Thursday, October 22, 2009

Punished By Rewards

I'm interested in reading:
Punished By Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

Can't find it in bookstores and I have trouble ordering it from Amazon since my country is not in love with the rest of the world!

Interesting review from Yolanda on Amazon:
"Rewards fail for five reasons.
- First, rewards punish and control by seduction. The failure to win a reward or the threat to remove a reward is functionally identical to the threat to employ a punishment.
- Second, rewards rupture relationships both vertically (student/teacher) and horizontally (student/student). Both rewards and punishment are really about someone maintaining power and control over another and they induce a behavior pattern whereby the subordinate tries to curry favor and impress the rewarder rather than encourage a relationship of trust and openness. Also, rewards lead to destructive competition.
- Third, employing rewards can change superficial behavior effectively, but it ignores the underlying reasons for the problem behavior and so does not effect long-term change. Rewards are not solutions, they are gimmicks, shortcuts, quick fixes that mask problems.
- Fourth, rewards discourage risk taking, creativity, and taking on challenges because the task is now just something that stands in the way of gaining the prize. - Finally, and most tragically, rewards change the way people approach the task. To reward someone for something that many find intrinsically interesting and enjoy doing is to destroy motivation. For example, the Pizza Hut "Book It" reading incentive and summer library reading incentive programs are, according to Kohn, very destructive. Reading is presented not as a pleasurable experience, but as something one has to be bribed to do with a food reward or other token."

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Exporting pdf from Jasper (problem with unicode)

In my other post I described how to export from Jasper.

There is potential problem if you need to use unicode fonts.

In order to export Jasper to pdf, you need TrueType font that has all the characters that your exported pdf is going to contain.
I had a lot of trouble to find free font that has all the glyphs I need.
Found it on myfonts.

euro-sans-pro

All you need to write in jrxml file is:

<font pdffontname="myPathToFonts\fontFileName.ttf" pdfencoding="Identity-H">