A new study finds that people significantly overestimate the ability of themselves and others to accurately understand the intended tone of online text communications:

Those who sent the messages predicted that nearly 80 percent of the time their partners would correctly interpret the tone. In fact the recipients got it right just over 50 percent of the time.
“People often think the tone or emotion in their messages is obvious because they ‘hear’ the tone they intend in their head as they write,” Epley explains.
At the same time, those reading messages unconsciously interpret them based on their current mood, stereotypes and expectations. Despite this, the research subjects thought they accurately interpreted the messages nine out of 10 times.
The reason for this is egocentrism, or the difficulty some people have detaching themselves from their own perspective, says Epley. In other words, people aren’t that good at imagining how a message might be understood from another person’s perspective.

This is a good case for the value of adding emoticons to your online communications, though such usage is often frowned upon for more formal communication. Maybe our younger Internet-savvy cohorts figured this out already.

I really dislike Valentine’s Day. I don’t mind telling or showing my loved ones how much they mean to me, but Valentine’s Day just seems like a totally artificial holiday. I’m anti-consumerist (to some small degree) and just generally passive aggressive. I don’t like anyone telling me that I must show my love on this day, and that I really ought to do so by buying specific (overpriced) items.
This morning, a well-meaning elderly lady was coming out of the coffee shop as I was going in. She asked me, out of the blue, “Have you gotten a Valentine’s Day gift yet for your wife? You’d better get on it. You should have seen all the men at the grocery store across the street.” It took a lot of restraint not to tell her to go to hell. I know she was just trying to be nice, but she really rubbed me the wrong way.

I’ve been thinking more about the New Yorker article about banning aggressive dog breeds that I blogged about yesterday. Gladwell concludes the article by listing the series of steps that government officials could have taken–or arguably should have–to prevent the one dog attack that he profiles.
But even if authorities were prepared to take such measures, it would not prevent many dog attacks. The main problem, I believe (and Gladwell says this to some extent), is people who think of themselves as bad-ass and who have dogs whom they view as extensions of this projected personality. Identifying such people and somehow preventing their dogs from hurting others would be a thorny, and probably impossible, sociological task.
To generalize, it seems to me that flagrant disregard for the well-being of others is an integral part of this tough-guy persona, and, as Gladwell mentions, such people often have a history of violence. Since we, as a society, don’t have a problem with limiting the rights and behaviors of convicted criminals (e.g., convicted felons can’t vote), then maybe it would be effective just to not allow people who have been covicted of violent crimes from dog ownership. But even that doesn’t seem like a very targeted means of avoiding dog attacks, which are actually a relatively uncommon problem. Just thinking out loud here.

This article makes me ill. Some excerpts:

A former high-school biology teacher, Ham travels the nation training children as young as 5 to challenge science orthodoxy. He doesn’t engage in the political and legal fights that have erupted over the teaching of evolution. His strategy is more subtle: He aims to give people who trust the biblical account of creation the confidence to defend their views — aggressively.
He urges students to offer creationist critiques of their textbooks, parents to take on science museum docents, professionals to raise the subject with colleagues. If Ham has done his job well, his acolytes will ask enough pointed questions — and set forth enough persuasive arguments — to shake the doctrine of Darwin.
“We’re going to arm you with Christian Patriot missiles,” Ham, 54, recently told the 1,200 adults gathered at Calvary Temple here in northern New Jersey. It was a Friday night, the kickoff of a heavily advertised weekend conference sponsored by Ham’s ministry, Answers in Genesis.

In two 90-minute workshops for children, Ham adopted a much lighter tone, mocking scientists who think birds evolved from dinosaurs (“if that were true, I’d be worried about my Thanksgiving turkey!”).
In a bit that brought the house down, Ham flashed a picture of a chimpanzee. “Did your grandfather look like this?” he demanded.
“Noooooo!” the children called.
“And did your grandmother look like that?” Ham displayed a photo of the same chimp wearing lipstick. The children erupted in giggles. “Noooooo!”
“We are not just an animal,” Ham said. He had the children repeat that, their small voices rising in unison: “We are not just an animal. We are made in the image of God.”

Can’t we be animals and made in the image of God?

It’s easy to make jokes about Vice-president Dick Cheney’s accidentally shooting a fellow hunter last weekend. But as much as I’m tempted, I’m reluctant to join the merry-making.
I grew up in the Texas Hill Country, surrounded by ranches. Pretty much all ranchers there supplement their income by leasing their property out to deer hunters. I knew not to go on or near ranch property during deer season, and I know that the ranchers themselves are worried about the risk of being shot while working on their ranches. They mitigate these risks by trying to lease to the same people year after year and by stipulating that only the agreed upon people can hunt on the lease, minimizing the possibility of their hunters bringing less informed friends out for the weekend. Many ranchers also make it a point to wear fluorescent colors when they’re out taking care of their livestock during deer season.
Depsite all of these precautions, when I was in middle school or so, my best friend Reginald’s uncle was shot and killed by the hunters on his ranch while he was out tending his cattle.

In a recent New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell examines the recent trend of local governments out lawing pit bull-like dogs (see here, for instance). Gladwell makes a case that the fundamental problem isn’t with specific dog breeds, but with the type of people who want to own bad-ass dogs; pit bulls are just the current popular breed for such people.
The problem for governments, Gladwell points out, is that it’s easier to make laws based on generalizations about dog breeds than it is based on generalizations about people. In regard to a recent pit bull attack, Gladwell concludes:

It was a textbook dog-biting case: unneutered, ill-trained, charged-up dogs, with a history of aggression and an irresponsible owner, somehow get loose, and set upon a small child. The dogs had already passed through the animal bureaucracy of Ottawa, and the city could easily have prevented the second attack with the right kind of generalization—a generalization based not on breed but on the known and meaningful connection between dangerous dogs and negligent owners. But that would have required someone to track down Shridev Café, and check to see whether he had bought muzzles, and someone to send the dogs to be neutered after the first attack, and an animal-control law that insured that those whose dogs attack small children forfeit their right to have a dog. It would have required, that is, a more exacting set of generalizations to be more exactingly applied. It’s always easier just to ban the breed.

My hero Jimmy Carter took some swipes at President Bush at the funeral of Coretta Scott King:

In an apparent swipe at the domestic eavesdropping programme authorised by Mr Bush as part of the war against terror, Mr Carter recalled how Mrs King and her husband had been the targets of secret government wiretapping.
“It was difficult for them personally with the civil liberties of both husband and wife violated, and they became the targets of secret government wiretapping and other surveillance,” he said.
Mr Carter also referred to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as evidence that the struggle for civil rights was not complete. “We only have to recall the colour of the faces of those in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi who are most devastated by Katrina to know that there are not yet equal opportunities for all Americans,” he said.

There was some discussion over on MetaFilter about whether this was the appropriate forum for such criticisms, and I have to agree with those MeFites who think that these comments were not only appropriate but a tribute to what Mr. and Mrs. King stand for. For instance:

MLK and Coretta were all about telling the truth to power. MLK paid the ultimate price for doing so. I think Coretta would have been absolutely thrilled that Carter stood up and spoke strongly for civil rights at her funeral. Her entire life was devoted to criticizing the establishment and pushing it to do better. For this woman, in this time and place, what better possible way could there be to say goodbye?

I filled out a form on a web site this morning, and I noticed the date below:

It’s an awfully long time past the year 2000 for something like that to still be showing up.

Physicians tell the lessons they’ve learned from working in the ER. For instance:

Stay away from people named “Some Guy” or “This One Dude”, because they for whatever reason, just punch someone in the face or hit them with a crowbar and run off. If I see them on the street, I cross the street to get away from them.

Never, ever leave flashlights, shampoo bottles, beer bottles or any long, circular object on the floor because someday you will fall on it and it will somehow, work its way up your rectum.

If you have taken 7 home pregnancy tests that are all positive, and you come into the emergency department…chances are that test too will come back positive.

(via BoingBoing)

I did my graudate education in literary/cultural theory in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which means I was thoroughly immersed in deconstruction and post-structuralism: truth is relative, our thinking and reality are limited by language, human relations are all about power, etc. I was hit with Derrida in my first semester of grad school and the theories of Michel Foucault figured prominently in my dissertation.
Some would find it odd, then, that I became a Christian in the midst of this education, what with faith’s appeal to universal truth and the institutional nature of Christianity. I find deconstruction and post-structural theories interesting, useful and basically sound, but in retrospect, I think my embrace of faith represented an ultimate rejection of those theories. If you completely embrace those theories, the end result is hopelessness: we are each stuck in our own little reality–which itself might be an illusion–unable to genuinely communicate with others.
I guess I refused to go that far. I wanted and want to believe that there is some meaning to life. I’m not even sure that it’s God, but in a community of faith, I found a group of people who also want to believe that it’s possible to connect with others in a meaningful way (whatever that means).
Oh, I feel great ambivalence about the institutional nature of the church. And it’s damn hard to cut through all the crap that constitutes our daily lives to get to know others intimately, but at least the members of a faith community profess to believe it’s possible to do so. It’s that belief–that faith–that counts. And occasionally, I actually glimpse that connection.