Fabulous Car Fortune Favors Me!

Hey, I won a Zipcar membership as part of their Low-Car Diet promotion!

The membership is only $50 a year, which is really very reasonable if you kind of want to have access to a car, but don't feel the need to own one. Insurance, taxes and parking would be a heck of a lot more than $50, even after you paid for the car.

I'm sort of tempted to reserve some cars and drive around just to try out different models--but that kind of a little bit defeats the purpose of the 'low-car' idea which is that for a month participants try to swear off cars. Also, we have to blog about it.

If only I were comfortable babbling on the internet! It's really too bad, is what it is.

Getting by without a car should be pretty easy for me on account of I already walk and take the train to work, but I've long found the Zipcar idea appealing, so it will be fun to know more about it.

Bribing Children

LISNews links to this post by a homeschooling parent in Seattle who spurns summer reading programs.

She argues that offering children prizes for reading a lot of books undermines what should be the real reason they read books--you know, 'cause books are awesome.

I have recently been thinking about rewarding behavior that ideally is its own reward, and I was a homeschooled child who once participated in a summer reading program, so I could naught but comment.

To the internet! Is what I said, before showing up here.

When I was 11, I thought the summer reading program at the library was the best thing ever. I read books all the time anyway, and now I could get a coupon to Dairy Queen for it? Sweet!

So in retrospect the program did not actually motivate me. I don't think I read any more than I would have without it, which was already about twice as much as was required for that free ice cream cone or whatever.

I guess I do get the whole "bribery is icky" aspect of trying to convince some child who normally wouldn't be reading all the time to read for ice cream, though. I mean, doesn't that kind of cheapen the whole thing? If you're only reading because you want ice cream, are you really getting everything you could out of it?

At the same time, this assumes that reading and learning are only ever to be properly valued as abstract jewels free from that taint of filthy lucre. And certainly they are valuable in that sense. If you like to read and learn stuff, I think you're more likely to have a sort of lively, thoughtful mind that will make you good at getting stuff out of life.

But reading and learning stuff can also be put to the service of making money and earning a living, and we can't really argue that that's a waste of time. Maybe it doesn't really matter if kids read for the love of reading or for the love of ice cream. Or money. They're going to wind up doing a lot of boring stuff for money later on, right? Get 'em in the habit!

Besides, maybe they start reading some boring book for ice cream, and then discover that it's actually fascinating and cool!

Bribery: is it really so wrong?

Yeah, I'm working on a parenting book right now that will lay out my theories on child rearing in more detail.

In the News Weeks Ago

Some things I never got around to mentioning lately...

If anyone is interested in a nice charitable endeavor, my friends Erika and Petra are collecting donations to renovate a school library in Thailand.

The Distant Librarian notes that Dartmouth is now beta testing a new federated search service called Summon. You can test it yourself on the Dartmouth Libraries page! I gave it a shot, looking for 'edible wild mushrooms,' and retrieved thousands of results including--on the first page--a book, a lot of journal articles and some newspaper articles.

I really don't have any smart review notes, though...the whole reason I meant to post about this was to make some sort of goofy joke about how much I wanted to use something called Summon because it would make me feel like a wizard casting a Summon Information spell ('cause you know, usually you Summon Monster, right?)...yeah, it needs work.

Dangerous Intersection has an interesting piece about how impartial focus groups could be useful to help settle all kinds of questions. Sadly, it would probably be pretty expensive to make this kind of service widely available.

And there was a really interesting Blowfish Blog piece called "Special Rights, Not Equal Rights" (linked from Greta Christina's Blog) about how weird it is to be in a same-sex marriage in California right now. Since it's no longer legal to get married, but if you already were married before Proposition 8 passed, you still are, there are a lot of people who do have 'special rights' denied to others.

Let Us Hold in Memory...

On this momentous day we commemorate the time when, as Got Medieval explains,

"Light from a star in the constellation Taurus going supernova reaches Earth. Arab and Chinese astronomers mark it down. Europeans, not so much. The remnants of that star come to be known as the Crab Nebula."

Also some sort of something to do with a British colony declaring freedom from tea or whatever. History was one of those subjects for which I could muster only desultory interest.

Heh. Happy 4th to my legions in the U.S.

Different Sides of Online Tracks

Interesting post on Feministing about "The Online Class Divide," specifically the ways that MySpace and Facebook have divided up the online social networking world.

Or, more to the point, the way that people have segregated themselves on the two sites...largely along racial and class lines, according to the argument here. I signed up for Facebook just because it was the one promoted on the university website when I started grad school--I didn't realize I was following trends established by my social status.

I suppose one often doesn't.

Who You Callin' Helpful?

I was mildly amused by this Rough Type post about a study suggesting that people who contribute to Wikipedia, rather than being motivated by a desire to selflessly advance the frontiers of human knowledge, tend to be cranky and anti-social, and to prefer communicating online because they don't really like personally interacting with fellow humans.

They sure have my number!

Well, except that I don't contribute to Wikipedia. But if I did, you can bet it would be in a dour and grouchy fashion.

Or...maybe the fact that I don't contribute to Wikipedia is evidence that I'm less cantankerous than I think?

Nah.

Hark! A Train!

Apparently my habit of wearing earplugs on the T is well-advised.

This Healthbolt post says that the subways in New York City (and, one can likely assume, those in other cities such as Boston), have "noise levels ranging between 80 and 120 decibels."

In case you, like me, have no real sense of what a decibel actually sounds like, the helpful comparison is that "normal conversation is between 60 and 70 decibels."

So the takeaway is that subways are loud.

As you probably know, regular exposure to loud noises can cause hearing problems over time, so this is of potential of concern to those who ride the train a lot. I'll hope that my earplugs help with that, 'cause there's no way I'm driving into Boston.

I need the train, loud or not.