The Daily Parker

A recent study found that activity trackers can actually de-motivate teenagers:

The problem with the monitors seemed to be that they had left the teenagers feeling pressure and with little control over their activities, as well as self-conscious about their physical abilities, said Charlotte Kerner, a lecturer in youth sport and physical education at Brunel University London, who led the study. The result was frustration, self-reproach — and less, not more, movement.

“You can’t just give a child a Fitbit for Christmas and expect them to be active,” Kerner said. “They will need educating on how best to negotiate the features.” Nudge them to set realistic step counts and other fitness goals, she says, and to consider whether they want to share their results with friends. For many young people, fitness may be better achieved in private.

I would be interested in why this happens, and how prevalent it is in adults. For some adults, like me, having an activity tracker is really motivating. I've arranged my life in part to make sure I get lots of steps, often more than 4,500 by the time I've gotten to work in the morning (or 9,000 if I walk the whole way).

Teenagers, though, really resent being told what to do. I wonder how this study could be altered to reduce that part of adolescent psychology.

Update: I just discovered that, when I hit 10,611 steps today, I'll have 15 million lifetime steps on Fitbit. Cool.

I'm about to fly to San Antonio for another round of researching how the military tracks recruits from the time they get to the processing center to the time they leave for boot camp (officially "Military Basic Training" or MBT).

I have some stuff to read on the plane:

• WPA, which is probably securing your WiFi, has been hacked after 14 years. Great. At least SSL is still secure.
• The New Republic claims that Republicans are ignoring the will of the people by tossing out ballot initiatives. (This is not new.)
• Chicago saw record rainfall Saturday. I know; I was in it.
• The Navy Pier bicycle flyover will take another two years and more money, because Chicago.
• President Trump made some remarks about Obamacare with the sensitivity and coherence we've come to expect from the man.
• Speaking of, the Washington Post has a view into the Adult Day Care facility at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW.
• Deeply Trivial name-checked The Daily Parker in a post about Sears.

OK, off to K20. Or K18. Or wherever my plane has got to.

Yesterday, the New York Times published an interview with President Trump that no president in history could have given. It contains so many wild assertions and outright lies that its value to the public may only be in its demonstration of the man's mendacity:

Mr. Trump rebutted [former FBI director James] Comey’s claim that in a one-on-one meeting in the Oval Office on Feb. 14, the president asked him to end the investigation into his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn.

Mr. Comey testified before Congress that Mr. Trump kicked the vice president, attorney general and several other senior administration officials out of the room before having the discussion with Mr. Comey.

“I don’t remember even talking to him about any of this stuff,” Mr. Trump said. “He said I asked people to go. Look, you look at his testimony. His testimony is loaded up with lies, O.K.?”

He expressed no second thoughts about firing Mr. Comey, saying, “I did a great thing for the American people.”

Uh huh. But that's nothing compared with this:

But Mr. Trump left little doubt during the interview that the Russia investigation remained a sore point. His pique at [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions, in particular, seemed fresh even months after the attorney general’s recusal. Mr. Sessions was the first senator to endorse Mr. Trump’s candidacy and was rewarded with a key cabinet slot, but has been more distant from the president lately.

“Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself, which frankly I think is very unfair to the president,” he added. “How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I’m not going to take you.’ It’s extremely unfair — and that’s a mild word — to the president.”

Mr. Trump also faulted Mr. Sessions for his testimony during Senate confirmation hearings when Mr. Sessions said he had not had “communications with the Russians” even though he had met at least twice with Ambassador Sergey I. Kislyak. “Jeff Sessions gave some bad answers,” the president said. “He gave some answers that were simple questions and should have been simple answers, but they weren’t.”

The president with fewer legislative accomplishments to his name than William Henry Harrison has outdone Ronald Reagan in incoherence and lack of focus:

He has turned completely against Attorney General Jeff Sessions, one of his staunchest loyalists, who he now blames for essentially launching the Russia probe. He is also lashing out at Rod Rosenstein. Sessions and Rosenstein, were complicit, substantively if not legally, in firing FBI Director James Comey, what I believe is to date the greatest impeachable offense of his Presidency.  He is setting out the terms upon which he will fire Robert Mueller. He inexplicably admitted to using his second conversation with Vladimir Putin to discuss the issues that had come up a year ago in that Trump Tower meeting with Don Jr.

You’ve heard about those. What I was almost more interested was the litany of bizarre and often inexplicable statements and claims that came before he even got to those issues. So I took a moment to annotate each of these passages …

We're not shocked anymore by the President's flaws, but maybe we should be. Because this is not a man in control of himself, his job, or his life. This is a deeply disturbed, possibly mentally-ill person, who shouldn't run a lemonade stand, let alone the most powerful country the world has ever seen.

Now that we're four days from Apollo After Hours, of which I'm the committee chair, and given that I still have work to do at work, the articles I need to catch up on keep piling up:

• WaPo columnist Greg Sargent points out that President Trump is flailing simply because Americans hate his agenda. It's not rocket surgery.
• Meanwhile, 538 points out that there are six pretty big blocs arrayed against Trump, any one of which would be a formidable challenge to a competent person.
• Via CityLab, a precinct-level map of the 2016 election, which is really really cool.
• TPM points to New York Times writer Noam Scheiber's explanation of how Uber uses psychological tricks to game its drivers to show why we need a stronger safety net for workers. (This might be why Trump is flailing; see above.)
• Deeply Trivial is doing the A-to-Z Blogging Challenge this month, starting with Alpha (Type 1 errors) and Beta (Type 2 errors). Good stuff.
• Closer to home, the Tribune has a story on the rebuilding and renovation of the Wilson Avenue El stop.

OK, back to the mines...

David Roberts, writing for Vox, says that trying to understand what Donald Trump really believes is a category error:

The question presumes that Trump has beliefs, "views" that reflect his assessment of the facts, "positions" that remain stable over time, woven into some sort of coherent worldview. There is no evidence that Trump has such things. That is not how he uses language.

When he utters words, his primary intent is not to say something, to describe a set of facts in the world; his primary intent is to do something, i.e., to position himself in a social hierarchy. This essential distinction explains why Trump has so flummoxed the media and its fact-checkers; it’s as though they are critiquing the color choices of someone who is colorblind.

What he’s doing is trying to establish dominance — to win, in his words. That’s what he uses words for. That’s how he sees every interaction in which he is involved. He is attuned only to what the words are doing, whether they are winning or losing, not to what they mean.

This point helps explain why Trump cannot ever admit a mistake or an error. He can only process accusations — of dishonesty, of cruelty — as social gambits, not as factual claims. To him, the demand that he apologize or admit error is nothing more than a dominance play. Apologizing is losing.

That the party of Lincoln nominated this person for president will go down in history as the turning point in American civilization, I think.

So far today, the following have crossed my browser:

• Donald Trump's campaign actually did set up a policy office, but after the convention most of them quit.
• Jonathan Chait thinks Matt Lauer completely sucked at the policy debate last night; Josh Marshall thinks he really didn't.
• The Economist's Schumpeter column has taken up the plight of us introverts in the workspace.
• Nature explains how to raise super-smart children.

Back to the mines...

Some articles to read:

• Trump, the single best example of the Dunning-Kruger effect since Dunning and Kruger identified it, thinks he can end Chicago's crime wave in a week. Right.
• Also, there is no retail voter fraud. Trump's call for vigilantes to police polling places is nothing more than Jim Crow tactics.
• Josh Marshall wonders just what Trump's immigration policies really are. (Hint: he doesn't have any.)
• Scott Hanselman has advice for how to reduce your psychic weight.
• David Dayin in New Republic wonders if the end of private prisons signals a winding-down of America's privatization fetish.
• The EFF has a list of ways Windows 10 can violate your privacy (he writes on a Windows 10 computer).

That's all for now. More conference calls...

Day two of Certified Scrum Master training starts in just a few minutes (more on that later), so I've queued up a bunch of articles to read this weekend:

• The climate prediction center forecasts a warm, dry fall for Illinois followed by a normal winter.
• Reactions to Trump dumping Russian stooge Paul Manfort in favor of right-wing nutjob Steve Bannon are pretty consistent: here's Fallows and Bloomberg, for starters, plus analysis from the Times and Marshall on how Trump's support is declining even among his key demographic group, angry old white men.
• Trump got his first intelligence briefing and concluded that he doesn't trust intelligence. We knew that already, but this is more pointed.
• Economist Joseph Stiglitz thinks the Euro is a failure. Krugman got there years ago.
• Asra Taylor, writing in New Republic, worries about the loss of the democratic urge. So do I.
• Pacific Standard has a new look at the Prisoner's Dilemma.
• A new AI is detecting depression on Instagram feeds.

Training begins again...

Sometimes, when I'm really busy, I click on articles I want to read. Right now I have a lot tabs open:

• Business Insider cites a (dubious) study that says smart people are more likely to stay up late and take illegal drugs.
• The Washington Post thinks airline frequent-flyer programs are about to get regulated.
• The Chicago Sun-Times reports that O'Hare runway 9C/27C, which began construction this week and will open in 2020, is a tremendous win for the mayor.
• Josh Marshall does the math and shows that, with current polls, Hillary Clinton is likely to win states totaling 273 electoral votes by more than 10%. That's a hell of a landslide. 
• James Fallows posts his 75th (!) Trump Time Capsule, this one about how Trump doesn't understand the 6th Amendment.
• Nuclear security expert Bruce Blair outlines scenarios in which you really don't want Donald Trump's finger on the button. And Mother Jones, on the same topic, points out "the stupidest thing ever said in presidential politics."

So, altogether, not entirely about the election.

• Yet another reporter stumbles upon the Dunning-Krueger effect (though without naming it) to explain Trump's stumbles upon the body politic.
• Meanwhile, some Republicans are finally distancing themselves from him, but in a way that makes them look even more craven than they already looked. It's even looking like they know they've made a huge mistake. Maybe.
• And even though his balloon is on fire, he's already starting to blame "them" for "fixing" the general election.
• Via Schneier, the NIST no longer recommends using SMS for two-factor authentication. Oh, yay.
• Via Deeply Trivial, some new research that seems to confirm first impressions are important.
• Don't read before dinner: cheap bacon has a lot of hidden costs. I'd say "no shit" but, well...that's one of the costs.