more things we need to find, at every phase in our careers, our highest point of contribution.

Should We Aim to Be “Wide Achievers” in Our Careers?

Few career counselors today would advise you to be a wide achiever: they remain obsessed by the ideal of the specialist. We need to recognize that our culture of specialization conflicts with something most of us intuitively know but which career advisers are only beginning to understand: we each have multiple selves.

So it is time to challenge the reverence for the specialist that has become the workplace norm. We all know that disparaging phrase "jack-of-all-trades and master of none." But the original Jack was probably a fantastically interesting and creative person who was far happier doing multiple jobs than his friends who were stuck in narrow careers. We need a more positive term to celebrate the Jacks (and Jills) of the world: welcome to the age of the wide achiever.

So, which is it?  Or is it both?

Learning New Things

There was a VP I worked for several years ago. He was a WordPerfect man, and we had standardized on MS Office, so he had some growing pains when he was hired. The business manager was obsessed with Quattro Pro and refused to use Excel, so we had all kinds of resistance we were dealing with. Everyone had both office suites on their computers, because a lot of legacy stuff was in WordPerfect, but people weren't supposed to create new files in WordPerfect. Yeah, that worked out well.

The VP was putting together an agenda for a meeting, and he was trying to be good and use the right software. He called me in to ask about a hot-key that wasn't working. Apparently WordPerfect had some hot-key you could press, where if you were typing something on a line, hit the key combination, then it would automatically add a right tab to the far right margin and add leader characters (periods) all the way over to it. The effect is you have something like:
Review schedule of upcoming events...................John Smith
...where the agenda item of reviewing the calendar starts on the left margin like usual, dots all the way across, and the name of the person leading that discussion on the right margin, right aligned. The number of dots automatically increase or decrease depending on how long the right-aligned name is. Fair enough and a nice effect.

But Word doesn't have a shortcut for that. I might be able to write a macro that does the same thing, but it's probably not worth the time. I just told him that Word didn't have the shortcut, but we could set up the same effect manually. Just click here, change the tab type, select the type of leader characters, click okay.... And in the middle of me demonstrating how to do it, he says - forget it, I'll just have the secretary create the agenda.

More than about three clicks was too complicated, I guess.  Really, just change to a right tab and select the leader characters.  It's not much.  And use the format painter to apply the effect everywhere else once you've done it once.

Of course, most people, rather than setting appropriate left or right tabs to get text to line up right will just space over and kind of eyeball it, but due to variable width fonts, you can never quite get everything lined up perfectly. Please do the OCD among us a favor and learn how to set tabs, because I guarantee we're not listening to what you're saying - we're angrily staring at the printed agenda with crooked text, or if you saved paper and sent the electronic file out, we're actually fixing the spacing and tabs on our own copy and wondering what excuse to give that would justify re-sending the fixed file out to everyone. At least the VP wasn't actually typing in a bunch of periods and trying to get the text to magically line up by getting just the right number of periods in there, so he had that going for him.

Password Security and the Minimum Password Age

Everyone has their favorite (or least favorite) password rule.  Just google password rules, and you'll find all kinds of things we inflict on our users.  Some sites require the use of special characters, while others prohibit them.  Upper, lower, numbers, symbols, length, change every 30/60/90 days, can't use the previous 3/5/10 passwords, no dictionary words, and so on.

There are a couple webcomics on xckd that address the issues of password strength and password reuse.  Go read them; they're great.  And then read a couple dozen randomly selected comics on the site, and if you remember to come back, the rest of the post with my point will be here waiting.

One of the most interesting to me is that of minimum password age.  We're all familiar with the maximum age - it's been 90 days, time to change it or you'll be locked out.  Whether it's effective to change a good password at all is debatable, but not the conversation for today.  The thing about not reusing a previous password is fairly common.  But why would you want to set a minimum password age?  That is, a certain amount of time needs to pass before you're allowed to change it again.

Let's go to an example.  There's a system I use that requires me to change passwords every 6 months.  Fair enough.  You can't reuse any of your last three passwords.  Okay.  The idea, then, is that you use one password for 6 months, a second for 6 months, a third for six months, and a fourth for six months, so two years later (or 18 months, depending on how you do math) you can switch back to your original password.  If someone had stolen that original password, they'd have to wait a long time to use it, assuming you ever switched back to it.  If it's been a couple years, maybe you're 'over' that password.

But what if it's been six months, and you're not over your first password?  So you change it, because you're forced to.  Only you change it three or four times to random whatever passwords that you don't even keep in your short term memory longer than to immediately change it.  You cycle through your throwaway passwords until the queue of previously used passwords is cleared, at which time you can set it back to your original password.

Stop and think about that for a second.  Without a minimum password age, which requires you to wait an hour, a day, two weeks, a month, or whatever you set it to, you can quickly cycle through 3, 5, or even 10 passwords to clear your preferred password from the queue in a matter of minutes.

Requiring a minimum password age of 1 month, with 5 previous passwords saved, means the quickest you could get back to your old standby would be 5 months.  If you've gone 5 months, chances are by then  you're over the old password.  Someone would have to have a pretty sustained interest in getting their old password back quickly to wait that long.

So if you're in the camp that a good password is a good password and need not be changed unless something has happened, and there's no minimum password age, you can rotate quickly through enough passwords to clear the list and go back to your original one.  On the other hand, if you're managing the system and setting password policies, if you decide you want users to have to change their password (and that's a big IF for another day), only let them change it once every so often with a minimum password age.

Legislative Goals

You've probably seen the pseudo-meme floating around Facebook and other places, saying something like this:

Legislators want teachers to be paid according to their effectiveness as evaluated by student test scores.
How about paying legislators according to their effectiveness - as evaluated by job creation and economic growth?

Being a teacher myself, although in higher ed rather than public ed so it doesn't work exactly the same way (yet), I understand the reticence of teachers to be evaluated on something they don't have complete control over.  Now, the argument could be made that teachers do have control over their classrooms and that they should be doing everything in their power to motivate their students to work.  If the students fail to progress, it is the teacher's fault.

I don't totally buy it.  I'm in the SMART goals camp.  For a true goal, you need something that is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based.  Specific means that you break up goals into appropriately sized pieces.  Measurable means you can objectively tell if you achieved it or not.  Attainable means it's possible to achieve.  Relevant means there's a purpose behind it.  Time-bound means at some point you need to be done, whether you finished it or not.

So whether we let teachers set their own goals or set their goals for them (since we do pay their salaries), their salaries should be tied to meeting goals, and their goals should be SMART, so they can be objectively measured.  That said, using student test scores fails the SMART test.  It is not attainable, because it relies on someone else to do something in order for teachers to meet their goals.  An individual student could have a goal to achieve a certain score, but if a teacher does not have direct control over achieving the passing score, it is not SMART for the teacher.  It's measurable, and students take the tests at the end of every year (time-based), so it fits some pieces.  You could argue relevance.  I'd have to know what test students are taking, but many tests are actually poor indicators of anything useful (or indicators that are particularly un-useful like the social efficiency curriculum theory), so they tend not to be relevant to the kinds of learning students should be doing, or to flip this back in the control of teachers, the types of learning teachers should be promoting.

So there are some problems with the teacher pay thing, but I have to admit that it's a false analogy to say that politician pay should be linked to job creation and economic growth, in spite of how poor a job I see them doing on that goal and as nice as it would be to hold them responsible.  I see the connection with teachers more directly, in that their job is teaching students, in spite of the problems I've already discussed.  The question, then, is whether it is job of legislators to create jobs and grow the economy.  I wonder if that's not giving them too much credit.

The government does create the environment in which businesses function.  But is it really their role to create jobs?  Isn't it also their job to create a safe environment for us?  So if crime goes down, that should count for something.  What about road construction and maintenance?  So do legislators get bonuses for building two more roads than the previous year?  They own the post office, so what if they didn't create more jobs but they do help the USPS reduce their costs?

One of the biggest problems is that you're going to get what you decide to measure and base performance on.  If we base teacher pay on students passing tests, we'll get teachers that reward students for passing tests.  If we reward legislators for job creation, we'll have legislators who encourage war, since war is one of few known job creators.  War is also conveniently a good excuse to take away our freedoms and make it appear we are more secure.

We must make sure we're asking for something we really want.  I'm not sure we want jobs created by legislatures.  We also don't want students who are good at taking tests.  Perhaps that is the point of the pseudo-meme.  There's just too much complexity that is lost behind the trite saying.

Congressional Term Limits

It's past time for a serious discussion of term limits in the U.S. Congress.  The current system of seniority holding so much power leads to situations like the one we have now, where they have abysmal approval ratings, yet the states keep sending back the same people.  The problem is that while no one likes what is going on, no one is willing to lose the power they believe they have through decades of seniority.

The problem is that the people don't have the power.  Again, they believe they do, but they don't.  Their congressional delegation has the power.  Each state sends back their own delegation and hopes that all the other states replace theirs with new people.

I was looking up something in the Constitution (something I think most of Congress hasn't spent much time doing recently), and I found something really eye-opening to me.  The U.S. Senate website has a copy of the Constitution on their webpage.  Great.  Thanks for that nice service.  Of course, they go so far as to interpret it for us.  Okay, so I know we're in murky waters when it comes to trusting their interpretation of the Constitution, especially since that responsibility falls in the lap of another one of the three branches.

Before even getting to the preamble, there is a short introduction.  It points out that the first three words, "We The People", stress the fact that the government is to serve its citizens.  Great so far.  And stop.

The supremacy of the people through their elected representatives is recognized in Article I, which creates a Congress consisting of a Senate and a House of Representatives. The positioning of Congress at the beginning of the Constitution reaffirms its status as the “First Branch” of the federal government.

I'm good where they say that government should serve the citizens and that the people hold supreme power, but that's not where they're going with it.  The Senate's claim is that not only is Congress the first branch of the government, but in effect, they are the people.  That is, our power is not inherent in that we are the citizens of the country but that our power is made manifest through Congress.  We are not supreme but rather supreme through our elected representatives.

I get that we are a republic and as such the statement they make is true from a certain point of view.  Our power, however, is supreme, in that we can replace those elected representatives.  The only problem is that we are tricked into not exercising that power by rules Congress puts in place to promote their own longevity.  So what we need to do now is push for a rule that limits longevity and promotes turnover and new ideas.

So where do we put the limit?

To figure out if there is a natural break, I grabbed a list of all current members of the House and Senate, all elected under an open market, if you will, with no term limits.  The average length of time current members of the Senate have been serving is 9.6 years, with a standard deviation of 9.8.  Given a normal distribution, two thirds of a population are within one standard deviation of the mean (0-18).  Since there is a hard cut-off at 0, one standard deviation below the mean, the percent actually drifts a little higher at the other end.  16% have actually been in office for longer than 18 years, more than one standard deviation.

Interestingly enough, the numbers are almost exactly the same in the House even though Representatives are elected every 2 years, while Senators are elected every 6 years.  The average tenure of current members of the House is 8.9 years, with a standard deviation of 9.5.  Likewise, 16% (71/435) have been in office for longer than 18 years, which is again, one standard deviation above the mean.

An interesting stat with members of the Senate is that almost exactly 50% of them served in the House before being elected to the Senate, so the numbers are actually even more skewed in the Senate if you include their full tenure in Congress.

While I'd be more tempted to place the limit at 12 years - 2 terms for Senators and 6 for Representatives, I'm actually okay with giving them 18, although if you let me think about it too much longer, I might talk myself back down to 12.  Only 16% really overstay their welcome all the way past 18 years, and those are more likely to be the extreme sociopaths.  If we cut it off at 12 years, we'd be skimming off the top 28% in both the House and Senate (still interesting how the percentages stay the same, 28 in the Senate and 122 in the House).  If the 18 years was a cumulative total between the House and Senate, that would perhaps make up for going with 18 instead of 12.  There would be a more steady churn from House to Senate and from Senate out to pasture (jobs with lobbying firms or a run for the presidency).

So where do we draw the line?

Color Differences

My mom has long wondered what my brother and I see, due to curiosity and potentially some latent guilt from passing along the color blind deficiency genes to us.  I don't feel bad about it, other than possibly knowing that I might not get the full effect of the fall colors in the canyon, but then again, I don't know what I'm missing.

I've written elsewhere about interesting conversations arising from my colorblindness, as well as the importance of colors and symbols.  Because I'm missing something, I notice things others often don't, like that in the board game Ticket to Ride, there are symbols along with each color to help distinguish the different lines.  They aren't just decorations to make the cards look pretty.  Go look real quick; I'll wait.

When I went to get tickets to Les Miserables, I had checked out what seats were available online and knew the row and seat numbers I wanted.  I went to the theater to buy the tickets instead of paying the online service fee, because we all know it's cheaper to perform a transaction with a real person than an automated system.  Of course, when I got there, those seats were no longer available.  The girl asked me what other seat I might like as she turned her screen to me.  The color scheme online to show which seats were or were not available was great - high contrast and easy to tell the difference.  Her screen looked all the same.  Every seat was the same color.  I just told her I couldn't tell from the colors which were available or not, and she had a look on her face that showed she obviously couldn't comprehend that someone couldn't tell the difference.  There was a little bit of a glare that may have contributed to making it difficult to tell.  I just had to ask for something close to the middle and trust her judgment.  Why the system at the theater used a different color scheme than the one online, I have no idea.  Better yet, put a big, high-contrast X in the middle of the ones that are not available or put them in a very light gray.

So for my mom, movie theater girl, and anyone else who has asked repeatedly what color I think everything in the room is, you can now see what I see.  Actually, I have two things for you.  The first is based on this graphic that was making the social media rounds recently on the differences in how women and men see colors, which I've included right here.

Then there's a spinoff on the differences in how dogs and developers see colors.  So I thought I'd take the men vs. women one and replace the generic guy on the right with me.  I only thought just now that as long as I was editing it, I should have actually put a picture of myself over there.  Oh well.  Pretend it's me, except that my shirt is blue, instead of the red one he is wearing.  I'm kidding; I know it's green.

So there you go.  Of course, just reading what I call the colors doesn't really mean you actually see the same thing.  Deep down inside you actually think I'm making it up.  Or that if you talk louder, you can get me to understand that you want me to squint and look harder and then I'll see the same thing you do.

Well, you're in luck, because there's a second way, where you can actually see the same thing, not just read what I say about what I see.  The Huffington Post was kind enough to put up some examples and link to the Colour Blind Simulator used to create the examples.  I assume it works, because the original and processed images I uploaded looked the same to me, and when my second grader said the colors of the two pictures were totally different, I made fun of him and said he needed to squint and look harder, and then he'd see they were the same.

Very Impressed

I was reading the paper and came across this article about a local travel agent being sentenced to prison for stealing money from clients.  He would charge their credit cards twice - once to pay for their trip and the second time to give himself a 100% tip that he used to pay off other debts and expenses he had.  A quick search turned up another article from a few months ago on the trial itself.  I'm not sure how I missed it the first time.  Perhaps it was the picture with the story the second time around that caught my eye.

Let me throw out there right away that I don't understand how someone wouldn't notice they paid for a Hawaii trip twice.  Maybe he figured if he only did it people who were rich enough and careless enough they wouldn't notice.  Perhaps he figured if he did it randomly and for the same amount as the original charge, he could play it off as a mistake if caught.  Maybe if people are making down payments and then several follow-up payments, they don't notice that too many smaller payments were made over a period of time.

Last summer, as part of my ongoing college courses series, I had written about the marketing class in my undergraduate program.  Although I remember who most of the instructors of my classes were, I haven't used their names in any of them, even when I've had nice things to say about them.  I had to go back and look at what I had written about my marketing class.  I actually hadn't remembered his name previously, but when I saw the picture and the name together in the paper, I knew he was the travel agent.

So how was my experience with him teaching my class compared to his double charged clients?  You can go back and read the original post, but let's say that my experience wasn't all that different.  Like his clients, I got what I paid for - they got a trip to Hawaii, and I got credit for taking a marketing class.  Somewhat similar to his clients, I lost something of equal value - in their cases, they paid twice for one trip, and in my case, I didn't actually get the marketing class that he was paid to teach us and that I got credit for.

The best piece of marketing he tried to get away with was his restitution offer that you can see in the first link above.  He offered to pay restitution of $100,000 that he had stashed somewhere and claimed that a mystery man was willing to lend him the remaining $30,000 on the condition that he not go to prison, since that would likely reduce his ability to make enough money to pay the mystery man back.

Oh.  Okay.  A mystery man doesn't want you to go to prison, and if you do end up in prison, the people who you stole the money from won't get restitution.  That's pretty clever.  It doesn't even matter whether or not the mystery man is real.  I wonder if it was the marketer or the lawyer who thought up that trick.

The judge's comment was an instant classic, "the parole board will be very impressed if restitution is paid."

Famous Deaths 2012

Everyone is in such a hurry to talk about the best/most/biggest/worst/etc. of the year that lists start coming out as early as November.  I think we should save those lists until January, so anything that happens in the end of December will still count.  I still remember hearing on the radio on Christmas day that Billy Martin died in a car accident, over 20 years ago, but how unfair is that to leave him off a list because it's near the end of the year?  I had my list ready a week ago, and sure enough, Norman Schwarzkopf died, and he shouldn't have been left off the list.

A few of these are pretty obvious, but some might need some explanation.  I left off some famous deaths because I didn't have much of a connection to them, like Harry Carey - he was in two great movies, Gremlins and Back to the Future, but I didn't really remember his characters even after looking them up.  When Polly Holliday, who played Mrs. Deagle, dies, she'll be in the list for sure.

The zombie actor is there, not so much because of his role specifically or anything about the movie itself, although it is the granddaddy of all zombie movies.  Actually, it is likely that we even have the zombie industry fascination that we do have because of the copyright status of this movie.  That is, it doesn't have one.  Before the U.S. adopted the Berne Convention, you had to claim copyright to be granted copyright.  A last minute change to the title of the film and someone forgetting to put a copyright notice on the new title screen meant it was public domain, open for remixing, sharing, and a multitude of other uses, which increased its popularity.

Trayvon Martin stuck out to me because of his complete lack of being famous, yet his tragic death, which is still being investigated is what made him famous.  I didn't know or care that much about Vidal Sassoon, other than growing up knowing it was a shampoo, and it wasn't until he died that I realized it was a person.  What's worse?  Being famous for dying or for being a shampoo?

Joe Paterno - Penn State coach
Ian Abercrombie - Seinfeld actor Mr. Pitt
Bill Hinzman - first zombie in Night of the Living Dead
Whitney Houston - singer
Gary Carter - catcher (Go Mets!)
Trayvon Martin - teenager
Davy Jones - the Monkees
Mike Wallace - news correspondent
Dick Clark - TV host
Junior Seau - football player
Adam Yauch - rapper Beastie Boys
George Lindsey - actor Andy Griffith
Maurice Sendak - author
Vidal Sassoon - hair stylist
Robin Gibb - singer Bee Gees
Ray Bradbury - sci fi author
Rodney King - LA riots
Andy Griffith - actor
Ernest Borgnine - actor
Stephen Covey - author
Sally Ride - astronaut
Mel Stuart - director Willy Wonka
Phyllis Diller - comedienne
Jerry Nelson - muppetteer
Neil Armstrong - astronaut
Michael Clarke Duncan - actor
Gary Collins - actor
Arlen Specter - politician
Zig Ziglar - author
Rick Majerus - coach
Jack Klugman - actor
Norman Schwarzkopf - general