Increase the peace

Remember being 18? Hamid Floyd does, because he is 18. He made a film about the violence that saturates Philadelphia right now, and its impact on him and others.

Hamid’s film won second place in a contest, but that’s not why you should watch it. Watch it because it’s good. And because it’s a really gutsy, brave thing for a teenager to do, and because even if there were no more murders in Philadelphia this year, we would still already have had one for every single day of the year.

Stop the violence. Increase the peace.

Watch the film.

Vindicated by DNA, but a Lost Man on the Outside

The New York Times has a tragic piece about what it’s like to be imprisoned for 15 years and then be exonerated based on DNA evidence. The article is unsurprisingly depressing, but it serves as an important reminder for us to think deeply about how we treat and prosecute citizens suspected or accused of committing heinous crimes.

I took particular note of these two paragraphs:

After repeated questioning over two months, Mr. Deskovic confessed during a seven-hour interrogation and polygraph test, telling the police he had hit Ms. Correa with a Gatorade bottle and grabbed her around the throat. In the lawsuit, Mr. Deskovic contends that detectives fed him these details, and promised that if he confessed he would not go to prison but would receive psychiatric treatment.

“I was tired, confused, scared, hungry — I wanted to get out of there,” he recalled recently. “I told the police what they wanted to hear, but I never got to go home. They lied to me.”

Next time you go to a hotel…

…remember that the folks who pick up after you are making about $8/hour, working as fast as they can in a physically brutal and demanding job. And leave a tip.

I can’t say it any better than Dr. B:

Now that travel season is in full force, this news from Salon’s Broadsheet is especially relevant.

the Jewish Funds for Justice, the Progressive Jewish Alliance, and the Jewish Labor Committee [has] collaborated to launch the Travel Justly campaign. The effort is designed to call attention to — and perhaps even improve — the relatively crappy working conditions of many hotel housekeepers. Ninety percent of these workers are women.

You can support their campaign by reading and agreeing to a pledge that you will:

- avoid hotels where workers are on strike;

- support union hotels (the site, unfortunately, requires you to enter the name of a specific hotel in a specific town; it would be a lot nicer if you could just search by city, assuming a full list would be too long to effectively navigate).

- TIP YOUR MAID $2-$5/day*

- be considerate by putting trash in trash cans, leaving dirty towels on the counter or racks so the housekeeper doesn’t have to bend over to pick them up; and stripping your own bedsheets;

- leave complimentary comment cards if you are happy with your maid service;

- keep a copy of the pledge in your suicase to remind you of it when you travel.

After you sign the pledge, you can buy a luggage tag to remind you of the pledge, plus make your luggage identifiable. 75% of the cost of the tag is tax-deductible. And maybe, if you’re lucky, occasionally give you an opportunity to talk to other travelers about the campaign.

*I always try to tip $1-2, but I often forget, and apparently I’ve been being a cheapskate. I’ll do better in the future. I find a lot of people don’t know that you should tip the maid, and I’ll always remember the woman who cried and hugged Mr. B. because, after cleaning the rooms of Mr. B.’s entire class of Air Force Weapons School guys for an entire summer, he was apparently one of the very few people who tipped her–$100. For three months of maid service.

The Nerd Handbook

Excellent post over at Rands in Response about understanding the nerd mentality:

A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That’s the nerd working on his project in his head.

Guilty.

Your nerd has built an annoyingly efficient relevancy engine in his head. It’s the end of the day and you and your nerd are hanging out on the couch. The TV is off. There isn’t a computer anywhere nearby and you’re giving your nerd the daily debrief. “Spent an hour at the post office trying to ship that package to your mom, and then I went down to that bistro — you know — the one next the flower shop, and it’s closed. Can you believe that?”

And your nerd says, “Cool”.

Cool? What’s cool? The business closing? The package? How is any of it cool? None of it’s cool. Actually, all of it might be cool, but your nerd doesn’t believe any of what you’re saying is relevant. This is what he heard, “Spent an hour at the post office blah blah blah…”

You can be rightfully pissed off by this behavior — it’s simply rude — but seriously, I’m trying to help here. Your nerd’s insatiable quest for information and The High has tweaked his brain in an interesting way. For any given piece of incoming information, your nerd is making a lightning fast assessment: relevant or not relevant? Relevance means that the incoming information fits into the system of things your nerd currently cares about. Expect active involvement from your nerd when you trip the relevance flag. If you trip the irrelevance flag, look for verbal punctuation announcing his judgment of irrelevance. It’s the word your nerd says when he’s not listening and it’s always the same. My word is “Cool”, and when you hear “Cool”, I’m not listening.

No comment, other than to say my preferred response is “OK” rather than “cool.”

Well, color me naive

Doing the same thing all the time is boring. All my life, I’ve chosen jobs in part to ensure I’d have enough variety. But I never thought about the impact on pilots or doctors of the way their jobs have gotten routinized.

[T]here are many, many areas of life where routinization is imposed in order to lower cost and raise overall quality — and it often has a detrimental effect on the job satisfaction of the people performing the work.

Some examples: airlines moving from hub-and-spoke to shuttle models, so their flight crews now spend all day every day flying back and forth from Indianapolis to Chicago; hospitals insisting that one physician perform all of a certain type of procedure, in response to AMA findings linking quality to volumes; programmers forced to use frameworks and purchased third-party tools instead of writing everything from scratch.

Does all this stuff save money and improve the quality of outcomes? Absolutely. And it also takes even the most skilled individuals down a path of stultifying boredom and repetition.

(That’s jen in comments at 11D)

And of course, it’s not just people at the top of their professions — doing the same thing all the time is tiring for flight attendents and operating-room assistants, too.