I am speechlessly in agreement with this:
I’ve ranted about math education before. There’s something just so effective about his three-minute stated solution to the problem. I dig it. I never use calculus, but statistics? Easily on a weekly basis.
Instead of our students learning about the technique of calculus, I think it would be far more significant if all of them knew what “two standard deviations from the mean” means, and I mean it.
Via digg.
A little over a month ago, I was gifted with a light-duty trailer. It’s about 15 years old and I’ll use it to haul crap to the local recycling/refuse center, transport craigslist purchases, annoy the cats, etc. The only catch is that my vehicle for towing it is a 2002 Saturn SL sedan, but he’s scrappy, so I have high hopes. In Massachusetts, for light-duty trailers there’s no insurance premium, but you do have to register the trailer so that it has its own plates. Your insurance company gives you an RMV-1 form to bring to the ever-exciting Registry of Motor Vehicles, you pay some fees, get a plate, and you may commence hauling.
We switched insurers last year after Mass de-regulated it’s auto insurance. I was a Commerce customer via AAA for years, and put up with their piss-poor customer service for the 15% discount I was recieving. (It was *almost* an even trade.) My company offered a group discount for a couple of companies, and based on what I wanted to insure, my only option was Liberty Mutual. I hadn’t heard anything *bad* about them, but also nothing *good*. From the first call with our rep, I’ve been pleased, but not so over-the-top pleased that I felt I needed to say anything about it.
When people do what you perceive as their job, that’s not much to write home about. When they exceed those expectations, then it’s noteworthy.
I’ve been pretty busy the last month and haven’t had a chance to get the trailer hitch installed on my car. As a result, I never bothered to register the trailer after my visit to Liberty’s office. Today I received a call from the agent who assisted me saying they noticed I hadn’t registered it yet and that my RMV-1 form was about to expire.
Wow, that’s totally my own darn fault. Matt FAIL.
Then she said there was a new form in the mail and that it should arrive tomorrow.
Liberty Mutual WIN. +10 for making my life easier, guys. Thanks.
Not sure which is funnier: the comic, or the ridiculous banter on the dilbert.com website about how “software can’t be 100% bug free” and “it’s impossible to fix every bug”.
Oh shut up people! It’s a comic strip!
[/Monday]
I don’t care how good you are at programming, finding bugs, whatever. If you’re rude, or if you speak poorly to people who don’t understand your… quirks…. you will wind up being shunted to the side. No one wants to work with someone who makes them feel beat down all the time, or someone who they simply can’t understand, or someone whose reaction to every issue is to start wailing about the end of the world.
– Catherine Powell (Via SvN)
This is such a great concept to keep at the front of one’s mind. Everyone, from your customers to your co-workers, family and friends, deserve your *niceness*. Their concerns and questions are real. Your attitude can go a long way toward keeping the peace!
Her follow-up post defining What Really Is Nice? also hits home for me:
To me, being nice is really about attitude and phrasing more than it is about the basic underlying message. It’s about taking the information you have to convey and making sure you convey it in a way that is respectful … and considerate of your audience.
This is very important:
Hat tip to @brainopera.
It’s been a while since I had baffles to clear, but nonetheless:
* I almost kept this one, but I’ll toss it and come back if/when the inspiration’s there.
I completely forgot how easy it is to breeze through non-fiction books. There are no characters. No intertwining plot-lines. Just *facts* and *opinions* (read: numbers and bs). Were I keeping track, this book’s 4-5 hours sure offsets the dozens of hours I spent reading The Confusion over the past four months.
I set my expectations a bit high for this book, for some reason. The jacket text leads off with a flu epidemic example, and so I thought that there would be a decent amount of text devoted to pandemics (e.g. plague, influenza, etc.). Instead, a fleeting reference to the flu gave way to a syphilis outbreak in Baltimore. Not quite as interesting, but poorly-conceived expectations will do that to you. The book reminded me of Psychology 101 and my courses in human factors research. There wasn’t a whole lot of new, substantive information. However, the examples and case studies were mostly new to me, so they did their jobs. Gladwell presents Three Rules of Epidemics:
Each of these has a varying degree of no-brainer-ness to it. The first rule has to do with the type of person carrying information. Gladwell uses the example of why Paul Revere’s midnight ride was successful in contrast to the same ride through different Boston suburbs by William Dawes, which had almost no success. The second is about what hooks people, and though it wasn’t the author’s point, my conclusion is that “someone’s lucky guess” is what defines success by this factor. The final rule is basically the Fundamental Attribution Error in practice.
It’s one of the examples from the last rule, however, that made me think the most and therefore kept me from being completely negative in my assessment of the book. Gladwell points to a seminary experiment conducted by two Princeton University researchers. The experiment has a simple premise: Put seminarians in the position of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, and see how they’ll act based on their background and whether or not they were in a hurry. The conclusions support the FAE in that, regardless of background (and even if the seminarians were recently studying the parable of the Good Samaritan), the factor which determined how helpful they’d be to someone in distress was how late they felt.
This kills me. I mean, I understand *why* it happens that way. Humans are humans and no matter how hard we try to imitate Christ, we’re going to behave like humans a good majority of the time no matter how hard we try to be better than our nature. It still bothers me a little. I’d like to think that in that situation, I would be an exception and not the hypothesis-proving rule, but the truth is that I know I react poorly to time-pressure also. I would probably get a 2 or 3 on their helpfulness scale, thinking that my academic success was super important and that I could call 911 or tell someone else that the person needed help. I could rationalizing passing the buck. It’s humbling.
Anyway, I also have a sense of humor about it: The only possible conclusion to this post is this VeggieTales clip from Are You My Neighbor, from their take on the Parable of the Good Samaritan because it’s just that silly.
Last November, as an anniversary gift to ourselves, my wife and I got matching phones: the Samsung SCH-i760. We went whole-hog with unlimited bandwidth and SMS, synchronized email accounts, etc. I fully integrated mine with my company’s exchange server, notifying me of meetings and tasks, and pushing my email. It was excellent. I could check email anywhere, use Google Maps for directions, tweet, etc. It was great.
Then the mysterious, aging Windows installation syndrome crept in. The phone would randomly freeze, crash or restart, sometimes in the middle of a call. When composing a text message, the phone would jump into the dialing application and start dialing numbers. I would go from three bars’ of battery life to none in a few minutes. As an internet device, it performed fairly well. As a phone, it was flat out annoying. I installed the Windows Mobile 6.1 update to see if it would resolve any of the quirkiness to no avail. Then, after taking a hard look at our budget, we decided to nix the internet service. This saved about $100 a month, but left us with two phones we otherwise hate.
At the same time, we switched to a family plan to save a bit more money, but this had the undesired effect of canceling my wife’s NE2 subscription (since her line effectively costs $10 per month, and the minimum is $50). Verizon’s NE2 plan isn’t really every two years, it’s every twenty months, meaning I can get $100 towards a new phone next month.
Yay! But what to do? I want to go simple, but I also want a few key features:
Disclaimer: I would love an iPhone. I covet every single one I see. I can’t, however, rationalize the expense of $400 up front for two phones and $150+ each month for service. It’s not economically sound, and I don’t need one. I also don’t want to leave Verizon. Their service is more than adequate and so far, from a customer service perspective, I’ve been fairly happy. Our entire extended family is on the VZW network, and I have FIOS at home which puts all of my communication utilities on one bill.
Sadly, I don’t love any of their phones, but if I’m not going to jump ship I’ll have to suck it up. Thus, I’m down to five from the current lineup:
To make a final decision, I’m going to need to play with a few of these hands-on at either Best Buy or a Verizon store. I’m leaning toward the Trance, mostly because of the size and my non-smartphone experiences with Samsung have all been stellar. I had an LG a few phones ago and it was terrible, so that doesn’t bode well for the Chocolate. (I’m really only considering it for the FM transmitter.) The Dare, while shiny, is just too costly and I’d be making the same mistake that I did with my current phone: buying features I don’t really need. Some field experience is going to make the final decision.
