Viral or Downward Spiral

What color is this dress?

Chances are, some of you see white and gold and some of you seem blue and black.

Last night, this dress hit the internet and online forums (Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) went berserk debating the color of the dress. "Blue and black Camps" and "Team White and gold" started popping up, usually accompanied by #thedress. I first noticed the epidemic on twitter, where the only two trending topics were escaped llamas and the dress pictured above. I had been working for about five hours, during which time both dilemmas had risen to internet fame. The tweets at the beginning were fairly innocuous, most people were just weighing in. Did they think the dress was blue? How many iterations of "llow speed chase" could the active, tweeting community really come up with? But as I scrolled closer and closer to real time, comments posted became increasingly caustic. People spent less time defending what they saw in order to cut down whoever saw the other colors.

Ultimately the dress story will die down, but it illustrates a nice point and made my internet discussions with strangers a bit easier. In my last post I argued that we are too easily fueled by our passions and confirmation bias online, but after participating in a few Reddit threads and Twitter conversations I would like to amend my claim. We are likely fueled by the same bias concentrations in person and online, however, the platform of the internet facilitates fiery-er responses. Either anonymity or that degree of separation we are allowed online removes the human aspect of whomever we are talking to. Even as I was scrolling through different feeds to try and find a good place to begin conversation I cringed at most of the material I was sorting through.

My argument here is not any sort of regulation of anonymous comments, rather a call for ideas. How can we fundamentally change the way we think? How can we, in the future, look at comments online and see the person who wrote the comment before we see the potential argument?

Professor Burton also took part in the conversation after class on Wednesday, at my request, and provided an interesting suggestion: rather than regulate content, write "codes of conduct" into literal codes (and I'm paraphrasing). But what if we actually wrote into the codes of programs that would... say... bring a comment that got more likes to the top of a feed? That way most of the filthy comments could sink to the bottom and be ignored. Of course there are problems with a model this simple, but isn't it an intriguing idea? In one of my discussions I brought this up, and the user cited the app YikYak. For those unfamiliar with the app, it is essentially an anonymous Twitter for your geographic area. All user posts are anonymous, but if any post gets five "down" votes, it is deleted from the site and those with more "up" votes can be found on popular pages.

Even this has its problems, and after a few days of trying out the app I deleted it for wont of content worth scrolling through.

Perhaps as the internet continues to develop and we as individuals become more "programmed" into our profiles and as we become more comfortable with relationships that are strictly digital, we will be able to recognize the humanity of those we interact with on the internet. And perhaps when they are more human, we will maintain a decorum more similar to that which we carry on in physical debates and will blog with the understanding somebody thinks that the opposite side of your argument is valid, and maybe even consider not typing that thing at all if it isn't nice. 

In the meantime, the next time you are tempted to write a disparaging blog post that has the potential to go viral, or tweet an insult that tells the white and gold team that they must see white and gold because they are depressed, remember who the other side is and ask yourself if you would start that conversation face–to–face.

Seniority the Outdated Mode

Well, it was a long shot, but I tried to contact the principal of my former high school, the president of the Clark County Education Association (the union for teachers in Las Vegas), and a trustee from the Clark County School District. I asked them all a very generic question about what their thoughts were on seniority in the school district. I’m still waiting to hear back from all of them. 

I did find a Facebook group that my own mother is a part of (who knew?) which is discussing these very types of issues as they relate to my former elementary school.

To pay or not to pay

To pay or not to pay? That is the question. After speaking with Sterling Randle and Alex Clark , the sports editors for the on campus newspaper, I learned that there is not one clear answer on this issue. Randle is fully supportive of paying athletes and feel that it is simply not right that athletes are not compensated for jersey sales. However, he does not believe that it would be possible to pay all college athletes. Clark on the other hand feels that athletes already receive a free education which is more than fair in his mind when it comes to compensation for athletes. He also thinks that if schools were to start to pay athletes then this would diminish collegiate sports. 

"If we start paying athletes then I think it will destroy college athletics," said Clark. I think by paying athletes, college football would become the NFL d-league. This would mean that all the good athletes would go to the schools that are willing to pay the most and the smaller schools would not longer be able to compete with them."  

Here is a video against paying college athletes.

On Reddit, I thought one person made a very good point in support of paying athletes. 

"While they(athletes) are being compensated for playing by being given a scholarships you have to realize that they do not go to school, play their given sport, then go to bed only to repeat. Education is not money. While a scholarship has significant value, it cannot be exchanged for money. A student who comes from a poor family cannot use the "payment" of education to help feed his family, buy clothes, or other things, and if he tries to borrow money from anyone for this purpose, he and the school are struck with sanctions and suspensions. Unlike other college students, they do not have time to get a job, or paid internship to help pay for these things. Then is the problem of how much. I believe they should be given reasonable compensation. Ways to do this would be for them to get a cut of revenue, or seek endorsements."

Here's a video in support of paying athletes. 

I think that this is an issue that needs to be changed but I don't think that there is one right answer to this problem. However, I hope that someday college athletes can be paid for their merchandize. 

Computation and Research

Theoretical math based on gambling was formalized by the French mathematician Pierre Fermat in the 1650s, from his exploration of probability theory came a theorem from Reverend Thomas Bayes.  Bayes work was well reasoned from the axioms of mathematics, however, it was computationally unfeasible, and therefore lived only in theory until the 1990s, when algorithms made Bayes’ theorem computationally feasible and improved dramatically the world of statistics and machine learning.

Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, worked with a mathematical model made by Johann Gauss to develop the idea of statistical regression, using statistics to analyze observational data. Observational data is abundant in our digital age.   Observational data is automatically being collected and could be used to inform research experiments. Today everyone who plans on researching using the scientific method ought to understand collecting and interpreting observational data.  To see things through the new lens of online data we need to pull from the world of the theoretical, arrived to on the ship of deduction, to build data finding and processing algorithms.

The past called for specialization of a field of knowledge like sociology, math, computer programming, economics or statistics.  Those who specialized typically were the more successful in their research as they could focus on something so specific that no one had attempted it before.  Today is the age in which flexibility is the dominantly trait of a world changing researcher.  At present we have so much information recorded.  It would inform focused research so well in social and organizational sciences.  However, there is a division between mathematicians, statisticians and social scientists that needs to be breached.

We need to change how the classes are taught so that students are ready to explore beyond the forte of their field.  Statisticians need to reason and derive their formulas deductively, they need to explore being a mathematician until they are comfortable coming up with models and formulas on their own.  Mathematicians need to estimate results before learning how to derive them exactly and reason through them totally soundly.  Social scientists need to become technology savvy and learn how to interpret and embrace new types of numerical data.  Doing this will open all three to the possibility of understanding the social and organizational world around them and performing more useful and significant research.

That's Not Why You Were Baptized - The Problem of Authority

I've worked at the Missionary Training Center (MTC) for a long time. There we help missionaries learn how to help others come unto Christ through baptism. We teach them how to help others overcome their concerns and make commitments to follow Christ. We as teachers often would role play as investigators to give the missionaries practice opportunities. We would pretend to be investigators with concerns, challenges, and questions, and then the missionaries would have to help us work through those and lead us to baptism. The last thing Christ commissioned to his apostles before he left was to go forth and baptize. This is still the commission to His missionaries today, and is something we stress in the MTC. Missionaries in the MTC will often extend an invitation to be baptized in the first meeting. The most common response to this invitation (at least from christians) is that he or she is already baptized. Almost without fail, the response to this by the missionaries to the investigator involves telling them in some way or another that their baptism was not performed by the proper authority, and that baptism has to be done by the proper authority to be valid. What the missionaries are teaching is absolutely true (that in order to enter into the Celestial Kingdom of God, one has to be baptized by the proper authority), but it drives me crazy that that is always our response to that issue, and I think that there are so many better responses to this issue (I don't want anyone to confuse my point. I absolutely believe that proper authority is essential to baptism, and that our church is the only church with that authority. I just think there are so many other things associated with baptism that are more worth focusing on). First off, how many of you were baptized because you had a burning testimony that whoever was baptizing you had proper authority. You may have known or understood that they had the proper authority, but I doubt that is why you were baptized. You were baptized probably because you believed that this church was true and you wanted to be baptized a member of it, or you believed on the testimony of your parents. The thing is, most of us got baptized because we wanted to join ourselves to the Church (which is one important main purpose of baptism), and receive all the myriad of blessings associated with membership in this church, not because you wanted to be baptized by proper authority.

I think the issue stems from the era in which the Church was founded. At the time, Catholicism was no longer THE authority in Christianity. For so long the Catholic Church had claim to proper priesthood authority, and then with the fall (in some sense) of the Catholic Church, and the rise of so many other Christian churches, there was a real dilemma pertaining to authority.  Then came the Restoration and the restoration of authority. If you read the accounts of many of the early missionaries for the Church you will read that their main selling point was not the Book of Mormon, but rather restored priesthood authority. That makes perfect sense, because that is what the people were looking for. You hear stories of people like Wilford Woodruff who searched diligently for a church with proper priesthood authority to baptize. Society has changed since that time, but unfortunately our preaching tactics too often have not. Not many people are anxiously searching for proper priesthood authority to baptize. They are, however, searching for happiness and peace in their families in this life and in eternity, forgiveness from their sins and peace of conscience, closeness to God, understanding of truth, etc. These are all things that baptism into our church can give them. These are the things people are searching for, and as missionaries we need to help them see the connection between those things and baptism, and not get too hung up on authority.