Tag: Philosophy

My 2016 Reading List

2016 was a fairly productive year for me compared to 2015.  At the end of every year, I reflect on my life and sketch out a rough vision of how I want to tackle the new year.  Last year, I noted that I had read relatively few books (and completed even fewer).  Don’t get me wrong, I was reading a lot, but it was all online and typically blogs and articles.  My shallow reading was going strong, but my slow, in-depth reading with books was waning.

I felt a sense of shame at this realization – I had completed undergraduate and graduate studies in the Humanities, but my commitment to arts and letters was dismal at best.  I decided to use 2016 as a year to focus and develop myself.  Using a combination of physical and audio books I have, as of this post, read 41 books, which amounts to a hair under 13,000 pages of content.

See below for the complete list.  If I finish anything else before the end of 2016, I’ll ensure to issue an update.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Note – eagle-eyed readers will count 42 books on my list.  There is a book on my list that for personal reasons I’m not publicly disclosing.

Title Author Pages
Deep Work Cal Newport 304
The Way of the Superior Man David Deida 207
Intentional Living John C. Maxwell 288
The Power of Habit Charles Duhigg 416
The 4-Hour Work Week Timothy Ferriss 416
The Imperfect Board Member Jim Brown 224
Mate Tucker Max 384
The Art of Asking Amanda Palmer 352
The War of Art Steven Pressfield 190
The Way of Men Jack Donovan 192
Brave New World Aldous Huxley 272
Living in More Than One World Bruce Rosenstein 244
Man’s Search for Meaning Viktor Frankl 168
Start With Why Simon Sinek 256
Antifragile Nassim Taleb 544
Zero to One Peter Thiel 224
Level Up Your Life Steve Kamb 288
Quiet Susan Cain 368
The Willpower Instinct Kelly McGonigal 288
The $100 Startup Chris Guillebeau 304
The 4-Hour Body Timothy Ferriss 592
Leaders Eat Last Simon Sinek 256
A Thousand Naked Strangers Kevin Hazzard 288
Poorcraft: Wish You Were Here Ryan Estrada 132
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Stephen Covey 432
Essentials of Human Anatomy & Physiology Elaine Marieb 656
Born To Run Christopher McDougall 304
No Fears, No Excuses Larry Smith 272
Doctored Sandeep Jauhar 288
Wisdom Stephen Hall 352
The 48 Laws of Power Robert Greene 496
Awaken the Giant Within Tony Robbins 544
Tribes Seth Godin 160
Smarter Faster Better Charles Duhigg 384
Purple Cow Seth Godin 244
Free Prize Inside Seth Godin 256
Ego Is The Enemy Ryan Holiday 256
I Will Teach You To Be Rich Ramit Sethi 266
Thinking Fast And Slow Daniel Kahnaman 512
Born For This Chris Guillebeau 320
Total Pages Read
13,487 (revised)

Addendum

After this post went up, I added two more books to my list to round out 2016:

Title Author Pages
God is not Great Christopher Hitchens 320
Left of Bang Patrick Van Horne and
Jason Riley		 228

Blog – The Rewards of Grading

I spent a fair amount of time this weekend grading papers from my class.  It was their first foray into writing a philosophical essay for me, so it was an interesting indictment on whether I was effective in teaching for the first half of the course.  There were the natural ups and downs, but I suspect my grade curve falls in line with what is expected (I have two late papers yet to grade, so the jury is still out).

I jokingly grumbled about the extra work it takes to grade poor performances for me.

This isn’t to say that I look down on students who do poorly, nor do I want to make light of their performance.  For me, marking is an opportunity to help the student learn and develop.  When a student does well, I often feel less compelled to give a lot of feedback because there is little they could have done to do better.  I praise where it’s merited, but I don’t think the students are helped if I don’t offer something constructive to mull over.

Marking poor performance, on the other hand, takes significantly longer to finish for three reasons. First, as in the tweet above, when I’m dealing with plagiarism, I need to do more research to ensure it’s genuine cases of plagiarism versus sloppy citation practices.  I use the TurnItIn service to give a “sniff test” for the paper, but the majority of the cases of flagged plagiarism are merely properly cited references to the text.  Otherwise, I use context clues to determine where students might have plagiarized, such as changes in font, and changes in voice or phrasing the student uses in their writing.

The second biggest reason why it takes me so much longer to grade poor papers (and this will relate partially to my next point) is that I have to sufficiently document my reasons for awarding a poor mark.  This is to not only justify my decision to the student (and avoid seeming arbitrary), but it’s also to protect future me.  My annotations and comments help me in the potential case where a student wishes to talk to me about their mark.  After time has elapsed, I need memory aids to help me understand why I made the decisions I made while grading.

Finally, the most important reason why it takes me so much longer is that I have to identify instances where the student could have done better, and give them direction on how to improve.  It’s not enough to rely on quick notations to tell the student the problem (i.e. Awk or awkward phrasing, SP or spelling error, Citation Needed, Does not follow, etc.).  I have to take the next step to identify the problems and provide guidance for improvement.  This is why the process is so time consuming.  It’s an important process.  I remember how important that direction was when I was in school.  Without the time my profs took to help me through my papers, I doubt I would have won an essay prize in grad school.

Grading has its rewards, though.  Sometimes, you are amazed at the quality of the work that gets turned in, as happened in this tweet below.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

 

 

 

Blog: Decisions in Life

A little while back, I swallowed some of my biases and checked out Tony Robbins’s documentary on Netflix, I Am Not Your Guru (trailer here).  I had prejudged him as something in between a vacuous motivational speaker and a charlatan.  I of course based this opinion on nothing and admit that it was incredibly closed-minded of me.

I quite enjoyed the documentary, and I felt that I was captivated by his charisma.  While I know a lot of the business involves crafting a certain persona and message, and that the documentary is edited to create a particular narrative, it softened me to him and I wanted to check out some of his other works.  I’m not interested in investing the money to attend his events (I’m not *THAT* open-minded), but I thought I’d give one of his books a shot.  He also recently appeared in a podcast episode with Tim Ferriss, whom I’ve started to trust as something of an authority figure.  Anything that Tim Ferriss says, I’m willing to listen to.

So, I checked out Awaken The Giant Within, by Tony Robbins.

There was a really cool perspective he shared that has stuck with me since hearing it.  Explained the etymological origin of “decision” or “to decide.”  Without getting technical, it splits the word into “de” and “cision” or “away” and “to cut,” or in essence, “to cut away.”

Ok, that doesn’t sound very insightful.  But then he framed it in terms of what a proper decision entails.  He notes that when we talk about “making decisions” in our lives, we often are speaking as if we are expressing wishes.  To him, people “decide” to lose weight all the time, but never follow through on the execution.  In other words, when someone says they’ve decided to exercise and lose weight, until they follow through on that action, all they are saying is “I wish to exercise and lose weight.”

To make it a proper decision, you have to essentially make a cut and discard every other alternative.  When you decide something, you are firmly choosing not to entertain any other alternatives, and you are committing to that course of action.  To decide is to cut off those alternatives.

Framing it that way made a lot of sense to me.  It’s a criticism of myself that I’ve heard flavours of for some time, and it’s something I try to be mindful of.  This past year I’ve been reading books and reflecting on myself in order to live more intentionally.  I’ve had a few decision points so far that are opening up interesting futures to me.  Right now, I’m looking at career moves; should I continue to become a paramedic, or should I commit more fully to teaching.  I don’t have an answer to that questions yet.  It’s still really early in the process and I’m fine to live with that ambiguity for now.  I have plenty of time yet to explore my options.

There are other areas where making decisions has become important.  For the sake of being cryptic, I cannot divulge them at the moment and I apologize for that.  I’ve had a decision weighing over me recently that I finally pulled the trigger on.  But there are other “decisions” that are manifesting themselves as “wishes” and I’m not forgetting about them (I’m looking at you, exercise!).  I still haven’t followed through on committing to exercise, so for now that’s is my personal shame I carry around.

What I’m starting to wrestle with is how to take ownership of deciding my life’s course and what it means to be a person of character and commitment.  It’s not a strength of mine historically, but it’s a virtue I seek to cultivate moving forward.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Thoughts on Email and Ethical Research

I sit on the Board for the Community Research Ethics Office.  Our organization helps community organizations have access to support and research ethics reviews traditionally only offered to members of an academic institution.  We field a number of applications each month that explain a research project to us, and we evaluate the degree of ethical considerations made by the organization/researchers and sign-off on projects that align with the requirements set out in Canada’s Tri-Council Policy Statement on Conducting Research on Human Participants.

At each of our monthly meetings, the Board dives into lively discussion on topics not often considered in the course of normal research.  During our last meeting, we had a discussion concerning the use of email during the data processing phase of a project.  In a review we conducted, there was mention of researchers using email to share data across geographic distances (the study was occurring in multiple cities).

When we consider email, especially at a corporate level, our intuition is that it’s reasonably safe.  There are the occasional reports of data breaches, but if you use adequate security measures, your content is relatively safe.

But there is a crucial consideration that we need to make when we conduct research.  In research, the most important element is the rights of the participants.  If a researcher wants safeguard the participant’s interests while the participant freely participates in a research project, then a number of additional measures must play into your research system.

The participant, by agreeing to participate in a study, trusts that the researcher will not only always make research decisions that respect the participant’s wishes, but also the researcher must work to actively protect the participant’s right to safety, security and privacy to the fullest extent possible.

This is where emailing data to researchers gets complicated.

The intuitive thought is that as long as your computer terminal is secure, the data is safe – if you can prevent anyone (except maybe a super spy) from breaching your data, you have done your due diligence.

Community-based research has become cut-throat in the last few years…

So, here is your security weak-points and your measures to guard against a breach:

  • Physically accessing terminal location – lock the building/room and restrict access
  • Accessing computer terminal – password protect computer terminal
  • Accessing data/email on terminal – ensure login credentials are enabled and encrypt the data before sending

Yes, there’s a problem with the third bullet: email is more complicated that that.

When you send an email, you are not taking a document/letter, folding up a copy and sending the only copy via the web to the recipient.  If that were the case, then email would be fairly secure.  But, what happens with email instead is you end up copying the information to various sources as it gets uploaded, transmitted, copied, and downloaded over the web.  There is a copy created in your computer’s cached memory, there’s a copy that get uploaded and saved to your email server, the data is transmitted to your recipient’s server, and that information is downloaded as a copy to your recipients device.

That’s right, device, not necessarily a computer. You see, a further layer of complexity is when we route mail to our mobile devices, which is yet another copy of the information.  A computer is cumbersome to physically lose, but cell phones are lost/misplaced all the time.  Same with external hard drives and flash drives.  And don’t forget your mobile device; if you send the data on the same email platform that is accessible on an app on your phone, that information can be retrieved from your sent messages folder.

All of these points are potential security breaches.  So, let’s update the list above as to the number of ways data can be compromised:

  • Physically accessing your terminal location
  • Accessing computer terminal
  • Accessing data/email on terminal
  • Your mobile device
  • Email server(s)
  • Recipients physical terminal location
  • Recipients computer terminal
  • Recipients data/email on terminal
  • Recipients mobile device

There are probably other ways the data could be breached that I’m not considering in this example, but I think I’ve made my point that ethical and security issues are ridiculously complex when considering research projects.  Regardless of whether you think your data, if exposed, will actually harm your participants in any meaningful way, that is missing the point entirely.  Your participant’s data was important enough for your to collect in the first place, and therefore you have an obligation to protect the rights and well-being of your participant to the fullest extent that you can.

The point of our ethics reviews is not to halt research.  Our purpose is to help the researchers think of all of the ways we can conduct good research and ensure that our good practices ensure we can continue to conduct research in the future.  We must learn from past mistakes and the harm that has come to people who participated in research (inadvertently AND in good faith).  Respecting our duty to care is the cornerstone of what it means to do good research.