May 3, 2013 · 8:30 pm

Grammar and Smut

When I encounter a sentence that is worded in an obscure way, my first response is usually to infer some sort of smutty meaning.

For example, this article on the BBC news website reported the case of a woman who had been declared legally dead after being missing for over a decade, but then turned up again alive and well, some further two years later. Apparent she had just decided one day to walk away from her family and join a bunch of homeless hitchhikers.

As you do.

It was all very interesting, reading about the legal ramifications of her legal death and subsequent reappearance, but then halfway down the site I read this line:

“While she was living in Florida, Heist worked some small jobs under the table.”

I’m sure the intended meaning was that she was PAID ‘under the table’, a euphemism for a cash-in-hand, or unregistered employment on which taxes would normally be paid, but in this case, and in the context of this story… well.

I wondered who the customers were being referred to as ‘small jobs’.

 

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April 25, 2013 · 2:24 pm

Pokies: A personal perspective

This post is a follow up to this post about poker-machine themed smartphone games in the hands of children. I wanted to offer a more personal response to the issue of gambling and poker machines separate from my exploration of such apps.

Before I became a teacher, I worked for a Rugby-League Football League Club. I won’t say which one or where. For the majority of the 5 years that I worked at the club, I was assigned to work in the ‘gaming lounge’, the polite name for the poker machine room. The time I spent working there confirmed in my mind the absolute certainty that for some people gambling is a sickness, a mental health problem that holds them tightly in its grip, and that pubs, clubs and casinos across Australia target with a predatory efficiency.

There are some people for whom gambling is a casual activity, some for whom it is a social activity, but a significant number for whom it is a compulsion. There were people who came into the club almost every night of every week, often alone or possibly with an equally-addicted partner, and they would play the pokies with the specific and distinct goal of winning money. Often they would play with the distinct intention of winning money, betting as high and as frequently as they could afford. Many people would occupy multiple machines, slapping buttons rapidly and waiting for the sound of the jingle that meant they had scored a win. And sometimes disagreements would break out over ‘ownership’ of a particularly popular machine which was perceived to be ‘luckier’ than others.

The club I worked in employed a number of bonus systems that, like the poker machine apps discussed in my last post, gave people a sense of winning or achievement, even when they were losing large sums of money.  I doubt any of these strategies were unique to the club I worked in. Strategies such as membership points that generated meat raffle tickets based on how much money you spent, bonus periods (like ‘happy hour’ at a bar) where a certain combination on the screen won you a $5 bonus (those periods were always frantic and required a large number of staff to handle effectively), and multi-machine jackpots that paid rare bonuses that climbed into the tens of thousands of dollars. Some of those bonuses were in-house, but the largest of them was connected to a state-wide network. One night, when the major jackpot was only a few cents away from it’s maximum possible payout figure, I watched three people desperately sink thousands of dollars into the machines hoping that they would recoup all of their losses in one fell swoop. One of them won it, one of them left the club in frustration, the other one cried a little.

For those not afflicted by the addiction to gambling, the response is often ‘so what’. I’ve heard people make glib statements like ‘they shouldn’t gamble more than they can afford to lose’ or ‘they should just walk away’. But people making those statements often haven’t witnessed, and don’t understand the nature of an addiction, of what it truly feels like to have your behaviour controlled by an unhealthy compulsion. Like any addict, the images aren’t pretty.

In my time working at the club, I saw one man win $2,500 with a lucky jackpot on a machine, but instead of claiming his winnings and going home, he proceeded to play it away over the course of about an hour. When he finally claimed a payout of a couple of hundred dollars he voluntarily told me what an idiot he felt like, and that he had just kept playing because he was trying to win back the $6,000 he had spent over the past couple of days.

I remember married couples having loud arguments over how much they could afford to spend, one particularly brutal shouting match occurred because one partner had come straight to the club after work on payday, and by the time their spouse caught up with them, there wasn’t much left of their monthly paycheck.

On a number of occasions I had to remind people that they couldn’t leave their children unsupervised in the club while they played the pokies.

There were a couple of regular players who would withdraw the maximum amount of cash from their savings accounts and credit cards, and would be waiting anxiously near the ATM’s waiting for the clock to strike midnight, resetting their daily withdraw limit so they could keep gambling into the night.

One night, a man beat his wife quite seriously in the car park after losing a large sum of money. We saw him beating her head against the dashboard of their car, and when security went to intervene they drove off. The staff were horrified when the man was issued with a warning letter by the club, rather than being banned from the premises. It was never stated officially, but all the staff commented on how he was never banned (or reported to police) because he reliably spent over a thousand dollars on the pokies each week. That incident still bothers me today, particularly my naive submission to the club manager’s willingness to let such behaviour slide.

There were also many gamblers who were clearly there because they were lonely. People for whom interaction with the staff was probably the most social contact they had with any person during the day. In a leagues club, the bar staff usually have other jobs to do when not serving customers, but during the late night shift in a gaming lounge, the staff are often a little more free to talk, and I think some people depended on that.

I often wonder about my efforts at ‘good customer service’, being friendly, having casual conversations or even showing some interest when a customer had a win on the machine, how much of that behaviour was ‘good customer service’ and how much was positively reinforcing the act of playing the pokies? Over the years I worked there I became more and more disgruntled with my role in the whole ugly process. Many people took the pragmatists perspective that we were the smallest cogs in a giant international industry, and relatively powerless, or argued that it was ‘just a job’, I still felt a great sense of relief when I finally left there to start my teaching career.

During my time working at the club there were number of initiatives implemented by governments to try to curb poker machine addiction, or to at least have a greater share of the profits. Increase pokies profits taxes, attempts to place increasingly stricter limitations on gambling in clubs, all of which were fought heavily by the clubs and gambling associations. Most of the time the governments would give in to the campaigning of these fairly influential associations, who were not above running misleading and fear-mongering advertising campaigns to make such measures politically dangerous for those members of parliament who supported them.

What did I learn from this experience? number Well, I learned to be more sympathetic to people with addictions and compulsive behaviour (except for the wife-beater, I never found anything to like about that man), and I developed an incredibly cynical view of politics that clearly separates what is legal from what is just. Though to be fair, that view has served me well in my role as a member of the NSW Teacher’s Federation. Ultimately it reinforced my existing belief in the importance of appropriate education of young people to help them make smarter choices in life, and provides some of the motivation that drives me to do well in my role as a teacher.

So, there’s no punchline to this, no final thought. I just wanted to share some of the reasons why I firmly oppose the proliferation of poker machines in our society, and of gambling in general. I would love nothing more for people like Tom Waterhouse to be run out of business, or for any major event from sports to elections to be held without some idiot on the television telling me the gambling odds. I recognise that in the long run, people must have the freedom to choose how they spend their money or free time, but until we have an adequate and free health service to treat gambling addiction effectively, I suspect that the freedom of clubs and casinos to operate their services in predatory ways means that the problem will continue to worsen for some time yet before society says ‘enough’ or a large enough number of politicians value social welfare over the interests of the gambling industry, or of their own political careers.

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· 12:32 pm

The Pokie Plague in Schools

With the current national focus on Gambling, particularly Tom Waterhouse’s never ending interruptions to televised sporting events, we might see a return to the debates on poker machines and their ubiquity in social venues around Australia.

The big issue being investigated is targeting gambling ads to children, and a key accusation of Tom Waterhouse is that his interjections into popular sports broadcasting is glamorising gambling in the eyes of the young fans watching the sport (Peter Fitzsimmons wrote an amusing opinion piece on the issue here), however I’m personally becomming much more concerned with the growing popularity of poker machine gambling among school-aged children.

No, they’re not using fake-IDs to sneak in to pubs and clubs and waste their lunch money. Instead, they’re playing poker machine simulator games on their mobile phones.

I don’t know if this is a recent and growing trend among teenagers, or if my recent move from a school in a more affluent area to a school in a more ‘average’ Australian suburb has brought me into contact with an existing trend among the children of more working class families. Over the last 12 months, however, I’ve noticed a significant number of students using their smart phones to play poker-machine simulator games; in the playground, before and after school, and even sometimes when they try to sneak their phones out to play games during class.

The issue did receive some media attention in January this year, and here are some links to articles on the ABC, news.com.au, and The Age. All of them are dated January 13 and revolve around the announcement of Senator Nick Xenaphon that he would seek to close the loophole that allowed these apps to operate. Technically, they are not ‘gambling’ as there is no chance for players to actually win any money, despite the fact that the games happily take money in exchange for in-game currency. This article on the site of RSG Australia (RSG = Responsible Service of Gambling) which appeared on January 17 identifies poker machine apps as the highest grossing games on the smart phone and tablet platform.

My interest was particularly piqued when, shortly before the end of the last school term, one of my senior students came into the room and proudly told me that she had won over $40,000 on her pokies game. I asked her if that meant she had won any ‘real’ money, to which she laughed and said no, it was just in -game cash. I asked her if it cost her any real money, and she went suddenly silent.

After this exchange I had a look on the Google Play store and found no shortage of poker machine simulators, most of them targeting an American market and going by names of ‘Jackpot Slots’ or ‘Vegas Slots’ (‘Slot machine’ being the U.S. slang term in stead of the Aussie ‘Poker machine’ or ‘Pokies’).

Sure enough, most of them were free to install, and as soon as you open the game you’re given a huge amount of starting ‘cash’, often round a thousand dollars. But right next to your ‘cash’ counter on most games is a simple little button saying ‘buy’. Clicking this button takes you to the in-game store where you can spend real money to buy additional in-game cash.

One game I tried  playing gave me a starting amount of 1,000 coins, and I made a small purchase of an additional 1,000 coins for $1.90. It took me 33 spins at a max bet of 90 coins per spin to reduce my 2000 coins down to 0.10, at which point any press of the spin button took me directly to the in-game store, prompting me to buy more coins. The whole process lasted less than 5 minutes.

When it came to purchasing coins, I had two options, provide credit card details or have it billed to my mobile account. As I am on a post-paid contract, I have no idea if you can bill such in-game purchase to pre-paid accounts, or if parents have the option of blocking in-game purchases on any phone they provide for their children. If I was a parent, I’d be finding out the answer to these questions very, very, quickly.

I also noticed a couple of other features of the game which are clearly designed to lure in players. While you could win in game cash from your spins on the virtual machine, you also had a second points track that went up seemingly based on how much you bet, with bonuses for the amount you won back. The points allowed you to ‘level up’ and with each level came bonuses like access to different types of virtual machines to play, or ‘boosters’ which provided increase chances to win for a limited number of spins.

These game-based features provide incentives that offer a sense of winning and achievement even if you don’t ‘win’ any in-game coins on the virtual poker machine. The sub-text of this set up is that ‘you’re a winner even when you’re losing’, a hideous subversion of the primary negative aspect of playing poker machines, that you lose money.

The game also featured social interaction as well. If your friends are playing the same game as you, you can trade coins, boosters, and other in game rewards. So not only are players taught that even losing is winning, but they have a virtual way to ‘borrow a fiver’ from a friend to keep playing as well as an incentive to recruit their friends into playing the same poker machine game as them.

It is the inclusion of these features that technically put these apps into the category of ‘games’ rather than ‘gambling’, and allow them to bypass Australia’s gambling restrictions and thus find their way into the hands of children who would normally be prevented from gambling.

The final thing that I noticed about the game I played, is that it requires constant network contact and each single spin of the wheels triggered a transmission ‘back to base’ meaning that the probabilities and results of each spin were not controlled by the software installed on the device, but by a central server which could be located anywhere in the world.

At one point when my network service dropped out, the wheels spun for about 15 seconds (which felt like an eternity in the fast-paced world of pokie-gaming) before a message popped up on screen telling me that the network was unavailable and that I had not been charged for that spin. Beneath the message was a helpful button allowing me to ‘spin again’.

In Australia, the law regulates the odds of winning that poker machines must offer, however such a game-based app, controlled form an international server, has no such restrictions, and players of the game may find themselves winning increasingly frequently, or, as I personally suspect, they might find their chances of winning, and winning big, increase with the amount of money they spend on in game currency.

My final point of investigation into the game was to find out who made it, and who was profiting from this dubious business endeavour. The manufacturer’s website (funzio.com) was connected to the game developers ‘Gree’ (gree.com). Gree is either a subsidiary or trading name of Hichina Zhicheng Technology Ltd (official website is http://www.wellsupplier.com) and the business is registered at 3/f, HiChina Mansion, no. 27 Gulouwai Ave, Dongcheng District, Beijin, 100120, China.

While they publish a wide range of games targeted at children, they also have a number of adult games including a Grand Theft Auto ripoff called ‘Crime City’, as well as war themed, and monster hunting themed games. Most of the games I looked at included a game mechanism that allowed you to make in-game purchases of some sort of currency or resource that assists in the playing of the game. The gambling games, however, appear to be the only ones that are entirely dependent on purchasing in game currency in order to play.

The business model is not new, and can be found employed by companies all over the world. Just cast you mind back to the Farmville craze of two years ago, or remember back in 2011 when the App ‘Tap Fish’ garnered some media attention for convincing kids to spend hundreds of dollars to resurrect dead fish in a tamagochi-style fish tank (A blog post on that issue can be found on Famingo.com).

These poker machine apps, however, are set apart from other games by the fact that eventually, a young player of such a game will be of an age where they can walk into a pub or club, and where $1.90 will not buy them 1000 coins, but rather buy them maybe 2 spins at the cost of a dollar (as no gaming machine will accept 90c!), and after however long they have spent playing their iPhone game and learning that even losers win, and that gambling is a fun social event, they will have to choose between walking away, or putting more and more of their own money into the machine to keep the wheels spinning.

While I personally put 100% of my support behind Sentaor Xenaphon’s efforts to ban, or at least regulate, the sale and operation of such apps for people under 18, I suspect that the very blurry line between games and gambling, as well as the issues of national jurisdictions for sales through international marketplaces like the App Store, will quickly become a legal quagmire through which there will be no easy regulatory route.

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April 21, 2013 · 2:49 pm

Isn’t it Ironic?

The great thing about the internet is that it offers such an amazing opportunity for everyone to have their voice heard, and allows for the free sharing of ideas between people in a way never before seen in human history. People on opposite sides of the globe can collaborate on a complex project in their spare time while communicating their thoughts and experiences to anyone with a computer and access to the ‘net (with the exception of people in countries that censor the internet, of course).

The terrible thing about the internet is that many people become convinced that just because they can ‘publish’ their ideas online, or share those ideas with other people, that such publication and sharing makes the ideas themselves more valid.

A poorly-informed idea is still a poorly-informed idea no mater how many people read it or even agree with it. And not every thought that passes through a person’s brain deserves to be spoken aloud, or even published online.

So says a relative nobody on his blog.

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April 11, 2013 · 6:09 pm

Chocolate, Betrayal and Sarcasm.

I posted this little sarcastic rant on the facebook page of ‘Cadbury Dairy Milk – Australia’, and was quite pleased with how it turned out as a piece of writing, so thought I would repost it here for a laugh. Will post updates if I ever get a reply,,,

“I went to a Donut King to buy a milkshake, and saw on their menu a picture of a Cadbury Mint Bubbly chocolate bar superimposed over the top of a photo of a milkshake with what appeared to be mint bubbly chocolate crumbled on top of it. 

Being partial to mint bubbly chocolate, and to the choc-mint flavour combo in general, I asked for a ‘mint bubbly milkshake’. The girl serving me said, ‘what?’, so I pointed at the picture, at which point she nodded and walked away.

When I was presented with my milkshake, it did indeed have Cadbury Mint Bubbly chocolate crumbled over the top of it, but when I took a sip I nearly gagged!

Instead of the expected taste of cool choc-mint, my mouth was assaulted by the horrific flavour of A Lime Milkshske!

Let’s forgo any discussion about how lime milkshakes should only ever be used as shock therapy for the terminally taste deprived, but why on earth is a lime milkshake being advertised as a Cadbury Mint Bubbly shake?

Did my taste buds miss a memo informing them that lime and mint were now the same flavour and to expect them to be used interchangeably? Has Donut King turned over its product development to an octogenarian orangutan that has retired from a laboratory life of smoking unfiltered dung? Or has Cadbury just decided that any publicity is good publicity, even if it means rewarding their customer’s brand loyalty with a lime-flavoured kick in the face? 

This experience has left me with the snack-related equivalent of PTSD as I find myself unable to trust the advertised nature of any snack. No longer do I shop at Donut King for fear of ordering a cinnamon doughnut and being served with an amusing novelty poo. Further, my confidence in my own ability to judge flavour has been so shaken that I now find myself eating only ‘healthy’ foods, knowing them to be utterly devoid of flavour and therefore able to be consumed without fear.

Finally, as a seriously overweight man whose brand loyalty to Cadbury had transcended all common sense or advice to lose weight, I feel betrayed by a brand that I have literally held at a value higher than my own life. 

For shame, Cadbury, that you put your name to such a lie. You leave me with the choice been finding an alternative brand to gorge myself on, or cutting such high sugar, fatty snacks from my diet. And that is an option neither of us really wants.”

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April 3, 2013 · 9:33 pm

Burying the lead!

As an English teacher, text types are a common focus of some lessons. A popular one is the news report. It’s manageable, it’s easy to break down, and it is a fun way for students to reinterpret the content of novels or films.

One of the more difficult things to teach students who don’t have regular exposure to print news is the concept of burying the lead. A news report should usually start with the most pertinent event being described in the first sentence, and burying the lead is when this sentence is somewhere further down the article than the first sentence.

For example, compare the difference between these two opening paragraphs.

Example one: At least 170 people are confirmed dead after a plane crashed into a hotel night club on New Year’s Eve. All 125 passengers on the plane were killed, as well as at least 45 night club patrons and staff.

Example two: A local bar was closed on Saturday after several bar staff suffered fatal injuries as a result of the passenger plane that crashed into the building shortly before midnight on January 31. the 125 passengers aboard the plane were also killed.

It may seem obvious, but some students have trouble evaluating the most important information in a story, or at least figuring out which piece of information might be the most relevant to the widest section of the audience. Generally speaking, 170 dead trumps a bar closure.

Anyway, I bring this up in response tothis blog post. *

Simply read the first paragraph, and you’ll see why I don’t feel so bad about year 8 students not fully grasping this concept when it seems that people publishing reports on America’s NBC sports can’t figure it out either. 

 

* I want to acknowledge at this time that I recognise the link is to a blog and not a ‘news’ report. But seriously… does that first sentence really need to be reported anywhere in the story? I think it’s safe to assume that the poor guy was carried off the court.

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February 16, 2013 · 9:37 am

Zombie Ideas in Education

Reblogged from Diane Ravitch's blog:

I have written on many occasions that merit pay is an idea that never works and never dies. It has been tried for over a century, and failed again and again. Yet it comes back. I didn't realize it, but merit pay is a zombie idea.

There are many more zombie ideas, like the well-known adage that "the beatings will continue until morale improves."

Read more… 270 more words

Australia's federal government keep talking about bonuses for teachers, in effect a watered down performance pay model. In this post, Diane Ravitch labels performance pay as a 'zombie idea' and highlights the flaws with implementation.

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