HERE'S TO GOOD ENERGY FOR THE BALANCE OF THE SUMMER

I have found it fascinating recently to follow the Astrologist in me and I am convinced that there is definitely something to it...certainly in the form of positive confirmations and useful hints about what might come my way in the weeks ahead and how I might prepare for them.

Well, with that said, it’s time to say farewell to July, and this week we can have many transits to help us do so.

It’s impossible to believe that we are officially at the halfway point of the laziest Summer months of the year already, so here's hoping that you have been having a safe, happy, and spiritually healthy Summer.

The Universe has certainly been sending us some zingers to challenge us and test us emotionally, however. July was a month ripe with change potential. As I understand it, the month opened up with a New Moon in Cancer and a solar eclipse, and the halfway point of the month completed some emotional deals with some of us with the Full Moon in Capricorn and a lunar eclipse.

Eclipse energy is all about change. And eclipse changes are generally large and broad-sweeping changes in our lives. The changes may not happen when the eclipse occurs, as much of the information we need to create change is eclipsed from the picture.

It’s important to note that both of the zodiac signs that the eclipses were in are Cardinal signs. And that means that many of the changes that happen in our lives, whether they are eclipse changes or not, will be led and managed individually. We are the ones to initiate the change.

Also happening under this eclipse cycle during the month of July was Mercury retrograde. Mercury retrograde took almost the entire month, but Mercury retrograde never lasts more than a few weeks. Come August, Mercury retrograde will be a thing of the past. As August opens up, Mercury retrograde energy is leaving the picture.

Goodbye, July! Goodbye, Mercury retrograde! And hello, August!

Other than that, there are few things in the forecast to think about, I'm happy to discover. Just enjoy those lazy, hazy days of Summer along with me. and we'll deal with Fall and Winter when they get here.

Enjoy this week, friends!

THE GRASS WASN'T GREENER ON THE OTHER SIDE, BUT IT NEEDED MOWING

Photo showing a portion of my neighbour's large front lawn.

TYPICAL ME: My next door neighbour has been laid up for the past couple of weeks recovering from prostrate sugery and an aftermath bout of infection. His massive front lawn has been getting quite long and I've been meaning to offer to cut it for him. 

Last evening as I finished up cutting my own lawn I noticed a young fellow starting to cut the neighbouring grass using the owner's electric mower and walking at a snail's pace behind it. I thought he may be the neighbour's son from Toronto and decided to chip in and help him get the large expanse cut before dark. (At the rate he was going, he would never have made it.)

After a good 45 minutes of cutting and without speaking, we met in the middle for the last two rows. Shutting off his mower, the young fellow reached out to shake my hand. "Thanks a lot," he said. "That was a big help!"

The scene now switches to this afternoon and the neighbour's wife was out picking some lettuce from her table top garden as I approached her from the driveway. "Incidentally," she said, "thanks for helping cut the lawn last night."

"No problem," I responded. "I thought Art's son (second marriage) needed some assistance. "He seemed to be labouring a bit in the heat," I added, putting it mildly.

"That wasn't Art's son," she announced to my surprise. "He is the grandson of a friend...and he was being PAID! Art's kids are older than that. But thanks again!"

As is so often the case, the joke was on me. But surely I get merit points along with a chuckle of embarrasment for a double good deed.

Then again, maybe I should just learn to mind my own business. I've been told that more than once.

THE WIDE-SPREAD HURT OF ONLINE CHARACTER ASSASINATI0NS AIMED AT OUR PUBLIC FIGURES

Freedom of speech is one of our core liberties. This freedom has traditionally included expression through print, speech and even conduct. However, technological advancements, coupled with a substantial increase in access to the Internet, have created an unprecedented medium of expression with virtually no limits on the dissemination of ideas.

I have had difficulty in expressing my opposition to online satire, critiques and other devised attacks (manipulated news) that demean the character of public figures. There seems to be something destructive in the North American nature these days...Downright do not like an individual, their personality, their qualifications, their politics, their record of action, so I will verbally disrespect them in the public domain, sort of thing.

There are a lot of inferiority complexes out there today just waiting to attack anything representing authority or establishment, under the guise of free speech. Politics have become a minefield in this regard with hatred for the opposition increasingly prevalent. It is a desease that is catching and harmful to the health of all of us.

In its early stages, the Internet provided users with limited functions like access to email, messaging with friends and chat room dialogues, but this landscape has changed dramatically with the introduction of thread messaging, blogging and social networking sites. Virtually every person with a computer has the opportunity to engage in some form of online discourse -- whether it be reconnecting with friends, making social commentary or engaging in politically volatile debates.

The Internet gives citizens inexpensive access to a medium of mass communication and therefore transforms every citizen into a potential ‘publisher’ of information for any number of purposes -- some quite entertaining, fun and informative. It is the hurtful, satiracle, unfair, venomous (dare I say unChristianlike) information, out-of-context presentations and scathing opinion pieces that are the bone of contention for me.

Worst of all, when originality fails and there is a lack of something bad enough to say, the readily available ability to regurgitate (share/cut and paste) and give legs to the warped and biased creations of special interest individuals, is all too common. It's called 'letting someone chop our wood for us' in an innocent, non-ownership sort of way.

While the option of online anonymity encourages the speaker or organized groups to distribute ideas and agendas freely, it is also dangerous as it widens the potential for cognizable legal harm to individuals in the form of online defamation. We all have our shortcomings (mentally, physically, even morally). We live in glass houses. We should be careful when throwing stones.

Personal web sites, blog sites, Facebook timelines and Twitter accounts are all excellent platforms on which to vent our spleens but for the life of me I cannot understand the overwhelming tendancy to hurt, defame and destroy the lives of individuals duly appointed to represent our best interests.

The worst part of taking sides is the depth to which we stoop when we become losers.

Heaven help us...We are becoming a spiteful, distrusting nation!

And there are those who would drag me and my penchant for reasoning and pontification along with them.

THE NEW WORLD OF INFORGRAPHICS:

Infographics have been around for many years and recently the increase of a number of easy-to-use, free tools have made the creation of infographics available to a large segment of the population. Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter have also allowed for individual infographics to be spread among many people around the world. Infographics are widely used in the age of short attention span. In newspapers, infographics are commonly used to show the weather, as well as maps, site plans, and graphs for summaries of data. Some books are almost entirely made up of information graphics, such as David Macaulay's The Way Things Work. The Snapshots in USA Today are also an example of simple infographics used to convey news and current events. Modern maps, especially route maps for transit systems, also use infographic techniques to integrate a variety of information. The question is: Can infographis be trusted in the hands of individuals who are intent on promoting questionable agendas?

I'm seeing more and more graphs these days in print media and online communications to illustrate, or support, points of view or contentions raised in so-called news stories. Truthfully, I rarely see one that I can fully wrap my mind around, more or less trusting that the graphic illustration accurately portrays the truth of the subject matter. 

Today, anyone with a computer or smartphone can create infographics, line charts, maps, diagrams, and various other graphics that appear authoritative, whether true or not. And social media has made them ubiquitous, with no editorial gatekeepers in sight. In his new book HOW CHARTS LIE GETTING SMARTER ABOUT VISUAL INFORMATION (W. W. Norton & Company; October 15, 2019), University professor Alberto Cairo offers a powerful and much-needed tool for cutting through the post-truth in infographics.

Cairo outlines what we need to look for when reading a chart, just how high the stakes are, and what kind of tricks politicians, advertisers, social media influencers, journalists, governments and plain-old liars can use to deceive us. He also explains how to become better chart readers and how to use them to our advantage.

In a pre-publication question-and-answer interview the professor was asked why he felt the need to write a book for the general public about charts and other methods of data visualization? The short answer was that charts are quickly becoming widespread, so we all need to become better chart readers.

"I've been designing charts—graphs, maps, infographics—and teaching how to make them for more than two decades. In the past few years they've become much more common in the news and in social media," he explained "Just think about the barrage of graphs and maps that are thrown at us whenever there's an election or a public discussion about a relevant topic. Charts can illuminate complex problems and reveal trends and patterns in data. They can make us smarter."

"However, charts can also obfuscate and mislead. Many people believe that charts are like illustrations or pictures—in the sense that they can be understood just by quickly looking at them—and that "a picture is worth a thousand words". Most of the time, that's not the case."

Social media platforms are great to disseminate both good and bad information; both kinds have exploded, so we readers should learn how to separate wheat from chaff. Because they are so attractive and clear, charts have become popular with good actors—statisticians, scientists, educators, journalists— but also with bad ones.

The latter are aware that charts can be very persuasive but that, at the same time, a substantial portion of the public isn't well equipped to deal with them. Therefore, they use charts to push agendas and spread deceptive messages.

The good news, though, is that following a few easy-to-understand principles explained in 'How Charts Lie', we can all become better readers, taking advantage of charts that are well designed, ignoring or denouncing those created to deceive us, and identifying those that, even if they aren't intentionally deceptive, still mislead us because we don't read them correctly.

Why do people trust infographics more than they should? Cairo said that because many of us have internalized that "a picture is worth a thousand words", that charts are intuitive and fun, and that you're supposed to understand them in the blink of an eye, without thinking much about them. These myths are dangerous. Charts can indeed be worth a thousand words, intuitive, fun, and quickly understandable—but only if you are a good chart reader already! That's a pre-condition.

What kind of cognitive biases and traits do we bring to reading visual data? Sometimes a chart will mislead us not because it's badly designed, but because we're all prone to lying to ourselves. Psychologists often talk about phenomena such as 'motivated reasoning' and 'the confirmation bias', which mean that we all prefer information that confirms what we already believe, and that we tend to project our beliefs onto whatever we hear or see, including charts.

"Imagine that I design a line chart showing that in the past fifty years obesity rates—the percentage of people who are obese—and life expectancy have increased in most countries at a similar pace. If you're overweight you may be inclined to read that chart as 'proof' that one of those variables is causing the other, that more obesity leads to higher life expectancies."

"But that may not be true at all! It may be that the negative consequences that higher obesity rates may have (shorter lives because of more diabetes or heart disease) are balanced out by other factors: longer lives because of declining poverty rates, medical science making tons of progress, and health care improving many places," he added.

"This is similar to many examples that appear in 'How Charts Lie' which I use to explain a few key principles of chart readership: first, that a chart shows only what it shows, and nothing else. In this example, my chart shows that both obesity and life expectancy have increased, period. Everything else we may see in the chart, such as possible causal links between obesity and life expectancy, is not in the chart at all; it happens inside our brain."

"Second, that we should try not to read too much into any single chart; a chart alone rarely 'proves' anything. If we want to learn about how obesity and life expectancy relate to each other, my imaginary chart is not enough at all. We need more evidence."


The professor was asked for a recent example of a misleading chart doing real-world damage? "I've seen people in the anti-vaccine movement use charts that show that there has been an increase in autism prevalence that is parallel to an increase in vaccination rates and to the introduction of new vaccines. This is yet another example of a correlation or covariation that shouldn't lead us to establish a causal connection.

"The prevalence of autism has certainly increased everywhere, but scientists explain that it's due to reasons that have nothing to do with vaccines. For instance, the public is much more aware of autism today than it was decades ago, so we may be better prepared to detect it. Second, we have children later in life, on average, and having older parents is a risk factor. Third, the technical definition of what constitutes autism has broaden throughout the years, which necessarily leads to an increase in diagnosed cases. Fourth, diagnoses have become more accurate: in the past, people with autism were often misdiagnosed. Finally, genetic factors likely play a key role."

Also, charts that are related to highly charged partisan topics, such as gun policy, abortion, or immigration, are nowadays thrown around in debates to 'prove' this or that point. As previously explained, a chart rarely 'proves', anything on its own. It can be a powerful instrument in any discussion, but it can't be the only element in that discussion.

What are some traits of a chart that should set off alarm bells in a reader? Cairo said that the main one is if a chart is presented devoid of proper context, or if it doesn't mention the source of the data it displays. If you can't verify whether the source of a chart is trustworthy, whether the numbers themselves are reliable, and whether those numbers are really measuring what the chart says they are measuring, distrust the chart.

What's the best tip you can offer when reading graphs? He stressed: "Pay attention!" It all begins with that. "Whenever encountering a chart, don't just look at it quickly and move on. If you do so, you'll likely misinterpret it. Rather, stop for a minute and try to understand what the chart depicts; check where the numbers represented in it come from, and what they are supposed to measure; pay attention to the patterns or trends the chart reveals. And don't read too much into any chart. Remember that we all tend to project what we already believe—or what we want to believe—onto the charts we see every day."

ANOTHER YOUNG POET WHO HAS IMPRESSED ME

Several Wrights Lane posts ago I wrote about Ocean Vuong, a 30-year-old Vietnamese-born poet who impressed me with his take on "the lexicon of destruction" in the English language today. Now I have discovered another amazing young man who is making a name for himself as a "spoken word" poet.  Here is his story and a recent coincidental video on the thought-provoking subject of "Re-Purposing Your Weapon."

Rudy Francisco is one of the most recognizable names in Spoken Word Poetry. He was born, raised and still resides in San Diego, California. At the age of 21, Rudy completed his B.A in Psychology and decided to continue his education by pursuing a M.A in Organizational Studies. As an artist, Rudy Francisco is an amalgamation of social critique, introspection, honesty and humor. He uses personal narratives to discuss the politics of race, class, gender and religion while simultaneously pinpointing and reinforcing the interconnected nature of human existence.

Rudy seeks to create work that promotes healthy dialogue, discourse and social change. Furthermore, Rudy has made conscious efforts to cultivate young poets and expose the youth to the genre of Spoken Word Poetry via coaching, workshops and performances at preparatory schools and community centers. Rudy has also received admiration from institutions of higher education and has conducted guest lectures and performances at countless colleges and universities across the nation.

He has shared stages with prominent artists such as Gladys Knight, Jordin Sparks, Musiq Soul Child, and Jill Scott. He is also the co-host of the largest poetry venue in San Diego, competes in domestic and international poetry slam competitions and had the honor of being nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Ultimately, Rudy's goal is to continue to assist others in harnessing their creativity while cultivating his own. He is also the 2009 National Underground Poetry Slam Champion, 2010 Individual World Poetry Slam Champion and appeared on TV One’s “Verses and Flow” as well as a recent engagement on the Jimmy Fallon Late Night Show.