Dan Q
On the way back from Geek Night at Rory‘s, saw the following bumper sticker:
A little googling places it as belonging to a restaurant in Baltimore. But it caught my attention on the way back through Aberystwyth tonight, so I thought I’d share it. Perhaps the marketers among you can learn something from this compelling advertising campaign.
Right, time for bed.
In case you hadn’t heard/didn’t care, ICANN have authorised the creation of arbitrary privately-controlled top-level domains. So what does this mean?
Well, the happy hippy theory fun about it all is that suddenly there’s the capacity for pretty much anybody (well, anybody with a particularly deep wallet, and – for now – a demonstrable business plan) to set up their own top-level domain. A top-level domain is the bit at the end of a domain name, like .com, .net, or .org. The idea is that this will increase the number of providers from whom you, as a consumer, can choose to purchase your domain from, as well as giving you more choice – someday, I’ll probably get the opportunity to buy dan.q, for example, or scatman.dan.
Of course, it’ll take a long, long time before people start understanding that these things really are domain names. There’s still a certain stigma attached to not being a .com, because many web users will guess the dot-com domain names first. The success of the “no www.” campaign has been hampered mostly because people do think, in general, that web site addresses have to start with www. and have to end with .com, .co.uk, or another one of a handful of extensions they’re familiar with. If Jo Public sees e.mail written on an advertisement without (or perhaps even with) a http://, www., or both, in front of it, they won’t have a clue that what they’re looking at is a domain name. And how often do you actually use a .biz or a .mobi, and they’ve been around for a while now?
A bigger problem, though, is the capacity for phishing attacks. Apart from their ability to sue my arse off, what’s to stop me becoming the registrar for .microsoft, .paypal, or .natwest. If I sent a large spam attack out suggesting that people get a critical update from https://www.windowsupdate.microsoft/, I’ll bet that at least 50% of the people who click the link will go on to download whatever malware I want them to and become part of my zombie network.
It’ll only take one such event – and perhaps less – for ICANN to start being very, very careful about who it gives top-level domains to. And with all of the applications they could potentially get, they’ll quickly get bogged down in administering the top-level domain system. There’ll be backlogs of months or even years on new top-level domains, a lack of trust of them, and people will still continue to play with .coms for decades to come.
It’ll all work out in the end, I’m sure (although I anticipate a punch-up between ICANN and New.net – which ICANN will win, of course – in the near future). But I’m just not sure we should be letting the unwashed masses loose on their own TLDs quite yet.
/mopes/
And the day started out so well, too.
“Asking about suicidal feelings cannot ‘put the idea into a caller’s head.'” If you’ve ever worked in a listening organisation that will openly talk about suicidal feelings, like a branch of Samaritans or a university Nightline, you’re likely to have heard this said. In virtually every training group to which talking about suicide is first mentioned, a trainee will ask “But if they’re not actively suicidal, might mentioning it give them it as an idea?” And the answer is no.
This is an important part of the work of these – and similar – organisations. While their manifesto may already state that they are there to talk about whatever feelings are on the mind of their caller, it’s still seen as necessary, sometimes, to remind the caller that yes, it’s really okay to talk about anything at all… even about ending their own life. Showing that it’s okay can open the door to really exploring the caller’s feelings and can make all the difference to somebody in a state of suicidal despair.
What I’d like to share with you is the evolution of a certain subset thoughts about suicide.
Talking About Suicide – A Revelation
(or How I Proved Myself Wrong Twice But Still Got The Right Answer)
Up to as recently as five or six years ago I was of the opinion that certain anti-suicide measures were pointless. I’m talking about building anti-suicide fences on bridges (like the Memorial Bridge in Maine), the installation of platform-edge doors on London’s Jubilee Line (mentioned in this article and shown in this video), and the restriction of the number of analgesics like paracetamol and aspirin that can be bought in one transaction, since 1998. I could not understand that this could possibly work. Suicide is almost invariably a pre-meditated act, and so access is removed to one means of doing away with oneself, you’ll simply use another – and there’s no shortage of ways to take your life.
Then, one day, I discovered that it doesn’t necessarily work like that.
Anti-suicide fences can be statistically proven to reduce not only the frequency of suicides at the site at which they are installed, but throughout the region – if suicide were, as I had believed, unaffected by availability of any one particular means of committing the act – then I would anticipate that a comparable, perhaps only slightly fewer, number of suicides would take place. Switching coal gas to natural gas in Britain in the 1960s was linked to a reduction in suicides on the whole (Kreitman, 1976), and only a smaller increase in suicide rates by other means. Similar studies in the US have shown that reducing the availability of firearms reduces suicide rates more than would be expected if the “saved” would simply switch to a different method.
So it turned out I was wrong. Reducing the availability of means of suicide really can have an impact on suicide rates, as if suicide really were a spontaneous thing (“I’m feeling so low… I could just – hey, look, a rope just hanging there; that’s convenient – well, go on then…”). But those who commit suicide often seem to have planned the act for some time before. Some have been known to have repeatedly visited what would eventually become the site of their death for months or even years before eventually taking their lives. Those who throw themselves under trains sometimes keep visiting their station of choice – unnoticed by staff as they mingle in with the commuter crowd – in order to determine where trains travel the fastest and which trains don’t stop at all. This fact has since been used to provide training to station staff in spotting these people in advance – another suicide prevention strategy.
What does this mean for talking to callers about suicide? When I learnt about these kinds of studies, I started to question what I “knew.” After all, if it’s true that passing a particularly high bridge can be sufficient to push a suicidally depressed person over the edge, so to speak, how could I possibly argue that it wasn’t the case that encouraging that same person to talk about their suicidal feelings would have the same effect. After all, aren’t both the same thing: making suicide seem like an acceptable option by making it more approachable – physically, in the case of the bridge, and more mentally paletable in the case of a caring ear who does not disapprove of your right to terminate your own life. This caused me a significant amount of cognitive dissonance (thanks, Changing Minds!) and I had to put a hold on my volunteer work in this area while I resolved it. As I put it at the time, I had “lost my faith” in the process I promoted.
And that could have been the end of the story. But I’m not a fan of unanswered questions in my mind, and I put a great deal of thought into suicide prevention and into talking about suicide.
Eventually I was able to resolve it. For a while, this resolution was simply based on “what felt right”: I came to the conclusion that seeing a bridge and talking about suicidal thoughts and feeling are actually quite distinct: the former is about the means to perform the action, whereas the latter is about the space to express the feeling. This was enough to put me back on track and, ultimately, make me far more comfortable. Later, I came across psychological studies that backed up that belief, like those referenced by the impressively-titled Scientific Foundations of Cognitive Theory and Therapy of Depression, by David A. Clak, Aaron Beck, and Brad A. Alford.
But for a while there, I wondered.
Further Reading
If I haven’t made you do so already, take a look at chapter 4 of Influence: Science and Practice, by Robert B. Cialdini, which I reviewed some time ago. I’m currently reading The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, by Malcolm Gladwell. Both of these books go into great deal about social proof and contagion and how what happens around us can have a huge effect on how we behave as a society, even leading to streaks of suicide or violent crime. For serious psychology in an easy-to-read and enjoyable format, I thoroughly recommend the Changing Minds website. And if you’re still interested, follow some of my links, above – many of them, combined with a little Google-fu or Wikipedia-surfing, are great starting points for further research.
Downloaded your copy of Mozilla Firefox 3 yet to help them make the world record? I’ve been using Firefox 3 since the early betas and I’ve got no qualms about recommending it wholeheartedly. The awsomebar is simply that: awesome, the speed and memory usage have become far better than the previous version, and the care and attention that have gone into the little things – like the fact that it now asks you if you want to save passwords after you’ve seen if they were correct, not before – really do make this the best web browser I’ve ever used.
Go download it already.
Hurrah! I feared for a while that the yeast I’m using might have died (either of old age, or of being kept in our utility room, which alternates between being very warm and very cool), but when my latest homebrew beer started breathing this morning, I knew that everything was going to be all right.
If you can’t see the video above, view this post on my blog or view the video on YouTube.
I’ve just set off a new batch of homebrew. The yeast was a little old, and I was concerned that it might not still be alive. But just a couple of hours after adding it to the wort, here’s the evidence that it’s breathing!
So, like a handful of others, I’ll be participating in Andy‘s Ninja Burger game tonight. He’s asked us each to throw together a character – or at least to look at character generation – so here’s mine:
Name: Ava Kurosawa
Job Title: Driver
Qualities:
- Average [+0] Ninja
- Average [+0] Driver (just because he does it doesn’t mean he’s particularly good at it)
- Good [+2] at Bojitsu (staff/club fighting)
- Good [+2] at Problem Solving (years of training in the Zen arts; also one-handed Rubix cube solving)
- Good [+2] at Reading Minds (a natural instinct for understanding what people want)
- Poor [-2] at Acting Impulsively (his clan history forbids rash thinking, and this has rubbed off on him, making him indecisive)
Background: Ava is descended from a long history of Ninja drivers. Despite only being an average driver, he seeks to gain the respect and honour of his family through his work with Ninja Burger, and by practicing the calm, collected, enlightened path of his clan. He prefers blunt weapons and particularly the bo staff.
Element: Air
Clan: Mysterious Clan Of The Gazebo Slayers
Matter of Honour: “I will never attack without provocation.”
Honour Score: TBC
If you haven’t put together a character yet because you haven’t seen the rules, there’s a copy here. Just make sure you use the 2nd edition ones!
I gather we’ll be meeting in #ninjaburger on Freenode at 7:30ish. If you’re confused as to how to do that, just use Abnib Chat and ask for help.
VANILLA SKY
Perhaps Vanilla Sky wasn’t the best choice of film to finish Troma Night last night on, based on the dream I had:
I dreamt that I was dreaming, and that during that inner dream I became lucid [not so hard, actually, and something I periodically do normally]. In the inner dream, I’d broken my phone while snowboarding, and needed to replace the battery, and so, in a test of dream control, I simply made a new battery materialise and installed it. However aware I was that I was in a dream, however, I didn’t come to realise that I was dreaming that I was dreaming – I was convinced that I was aware of my waking life as the one that I had in the first-level dream – until I “woke up” and, a few minutes later, achieved lucidity again.
Strange, but not really unexpected: mixing my head with films that have themes of altered states of conciousness almost invariably gives these kinds of results.
A LETTER
We’ve got a letter here addressed to Bryn – it came through the letterbox yesterday evening at some point. If you’d like to pick it up, Bryn, we’ll be around all morning and then we’re disappearing (see below).
A TRIP
Claire and I are off to Preston this afternoon to visit my family before moving on to Manchester tomorrow, where we’re seeing Foo Fighters. We’re back late on Monday night/early Tuesday morning. I gather that Geek Night B is taking place at Rory’s tonight, if anybody’s that way inclined, but I’m afraid you can’t have Pandemic, because I’ve promised to play it with my family. Next week!