 Although it’s disastrous for the environment, flying to a faraway place or different culture provides a great opportunity to hone your observational skills, and to open up your senses and perceptions and tune into your instincts. In familiar environments where ritual drives much of our conscious activity and the landscape is so familiar we hardly notice it, this is much harder to do.
My two days here in London so far have given me the chance to do this, with some remarkable results:
By the way, I want to thank the conference organizers, my blog readers who have dropped by or who I will be seeing later in my trip, andespecially David Gurteen, for their wonderful hospitality. Watercolour by Julie Zickefoose |
November 30, 2006
Strange Days in the UK
November 29, 2006
For the Love of a Dog
 Another of Patrick McDonnell’s Mutts strips Patricia McConnell’s book For the Love of a Dog is one part training manual and one part love story. It is a study of the behaviour of our companion animals and of ourselves, but mostly of our relationships with each other. Much of the early part of the book is about dogs’ body language and what it tells us about their emotional state. McConnell concentrates on four primal emotions: fear/anxiety, anger, joy and love. Here is a summary of the signs (the book has photos that illustrate them):
Just as we need to be observant of dogs’ body language, and careful to note the signs rather than projecting how we would feel (or think we would feel) in their circumstances, we also need to be aware of our own body language and how it is being interpreted by, and influencing the emotions of, our dogs. That means we should avoid wearing sunglasses or large hats that can conceal or misrepresent our feelings, approach dogs we don’t know as they do (from the side without making direct eye contact, walking loosely with mouth open and relaxed, breathing deeply and evenly, and cocking our head). We can be sure that, though we may be unobservant and inattentive of dogs’ body language, they are very attentive to ours. We also need to avoid gestures and words that mean nothing, or different things, to animals. Hugs, for example, are generally distressing to dogs, since they block view and constrain movement and hence are ambiguous in meaning to dogs. When our words say one thing but our tone of voice or body language conveys something else, the dog will respond to the latter, even when the words are those s/he has been trained to recognize. McConnell has no use for the show-’em-who’s-boss school of training that has recently come back into vogue. There is no substitute, she says, for positive reinforcement and gradual, patient repetition of lessons, not to the point of intellectually exhausting your dog. As I read this book, it occurred to me that everything McConnell says about how we signal to and relate wordlessly to our animal companions applies very much to how we relate to other humans as well. “Accurate, objective observation is a skill that requires practice, but it starts with asking your mind to focus on what you see, not on what you think it means”, she writes. This is precisely the instruction we are given in cultural (and customer) anthropology training, to learn to better appreciate and understand our fellow human beings. And she goes on to explain in Lakoffian terms how we can misinterpret our dogs by failing to get outside our own ‘frames of reference’, describing a woman who was convinced her dog’s misbehaviour was an attempt to ‘test’ her, when it was merely a reflection of the dog’s ignorance that that behaviour was not acceptable. The latter part of the book explores the four primal emotions. The chapters on fear explain the Darwinian advantage of shyness/fearfulness (shades of my last post) but note that shyness combined with other traits can lead to aggressiveness. Fear can be genetic, nurtured (deliberately or accidentally), or the result of trauma. Genetic shyness can be overcome with gentle, gradual, patient conditioning. McConnell explains how to do this in the context of dealing with separation anxiety and excessive barking when someone comes to the door. The chapter on anger/hatred presents an interesting hypothesis that fortunately doesn’t extend to humans: Competition as puppies for mother’s milk and attention teaches a tolerance for frustration, and puppies from a ‘litter of one’ tend to be intolerant of frustration and prone to outbursts of anger/hatred as they grow older unless they are carefully trained. A good test is to gently roll a relaxed puppy after play over on his/her back and hold him/her in that position for a short while — puppies that become very aggressive in this situation will likely be difficult to handle as they become full grown. Just like some people, some dogs need to learn anger management, and this requires considerable expertise (a series of progressive, positively-reinforced ’stay’ exercises for impulse control is explained in an appendix to the book to help with this). The danger here is that dogs will learn from the model we show them — if we show anger in our training and response to them, it will reinforce the acceptability of such behaviour, no matter what we do to discourage it. The chapter on joy/happiness lays out the conditions that make our dogs happy: fresh water and good food, of course, but also companionship, physical and mental exercise, consistency and clarity in our behaviour toward them, respect for their individuality, physical contact (at the right times, the right way in the right places), and a sense of security. Our happiness and theirs is mutually contagious and self-reinforcing, and, as with humans, sometimes the anticipation of happy events is as joyful as the event itself (which is why the ‘clicker’ employed just before a reward is given, works so well as a training tool). The final chapters deal with dogs’ capacity for love, jealousy, grief, self-awareness and problem-solving. Of all the personal stories in the book about McConnell’s beloved dogs, the one I found most moving (perhaps because it reminded me so much of my story and feelings about Chelsea) is one of the last. Here’s an extract: About a week before [Luke, suffering from debilitating kidney failure as a result of a lengthy tick-borne bacterial illness] died, I began to feel that my efforts were harassing rather than helping him. Accepting that I couldn’t save him, I switched to hospice rather than hospital care. I emptied my calendar and spent my last week with him, soaking up the touch of his nose, the smell of his fur, the pink of his tongue. I sat long hours with him in the sun up in the pasture, full of the bittersweet emotions that accompany love and grief. At the end, we slept together in a makeshift bed on the living room floor. That’s where the veterinarian and I helped him pass on, peacefully snuggling up against me, nothing but bones and a shockingly beautiful black-and-white coat.
After Luke died, I was dumbstruck with grief, stumbling through the next months in a haze. I felt as if I’d been hit by a train, as though I’d been physically as well as emotionally injured. None of my senses seemed to function as they had before. The colors of the earth were different, wrong somehow, although I couldn’t quite say how. I coped well enough, seeing clients, running my business, tending to my farm. But a day didn’t pass when I wasn’t heartsick and hurt and angry, and that I didn’t agonize over whether there was something I’d missed, something I could have done to save him. McConnell goes on to relate evidence of the immense grief experienced by Lassie, another of her dogs and Luke’s best friend, in the months after Luke’s passing, laying to rest any doubt that animals feel the same emotions, and in their own way at least as deeply, as humans. This is a book for anyone who wants to understand our animal companions better, either to solve behaviour ‘problems’ or just to begin to fathom our own species and its relationship with the natural world. In his books, Jeff Vail talks about how the world is better represented by connections than by the things connected, and McConnell’s book is mostly about our connections with dogs, and through them with nature, and our true selves. Read it and discover how much we can learn from, and feel mutually about, creatures who have no need for our strange and imprecise tool of language. |
November 28, 2006
En Route to London
I’m on my way to the UK, so no post today. I’ll be waxing philosophical from London tomorrow.
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November 27, 2006
Unfamiliarity Breeds Contempt
 Patrick McDonnell’s wonderful Mutts An op-ed in todayís NYT by Jonathan Safran Foer describes the challenges that pets, and their companions, face in a city like New York. In the greater Toronto area, the loathing for our animal companions has recently spiked sharply, largely due to the huge new immigrant population here, some of whom have grown up with an irrational fear of animals (they are used in some struggling nations to intimidate and extort money from the poor, and in others, because of superstitious religions, they are considered a cause of disease). The fear comes from exposure to the darkest side of our animal friends (a side brought out deliberately by despicable humans). The loathing comes from ignorance. As Foer puts it: In the course of our lives, we move from a warm and benevolent relationship with animals (learning responsibility through caring for our pets, stroking and confiding in them), to a cruel one (virtually all animals raised for meat in this country are factory farmed ó they spend their lives in confinement, dosed with antibiotics and other drugs).
How do you explain this? Is our kindness replaced with cruelty? I donít think so. I think in part itís because the older we get, the less exposure we have to animals. And nothing facilitates indifference or forgetfulness so much as distance. In this sense, dogs and cats have been very lucky: they are the only animals we are intimately exposed to daily. This is, of course, true of more than just the fear, hatred, cruelty and neglect we show animals. It is true of almost every creature, human and other, we fear, despise, and mistreat. We hate and fear ëterroristsí because we are not exposed to the plight that so many people in struggling nations live with every day, which seeds the desperation their actions manifests. The suicide bombers hate and fear us in return because they donít know us, donít know that weíre not just shallow, amoral, mindless consumers prepared to destroy the planet, and their home, to meet our arrogant and insatiable materialistic appetites. English-speaking and the French-speaking Canadians have never got along well, largely because most of us wonít or canít talk with each other, and donít see just how much they have in common. The old fear the young, and the young fear the old, because they have so little contact with each other. Except for those who have regular contact with them, we fear those who are physically and mentally disadvantaged, because we don’t know how to relate to them, don’t know what they’ll do. The poor hate and/or envy the rich, and the rich fear that the poor will steal from them, or worse. And we all fear nature — from the farmer paranoid about coyotes and poultry flu to the city-dweller paranoid about mosquito bites, bacteria and viruses. So we poison coyotes with agonizing strychnine, trap ‘vermin’ with torturous leg-hold traps, kill millions of factory-caged birds rather than adopt responsible, sustainable farming practices, and spray our homes and lawns with toxic chemicals that destroy ecosystems and poison every creature that comes near them, including ourselves. It is in our nature to fear and shun what we do not know. Discretion is the better part of valor, after all, and creatures who are cautious tend to outlive those who are rash in confronting the unknown. Our dislike of people who are different and unfamiliar has a second Darwinian advantage: It increases the genetic heterogeneity and physical separation of tribes and hence reduces the spread of communicable diseases. In the crowded modern global village, however, this Darwinian advantage becomes a disadvantage: Although we are in physical proximity with different cultures, we don’t mix with them and hence don’t know, distrust and often end up in conflict with them. Our economic and military reach vastly exceeds our cultural grasp, so we pass and exercise judgement on other cultures (often with the best of intentions, though sometimes not) without understanding what we are doing or the effect of our reckless presumption that everyone shares our goals, ideals and values. Our intolerance of those who are not like us makes us angry, hateful, violent, distrustful, paranoid, and ultimately numb and indifferent to the suffering of ‘others’. And as we lose touch with nature, and become disconnected from all life on Earth, we forget who we really are, and we destroy the natural world and all its creatures without knowing or caring what we are doing. This destruction of ‘otherness’, of heterogeneity, of difference, is a vicious cycle: Lack of diversity means we have less opportunity to meet and see and appreciate cultures, creatures and environments different from our own, so we become even more distrustful of them, and indifferent to them. The conservative dream of one single global culture, all of us indistinguishable from each other, and of one single species squeezing out all others’ rightto exist, is the world of the Borg — with zero diversity comes zero tolerance. The death of nature, and of culture. |
November 26, 2006
Sunday Open Thread — November 26, 2006
| I haven’t made much progress on the items I promised to write about last week, but I will get around to them.
What I’m thinking about this week: How politics is becoming less and less important, and more impotent to deal with matters that are really important. Our political systems are really incapable of dealing with complex issues, and I’m not sure they even want to — there is more political capital in ‘dumbing down’ issues to absurd, overly simple sound bites and slogans. Specifically, I don’t think the change in control of the US Congress will change anything, other than slowing the rate at which it is getting worse. The Democrats have neither the will nor the ability to start to grapple with global warming, nor to get the US quickly out of Iraq as the civil war deepens. The social and environmental issues that we need to address on a massive, coordinated scale will not be addressed by them, or any traditional political entity. In Canada the political situation continues to deteriorate: The right-wing Conservative minority government is prostituting itself to the Quebec separatists to get their continued support for its ideologically extreme platform. The separatists don’t care what wingnut policies the government imposes on Canada — their conditions for support are to enable them to successfully launch a new separatist initiative, so they won’t be bound by any of those policies anyway. The government is publicly reneging on Kyoto, undermining that feeble first step to dealing with global warming and holding Canada up to international public ridicule. It is supporting the expansion of Canada’s Afghanistan role from futile peacemaking to waging a devastating and unwinnable full-scale war with the Taliban and local warlords. And now it is proposing some Bushian social and economic policies, including tax cuts for the rich. One step forward, two steps back. If you wonder why I rarely write about politics any more, that’s why. It’s just a distraction, a diversion from matters that are really important, and from what the people, notgovernments, can and must do. What’s on your mind? |
Links for the Week – Saturday November 25, 2006
 This week’s lineup illustrates why the media need to do a better job of making what’s important interesting. Each of these items is, in my opinion, very important, but none of them gets any attention in the legacy media. The Real Meaning of Thanksgiving: This week’s New Yorker Online has four Thanksgiving-theme magazine covers (subscribers, like me, only get one of them in hard copy — excerpt above) and one comic strip by the inimitable Chris Ware. If you want to know why I listed ‘cartoons’ as one of the most effective means of adding meaning to information, go read Chris’ stuff. His work packs an enormous emotional punch, as I’ve reported before. Why Bush and Israel Won’t Tolerate a Nuclear Iran: Also in this week’s New Yorker is the latest salvo from Sy Hersh, describing why a cornered and hurt George Bush is even more dangerous than a ‘popular’ one. Key messages: Israel considers a nuclear Iran a threat to its existence even if that threat is never exercised — it will discourage Jews from living in Israel. And: Bush and his cabal see a nuclear Iran as a threat to its power and an affront to its US-dominated world order. Both will take whatever steps are necessary to prevent it happening, even if it requires rushed, covert, or possibly even illegal action. Madison Avenue, Making the World Dissatisfied with What’s Real and Possible: On YouTube, an explanation of how the beauty that you see in contemporary ads is entirely illusory, literally larger and better than real life. And an impossible standard for real people to live up to. Thanks to Rob Paterson for the link. When ‘Poor’ and ‘Sick’ are Synonyms: I’ve reported before on research that suggests that violence — in a country, region or city — is directly proportionate to the wealth disparity between rich and poor in that area. When everyone in poor, there is little violence (no one to be angry at, envious of, or steal from). Now a Canadian study says that this wealth disparity maps closely to a health disparity, even in communities where rich and poor supposedly share the same hospitals. If it’s this bad in Canada, imagine what it’s like incountries like the US with much higher disparity indices. The Father of Firefox Seeks to Bridge the Digital Divide: Blake Ross, one of the founders of Firefox, is creating a web-based meta-operating system that would allow users to navigate and manage their computer (all its content and applications) from a single ‘web page’. This is along the lines of what I proposed a year ago as the means to allow people who are intimidated or just too busy to learn to use and share stuff on a PC to do so. |
November 24, 2006
Communication Technologies — A Decision Tree for Users
 Part of my task in my current consulting assignment is to develop the client’s strategy for the use of e-learning and other communication tools. So I thought I’d update the decision tree I developed about three years ago. The result is shown above, and reflects the decision from the perspective of employees of larger organizations with a broad range of communication technologies at their disposal (or, in some cases, technologies that should be at their disposal). This assumes the organization has sufficient budget to invest in some commercial solutions, or to build their own. Some interesting observations about all this:
With a peer-to-peer, self-help, and self-management approach to use of communication technologies, you should be able to slash how much you spend on centralized training and support. Then you can get your support people doing what front-line people can’t — fixing the stuff that’s broken.
What are the reasons we use faulty judgement, and use the wrong technology for communications?
I won’t get into the debate about which particular product is best-of-breed for each type of technology tool — this is a highly personal matter, and probably depends on the organization, industry and people. But what is clear is that these technologies are getting better and cheaper at the same time, and there is a long-overdue trend to more simplicity and intuitiveness in some new tools. Unfortunately, many large organizations remain in the communication stone age, locked into expensive, centrally managed, unfriendly, sub-optimal legacy technologies. The change to decentralized, free, and open tools is justtoo frightening for many heavily-invested organizations to contemplate. |
November 23, 2006
Crash-Proofing Your PC
 We’ve all heard about the importance of backing up your PC regularly. But if you’ve ever had to restore a disparate set of week-old or month-old data onto a new computer, and reinstall all your software (and probably have to buy the big-ticket software again — productivity, antivirus, etc.) you know how difficult and messy it is, and how much time it wastes and anxiety it creates. Even if your hard drive is fine and it’s the shell, monitor, power supply etc. that goes, do you think you can just plug your hard drive into a new machine? Hah! Consumers’ Union consistently reports that PCs rank second only to lawn tractors in rate of major repair in the first three years of use. A crash of your PC is not just a risk — it’s a probability. The sad reality is that software and hardware changes so quickly that PCs become obsolete in three years and hence most consumers are unwilling to pay the premium for a machine that will survive longer than its useful life. So I’ve concluded that the only sensible crash-proofing program entails getting all your data and applications off your hard drive. Keep your data in cyberspace (use a flash drive for when you’re offline) and use apps that are web-based rather than residing on your machine. Then you don’t care when your PC crashes — you can just go to any other machine and resume working immediately. So how would this work? Let’s take a look at the major apps and types of data, and see how we might get most or all of this stuff into cyberspace and off our hard drives: Applications:
Data:
So we’re getting there — maybe a year away from liberating ourselves from carting around hardware and software and relying on it to store our critical data. Freedom! Can’t happen soon enough for me. Graphic: This spoof is all over cyberspace, and I have no idea where it originated. |
November 22, 2006
Hockey Salary Caps and Performance
| After a two week wait, Millennium Data Systems fixed my computer in two hours once they got the replacement part from HP. Thanks to Debbie at Millennium for persevering, and Stan Garfield at HP for expediting things at HP’s end. I’m back in business!
When I first started blogging I posted this chart showing 2003-04 season NHL team performance versus team salary, to show how spending more money (in hockey, anyway) doesn’t necessarily get you a better team. The difference between the top-performing teams and bottom-performing teams has modestly increased with the advent of salary caps. Since 2003-04 the game has become much faster, with more penalties for clutch-and-grab defence, so smaller, fitter players are doing much better; as a result the teams that have brought up small, fast players are dramatically outperforming those relying on older, bigger, slower players, and this, rather than salary, probably accounts for the widening performance gap between the best and the worst teams. The top-performing teams, as always, tend to have either exceptional goaltenders or great teamwork — unlike in other sports, balanced, spirited teams with no superstars tend to outperform. As in 2003-04, the six teams based in Canada are neither under- or over-performers; they tend to be performing modestly above average for modestly below-average salaries. Some would say that’s typical of all Canadians, except the reality is that both US- and Canada-based teams are made up of a mix of Canadian and European players, with a few Americans thrown in for good measure. What’s also interesting is there are individual salary minimums and caps of about $0.5M and $8.8M per year respectively (prior to caps, minimum salaries were only about $150k). So in the unreal world of the NHL, there is what amounts to a 100% tax on salaries greater than 18 times the ‘minimum wage’. If this rule were applied nationwide, maximum salary would be about $150/hour or $300,000/year. If we had a decent minimum wage of, say, $25/hour, the CEO could then earn $450/hour, or $900,000/year. Nice idea, but of course it will never happen. Despite the fact that most industries are indeed oligopolies like professional hockey, they would never allow themselves to be regulated the same way, even if the result was good for everyone. A lot of CEOs and other execs earning obscene salaries on the backs of those lower in the hierarchy would not be ‘motivated’ towork for a mere $900,000. That’s the sad world we live in. |
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November 21, 2006
Laptop repair update
The replacement part for my HP laptop is in, so there will be no post tomorrow. With luck, I’ll be back on Thursday, and things will be back to normal. Keep your fingers crossed! /-/ Dave
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