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Passing notes in Google Docs

As more and more laptops find their way into middle and high schools, educators are using Google Docs to do collaborative exercises and help students follow along with the lesson plan. The students, however, are using it to organize running conversations behind teachers’ backs.

Meh. Actually, as more and more teachers disallow phones and school IT administrators block access to Snapchat, Instagram, Tiktok, and other popular social media, students are leveraging the tools at their disposal to not pay attention.

And bonus: it includes ways to hide the conversation by making it look legit!

They’ll clone a teacher’s shared Google document, then chat in the comments, so it appears to the casual viewer that they’re just making notes on the lesson plan. If a teacher approaches to take a closer look, they can click the Resolve button, and the entire thread will disappear.

It kind of reminds me of how the US general was using a free email service to converse with his reporter mistress by composing emails that were not sent.

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Diaper math

white blue orange and yellow drawstring bag
Photo by Public Domain Pictures on Pexels.com

Pre-parent, I was aware of parents complaining about diapers. The complexity staggers the imagination.

Some brands work better than others, so one has to find the right balance of cost to failure rate. Get a bad model and one pays by having to get the poop out of clothes or even worse throwing away items.

Then there is the timing of switching the size. Each has a maximum weight limit, but I swear it seemed like when Fleur was close to the max size, there were more blowouts.

Comparison shopping even within a specific model is a pain because each store has different size boxes. So, you cannot just look at the price on the box. Instead, you have to try to calculate the cost per diaper to find the best deal.

To keep from going to brick and mortar stores, one might go online to get prices and do the math to save the amount of travel to just one store. One store’s website lists a 136, a 140, and a 144 count box of same brand, model, and size. $7 price difference between the largest box and the others which are the same price. Which comes out to about 4 cents per diaper difference.

The stores also know they overprice them and somehow when we need to buy again, they always have some kind of deal. The same store as above likes to offer a gift card if you purchase over a certain amount AT THE SAME TIME doing a multiple amounts off for buying them as a pickup.

So, the formula is: ([(list price – discount) x number boxes] – gift card) / (number of diapers per box x number of boxes)

Huggies, I think is trying to be as confusing as possible. They have three similar sounding models:

  • Snug & Dry
  • Little Snugglers
  • Little Movers

I think this is mainly due to the fact the size 3 hits all three models. Once we get to size 4, I think it goes back to just have to decide between a couple models again.

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Causation

fb_img_1552696891627Fleur has gleeful look when adults make weird sounds before doing something funny. Nose boops, tickles, and the like. She loves the stuff from people she likes. And doing it well, is a good way into her favorite people list.

Dopamine is thought of as the reward neurotransmitter. But, it is more complicated. It is what we get anticipating a reward. Say, you are playing a video game, dopamine surges to ensure you focus and persevere to achieve the level or match.

The noise right before tells her it is coming. Classical conditioning pairs a neutral stimulus with a desired one. The prior one is neutral the first time, but after she has paired it with the desired stimulus and anticipates the desired one. It seems like she enjoys the anticipation almost as much.

In getting mobile and manipulating objects, she is learning to use operant conditioning as well. She exerts her will on the world around her. This takes the form of doing the same thing over and over both using the same technique to confirm it works and adjusting to see what might work better. The other day she was trying to get into my tablet and tapping different spots to see how it reacted. You could see the Scientific Method in action: hypothesis, design test, execute test, evaluate result, new hypothesis.

Something I never thought about in university psychology classes was the impressive nature of linking things into causal chains. If this, then that. Over and over. Both forms of conditioning require understanding causation. The sponge that is Fleur’s brain seems to seek out understanding causation. And happiness to me is creating an environment for her try things and figure out how they work.

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Shaving

I let the beard get too long. So much so the child was terrorized by seeing me. She didn’t think I am her loving father.

The laughter probably didn’t help. Nor did the change of clothes.

I usually do not go so long between shaves. Guess I ought to go back to the more frequent schedule.

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Camera Spidey-sense

How do kids have such great awareness about the presence of a camera? Back in the old days, I noticed they would stop what they are doing and stop acting natural before the camera could finish booting up. You had to wait them out to get the photo.

Someone needs to put a kid in an fMRI and see.

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Storytelling as behavior modification

On how the Inuit control anger starting with young children.

Across the board, all the moms mention one golden rule: Don’t shout or yell at small children.

Traditional Inuit parenting is incredibly nurturing and tender. If you took all the parenting styles around the world and ranked them by their gentleness, the Inuit approach would likely rank near the top.

The culture views scolding — or even speaking to children in an angry voice — as inappropriate, says Lisa Ipeelie, a radio producer and mom who grew up with 12 siblings. “When they’re little, it doesn’t help to raise your voice,” she says. “It will just make your own heart rate go up.”

Traditionally, the Inuit saw yelling at a small child as demeaning. It’s as if the adult is having a tantrum; it’s basically stooping to the level of the child.

Where the article gets really interesting is the use of storytelling. They have oral stories passed down ever generations that are designed to shape behavior to prevent bad behavior. So, instead of raising your voice, you seed their imagination that they are going to suffer if they do the bad thing and softly remind them about this potentiality. Or perform satire of the bad behavior to make the perpetrator of it appear childish.

I also love how this ties into the traditions of storytelling. I view blogging as the modern equivalent: a medium of passing along information for the social group. Bloggers are modern griots. A tribe’s storyteller holds a prized position in the group, which is due, I think, to how our brains are wired to better understand information in the form of a story.

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Cousins

My cousins were geographically disparate. I had quite a few of them. They came to visit during Christmas or during the summer. We played together during these periods, often getting into trouble over our misdeeds. Or getting heated while playing video games. Being an only child for about half my childhood, my cousins were my “siblings.” They were who I thought of as family my age. In middle school, one family of cousins lived in town for a short while, which was amazeballs. (Yes, that is a technical term.) They came back to permanently stay in high school.

Researchers found that individuals responded they were far more likely to help kin, including cousins, before they would help out friends. This remained true even when the researchers controlled for emotional closeness, suggesting that even if there was not a close emotional bond with the family member. the likelihood of offering help was still high. They called this a “kinship premium.”

We get to choose our friends, but we are stuck with family. I consider myself lucky to have a good family. If anyone considers me intelligent, then I point to aunts and cousins and brother and parents who routinely destroy me at board games requiring advanced thinking. My ability to speak on any subject came from having to hold my own at after dinner conversations. (At some point it was more important to win a debate than win Mario Kart.)

My family is also pretty politically diverse, which helped see and understand different sides. And my practices of ingesting information came from wanting to hold my own in such discussions.

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Tiny dopplegangers

It took a while to get a good ultrasound of Fleur’s face. When we did, there was no denying she was my kid. That wave of emotion was interesting. It felt like a huge connection to this new entity. Of course, it is good she now looks more and more like her mother not just because why look so ugly but to maintain that bond with mom even as she gets more independent.

Apparently the father feeling like I did indicates good things for their children.

“We find a child’s health indicators improve when the child looks like the father. The main explanation is that frequent father visits allow for greater parental time for care-giving and supervision, and for information gathering about child health and economic needs.

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Momo

I mentioned the Momo Challenge to Galahad who scoffed at it. Rightly so.

Momo was perfectly tuned to set off alarms in the mind of any parent: There’s something online that you don’t know about, and it’s about to kill or traumatize your child. Just one problem: There’s little evidence to confirm that the Momo challenge is real. Although multiple deaths are often attributed to the challenge in warnings about it, none has been confirmed.

Several parent friends shared news stories about it. G correctly noted that it was back, which adults seemed to have missed. Attaching the concern about teens committing suicide elevated the danger that overwhelmed the downsides of failing to share it. Death is a cheap and easy button for parents.

In my day it was Satanism and heavy metal music. Parents were concerned about kids listening to the music would be seduced by Lucifer and thus kill themselves, I guess so that would go to Hell because you cannot go to Heaven if you do that. Anyway, it was easy to get parents to worry each other by sharing with others how bad it would be for the teens to participate in that stuff.

That watching Youtube is something kids are doing outside the view of parents helps with the worry. We don’t necessarily know everything that kids are watching. So, it is easy to be concerned that they are getting influenced like parents in my day were terrified of what we were listening to under our headphones.

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Kid jokes

I love reading about the incongruity of the kids of friends. Part of why I started this is in hopes of reporting on the best of Fleur’s. The Atlantic has a good article “Knock Knock. Who’s There? Kids. Kids Who? Kids Tell Terrible Jokes.“:

“Even when their parents are feeding them ‘dad jokes’ to try to teach them about humor, half of the jokes that kids hear, they don’t quite get.” So it’s only natural, Dubinsky says, for some children to believe that a couple of absurd or mismatched concepts assembled into a familiar “knock-knock” or “What do you call …” structure adds up to a joke.

“Kids say, ‘Oh, jokes are about incongruity. I’ll show you some incongruity,’” Dubinsky says. “But they haven’t got the sophistication to construct an incongruity that’s going to be resolvable.”

Which, coincidentally, sometimes results in jokes that resemble a more advanced form of humor: an “anti-joke.” Anti-jokes deliberately deny the audience a clever or satisfying punch line, and they often serve as edgy or sophisticated commentary on jokes themselves.

Poor Fleur will suffer from “dad jokes.” She already hears them. She just has no idea she is inundated with them. And I love me some incongruity. So much of my attention is analyzing rules from social behavior to code to business process rules. I am always interested in the how and why to tease out mismatches to learn from them. Maybe that is why I love “dad jokes” so much?