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Stereotypes and Communication

vic — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 06:01:12 +0000

Genie had a nice exploration of stereotypes - especially gender stereotypes - which led off with what I assume to be a tongue-in-cheek assertion of "stereotypes are a real time-saver." That's true; stereotypes let us stay in our established boundaries with established norms and don't really demand too much in the way of cognition. Sort of a ready-made reputation that you can hang on people who seem to fit the pattern of what you've seen before. If nothing else, we're a pattern-matching species. The issues arise when pattern-matching is performed at the expense of rational, logical thinking. (see: confirmation bias) Gender-wise, I've seen it occur on both sides of the spectrum. Genie linked to an advice column that said what boiled down to "start men small when it comes to household chores. They're just not used to it." She even goes so far as to advise that you treat your husband like a smarter chimpanzee and "work up" to grocery shopping.

I wish I was kidding.

I assert that the majority of men do know a lot about doing chores but that their internal concepts of "how to do a chore" differ from their significant others'. This isn't a problem until you leap into a situation where a chore is already started - you don't know the progress of what's going on, or what's next - all you see is a basket of rumpled clothes by the washer. Wanting to show your wife how much you want to help out, you throw them in the washer, add detergent, and voilà: instant helpful husband! Had you asked your s/o "hey, is this laundry in the basket clean?" you still get brownie points and the laundry isn't done twice.

What it boils down to is active, persistent communication. When you come across a situation that you don't know about, ask! We're ostensibly a team, right?

I'm part of the world's greatest team sport - naval aviation - and we still sometimes struggle with communication. A large part of that is the need to consistently and reliably process large amounts of critical information in order to make a decision, which can and does result in stereotyping. Word gets around about the guy who shuts down under pressure or the gal who is a mess on the radios and that reputation is tough to shake. Even if you've worked extremely hard on that issue and now have it under control, the people you're flying with will operate on the assumption that you're just this close to reverting back to your earlier behavior. Part of this is due to the primacy effect - if you've got that habit, it's going to be exceedingly hard to shake and odds are good that you'll revert back to it once you stop actively flying and start autonomously flying, such as what happens under stress.

In the training command, we stress that every flight is a new chance for success and with few exceptions it is. A big emphasis is placed on letting students make mistakes and then learn from them - but the communication aspect is critical if the correct behavior is to be imparted. Just doing it once won't help near as much as doing it a few times - once immediately after the mistake, once on the ground while reviewing the overall flight, and then once again on their grade sheet.

Where does this leave us with gender and stereotypes? Communication between both parties has to be emphasized and practiced, over and over again. It won't be second nature until you're that old couple that knows each other inside and out, but it will help everything along.

(Also, I thought that NYT article was a pretty standard overview of a relatively new phenomenon with a rather incendiary headline.)

America…. refreshing!

vic — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 04:10:57 +0000

Buddy: i bought a navy guy and an air force guy a pitcher at a bar when i was in kansas for the holidays
i mistook one of them for a friend of mine, and said, hey man long time
and then it was awkward, and then they were like we're getting deployed, you should buy us a pitcher, so i did
support our troops woooooo

Me: hahahaha
$8 of freedom!

Buddy: six, actually, but still a solid five pint glasses of AMERICA

New theme

vic — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 17:36:12 +0000

Old theme was getting to be meh. Trying out this one for a while.

Rivers Cuomo, You are Weird.

vic — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:20:38 +0000

From facebook, of all places:

Since this is Facebook, and it started at Harvard, can anyone help with this quandry? We are trying to locate a female student that was in Rivers’ English 97 Sophomore Writing Tutorial with Professor Nancy Yousef in the Spring of 1997 at Harvard. If anyone remembers the women in this class (or if you were in the class with Rivers), please contact us immediately.

Password rules

vic — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 21:00:15 +0000

Today at work a website that a buddy frequently uses updated their password criteria and expired his old password. He had been trying to make a new password for about 45 minutes when I looked at the new critera...

Passwords must be changed every 60 days.
Passwords must be at least 15 characters long.
Passwords can only be changed once in a 24-hour period.
Passwords cannot contain English words of 3 or more letters.
Passwords cannot have consecutive identical characters.
New passwords must differ from the previous password by at least 4 characters.
Spaces are not allowed at the end of a password.
Passwords must have at least the following:
- Two or more upper case letters
- Two or more lower case letters
- Two or more numeric digits
- Two or more special characters.

This makes passwords almost impossible to memorize - especially the English word of 3 or more characters part. Awesome!

I feel you, Fafblog.

vic — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 01:56:34 +0000

Monthly is a bad posting schedule for a blog.

CMSs and Usability

vic — Fri, 30 May 2008 05:29:10 +0000

My first blogging experience was on blogger.com in 2000, where I recounted the experiences of that summer. It was pretty easy to use and wrote to a remote site on a server that I had. After that blog fell into disuse, I wrote on a collaborative blog that used WordPress 1.3 and the b2 theme, hosted on a different server, but still one that I owned. We settled on it because it was pretty easy to install and we could see what was going on under the hood, making it easy to muck about with the layout. After a year or so, we upgraded to WP 2.0 in order to use newer and shinier layouts. This proved to be a disaster, with the end result being an 8 hour session to manually move the content from the old database structure to the new one. When that blog went by the wayside, I focused more on my community of friends that use LiveJournal and moved away from blogs that I had to host myself. After an unfortunate blogging incident, I set all of my entries to friends-only. This is all well and good, but part of the genius of the web is the ease with which ideas are shared amongst people - to include total strangers. So when I saw that "erudity.net" was available, I snatched it up with the intent of getting back to my roots, blogging-wise.

I started by installing Textpattern onto a TextDrive account. You'd think that this would be easy, right? Dean Allen explicitly made the service so that people could use TextPattern as their CMS. Of course, in their transition from self-financed to being owned (pwnd?) by Joyent, a good many things seem to have gone awry. After a bit of wrangling, I got TextPattern up and running with the default template - hooray! Now let's get it looking pretty. And don't get me wrong, there are a lot of really pretty TextPattern templates out there. Which all take a BS in Comp Sci to install. In this day and age there is no reason to have to manually add, edit and delete pages in a CMS setup in order to get a template to work - that's not a template, that's a set of directions for customizing your website. If I wanted to do that, I would have just started from scratch. (Which, incidentally, is exactly what my friend who runs TextPattern recommended.)

So POOF to TextPattern. Call me when you get a usable system for managing design and layout, to say nothing of plugins. I'm now running WordPress again, which is VASTLY improved since I last used it. Now all I have to do is get the dumb "powered by black minimalism" watermark off the top of the layout and I'm set.