Wendell Berry has died. Patti Digh's was the first obituary I saw this morning. And so here is her brilliance, as she offers a characteristic take on his work and legacy:

Most of us are not good at staying. We are trained for leaving—for the bigger market, the better opportunity, the next thing, the bright lights. Berry’s work is a patient argument that this training has cost us something we can barely name anymore: the knowledge that comes only from affection, and the affection that comes only from time. You cannot love a place in general. You can only love it in particular—this hillside, this river, this church pew where the same men have held court about the weather for thirty years.

My friend Scott has run a series of 20 Questions posts for years now, and today he released an edition with Andrea Jones-Rooy, a data scientist and circus performer.  She has a solid take on why numbers are less important than what they mean:

Question 6: Where do you feel the general populace's level of data understanding tends to exist? Where do you feel data conversations tend to leave people lost?

Oh man this is a mega wonderful question and is maybe at the core of my VERY BEING!

Of course there's a ton of variation on this, but extremely generally speaking, I think most people without (much) formal training in data or statistics — or who haven't interacted with data training recently — tend to overly focus on specific numbers rather than broader trends or the actual context or validity of the number. As in, we get very sucked into conversations about whether a number is 2.66 or 2.67 and we lose sight of whether that number is meaningfully different from, say, the same value in a previous time period or whether we are even capturing the thing we are trying to understand in the first place.

For example, most large companies run engagement surveys. Sometimes they ask me to come in and help them analyze them — usually I find that when we present results even to the top level leaders, they get all wound up about ohhhh it's 5.6, how do you know it's not 5.5? Or 5.7? And is it statistically significant?

When what they really should be asking is:
_- Is this value meaningfully different from other times we've conducted similar surveys? Why or why not? How might we probe which of our plausible explanations are likely correct?
__- Is this value a number that I, as a leader of a company, am happy with? (Statistical significance tends to be less interesting to me, I recommend substantive significance)
_– Do I really think I'm measuring "engagement" at my company? Why or why not?

I'm in the process of preparing a proposal for a client, and making the case that the strategic question is more strategically important than the survey answer seems self-evident, but the seduction of numbers works hard against that.

I miss Bernie DeKoven.  I had the chance to meet him once at the Applied Improv Network Conference in San Francisco.  We played games. His website DeepFun, which is still up, was an endless source of inspiration to me when I was raising my kids. It also inspired teaching activities and work with clients. Today in Aeon is a lovely article exploring the vast territory about why play matters for it's own sake: 

Simply put: adults need play as desperately as children do – a zone where inner life meets outer materiality and something unpredictable emerges. The Greeks, of course, had a term for this. Aristotle’s medieval fanboy Thomas Aquinas identified eutrapelia, the habit of knowing when and how to play well, as a genuine and discrete virtue. A person who never plays is as disordered as one who never works. I’m not talking about ‘work-life balance’, an exhausted metaphor that still treats play as recovery time for the next productive thing. To practise the virtue of eutrapelia means that a good life requires play. You don’t earn it. You practise it, daily.

If the writer Justin Neuman was sitting with Bernie right now trying to explain this, I'm sure old Blue would have invited him to make it into a game instead. Blogging is play for me. Finding neat little bits and pieces, letting them sit and sharing them with you.  Thanks for playing along.

A technology professor in France provides an option for students to use chat bots in his exam and researches what happens. Here are the rules he set.

# Use of Chatbots

Tell the professor if you usually use chatbots (ChatGPT/LLM/whatever) when doing research and investigating a subject. You have the choice to use them or not during the exam, but you must decide in advance and inform the professor.

Option A: I will not use any chatbot, only traditional web searches. Any use of them will be considered cheating.

Option B: I may use a chatbot as it’s part of my toolbox. I will then respect the following rules:
1) I will inform the professor each time information come from a chatbot
2) When explaining my answers, I will share the prompts I’ve used so the professor understands how I use the tool
3) I will identify mistakes in answers from the chatbot and explain why those are mistakes

Not following those rules will be considered cheating. Mistakes made by chatbots will be considered more important than honest human mistakes, resulting in the loss of more points. If you use chatbots, you should be held accountable for the output.

Tell the professor if you usually use chatbots (ChatGPT/LLM/whatever) when doing research and investigating a subject. You have the choice to use them or not during the exam, but you must decide in advance and inform the professor.

The whole post is worth a read for what he learns, for his pedagogy and for the costumes.

I’m on a mini quest this year to see if I can hear or see 365 different species of birds. Between trips to France, Costa Rica and Eastern North America I have logged 305 so far. I’m going to have to do some serious birding during the fall migrations to meet the target. But it’s not about the numbers. I love being in the world with birdsong everywhere. I’ve become a good bird-listener in recent years, being that my musical brain and my diminishing eyesight quality have shifted my senses. I’m good enough now with my ears that I can often identify an unknown birds by its genus before I get its species. Apps like Merlin help to make confirmations, or point my attention to quieter or high pushed bird calls I might be missing.

Here’s something about how this activity is so good for you:

interconnected learning associated with birding may lead to structural and functional changes through neuroplasticity—the brain’s capacity to rewire and adapt with experience. Wing says that there are multiple routes through which birding can sharpen perception and calm the mind. Identifying subtle patterns—movement, shape, and sound—requires adaptive thinking and integrating our senses. 

“Birding combines multiple factors we know support cognitive and mental health—like nature exposure, social interaction, and novelty—into one activity,” Wing says. 

And though it demands high-level thinking, birding is also a form of mental rest.

“Birding helps interrupt cycles of stress and rumination by directing attention outward,” Wing says, referencing a 2022 study by German scientists published in the journal Scientific Reports that documented how listening to birdsong reduces anxiety in people. Birding, he says, offers “a moving, engaging focus in the natural world.”