Autodidacticism

Another great word. It just resonates with me now -- more than ever. While browsing the Wikipedia article on Brazilian musician/producer, Eumir Deodato, I clicked over to the page on this word.

Autodidacticism is self-education or self-directed learning.
An autodidact is a mostly self-taught person, as opposed to
learning in a school setting or from a tutor.

A person may become an autodidact at nearly any point in his
or her life. While some may have been educated in a conventional
manner in a particular field, they may choose to educate
themselves in other, often unrelated areas.

This always seemed natural to me and I think we all do it to some degree. I've had "learning projects" going on in the background for what seems like forever. Ironically, what I have been curious about since way back in my days as an engineering student is how some people actually learn in a conventional classroom. Sometimes you take a class for the credit but have to teach yourself anyway. When you are lucky you have teachers/mentors who package and deliver the information in a way that really makes a difference, but often times, this just is not the case.

The curious part is where I've seen a fellow student latch on to some abstract topic in a flash and be able to work and solve problems given to them in assignments. These people are in a separate category. Yet sometimes, when talking to them, it becomes clear that they don't fully understand what it is they are doing, even though they do it so well! Forget about them explaining it to someone else or talking about how it might relate to anything else. It did, and does, seem weird to me -- like they had learned to sing the words to a song in a foreign language they don't know.

On the other hand, when speaking with an autodidact, you typically get clear and concise summaries of the important yet subtle details that cut to the core of the issue. You get to talk about the strengths and weaknesses... the inter-relationships with other topics, etc. In short, it seems that self teaching or self-directed teaching often leads to more of a Gestalt -- rather than the simpler ability to just apply the topic at hand to a well formed problem.

Chase SUCKS!

I just received another of the many Privacy Policy statements I get regularly. This one from Chase (JP Morgan Chase, previously Bank One). The cover letter includes these choice lines:

• We want you to know what we're doing to protect your privacy.
  
• Your privacy is important to us and,
  
• protecting your personal information is one of our top priorities.
  

I decided to thoroughly read the enclosed privacy policy. Here are some highlights.

Information they collect includes:

• All details we enter on any form for them,
  
• Account transactions and balances,
  
• for good measure, they get additional information from credit bureaus.
  

What they do with this information:

• They share it within their "family of companies"
  
• They share it with their "service providers"
  
• They share it with companies which have "joint marketing agreements"
  
• They share it with "non-financial companies" including auto dealers, auto makers, direct marketers, membership clubs and publishers.
  

What are my options regarding this sharing:

• Nothing. Actually, they state that I can fill out some forms but that they might still share my information "as permitted by law" anyway!
  

Again, from the cover letter they claim that this communication is to tell me:

• We want you to know what we're doing to protect your privacy.
  
• Your privacy is important to us and,
  
• protecting your personal information is one of our top priorities
  

At no point do they mention ANY INFORMATION they they will NOT give out to ANY ORGANIZATION willing to pay them for it.

An Observation

Living here in Chicago my whole life I would say that I have noticed media people, by chance, within a few feet of me at least 15 times. Mostly these are people in the news media and in one case a rather famous talk show host (her name starts with O).

Anyway, in nearly every single case where I noticed one of these people they were already looking directly at me when I first noticed them. For a weird split second I'm starring eye to eye with someone I'm used to seeing on television -- and nobody else is noticing. I tend to think that most other people wouldn't notice me even if I were wearing an ostrich plume hat.

I think this must be a characteristic of journalists (and I'm including one sportscaster). They have their eyes open and are looking at what's going on around them. They are looking at everyone, and my "encounters" occur only when I happen to notice them.