Researchers at the University of Florida are working on an  video game that attempts to educate pre-teen Latina girls on how to resist peer pressure to have sex. Players will don motion capture suits to interact with the characters on the screen to practice proper social responses. Now, forget for a moment that it’s abstinence education. Forget that it’s the result of a $434,000 government grant. What we have here is a group of adults who have completely misunderstood children and video games.

The most obvious flaw in this project is the graphics. How is this game supposed to engage anyone if we’re scraping the bottom of the uncanny valley with these character designs? It seems like the researchers believe that realism is the most important aspect of engaging people through video games. Most best selling video games often feature cartoon avatars, or at the very least highly stylized human avatars. There is an entire genre of school simulation games like the Persona series that are based on simpler technology and would be way more entertaining and effective than this awkward monstrosity.

The game also seems to treat decision making as if it were some kind of pavlovian response. There are way more factors going into a child’s decision to use drugs or have sex than remembering to “just say no”. No matter how realistic the graphics might be, it’s much harder to model factors like the involvement of a parent, the availability of birth control, or the feelings you’ll have to manage when it’s a childhood friend applying the peer pressure. If you can express those concepts, your game might become entertaining, but then it’ll run the risk of being accused of glorification. Some parents think that just learning about a bad behaviour in an engaging way constitutes glorification. It’s a risk that educators run into more often than they should.

Dealing with peer pressure is an important part of being a child. The more education you have about peer pressure, the better equipped you’ll be to make good choices. However, if we design that education based only on adult assumptions about children and concepts adults are comfortable with,  all you’ll be left with is a half million dollars worth of creepy CGI corpse-children.

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A screencap of an actual ad on facebook. I don’t know if you’ve heard about this BS in Religion, but apparently it’s pretty important.

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If the fallout surrounding the American Health Care bill was any indication, you’d think that the States were about to have another Civil War. Comment boards on CNN are aflame with rant’s about Obama’s “Nazi socialist baby-killer”. Angry Mobs are literally spitting in the faces of congressmen. Protesters are marching on Washington with assault rifles. Is the great American experiment over? Will I have to start running an underground railroad to Canada for my Seattle friends out of my apartment?

I doubt it. America couldn’t possibly have just doubled its amount of populist right-wing hatred in one week. Washington is in no danger of falling under a coup d’etat. If anything, the media coverage of the Tea Party protesters is only cementing the Democrat hold on the government.

Still, the discourse over this health bill seems to be dominated by a bunch of paranoid red-necks who believe that Universal Health care is the work of the devil. Why?

There is one thing that the Tea Party goers have figured out that more centrist Republicans haven’t. Everyone else is too worried if they have their facts right or if they are going offend anybody. People without such filters are going to be commenting on more blogs, posting videos, and speaking to more people about their cause. They’re not going to convert anybody, but they are going to rally anyone who is sitting on the fence. When all it takes is an email or a blog post to express your views these days, we should be less concerned with making sure our opinion is correct and more concerned with expressing it in the first place.

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First, a little bit of background. The Canadian Board of Health recently appointed Bernard Prigent, Medical Director of Pfizer Canada. This presents a potential conflict of interest because the last time a Pfizer executive was appointed to a Government advisory committee, their recommendations included reducing support for generic drugs and doing away with drug research committees like UBC’s Therapeutic Initiative.

A friend of mine sent the Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq a letter explaining that appointing Mr. Prigent would skew the boards decisions in favor of Pfizer’s stock price rather than the Canadian People. The Health Minister’s reply was a single page of a two page letter, stopping in mid-sentence. (Click to Enlarge)

I wonder if the good people of the Health ministry are aware of their position here. To them, this might be a small office mix-up, but in the age of viral social media, word gets around. This one letter alone is not enough to start a revolution, but it raises questions about how the Canadian government communicates with people. Even if you disregard the missing page, it carries that passive aggressive tone of “we appreciate your concern, but you’re just an anonymous screwball, so there.”

So if were not going to rise up against the corporate plutocracy, what are we to do? For now, we’ll just make a note of it, keep an eye on the situation, and spread the word. This is just one example of the government acting callous, but if we come up with more of these, then we’ll start to see something happen.

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I caught up with the passionate Eye on CBC Newsworld the other night. The feature for the evening was “How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin”, the story of the effect of the Beatles on Cold war-era Russia. The songs were first smuggled in by recording broadcasts from Radio Luxembourg using cannibalized X-ray prints as records. The bootlegs turned out to be one of the factors in inspiring the movements that eventually toppled the iron curtain.

This got me to thinking. There is now an entire generation of a civilization that owes their political freedom to piracy. The music and movies that they copied gave them the chance to dream of the better life that they now have. The oppressed peoples of the world may continue wrest control of their own destinies this way in Iran, Burma, Zimbabwe, and even North Korea. Russia and other former communist countries still have music industries despite this prevailing attitude against copyright. It looks like the battle to label piracy as theft may already be lost.

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I probably wasn’t the only one disgusted with the Canadian Minister of Industry Jim Prentice when he referred the to the problem of climate change as “hype”. A mountain of scientific evidence apparently doesn’t amount to a hill of beans when you’ve a bunch of Alberta energy companies breathing down your neck. I also love how he tries to pay lip service to investment in clean technologies. Does he expect the market to take on the uncharted territory renewable energy when they have a sure thing in the tar sands? It wasn’t the market that protected Canadian investments during this recession, and it’s not going to clean up the environment either.

Now I’m not saying I believe all of the “hype” of climate change either. The extinction of the human race? Highly unlikely. But famines, floods, droughts and the Earth looking like hell in general? Certainty. Already happening, in fact. If we don’t do something about it, very bad things are going to happen. And don’t even bring up that climategate or whatever the so-called “skeptics” are calling it. If you’ve worked on any form of geographic data, you understand that those scientists are not trying to falsify anything. Since those e-mails are also 10 years old, they likely have little to no bearing on the research that continues to this day.

But if we are steadfastly refusing to take the debate of climate change outside the realm of ad hominem attacks, consider this. Upon news of the leaked e-mails, the rest of the scientific community regarded it as a non-event, while Saudi Arabian Climate negotiator Mohammed Al-Sabban stated, “It appears from the details of the scandal that there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change.”

So on one side we have the representative of feudal military dictatorship that considers freedom of the press, women, and religion as an affront to God. On the other side, we have scientists whose job it is to provide us with the technology and foresight to keep our country from looking like said feudal military dictatorship. That’s easy math, if you ask me.

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I have a conundrum for you. Let’s say a certain Churubusco High School in Indiana is being sued by the ACLU. The school had banned two female students from all athletic and extra-curricular activities for one year for appearing in some photos where they were in lingerie, licking phallus-shaped lollipops. Dan Savage, a sex advice columnist whom I have read for many years, spent the intro of his November 10th podcast episode carpet f-bombing the whole situation. How dare they stifle these girls’ freedom of expression! Their bodies are theirs to post on MySpace where “only their friends can see them”. Here comes the conundrum. Why do I think that suing this school over this is a galactically stupid idea?

Now again, I wouldn’t be ranting about this unless I read Savage’s column, or listened to his podcast. They are entertaining and open up an important dialogue about our modern moral values. However, if he’s willing to beat up a principal over this, he has no idea how these situations work. The reason this suspension seems like an authoritarian beat-down is that the schools can’t talk to the media like the ACLU can. They can’t provide details of sweet jack all if it isn’t approved by their lawyers. Details like where they got the photos, what else the girls may be in trouble for, or complaints from other parents regarding these girls’ behavior.

Still, even though the photos were taken off of  school grounds, since they made it into school grounds, that turns it into something the school needs to deal with. It’s not going to matter that the photos were posted in a private area of Myspace (no pun intended) if the girls have several hundred friends. Even if the school did nothing about it, the photos would probably  be used against the girls in some other way, which would have the girls’ parents screeching into the principal’s office waving around a bullying lawsuit with the fury of 1000 Elizabeth Hasselbecks.

What will the lawsuit accomplish anyway, even if the girls win? Posting racy pictures online is still a bad idea. They will make you look flakey and desperate for attention no matter how enlightened our society gets. Meanwhile, the school will have to make some cuts to pay for their legal fees. What do you think will be the first to go? Athletics? Nah, the soccer moms would tear them a new arse. How about services that fewer students use, like drug counseling, or special needs? Oooh, I know! They could cut sex education! And if you think that the Principal should have thought more about his students’ welfare before going on his crusade against women’s bodies, ponder this. If he’s like any other school principal in the country, between dealing with this lawsuit, his staff, and hundreds of other students and parents, he has no time to think of anything but his students’ welfare.

You know, I deplore censorship of any kind. I also think sexual expression is a beautiful thing. Even so, this should not be the hill we die on for those ideals. The administration of Churubusco High School made a tough call, but this punishment pales in comparison to the kind of difficulties these girls will face in the future if they think this behavior is okay. Photos like that could damage their careers and relationships. Now that the girls know better, they can avoid all that. Freedom is the supreme value of our time, but if we send our kids to these schools to learn how to make decisions and think for themselves, we have to appreciate the lessons in all their forms. Even the ones that get you kicked off the volley ball team.

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You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We’d all love to see the plan

-John Lennon

Last week the Olympic Flame was diverted from its intended path in front of the BC Legislature by protesters. The downtrodden and disenfranchised of this province rose together in glorious revolution to disrupt an integral cog in the all-consuming Olympic machine – the photo op.

Every time I see the No2010 protesters on the news, I am filled with armrest-ripping rage when I see their flakey, malnourished leaders make  a speech on the evils of capitalism. Is it because I’m just shy of my 30th birthday? Is it because my factory farm fed existence is being threatened? Have I sold out to the corporate machine, put on a blazer and started selling real estate?

Not exactly. Well, at least I’m not selling real estate. I’ve been following protests like these in the news since the so-called “Battle of Seattle” at the meeting of the G8 countries in 1999. In that time, wars have broken out, oil prices have skyrocketed, the cost of computer storage has plummeted, and every year these protests seem to be less about affecting actual  change and more about making noise and ruining things.

The Olympics are a particular sore spot for me because it is only tangentially related to the problems the protesters are trying to address.  Are any of the torch runners greedy land developers? Did any of the snowboarders widen the sea to sky? Should the Olympic flame be blown out as Terry Fox’s mother might carry it to the podium? Most of the people involved with the Olympics are simply trying to achieve their hopes and dreams. Disrupting that proves nothing. If the protesters are complaining that society sees them and the poor as human garbage, they do themselves no favors by acting the part.

You might say that making an out-dated and kyriarchal sporting event slight less enjoyable is a small price to pay in the never-ending class war between the rich and the poor. Over time these efforts will result in the anarchist paradise that supposedly we’re all hoping for. But let me ask you this.  Is there any mention on the No2010 website of actually talking to government officials? Will they be sending any bills to Parliament? The Legislature? City Council? Strata Council? Are they knocking on any doors? Raising campaign funds? I must admit I haven’t been looking all that hard. There’s only so much rhetoric I can take at one time. I did find a lovely Riot 2010? Riot Now! pamphlet, though.

Even if No2010 achieved its goal of stopping the Olympics, then what would happen? There never seems to be any plan with these movements, be it No2010, the Green Party, the Marijuana Party, or even the current NDP. I think that there is such deep-seated hatred of authority in these organizations that any kind of leadership or coordination is immediately shouted down. Meanwhile, the BC Liberals will probably be in power for the next 100 years. You can be sure they will pass any dumb idea that the Fraser Institute can cough up. It’s not because the Liberals are necessarily on the take. By the time the Fraser Insitute presents an idea for a bill, they’ve got all sorts of studies and petitions that make the legislature’s job much easier. The only people who even pay attention to protesters are running paranoid military juntas. Canada is nothing of the sort, so we’d do best to start acting like it.

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Not too long ago, Dan Pink held a very interesting TED talk on the nature of motivation. The speech is twenty minutes, so I’ll try to summarize. What business commonly assumes about motivation is wrong. Monetary or reward incentives tend to make people think more about the reward and less about the problems they are trying to solve. This philosophy took root because it was great for very simple tasks like the ones  you would find in a factory.  Unfortunately, today we live in a world where the knowledge work to design the factory is more valuable than the work that goes on inside. Providing people with the autonomy to do their own work properly provides much more motivation than a simple Christmas bonus. In fact, the introduction of such rewards can kill the creative thinking they are trying to foster.

Pink’s argument is a great example of unexamined ideas being sacrosanct even in our so-called age of rationality. There was a grain of truth to that carrot-and-stick philosophy, but when held up to scrutiny, its flaws make it impractical. You could even blame the current economic crisis on extrinsic motivation. The financial compensation offered to the captains of the financial industry may have blinded them to the fact that dealing in bad credit is no way to run a bank.

While the focus on intrinsic motivation may allow us to solve many problems, it’s something people have pondered for centuries. As Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “A man does not have himself killed for a half-pence a day or for a petty distinction. You must speak to the soul in order to electrify him.” It may be scientifically proven wisdom, but it’s wisdom nonetheless, which has a habit of being warmed over by fanaticism and repetition until it contradicts its original meaning.

Dan Pink describes extrinsic motivation as a lazy and dangerous ideology.  I know he’s trying to make the strongest point possible for a 20-minute talk on a subject that encompasses an entire book, but I can see how his words could be twisted around. What if people start to believe that no incentive is the best incentive? Monetary rewards might not work, but the other three rewards Pink talks about, autonomy, mastery, and purpose still need to be there. Lack of any compensation might interfere with those three concepts. What if we try to apply intrinsic motivation to tasks that are too simple? Can we expect people to follow and uphold the law without the extrinsic disincentives of police and prisons?

Like any other complex problem, motivation is not something achieved through glib slogans and magic bullets. Dan Pink’s research was the result of a lot of creativity, observation and hard work. We can only apply his ideas when we incorporate those qualities in ourselves.

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