My message board is having problems. I opened a service ticket with my ISP and was gratified by how quickly they responded. If you visit the board, it looks okay until after you log in. Then the page keeps resetting and never displays fully. Apparently it’s a known issue at the ISP and they are working on it. I almost went so far as to launch a new message board, one that doesn’t rely on CGI/Perl, but the headache of porting the existing MB content over was enough to keep me from heading down that road. I was also about to upgrade from 2.4 to 2.5—glad I didn’t. I might have thought I had broken something during the upgrade.
Had an e-mail this morning that one of my short stories is still under consideration for an Atlantic Canadian contest, and the longlist will be released next Tuesday. There will be three winners, with a nice cash prize and publication in an anthology “alongside some of the country’s finest writers.” Nice to know that I’m still in contention. Fingers crossed to see if I make the next cut on Tuesday.
Specters in the Coal Dust, the Woodlands Press anthology that contains my story “Centralia is Still Burning,” is now available for pre-order.
I found a very nice review of “A Murder of Crows,” my short story in Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead, at Temple Library Reviews. The reviewers is covering a few stories from the anthology each week, and covering them in depth. He hit every point I attempted to make with the story.
Lee Thomas posted a bunch of reviews and blurbs for Thrillers: 100 Must Reads. Rather than duplicating that list here, I’ll just provide a link to his LiveJournal. My essay is about Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon. Lee writes about Dean Koontz’s Watchers. Here’s just one of the glowing comments: “Not only is this book fun to peruse, it is intelligently written and researched. Make space on your reference shelf.” The Florida Times Union, July 4, 2010
We watched Freakonomics last night, a movie based on the bestselling book. The thesis of the movie, which is narrated by an economist and a journalist, is that there is a tendency in modern culture to mistake correlation for causation. You see this a lot in studies that claim that such-and-such causes cancer. Does it cause cancer, or does it just happen at the same time as something else that causes cancer? It’s hard to tell. They present six case studies, each one directed by a different person. In one, they explore the question of whether being branded with a strange name causes a person to be less successful. The avatar of this was a case where a man named his oldest son Winner and his youngest son Loser. Their lives turned out to be the exact opposite of what you might expect. However, in another study, identical fake job applications were sent, with the only difference being that one had a traditionally white person’s name (Greg) and the other had a traditionally black person’s name (Tyrone). Tyrone was invited to far fewer interviews than Greg was.
There was also an interesting study from the University of Chicago about using money to try to incentivize poorly performing ninth graders. If the students could meet a fairly low set of criteria (few absences, few detentions, straight C or above grades) they would get $50 for that month, with a chance at $500 from a random selection of $50 winners. The two profiled students were both initially energized by the thought of the money, but one of them (whose mother promised matching funds) couldn’t motivate himself to do the work and continued to fail. The other one kept at it and barely met the criteria in the final month, but he did it. Overall, the study showed that ninth graders are poorly motivated by financial incentives.
It was an interesting film, good as a conversation starter, without getting too deeply into anything. There was a fascinating study of cheating in sumo wrestling that was obvious once someone looked at the statistics. When one contestant needed to win his fifteenth contest to have a winning record for the tourney and the person he was competing against already had a winning record, the person on the cusp won regularly, and then lost the next time he faced the same opponent. A kind of sumo quid pro quo. The most controversial conclusion the economist arrived at was how a decline in violent crime in the late 80s/early 90s could be attributed to legal access to abortion 17-18 years earlier. The evidence he presented was compelling.
The movie opens in theaters in a few weeks, but it was available via our Comcast OnDemand system this week.
