Are You Paying Attention?

Eric Barker's blog Barking up the wrong tree features an interesting little post, "Does doodling make you smarter?"

The conclusion of the study that Barker references--"Unlike many dual task situations, doodling while working can be beneficial"--is intriguing enough, but what really caught my attention is Barker's own subsequent commentary, especially this:

...Well, now I post this and play my trump card against every one of my elementary school teachers. (Have no illusions; just like all of you, I thrive on petty vengeance.)

Exactly! Not the petty vengeance paty--that goes without saying--but the elementary-school teachers part. (And junior-high teachers. And high school. Don't remember any of my college profs caring, however.) The assumption always seemed to be that doodling in the margins, which I do to this day, some 30 years after my college graduation, indicates a lack of attentiveness. I suppose it may do so, but my experience and observation incline me to think that it indicates greater attentiveness. A distraction it may be, but I think it's a way of distracting the hand while the mind focuses on the matter before it.

Likewise the closing of one's eyes.

We are taught from the earliest days that "paying attention" means "look at me." That makes sense in the case of a demonstration. But I have always found it easier to concentrate on a speaker if my eyes are closed. Unless I'm taking notes. In which case the results can be disastrous.

But in our society, to listen with eyes closed is somehow considered rude. It makes no more sense to think that my closed eyes mean I am not paying sufficient attention than to think that my fixed stare means I'm hanging on every syllable. And yet society seems to think that the latter is inarguably true.

Nor is it logical to assume that my closed eyes mean that I am asleep...although I must confess to having sat through any number of sermons, homilies, and presentations where that outcome could easily have occurred. Why my desire to shut out extraneous distractions (look at that bird on the window sill! I wonder how long that pencil has been embedded in that ceiling tile. It's annoying how that fluorescent tube keeps flickering) should be interpreted as an insult instead of a compliment is beyond me.

That said, I must weigh in with my belief that to engage oneself with a laptop or smartphone is not the same thing. Electronic devices distract the mind as well as the hand. I've taught enough classes with students hunched over their laptop computers--and, more to the point, graded their subsequent papers--to know they're not listening. Certainly they're not taking notes!

Oh, and that eyes closed thing? If snoring and/or drooling is involved, forget all that stuff I said above.

Playing God?

Here's a fun story from the Telegraph:

Russia plans to stop asteroid crashing to Earth

Russia wants to send a spacecraft to knock the large Apophis asteroid off a possible collision course with Earth.

The ambitious plan envisages the co-operation of Nasa, the European and Chinese space agencies to pull off a mission with echoes of a Hollywood blockbuster.

Anatoly Perminov, the head of Russia's space agency, said it would assess the difficulties of knocking the asteroid Apophis out of harm's way.

The 885-foot-wide asteroid was first discovered in 2004. Astronomers estimated the chances of it smashing into Earth in its first flyby in 2029 were as high as 1-in-37, but have since lowered their estimate.

The rest of it is here.

Now, setting aside for the moment the fact that I already saw this movie, I am left with the same question I have whenever I read about this sort of thing, viz., do we know for a fact that it would be a good idea to stop an 885-foot-wide asteroid from crashing into the Earth?

Sure, it sounds like the sort of thing we should take on. But here's the thing: My chums on the right-wingnut fringe of society keep insisting that stuff like stem-cell research, cloning, genetics research, unplugging a dead person's respirator, etc., etc., is wrong because it's "playing God." And they always say that as if it's a bad thing, playing God, although, I dunno, I can certainly think of worse examples to imitate.

But let's go along with the idea that "playing God" is a bad thing. And let's skip over my usual question, namely, "Don't we 'play God' much if not most of the time?"...like, say, every evening when I take my cholesterol medication without the slightest thought given to whether God wants my HDL to go down and my LDL to go up, or whatever's supposed to be happening. We'll leave all that for another day.

But back to the asteroid Apophis: How do we know that God hasn't sent it hurtling toward Mother Earth because that's how he plans to end the world? To my knowledge, most religions preach some kind of end-of-days scenario, however vague or specific they prefer to make it. Maybe Apophis is it!

Maybe this is supposed to happen!

And maybe our attempt to prevent it from happening is, well, "playing God." Which, we previously agreed, is a bad thing.

At this point you might say, "Well, you know, if God wants this to happen then it will happen. Nothing we can do to thwart God, after all."

To which I say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, there, buckaroo! How come you're not so sanguine about, say, genetics research? Or cloning? I mean, if God doesn't want us monkeying around with those things, either, then can we not safely assume that all the effort will simply come to naught and we have nothing to worry about?"

One might--might!--almost form the opinion that it's only "playing God" if it's something of which we disapprove. Otherwise it is both hunky and dory.

So, first thing we need to do is get Bruce Willis. He knows how to handle asteroids.

If All Else Fails

My work (in one of the facets of my, um, multifaceted existence) often requires me to send e-mail to this or that list of Usual Suspects. I believe the bizarre term for this is "burst" e-mail, which makes no sense to me: if it's gonna take me upwards of 20 minutes to get the silly thing in the air, how can it be "bursting"? But I digress.

I have noted, in undertaking the above, both a strange quirk of human nature (and if not strange, at least odd) and a glaring oversight in the version of Groupwise that my employer uses, to wit: Groupwise 6-point-whatever has no "reply to" feature; and no matter how many times I encourage my "burstees" to contact such-and-such source with questions or comments, they invariably hit the reply button and land back in my inbox.

Yes, I realize there are products and services on the market that will do burst e-mail for us, and someday we might come to that. But really, as things now stand, it would be a waste of money for us make a purchase for that sole purpose (we don't do enough, nor often enough). And it would deprive me of the perverse fun of replying to the Usual Suspect, "As indicated in the original message, you should contact X at Y for more information..."

Anyhow, wouldn't it make just as much sense for Groupwise to incorporate a reply-to feature? That would also solve the in-house problem I've encountered, viz., I forward a message to a co-worker, who then replies by, you know, hitting "reply"...which replies to me!

I've written to Novell to encourage them to add the feature to a future release; I wouldn't think it an impossibility, since the free e-mail client I use in real life, Thunderbird, has the feature and it works like a charm.

Of course, so too would reading the line in my e-mail that says If you have any questions, contact X--which usually includes a link and everything--but I once again fly in the face of human nature. Or human alliteracy.