Gender | Prop. that have experienced | Prop. that have witnessed |
---|---|---|
Cis-female | 0.28 | 0.38 |
Cis-male | 0.13 | 0.34 |
May 1, 2016
by sarcozona
0 comments
May 1, 2016
by sarcozona
0 comments
Gender | Prop. that have experienced | Prop. that have witnessed |
---|---|---|
Cis-female | 0.28 | 0.38 |
Cis-male | 0.13 | 0.34 |
April 15, 2016
by sarcozona
0 comments
My stomach and back hurt so much right now that I’m having a bit of trouble breathing. But not only am I standing at my desk writing code (and blog posts), I’m feeling cheerful about how well I feel.
Migraines have seriously skewed how I respond to and rank pain and disability.
I classify my migraines as mild, moderate, severe, or extreme. Lately, I’ve had almost no severe or extreme migraines. My doctors are more thrilled by the reduction in pain levels than I am and seem a bit confused when I keep pushing for frequency reduction. Sometimes I feel a bit like a whiner.
Here’s why I’m still whining: a mild migraine typically causes me to feel worse than this and limits my activities more even when there’s no pain at all. I think I need to clarify for my doctors what I mean by “mild.”
March 26, 2016
by sarcozona
0 comments
Chaco, Paraguay, 1986
A pampered and naive young Englishman finds himself thousands of miles from home on the windswept Pampas of South America. In the isolated village of Las Minas, he soon attracts the attention of the dangerous (and dangerously sexy) locals…
At night we stopped at a pulperia, or drinking-shop. During the evening, a great number of Gauchos came in to drink spirits and smoke cigars: their appearance is very striking; they are generally tall and handsome, but with a proud and dissolute expression of countenance. They frequently wear their moustaches and long black hair curling down their backs. With their brightly coloured garments, great spurs clanking about their heels, and knives stuck as daggers (and often so used) at their waists, they look a very different race of men from what might be expected from their name of Gauchos, or simple countrymen. Their politeness is excessive; they never drink their spirits without expecting you to taste it; but whilst making their exceedingly graceful bow, they seem quite as ready, if occasion offered, to cut your throat.
March 11, 2016
by sarcozona
0 comments
March 11, 2016
by sarcozona
0 comments
It’s not uncommon to come across artists bemoaning people pirating their work. I’ve written about this before, but I’m going to write about it again with some insights gained from living outside the US and with a disability.
First, here’s what independent film maker Jem Cohen has to say about media piracy in Astra Taylor’s The People’s Platform:
Jem Cohen was dismayed to find his recent film … on file-sharing sites before its official release. An implicit social contract has been broken, Cohen felt. “The message was, don’t bother to make this movie next time,” he told me. “If something that I’ve made is just plain not accessible, then I’m not going to hold it against somebody for making it available, ” he said, referring to movies that have fallen out of circulation. “But when I put out a documentary … and I put it out on an independent label, that’s just insane.”
If something hasn’t been released at all, I do think plastering it all over the internet for free is a problem. But release dates are funny things – I have a friend whose book is finished, but it won’t be “released” for a very long time because the publisher is timing it for a kind-of related holiday. Release dates for different formats are different: movies are “released” in theatres long before they’re released on DVD. DVD release dates, Blu-ray, digital release dates at high and low resolution, and rental release dates are all often different. Release dates on different digital platforms are different. Release dates are different in different countries.
The documentary Cohen is talking about – Building a Broken Mousetrap – is only available to buy as a physical object. Where I live, it’s only available as an expensive DVD import with a ship time of more than a month. I don’t know many people with a real DVD player. Most of the people I know can’t even play DVDs on their computers.
I could torrent the film in a high quality format right now, though.
Cohen complains about the film being pirated before it was released – but it was never released digitally. People who wanted the film digitally were never going to have the option to get it legally. Why should fans of his work have ever expected to be able to? Most of his films are available as physical objects only.
Many of his films are only available on DVD/Blu-ray and thru archives like the Video Data Bank. Here’s what buying from the VDB is like:
VDB offers very few titles as Individual Purchases. Individual Purchases come with no public performance or duplication rights, and may not be shown in any commercial, institutional, theatrical or educational settings. Prices typically range from $50 – $120, and titles are available only on DVD.
If an individual is interested in viewing certain works, we recommend that they make a request with an affiliated library, or make an appointment at VDB’s screening room.
You have to email them, ask special permission, and pay an exorbitant price for a DVD, which many people can’t play. Amazon sells a tiny fraction of his films, mostly through third party sellers, mostly for upwards of $30 with slow and expensive shipping.
There is nowhere legal I can buy and download any of Jem Cohen’s films on my computer today. If I could run iTunes on my Ubuntu-running laptop, I could rent or watch 2 of his 75 works on my computer. Those two films aren’t totally inaccessible to me since I do have an iPad, which is becoming slower and more unusable with every update. I could access one of those films as a dvd from my city or university library if I physically go to the library and dig out my old plug in optical drive.
Very few of Jem Cohen’s works are available to buy and most of those are not available digitally. Of his many, many works, there are only 3 I can realistically access and one of those only because of the people he complains about releasing Building a Broken Mousetrap.
When artists complain about media piracy, they often have absolutely no idea how inaccessible their work is. Here are reasons I might pirate something:
It sounds like I’m picking on Cohen in this post, but he’s not unique in his attitudes toward piracy and his ignorance of accessibility. I think he’s a good example here, though, because he and I actually agree on something pretty fundamental:
Sometimes we need to remind ourselves that the relationship between those who make creative work and those who receive it should be one of mutual support.
I call it the ‘double anchor.’ Each end holds up the other.
I am willing to pay for things. I want to support the artists I love. I spent $1000 on books alone last year and I’m a graduate student. You think I didn’t try to buy the things I pirated?
Your audience isn’t all in the US. Your audience doesn’t all want to use physical media and many can’t. Your audience isn’t all able-bodied. Your audience isn’t all wealthy. Your audience can’t or won’t all use DRM’ed media.
When artists complain about pirating but their work is hard to access legally and conveniently, I get pretty annoyed. Pay attention to when, where, and how your work is available if you want people to buy it.
March 6, 2016
by sarcozona
0 comments
Women asking me for help with a programming issue:
Hi! I really liked the X you made in R that you presented a few months ago. I’m trying to do something similar, but I’m having trouble with [specific aspect of X]. I was wondering if you could direct me to a few resources or help me later this week. I’ll buy the coffee!
Dudes asking me for help with a programming issue:
Need a favor! I know you make alphabets in R. Could you make me a Q or tell me how? Thanks!
February 27, 2016
by sarcozona
3 Comments
I think more science textbooks and classes should devote space to wrong ideas and stuff we don’t know. Like
Codons took forever to figure out after we got the structure of DNA down. Here are some coding schemes we thought might be real, but were total bullshit.
and
We figured out the genetic code, but we have no fucking clue of its origin, how it evolved.
I felt really overwhelmed in one of my math courses in university (ok, all of them). I felt like I’d barely begun to grasp one concept, let alone master it, before we were on to “the next logical step.” Then the professor mentioned that we’d covered 400 years of math history in two weeks, that every step we were learning took decades or even centuries to figure out, that brilliant mathematicians who’d gotten one step never found their way to the next. Suddenly, I felt both less ashamed at my struggles and more excited about learning what came next.
Many textbooks are a winning combination of condescending and boring. Information is often presented as an obvious set of conclusions, leaving the student to feel as if difficulty means they’re stupid. Learning something isn’t the same as discovering it, but acknowledging that the material isn’t obvious and was hard to figure out can make the struggle of learning rewarding and exciting instead of demoralizing.
Science textbooks do include some history to try to give students a feel for the process of science. Typically, this involves a box inset with the details of famous and successful experiments. The unsuccessful are ignored or mocked.
Including some of the mistaken ideas, dead ends, and unknowns as a good and normal part of science is a better idea than ignoring or mocking them. This doesn’t just make students feel more confident and open to learning, it teaches them about how scientists think and work – more than the successes do. Combining the unknowns with a sense of the long and complex process of figuring any of this stuff out can make students feel like they’re part of the process or can even contribute.UPDATE: Commenter eriastrum points out this interesting study showing that not only do scientists’ struggles help students learn, but the typical way scientists are presented actually lowers students’ performance.
Eriastrum eremicum. Credit: Stan Shebs [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or CC BY-SA 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons
At the end of a six-week grading period, students who learned about the scientists’ intellectual or personal struggles had significantly improved their science grades, with low-achievers benefiting the most. The students in the control group who only learned about the scientists’ achievements not only didn’t see a grade increase, they had lower grades than the previous grading period before the study began.