Posted by Peter Armstrong
Tue, 17 Oct 2006 10:45:00 GMT
About a month ago, Gregg Easterbrook speculated about a link between TV watching by young children and autism.
Now, my son Evan is two years old.
So, I did a bit of math:
probability Easterbrook is right * potential negative consequences for my son if he is = X
enjoyment Evan receives from TV + enjoyment Caroline receives from TV +
enjoyment I receive from TV = Y
Is X > Y?
Can I look in the mirror? Of course it is.
(I like looking in the mirror.)
The "potential negative consequences for my son" multiplier is SO HUGE that even if the probability Easterbrook is right is small (say 10%, hell, even .001%) it's no question.
(Note to math geeks: yes, I know this can be done as an expected value question.)
So, I cancelled cable, unplugged the TV, moved it into my office and covered it with a duvet. I blogged about it here.
That was 8 days ago.
Now, yesterday Gregg Easterbrook provided a link to a study showing empirical evidence of a correlation between TV and autism.
The only reason I might be able to sleep tonight (it's 4 AM so it's not looking good at the moment) is that I have already cancelled cable.
Of course, any damage that has been done has already been done.
And it was something I could have prevented.
Okay, maybe I don't like looking in the mirror very much right now.
"But it was just a bit of Baby Einstein. Oh, and Treehouse (a Canadian network with kids shows). "Max and Ruby" and "Mighty Machines" can't be too bad, can they? Oh, and Franklin. And Little Bear. And 'This is Daniel Cook'."
Oops.
[And at the end of a night of debugging, our intrepid blog writer heads off to Slashdot.]
Ooh, look, here we go kids: Correlation Doesn't Mean Causation.
Woo hoo, it's like Philosophy 100 without attractive classmates.
Oh, what the hell.
The following is a copy-paste-modify from my Slashdot post here:
In Canada we have warning labels on cigarette packs. Big warning labels. Cigarettes cause cancer, etc. So, naturally, some dollar store entrepreneur created fake warning labels.
Anyway, when I was a stereotypical angry young philosophy student, I thought it would be fun to make my own fake warning labels to put on my cigarette packs. I could surely come up with a better joke. So, who did I turn to? Hume, of course.
So, my cigarette packs had a big warning: "Correlation Does Not Imply Causation" on them. I thought it was a good joke, by philosophy joke standards anyway.
Now, I knew perfectly well that in this case even though it did not imply it, it was in fact true. Of course cigarettes caused cancer. In many cases correlation is, um, correlated with causation. But I was 18 so I didn't care; I thought it was funny.
What a joke.
So, the point is: correlation is a start. If there is a correlation, you should look for ways to establish whether causation exists or not.
Now, you cannot do perfect experiments on the effect of smoking on humans--you would have to start with a large random set of non-smokers, make a random half of them smoke their entire lives, and then in about 80 years check to see how many of the smokers died of cancer compared to how many of the non-smokers. It would be completely morally reprehensible (not to mention impossible: some of the non-smokers would start smoking and some of the smokers would quit). Not only would the ethics boards at the university not approve, it would take too long to run the study for it to help you to get tenure! ;-)
[Note for the sarcasm-impaired: of course I'm joking.]
So, do you just give up and say "thank you for smoking" or "well, we'll never prove anything according to David Hume then"?
No, you don't.
There are statistical tools like factor analysis which let people smarter than me figure out how much of A is (probably) caused by B, etc.
Anyway, since I am older, fatter and wiser, stuff I thought was funny at 18 is certainly not funny any more. I quit smoking over 5 years ago. I certainly wouldn't give my son a cigarette, ever.
However, if there is a strong correlation between TV and autism, I have to wonder whether I am in effect doing something similar.
What if further analysis proves (as much as you can scientifically prove anything regarding humans) that it is indeed a cause?
What would I have done???
[Yeah, yeah, I know that in the case of smoking and cancer there's a mountain of evidence, whereas in the case of TV and autism there is one study. It's obviously not a perfect analogy, but this is a blog post and I've been debugging way too long to care.]
"Correlation Does Not Imply Causation" does not mean act insanely. You have only ever seen gravity by correlation, but you still believe in it. (Yes you do. Wipe that smirk off your face.)
Do I think there is conclusive, Hume-would-be-proud proof that TV causes autism? No, not yet.
Do I think that TV is good for young children?
Would I give my 2 year old son a cigarette?
Posted in science, parenting, TV
Posted by Peter Armstrong
Mon, 09 Oct 2006 05:24:00 GMT
This wouldn't be a proper blog if I didn't go into long rambling tangent-filled posts with no real point at all. Let's fix that now.
It's been 9 days since I cancelled cable TV!
Caroline and I moved the TV from the living room to my office and covered it with a duvet (so that Evan, our 2 year old son, doesn't see it if he looks in my office). We moved a couch in front of where the TV used to be (sunk into an open cabinet built into the wall) and put an old headboard behind the couch, thus blocking off the hole where the TV used to be. The design goal here is safety not aesthetics: we don't want Evan climbing into the cabinet where the TV was. However, it has the bonus side effect of giving the impression (to a 2 year old anyway) that the TV is still behind it, just inaccessible.
The first two days Evan tried to look behind/beside/over the couch + headboard combination. No such luck.
By day #3 it had mostly faded from his memory, and now he doesn't even appear to think about it.
Now, when we come home from the beach or from shopping he goes for his trucks or trains and starts playing, instead of going for the TV and wanting to watch "Mighty Machines" or "Max and Ruby". (I'm not knocking either show: both are great shows for a 2 year old--no violence, etc.)
However, it's so easy (for me anyway, since I'm weak) to slide down the slippery slope from half an hour of TV per day allowed, to an hour, etc. Especially after a long day coding and there is dinner to help with and there is a very unhappy little person desperately signing his version of "again" and saying "ah-geh".
At this point, you learn the true meaning of guilt: not that you feel guilty about saying no, but that he is so wrapped up in it. You're not Daddy, you're the enemy for taking TV away.
"You're 2. You should be playing."
Now, I've never been a perfect parent, and I'm not kidding myself that I'm starting now. We have a portable DVD player which we have resorted to on a few occasions since cancelling cable. (Yes, we went and bought "Mighty Machines" and "Max and Ruby" DVDs, of course. I like to think of this as the TV equivalent of methadone.)
That said, it's been 9 days and probably about 5 hours of portable DVD player viewing. Some days none at all, other days 20 minutes, etc.
The great thing about the portable DVD player is the "out of sight, out of mind" aspect of it: The TV existing in the living room existed as a constant option--Evan would be playing happily and then suddenly stop playing and walk over to the TV and turn it on. So even if you put your Good Parent hat on and turn it off, you've gone from him having fun playing to a struggle of wills about TV.
This is much better. There are enough times when you simply must impose rules; having a TV just creates a whole other class of problems. Rules about watching it are the equivalent of hack workarounds--not a proper solution. Removing the TV just removed a whole class of problems in one shot.
TV had turned from a feature into a bug.
Talk about a refactoring!
Simplification.
Yikes, I've gone all 37signals.
Actually, yes and no.
I simplified a bit more, in fact: I also took my PS2 and my 8 games and took them to EB Games and turned them into a $110 gift card. I'm too busy to do the ebay thing with them. In some senses $110 is pretty bad considering what I spent to buy the games, but I realized that I hadn't played a PS2 game in about a year! The PS2 had turned into a DVD player--a really, really bad DVD player. (I remember a Japanese TV commercial I think I saw linked to a long time ago from GMSV where a guy in an office cafeteria is talking about Kill Bill and he's acting out a fight scene but freezing and restarting (the implication is that his DVD player he watched it on was freezing) etc. Anyway, the PS2 was like that, but worse--about a third of all DVDs I'd rent wouldn't make it all the way through without issues.)
But I then bought a proper DVD player. Luxury!
Furthermore, the gift card is going to get used for part of a Wii of course. Eventually. Who am I kidding--I'm sure I'll be preordering or I'll be there on launch day. However, Wii or no Wii, the TV will be staying in my office, covered with the duvet until after Evan goes to sleep. And if/when I get a Wii, it will be in my office too, covered with the duvet until Evan is asleep.
Having just gone down one slippery slope and back again, wii certainly don't want to go down another. Wii would have a big problem on our hands.
(There, I did it. Like everyone else on the planet, I gave in and made a bad pun about the Wii. Nintendo's marketing is absolutely brilliant--every hack writer in the world has hundreds of puns in them about the Wii, begging to come out. It gets to the point that you have to write an article just get it out of your system. Once you start talking or thinking about it, it's only a matter of time before it comes out. You can only hold it for so long. And I've just made another. Must. Stop. Now.)
Anyway, I hope this concludes my cycle of TV in my life:
- TV with No Cable
- Cable TV
- Digital Cable
- Digital Cable + HD
- Digital Cable + HD + HD PVR (worked well for about a month before having issues and getting returned)
- Digital Cable
- No TV
It's really a different feeling being in a living room with no TV in it. It's kind of like going to one of those resorts on Vancouver Island with no TV, phone, etc.--there is a sense of quiet and calm. You can sit and read a book or talk without getting turned into a channel-surfing slug.
That said, I do miss Fox Sports World report and especially the 1 hour highlight show of Premiership matches.
And worst of all, Chelsea plays Barcelona in less than two weeks. I'll need to find an alternate way of seeing that :-)
Posted by Peter Armstrong
Sat, 07 Oct 2006 19:00:00 GMT
In the (ruby) red corner, Dave Thomas. He:
- is an excellent writer of books
- wrote The Pragmatic Programmer (hooray!)
- wrote Programming Ruby (huzzah!)
- co-wrote Agile Web Development with Rails (hooray and huzzah!)
- co-authored the Agile Manifesto
In the blue corner, Steve Yegge. He:
- is an excellent writer of essays (his blog posts are essays, much like Paul Graham's)
- writes lots of pro-Ruby blog posts (hooray!)
- is an Emacs user (huzzah!)
- works at Google (ka-ching!)
- slammed "Agile Development" in this and this blog post
The funny thing is that if you actually read the Agile Manifesto it does not read like Egomania Itself.
In fact, I suspect that Steve Yegge probably agrees with the following four tenets of the Agile Manifesto:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
They sound a lot like how Google works, according to Steve Yegge's description of it. (I have no knowledge of how Google actually works.)
I like to think of what happened to Agile Development as kind of a microcosm of what happens elsewhere.
You start with four truths:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
Most talented software developers in a business setting will look at these and either agree with these outright or at least see where the authors were coming from.
Then, you move on to some principles, which are still pretty good. Here are some of my favorites:
Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they need,
and trust them to get the job done.
...
Working software is the primary measure of progress.
...
Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount
of work not done--is essential.
...
The best architectures, requirements, and designs
emerge from self-organizing teams.
At this point, most of the value has been created.
If you were an intelligent software development manager and you read--and thought deeply about--the ideas on those two web pages (and nothing else that the Agile community produced), you would probably become a better software development manager.
However, no money has been made yet!
And so, human nature comes into play. You can't just take the message, you need a medium to sell it to you. Repeatedly.
And when this is applied to software development, hilarity ensues.
So, since all you need to create your own software development methodology is a blog or a PDF-only book, I'll do it too! I have a blog (obviously), so here we go:
Pragmagile Development
Pragmagile Development will be the subset of Agile Development that I could imagine both Dave Thomas and Steve Yegge (and the cool 37signals kids for that matter) agreeing on. (I'm sure it would appeal to Dave Thomas since Pragmagile derives from Pragmatic as well as Agile :-)
There will be no original ideas in it, which means that it's totally in keeping with the Zeitgeist of Web 2.0.
I've created a Brand New Software Development Methodology and I still haven't eaten lunch yet!
Time to go fix that, and also buy a Dyson vacuum at Costco. (It sucks more than most software development projects!)
Ah, the Saturday Routine of the Domesticated Suburban Father.
Update 2006-10-23: I've revised this post to be a tiny bit more measured in tone. Also, the Dyson vacuum is the greatest appliance ever created. If only most software development practices worked as well as it does instead of sucked as much as it does...
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Posted by Peter Armstrong
Sun, 10 Sep 2006 02:28:00 GMT
Get it at http://www.flexiblerails.com.
I can't believe it's taken so long, but I also can't believe that the alpha version is actually for sale today...
Hooray for Lulu for taking all the pain out of selling something. Their taking a 20% cut is nothing compared to having to figure out how to change GST / VAT / etc.
Time to celebrate!
Posted by Peter Armstrong
Sun, 11 Jun 2006 00:38:00 GMT
This is an expanded version of a comment I posted on Robby Russel's blog.
Once upon a time I had major back and wrist pain. The back pain was because I was rear-ended in an auto accident; the wrist pain was because I was spending way too much time at the keyboard.
While a chiropractor helped my back to a large extent, fixing my wrist pain was done entirely by switching to Dvorak layout, a better keyboard and a keyboard arm that offered a negative slope.
Legal: This is NOT medical advice; this is just my experience in case it is helpful to anyone...
Dvorak Layout
Lots of people argue about whether you can type faster or slower with Dvorak. My answer is: WHO CARES!? If you want to type faster, don't switch to Dvorak: the slight speedup you may get is not worth it. You may type faster, but your standard keyboard shortcuts won't be in the same spot. (Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V won't be beside each other, etc.) If you're a gamer, even a casual gamer, you'll end up switching back to QWERTY for games. (This is what I do to play Civ 4.) So, if all you care about is typing speed, stick with QWERTY. (Note: on Mac and Windows, it's a 1-second thing to switch between Dvorak and QWERTY. On Mac you use the international thing, on Windows you use the language bar.)
However, if you have RSI in your wrists or just pain in your hands, you should (imho, I'm not a doctor) seriously give Dvorak layout a try. Switching to Dvorak from QWERTY is the single best thing I did to cure my RSI. The fact that all the vowels are on one side means your hands take turns typing a lot more. Furthermore, the fact that the most commonly typed keys are on the home row mean you move your hands less. I know I type aoeuidhtns [Dvorak] WAAAAY more than I type asdfghjkl; [QWERTY]. With Dvorak, you can type the without moving your hands--your fingers are sitting on t,h and e in their home position. Seriously, take 2 weeks when you don't have life-or-death deadlines and try Dvorak.
To learn Dvorak, I used the following tutorial. I highly recommend it.
Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000.
I used to be a big advocate of the Kinesis contoured keyboard. It works great with Dvorak layout: you can toggle between Dvorak and QWERTY with one key, and it also works great with Emacs since you can assign big keys to ctrl and escape. However, I found that extensive use of it led to really bad pain in my right thumb. This was probably my fault for lazy hand positioning, but it happened. As such, I had to look to somewhat less thumb-intensive (i.e. more normal) keyboards.
Currently, the best one on the market is the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. Their hardware is much better than their software!
It has a wonderful split layout, really nice wrist rest and works great on a Mac. Ironically, it is actually more configurable on a Mac than it is on Windows. On the Mac, you can remap the right application key so that you have two command keys and two option keys, one on each side. Finally, it has a nice detachable molded-plastic thing which gives you a negative slope if you’re stuck on a flat desk. A negative slope is essential for happy wrists.
(I have two of these keyboards, one on my Windows PC I use for work and one on my Mac I use for fun. It is such a good keyboard that I bought a second, since I couldn't stand to use any of the spare keyboards I had lying around after using it on my Windows PC, and I got tired of unhooking it and moving it twice a day.)
Humanscale keyboard arm.
This gives you a negative slope for your keyboard and mouse, as well as a nice mouse stand that you can pivot to exactly where you want.
Humanscale Freedom chair.
This puts the Aeron and Steelcase chairs to shame. If the Steelcase chair is a Linux box (good, highly configurable, etc.) this one is a Mac: it knows what's best for you and automatically adjusts accordingly. Get the headrest: it actually moves forward to meet your neck as you lean back. Pure seating bliss.
(Note: Humanscale now has a mesh chair called Liberty which I’ve never tried. Anyone try both for an extended period of time?)
Posted in ergonomics
