Ecology of Impact: Applying Barker's Behavior Settings to Onsite Post-training Assessments

Typically, when assessing training, we focus on individual's recall of content, and perhaps on the extent of application of the new knowledge to the task at hand. This narrow focus misses the larger and, arguably, more significant social context, within which, when change efforts succeed, we find enduring structures that continue to shape the behavior of all who dwell there over time. these structures are the real fruit of learning. Absence of such structures are evidence that the instructional effort has failed, despite individual differences in achievement.

This approach might be called an ecological one. It premises that interactions among individuals explain the tools which Barker and his disciples created to describe them in detail.

From Wikipedia:

"Behavior settings are mediating structures that help explain the relationship between the dynamic behavior of individuals and stable social structure. Social scientist Roger Barker first developed this theoretical framework in the late 1940s.

Behavior settings also may serve as a bridge between the foundational work of Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela on Autopoiesis and the insights developed in AmericanPragmatism and Continental Activity Theory.

A behavior setting exists at the interface between the standing patterns of behavior and the milieu (environment), wherein the behavior is happening in the 'milieu', and the 'milieu' in some sense "matches" the 'behavior'. In technical parlance, the "behavior-milieu interface" is called the synomorph, and the 'milieu' is said to be circumjacent and 'synomorphic' to the 'behavior'.

In a dentist’s office, for example, "patients get their cavities filled". This is the standing pattern (the behavior/milieu part or 'synomorph') because we are in the office (the 'milieu' surrounds us, i.e. 'circumjacent') and the pieces of the 'milieu' 'fit' the standing pattern (the drill is meant to fit in my mouth and drill my tooth, i.e. 'synomorphic' with the 'behavior'). Further, to be considered a 'behavior setting', these 'behavior/milieu parts' or 'synomorphs' must have a specific degree of interdependence that is greater than their interdependence with other parts of other settings.

There is an empirical test that can determine the relative robustness of behavior settings, depending on the index of interdependence between and among specific standing patterns of behavior. By itself, a standing pattern of behavior is meaningless; it would be like watching a person pretending to go to the dentist’s office and having a cavity filled. Also, a dentist’s office without patients (or the possibility of patients) would be a meaningless artifact.

So, a behavior setting is a self-referenced (internally interdependent and self-defined) entity that consists of one or more standing patterns of behavior. Just as the standing pattern is synomorphic with the artifacts in the milieu, so are standing patterns synomorphic with other standing patterns in the behavior setting. We see in the eminent ecological psychologist, Roger G. Barker’s conception, an elegant and stable view of the nested interrelationships that exist within our common experience. The pieces fit, and in their fitting we see the larger structure-in-a-context that is necessary for making claims about development, causality, or purpose.

Instructional Strategies That Work, (and Don't)

In this monograph (link), Dunlovsky, et al discuss 10 learning techniques in detail and offer recommendations about their relative utility. The techniques include elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, summarization, highlighting (or underlining), and the keyword mnemonic, imagery use for text learning, rereading, practice testing, distributed practice, and interleaved practice. The study evaluated whether their benefits generalize across four categories of variables: learning conditions, student characteristics, materials, and criterion tasks. 

Here are five common study strategies that, according to the evidence, really don’t work very well:

Highlighting

Evidently, the value of this scheme in retaining new material is tied up with how you do it. Unless you apply critical thinking, highlighting does not help understanding or retention. In my own experience, underlining and writing marginalia seem to enhance my understanding of the material at the time I'm reading it, but may or may not really boost retention of transfer.

Rereading

Essentially, they found that unless the second read is more critical than the first, merely revisiting text has little lasting value for retention or transfer.

The keyword mnemonic 

A keyword is one that arbitrarily tags a single mental image with an assigned abstract meaning. This is an instance of tying the new to the familiar. The study shows poor long-term results, particularly in foreign language learning, where it seems to be quite common.

Self-generated Imagery

This consists of students being directed to create their own images of the principle or abstraction under study. The study did find that some domains (math and science) were more amenable to imagery than others.

Two somewhat more effective strategies

Elaborative interrogation

Merely prompting students to answer “Why?” questions about any new material can facilitate learning it. The particular form of the explanatory prompt is “Why would this fact be true of this [X] and not some other [X]? Students posing questions to themselves about similarities, differences and causal links around the unfamiliar evidently activates application of the familiar, weaving the new learning into the old. The more precise and elaborate that weaving is, the more effectively we can retrieve the new content later.

Self-explanation  

This goes a bit beyond merely asking why about new facts, abstractions or procedures to prompting students to self-generate logical rules to apply to the new material. Part of the value seems to come from speaking the “rules” aloud as one applies them. This strategy might be more helpful in rule-driven domains like math and physical science. 

Three highly effective strategies

Practice testing

This can include any form of low-stakes test from a formal Q & A to flash card practice. The Dunlosky team found substantial support from learning theory (going back to Thorndike) and experimental results to show it works across all ages and learning settings.

Distributed practice

Particularly when compared with “cramming”, practicing new material in short bursts, over time is by ar the better method for retention.

Interleaved Practice

This is an approach covenes with distributed practice (above) when closely-related materials (say, computing volumes of several different solids) are practiced in conjuncture with one another, as opposed to devoting single-topic blocks of time to solutions to a specific type of problem. Interleaving works, they surmise, by reinforcing attention, not to just the subject matter (a given formula) but the distinctions between related issues. In another domain, identifying different artist’s styles of paining, interleaving seems to strengthen discriminatory skill as well as the ability to simply recognize an individual artist’s work. Interleaving even seems to improve performance in motor skills as well.

There is more to learning and transfer than mere repetition. One wonders, thinking about what we typically see in K-12 and Adult Education, just how often we utterly fail to offer students any effective personal study strategies beyond just that!

-JEC

Eight Ways Of Looking At Intelligence

Anyone concerned with teaching and learning must consider intelligence, not as a fixed capacity, but one always subject to instances and context. To that point, Annie Murphy Paul blogged "Brilliantly" today (link), summarizing and re-organizing the emerging science of learning. I've recapped her categories here with a few thoughts of my own: 

Situations can make us smarter. Intelligence is as intelligence does. Children and adults alike learn and perform in a context, and we, as "context builders" and managers have a lot to do with learning outcomes. As I consider the content I want to "present" to the learners, I must also think about the arrangements I might make for that content to be relevant, actionable, and memorable.

Beliefs can make us smarter. Martin Seligman, Angela Duckworth, and Carol Dweck have taught us that non-cogntive factors, like "grit" and "optimism" hugely affect learning & performance outcomes over entire lives. These are not some vague attributes, nor are they fixed. The self-told story matters. We can help habitually pessimistic students re-frame their experience in a more productive way.

Expertise can make us smarter. Expertly-held knowledge is different from that of the newbie. Experts are those, who over thousands of hours of trial and error, have converted slow-thinking neural paths into fast-thinking, pattern-recognizing raceways to performance. In performance, the marginal differences between experts and nons are largely reflected in unconscious processing. 

Attention can make us smarter. We live in attention-starved times. The ubiquity of screens today is the teacher's greatest challenge. To be a master teacher is an artist at attention-getting and attention-steering.

Emotions can make us smarter.  Just as optimistic renderings of one's life story need not be accurate to be fruitful, the feeling of hope is irrational (given the dark facts of our existence) but it works. Mirth, solidarity and pity can all drive us to learn and perform better. 

Technology can make us smarter. Language evolved to allow humans to store and share knowledge outside of their personal skulls. Writing accelerated this capability and printing put us into orbit. Now we have to watch it, as the proliferation of gadgets (see "screens" above) may make us dumber and less attentive. 

Our bodies can make us smarter. We need sleep. Our brains need food. More more deeply than Paul suggests here, all our knowledge, even the most abstract must be grounded in concrete experience. Even as adults we cannot grasp new ideas without the metaphors based in embodied knowledge. 

Relationships can make us smarter. Humans evolved to dominate the planet by collaborating. Twenty-first century man remains a deeply social animal. Social capital figures more deeply in the differences in achievement that physical capital, and certainly more than sheer indiviudual intelligence. Our institutions define and support us as learners and performers.

"The science of learning suggests that we ought to imagine our roles—as parents, as professionals, as learners. We should aim to be situation-makers—creators of circumstances that evoke intelligence in ourselves and others." -AMP

What can we learn from video?

Annie Murphy Paul raises an intriguing question in a recent "Brilliant" post.

(http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/05/what-do-we-actually-learn-from-videos/)

I'm not sure this is all there is to say, however. Decades of research into audio-vusual and multimedia learning have shown that images, both photographic and diagrammatic, cimematographic and animated, can convey cogntive lessons that stick. The domains of subject matter include mathematics and natural sciences as well as more practical realms, like how to re-string a guitar or perform electronic soldering.

It's interesting that we are awash with "learning" video these days, from the wonderful new PBS learning site to the Khan Academy online. Yet there is, as far as I can tell, no systematic coverage of all this activity in terms of a more general theoretical model. 

To pursue:

• Journals?
• The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia (updated)
• Academic Texts

From Annie's Blog:

"TED talkers are nothing if not fluent. Could it be that the effective presentation of the speakers in TED-style videos fools us into thinking we’re learning more than we are? As someone who watches TED videos often, and who has given a TED talk herself, I’m biased. But I think there are good reasons to believe that these videos can be vehicles for genuine learning. Here, five ways that  well-made videos (including MOOCs and other kinds of digital instruction) can help us learn:

• They gratify our preference for visual learning. Effective presentations treat our visual sense as being integral to learning. This elevation of the image—and the eschewal of text-heavy Power Point presentations—comports well with cognitive scientists’ findings that we understand and remember pictures much better than mere words.

• They engage the power of social learning. The robust conversation that videos can inspire, both online and off, recognizes a central principle of adult education: We learn best from other people. In the discussions, debates, and occasional arguments about the content of the talks they see, video-watchers are deepening their own knowledge and understanding.

• They put practitioners in the role of teachers. We take in knowledge most readily, not when it’s presented in the abstract, but when it’s embedded in a rich context of stories and experiences. TED’s speakers are effective teachers because most of the time, they don’t teach; they do.

• They enable self-directed, “just-in-time” learning. Because video viewers choose which talks to watch and when to watch them, they’re able to tailor their education to their own needs. Knowledge is easiest to absorb at the moment when we’re ready to apply it.

• They encourage viewers to build on what they already know. Adults are not blank slates: They bring to learning a lifetime of previously acquired information and experience. Effective video instruction build on top of this knowledge, adding and elaborating without dumbing down.

It’s become fashionable to mock the distinctive style of TED videos; their success makes them a tempting target. But in a world in which we want—and need—to be learning all the time, they’re excellent arrows to have in our quiver. (An abstract and link to the Carpenter article can be found here.)"

More on Mentoring in DISD

Editorial writer William McKenzie  wrote on May 9th:

"As part of the mayor’s education push, why not create an I Tutor Dallas campaign? The city has initiatives built around biking, parks and the arts. Why not complement them with a new effort that mobilizes various parts of the city in helping schools intervene with struggling students?

I am not talking about random work or feel-good assignments. Rather, I am talking about a strategic campaign that draws upon some of the city’s best educational resources and experienced talent.

For example, SMU’s Simmons School of Education and Human Development has experts who could perhaps advise schools, parents and volunteers in the most appropriate ways to help kids who are behind in, say, math. Simmons already is involved with DISD in trying to improve West Dallas schools, so they already have a relationship with the district."

http://educationblog.dallasnews.com/2013/05/i-tutor-dallas-this-is-the-new-campaign-rawlings-and-others-should-launch-for-disd.html/

I wrote to Gilbert Leal (gilbert@texasmedia3.com)  after seeing his editorial in the Monday DMN, calling for more involvement of the business community with DISD students. 

Massive programs may work, but what we are looking for here is a more modest effort, first just to find out if a "proximate mentor" is really any better than a standard approach, and whether we can find and employ them in a useful manner. We also are concerned that all this avoids a "boxcar syndrome" where teachers view it as another add-on to the already overburdened school day and curriculum. 

We also need to look at the power of explanatory style on school and career. If Martin Seligman ( Learned Optimism, 1990) is right, we can identify children more likely to profit from special attention (those try- and try-again optimists), and even more powerfully, perhaps we can teach kids optimism to the extent that it changes their school performance. 

Last week, we met Marilen Mendez, a working young architect of Puerto Rican background, who expressed interest in what we are thinking about at Trini Garza. She referred us on to Clemente Jacquez, a colleague in the Dallas AIA who heads up a Latino group there. 

I called Vince Reyes, Director of Instruction at DISD and asked for a meeting. I'll get his take on our idea and see what else may be in play within the district.

The next step is to meet with the TGECHS faculty next week, and present the idea to them. One obvious question: to what extent are they already tapping to to the resource right there at their feet-- the collegians of the Mountain View Campus? If yes, how is it working, if no, why not? Another important issue to look into is how the teachers see their kids now, and explore what they need in terms of problem-solving and self-management strategies. The "presenting problem" from the Principal, Dr. Lombardi, was, of course, not for mentoring, but more specific training in project management. We have to start from that point, it seems to me. 

What if we turned "mentoring" on its head?

(notes towards a new high school mentoring program)

What if we:

Put students in a more active role?
We know that having the learners’ take an active role is pedagogically superior to taking a passive one. Instead of a traditional career night, perhaps a better idea is having the students "interview" a professional or career person. The instructional task then becomes teaching them to conduct an interview.

Reached beyond stereotypical career targets?
Clearly, most of the students, when asked about what they want to be when they grow up will give answers like doctor or lawyer or “neo-natal nurse” These are essentially career stereotypes. Neither they, nor we can know what jobs might be there in 20 years. Why premise our work on stereotypes? Instead of focusing on “aspirational jobs” (lawyer, surgeon, rock star, etc.) should be not focus on aspirational people?

Saw mentors as both proximate and distal aspirational figures?
Instead of just established professionals, what if some mentors were only a few years older than the mentees? We might better find mentors who are as much like the students as possible--in race, culture, economics, and age. Sure, a 40-year old thoracic surgeon would be a terrific interview, but how about a 22-year old college student who will actually graduate in 4 years (as only a small percentage of most Texas collegians and an even tinier number of non-traditional and 1st-gens do)?

Created a path from showcasing success stories to real mentoring?
Much may be learned in a one-shot event, but a real mentor/protege relationship cannot be planned. Provide for mutual election. Hold formative events. Host a summative event later, a "cocktail party" (with iced tea and cheese) where the semester's mentors can come back and mingle with the students less formally. Prepare sts. with networking tips and suggest specific ways for mentors to follow up.

Reflected on what we think we are teaching and what we are actually communicating?
Is it reasonable to expect a student to adopt the goal of being, say, a thoracic surgeon? Instead of focusing on “what I will be when I grow up”, what if we acknowledged that most of us (even the very successful ones ) had no idea we’d be by now? Life is so random. Instead of focusing on long-term career goals, what if we focused on shorter- term or intermediate goals at first? Finishing college in 4 or 5, not dropping out? Not getting pregnant? Perhaps too, what we really want to get the students thinking about is how successful people solve problems and organize themselves for their work--a more general and perhaps more transferable idea.

And more deeply still....while we are doing project-management perhaps we can convey certain determinative social and non cognitive learnings: that successful people are not just talented, but persistent, not lucky but plucky. This effort will die if it is just another add-on. What if we came up with a mentoring process somehow integrated into the school curriculum? We do not believe that class is destiny. From Martin Seligman and Paul Tough we have learned that qualities like grit, persistence, and optimism are what really lie at the core of success, and they are learnable. How do we teach student to re-narratize their life experience so far, and prepare them for the inevitable adversity to come?

(The dark matter of education may be those social skills and non-cognitive elements (like learning how to look at someone, shake their hand and  introduce yourself) that middle-and upper class kids are steeped in from birth. Perhaps the task at Garza is to help students "catch up" with 
some of these social and non-cognitive skills? Janice Lombardi has done this already by teaching her students how to make a proposal, requiring them to think about time horizons more than just a day away. )

Applied new metaphors to bridge experiential and cultural gaps?
We know that all knowledge and cognition begins with embodied experience.  All children bring with them a different set of such experiences, which provide metaphorical scaffolding for abstract concepts. They can learn anything if they begin from this solid ground.

Are we just adding another "boxcar"to the freight train? Can we fold this into what the schools are already doing?
Instead of this being another add-on program, (further burdening teachers and risking burning out the limited volunteer resources available, what if we came up with a mentoring process that was somehow fully integrated into the school curriculum? (like a gallon of water will disappear into a bucket of sand) How do we get this in the everydayness of school? On the (existing) clock and on calendar? Can we somehow come up with a sustainable & replicable process for learning optimism?

• The process we teach will be one of interviewing, or inquiry.
• The content will be time and resource management, (more deeply, it may be explanatory style as self-management).
• The activity will be an interview process with preparation before and reflection after.
• The goal is to change the way in which students explain their experience to themselves, form goals, and develop optimism.

JEC

(below, from abridged Wikipedia entry on Mentorship)

The person in receipt of mentorship may be referred to as a protégé (male), a protégée (female), an apprentice or, in recent years, a mentee.Mentorship is a personal developmental relationship in which a more experienced or more knowledgeable person helps to guide a less experienced or less knowledgeable person. However, true mentoring is more than just answering occasional questions or providing ad hoc help. It is about an ongoing relationship of learning, dialog, and challenge.

"Mentoring" is a process that always involves communication and is relationship based, but its precise definition is elusive. One definition of the many that have been proposed, is

Mentoring is a process for the informal transmission of knowledge, social capital, and the psychosocial support perceived by the recipient as relevant to work, career, or professional development; mentoring entails informal communication, usually face-to-face and during a sustained period of time, between a person who is perceived to have greater relevant knowledge, wisdom, or experience (the mentor) and a person who is perceived to have less (the protégé)".^[1]

Mentoring in Europe has existed since at least Ancient Greek times. Since the 1970s it has spread in the United States of America mainly in training contexts^[2] and it has been described as "an innovation in American management".^[3]

Historical [edit]

The roots of the practice are lost in antiquity. The word itself was inspired by the character of Mentor in Homer's Odyssey. Though the actual Mentor in the story is a somewhat ineffective old man, the goddess Athena takes on his appearance in order to guide young Telemachus in his time of difficulty.

Historically significant systems of mentorship include traditional Greek pederasty, the guru - disciple tradition practiced in Hinduism and Buddhism, Elders, the discipleship system practiced by Rabbinical Judaism and the Christian church, and apprenticing under the medieval guild system.

Mentoring techniques [edit]

The focus of mentoring is to develop the whole person and so the techniques are broad and require wisdom in order to be used appropriately.^[4]

A 1995 study of mentoring techniques most commonly used in business^[5] found that the five most commonly used techniques among mentors were:

1. Accompanying: making a commitment in a caring way, which involves taking part in the learning process side-by-side with the learner.
2. Sowing: mentors are often confronted with the difficulty of preparing the learner before he or she is ready to change. Sowing is necessary when you know that what you say may not be understood or even acceptable to learners at first but will make sense and have value to the mentee when the situation requires it.
3. Catalyzing: when change reaches a critical level of pressure, learning can escalate. Here the mentor chooses to plunge the learner right into change, provoking a different way of thinking, a change in identity or a re-ordering of values.
4. Showing: this is making something understandable, or using your own example to demonstrate a skill or activity. You show what you are talking about, you show by your own behavior.
5. Harvesting: here the mentor focuses on "picking the ripe fruit": it is usually used to create awareness of what was learned by experience and to draw conclusions. The key questions here are: "What have you learned?", "How useful is it?".

Different techniques may be used by mentors according to the situation and the mindset of the mentee, and the techniques used in modern organizations can be found in ancient education systems, from the Socratic technique of harvesting to the accompaniment method of learning used in the apprenticeship of itinerant cathedral builders during the Middle Ages.^[5] Leadership authors Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner^[6] advise mentors to look for "teachable moments" in order to "expand or realize the potentialities of the people in the organizations they lead" and underline that personal credibility is as essential to quality mentoring as skill.

Typology [edit]

There are formal mentoring programs that are values-oriented, while social mentoring and other types focus specifically on career development. ...There are two broad types of mentoring relationships: formal and informal. Informal relationships develop on their own between partners. Formal mentoring, on the other hand, refers to a structured process supported by the organization and addressed to target populations. Youth mentoring programs assist at-risk children or youth who lack role models and sponsors. In business, formal mentoring is part of talent management addressed to populations such as key employees, newly hired graduates, high potentials and future leaders.

....There are many kinds of mentoring relationships from school or community-based relationships to e-mentoring relationships. These mentoring relationships vary and can be influenced by the type of mentoring relationship that is in effect. That is whether it has come about as a formal or informal relationship. Also there are several models have been used to describe and examine the sub-relationships that can emerge. For example, Buell describes how mentoring relationships can develop under a cloning model, nurturing model, friendship model and apprenticeship model. The cloning model is about the mentor trying to "produce a duplicate copy of him or her self." The nurturing model takes more of a "parent figure, creating a safe, open environment in which mentee can both learn and try things for him-or herself." The friendship model are more peers "rather than being involved in a hierarchical relationship." Lastly, the apprenticeship is about less "personal or social aspects... and the professional relationship is the sole focus".^[8]

Contemporary research and practice in the US [edit]

Research in the 1970s, partly in response to a study by Daniel Levinson,^[9] led some women and African Americans to question whether the classic "white male" model was available or customary for people who are newcomers in traditionally white male organizations. In 1978 Edgar Schein described multiple roles for successful mentors.^{[10][clarification needed]}

Two of Schein's students, Davis and Garrison, undertook to study successful leaders of both genders and at least two races. Their research presented evidence for the roles of: cheerleader, coach, confidant, counsellor, developer of talent, "griot" (oral historian for the organization or profession), guardian, guru, inspiration, master, "opener of doors", patron, role model, pioneer, "seminal source", "successful leader", and teacher.^[11] They described multiple mentoring practices which have since been given the name of "mosaic mentoring" to distinguish this kind of mentoring from the single mentor approach.

Mosaic mentoring is based on the concept that almost everyone can perform one or another function well for someone else — and also can learn along one of these lines from someone else. The model is seen as useful for people who are "non-traditional" in a traditional setting, such as people of color and women in a traditionally white male organization. The idea has been well received in medical education literature.^[12] There are also mosaic mentoring programs in various faith-based organizations.^{[citation needed]}

(mutual election)

... Bullis describes the mentoring process in the forms of phase models. Initially, the "mentee proves himself or herself worthy of the mentor's time and energy". Then cultivation occurs which includes the actual "coaching...a strong interpersonal bond between mentor and mentee develops". Next, under the phase of separation "the mentee experiences more autonomy". Ultimately, there is more of equality in the relationship, termed by Bullis as Redefinition.^[16]

Matching mentors and mentees

Mentees are matched with mentors by a designated mentoring committee or mentoring administrator usually consisting of senior members of the Training, Learning and Development and Human Resources departments. The matching committee reviews the mentoring profiles and makes matches based on areas for development, mentor strengths, overall experience, skill set, location and objectives for the mentorship. Mentoring technology can be used to facilitate matches allowing mentees to search and select a mentor based on their own development needs and interests. This mentee-driven methodology increases the speed in which matches are created and reduces the amount of administrative time required to manage the program.^[17] The quality of matches increases as well with self-match programs because the greater the involvement of the mentee in the selection of their mentor, the better the outcome of the mentorship.^[18] There are a variety of online mentoring technology programs available that can be utilized to facilitate this mentee-driven matching process.

Mentorship in education [edit]

Main article: Peer mentoring

In many secondary and post-secondary schools, mentorship programs are offered to support students in program completion, confidence building and transitioning to further education or the workforce. There are also many peer mentoring programs designed specifically to bring under-represented populations into science and engineering.^{[citation needed]}

Blended mentoring [edit]

The blended mentoring is a mix of on-site and online events, projected to give to career counselling and development services the opportunity to adopt mentoring in their ordinary practice.

JEC

Story on a Stamp

It's a story on a stamp.

Well, it's not a story, but a comment about the nature of cities as collections of stories.

I find a number of things of interest here:

1. That the author is a flaneur. The city is to be known by walking it. A cyclist can be a flaneur too. This idea needs to be brought back to life and applied to discussions of placemaking, public art, and urban life.

2. But how do I access its stories as I walk? Where, and how might we actually inscribe stories into the very streets and buildings--in a publicly accessible manner? What if stories were related by a kind of street actor, or interpreter? (We will never forget our wonderful guide in the Berlin Insider Tour in 2011.) They could be media objects, and the street could be a guided tour on one's cellphone. What if they were steganography?

3. The "space" for the story is the size of a stamp--a small, but arguably high-value space (at $63 a square foot, right now, and microprinting adds value!). That the publication of one's literary work on a stamp was a prize. This might be a way to give voice to the young, and stimulate new talent. This is replicable.

4. OK, so it's not a story. It's a paradigmatic statement instead. Is there not room for both? Perhaps, but stories are more accessible.

Here it is:

"The 60c stamp was commissioned to celebrate Dublin’s permanent designation as a UNESCO City of Literature in 2010. It was unveiled at Roddy Doyle’s Fighting Words Centre earlier today.

Designed by the Stone Twins, two Amsterdam-based Irish designers, the bright yellow rectangle includes all 224 words of Eoin Moore’s short story which strives to capture the “essence” of the capital. It was chosen from a host of works completed by participants in Dublin’s Fighting Words’ creative writing programme."

Here is 17 year old Eoin’s observation in full:

The thick clouds cover up the moonlight, but the city’s lights provide worthwhile illumination – above them all, the beacon burns bright atop the monolithic podium, signalling to wayfaring voyages the ancient Viking settlement.  Now, where Norsemen once stood, I look back, along the quays, streets and alleys, to where the inhabitants live their lives: eating, speaking, and breathing their city into existence.  It gives me cause to wonder, as I stroll aimlessly along the cobbled paths, about those who have traversed them before me, by carriage or before there were even cobbles to walk upon.  I feel their lives and mine are somehow connected, that we all were at one point a part of this city, living pieces of its grand, striking framework.   Every High King and scholar, every playwright and poet, every politician and every rebel, every merchant, student, and busker who ever set foot in the city holds or held onto a chunk of this city’s soul; every one of them stepped to the city’s heartbeat.  I listen to the streets at night and I can feel the city’s lifeblood pumping through me; I can feel myself flowing through it.  All of us who travel those arteries step on the words, actions, and lives of those who travelled them before us. The city embodies the people, and the people embody the city.

GOOD PASSWORD HYGIENE

From Ars Technica:

GOOD PASSWORD HYGIENE:

Use a program such as Password Safe orLastPass to generate and store all your passwords, and make sure they are protected by a master password that's truly strong, unique, and memorable.

Use this password management app to randomly generate passcodes that are a minimum of 13 characters. If you won't be typing the password into a smartphone or other device with a limited keyboard, make sure each password has symbols. Otherwise, a mix of lower-case letters, capital letters, and numbers will suffice.

Generate a unique password for every account that contains any personally identifying information about you.

Change your password at least once every six months, and more often for your most sensitive accounts or after you've used a network you don't trust. Change your password immediately if you learn the site it's used to access has been breached.

When signing in to websites, try to use a login URL that begins with "https."