950 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2017
    1. Avant d’être des biens économiques, la culture et l’information fondent notre humanité

      La culture et l'information participent à la construction de notre personne en ce sens qu'à travers elles, nous avons les ressources et les outils favorables à notre épanouissement.

    1. What, but education, has advanced us beyond the condition of our indigenous neighbours? and what chains them to their present state of barbarism & wretchedness,

      This line of thought follows the belief in some sort of hierarchy of culture, as if one can truly be more "advanced." We have been led to believe this is a natural line of thinking, when in reality, it is society perpetuating this ideology. Culture does not follow a hierarchy from barbaric to advanced but rather is a dynamic process constantly being influenced. Education has not 'advanced' them but has been used to disenfranchise their "indigenous neighbors."

  2. Sep 2017
    1. within the powers of a single professor.

      This is interesting because, currently, one professor often does not teach more than one class. There has been an increasing amount of specialization as the University and the curriculum has grown. It's possible that it was easier at the time to teach more than one class because the requirements were lesser than today and the general knowledge on the topics were different. In addition, each class has significantly less students than today.

    2. Spanish is highly interesting to us, as the language spoken by so great a portion of the inhabitants of our Continents, with whom we shall possibly have great intercourse ere long; and is that also in which is written the greater part of the early history of America.

      Though they excluded non-whites, the founders of UVA wanted to create a curriculum that reflected the culture of North America. They realized they no were longer in Europe and creating the most complete education meant teaching a primary language of North America. Spanish was also valuable for academic reasons, as the sentence mentions. Many historical documents were in Spanish.In the pursuit of knowledge, Spanish was a crucial language. UVA created an education with many of values we admire today, including the emphasis on learning about other cultures. They accomplished an inclusive curriculum while failing to include the actual people of other cultures.

    3. To harmonize & promote the interests of agriculture

      This quote is significant because it highlights the importance of agriculture at the time period. Jefferson believed that the United States should be a group of small farmers and not a place that centered around urban planning and development. It was a very agrarian-centered society. This contrasts to the University's ideals today because there is not a huge press on an agricultural program. The word we picked is culture because it involves the people of Virginia's priorities at the time: farming.

    1. ystander behaviors can tell us there is a difference, but not much more.

      How would you analyze this via SNA? What networks would shape bystander intervention? Networks at the party? Personal or friendship networks? Networks on campus? Could you think about doing something on this for your small paper?

  3. May 2017
    1. “An individual building, the style in which it is going to be designed and built, is not that important. The important thing, really, is the community. How does it affect life?” I.M. Pei
  4. Apr 2017
    1. fears have not diminished and may have prompted calls and means for voluntary euthanasia. This process appears to have occurred in parallel with what has been described as the ‘Alzheimerisation of ageing’. Reinforced by media reports of ‘institutional abuse’ in nursing homes, the intensified search for ‘a cure’, and the dire predictions of demographic apocalypse. The Alzheimerisation of ageing seems to contribute to the propagation of an associated and potentially negative ‘neuro-culture’ spread across the whole of society (Williams, Higgs & Katz, 2012).

      Dementia and old age as part of negative neuro-culture'

    1. making poetry in the streets

      One of the cool things about signifyin' is how much it blurs boundaries between everyday speech/language practices and things like writing and speeches which have traditionally been the modes of communication that rhetoric scholars have concerned themselves with. High and low culture is very interconnected, which is something we see not just here but I think also in literature of the Harlem renaissance and of modernist literature (might be worth noting that the Harlem renaissance was during modernism).

  5. Mar 2017
    1. I realized that what sold was not the script but the connection of excitement, the acceleration of a heart beat, the comic tone, the sudden absurd eruption in the life of another.

      Facts count for nothing.

      Excitement. - Career? Power? Attachment? Identification? Meaning? Numbers?

    1. Who do children identify with? Superman? Spiderman? Ironman? Barbie? Gandhi?

      International.

    2. I identified immediately with their show. I reckon that this must be like Mr Benn. We need characters who somehow capture our imagination.

      Identification Narrative culture

    3. Yesterday, I started the day with a blog post entitled 'In the Tribble Valley' inspired by a series of tweets between people who I had never met

      Imaginary space. What shape does it have?

    4. during the week we had students reading my blog, seeing their snow hat from last winter being commented on by people all around the world and retweeted by Rihanna (a robot - I kept that quiet not to spoil the effect) on Twitter.

      Modeling reflective practice.

      Narrative connected

    5. I have indeed succeeded in my ambition, I even referred to Mr Benn in a conference I did in Plymouth in 2011 entitled "In Search of Nomad's Land".

      vulnerability storytelling child/adult Historical Body Discourses

    6. a writer...(now, I come to think of it, I could say that now, I had never assumed that costume before)

      Writer.

      Blogger at least.

    1. whose story are we telling 'objectively'?

      KEY "Whose story are we telling?"

    2. Another star discovered with my brother's telescope might have made a blemish in their cultural landscape...

      innnovation outlier culture belonging belief

    1. strangers in their own land

      Berger expresses how the Native people felt like “strangers in their own land”. The more the Qallunaat or white people started to live on the natives land, the more the Native people felt as if they could not share land with these people. Many Inuit people believed their culture was being lost in the ways of the white people. But now we start to see that while many people still believe the Inuit culture is being lost they have also received and adapted to certain Qallunaat ways. The white people introduced things such as riffles for hunting and the use of snow mobiles instead of dog sleds. The more the Inuit are using the new technologies and ways of the white people, the further and further they get from the culture and the way they used to live on the land. The land that the native people have lived in for centuries are being over taken and changed by white people. The culture and ways that the natives once knew are no longer what is relevant on the land. The hunting has changed, the people have changed, and the ecosystems have changed, and this has caused native people to wonder how their land has shifted so far away from the culture and ways that they have always known. Some native people and cultures have started to feel as though they are gaining back control by governing their own land, but native people will never live on their land as their ancestors once had. Edmund (Ned) Searles (2010): Placing Identity: Town, Land, and Authenticity in Nunavut, Canada, Acta Vorealia, 27:2, 151-166.

    1. Law and custom were of course largely re-sponsible for these strange intermissions of si-lence and speech. When a woman was liable, as she was in the fifteenth century, to be beaten and flung about the room if she did not marry the man of her parents' choice, the spiritual atmos-phere was not favourable to the production of works of art

      Unfortunately, these stifling customs are still present in many areas around the world, making me wonder what sorts of works of art have the capability to be produced if not for certain cultures and laws

  6. Feb 2017
    1. They arc deeply immersed in illusions and in dream images; their eyes merely glide over the surface of things and sec "forms." Their senses nowhere lead to truth; on the contrary, they are content to receive stimuli and, as it were, lo en-gage in a groping game on the backs of things. Moreover, man permits himself to be deceived in f I his dreams every night of his life.

      So much of this piece reminds me of the films of David Lynch, specifically Mulholland Drive. Much as Nietzsche is fascinated by language as a sign of something rather than something in itself, Mulholland Drive is a film that is more interested in exploring the vapid nature of cinema and the nothingness of film. Throughout the film, Lynch pulls the rug out from under his audience repeatedly, bluntly drawing attention to the fact that film is only the representation of genuine experience or emotion, leaving viewers alone with the nothingness that film actually is. Everything in Mulholland Drive is a "surface of things" (as Nietzsche would put it) rather than an actual thing. The best example of this is the "Club Silencio" scene in which the club's emcee repeatedly yells "No Hay Banda." However, when a number of musicians emerge on stage immediately after this proclamation, viewers still are surprised when these acts are revealed to be nothing but hollow, fraudulent performances, merely a "surface of things."

      The deception of dreams that Nietzsche touches on here is also another central theme of Mulholland Drive as Lynch explores the disorientation and terror of nightmares.

      The moral of this annotation is Mulholland Drive is a brilliant film that you absolutely must watch.

    2. tropes "are considered to be the most artistic means of rhetoric.

      Nietzsche's use of "trope" here is interesting; the positive connotation is certainly distinctive from the negative connotation that the word has in our 2017 society. However, his high praise of tropes is fascinating and relevant, and though it is probably only tangentially related, it reminds me of this article from io9 which discusses how tropes in science fiction films ought to be viewed as positive artistic devices instead of negative ones:

      "Even when a movie gleefully steals from everything it can get its grubby mitts on, as in the case of James Cameron's Avatar, that doesn't necessarily make it any less of an "original" story. Cameron may have admitted Avatar is basically Dances With Wolves in space, but he still came up with a cool new world (including the telepathic fiber-optic connection between people and creatures) and the neat plot device of a human occupying a genetically engineered alien body. Plus there was still no existing Avatar fanbase saying "if it doesn't have the big red dragon, I'm rioting."

      Avatar is terrible, but not because of its use of tropes.

    1. Although anonymous comments are "six times more likely to be an attack," they represent less than half of all attacks on Wikipedia. "Similarly, less than half of attacks come from users with little prior participation," the researchers write in their paper. "Perhaps surprisingly, approximately 30% of attacks come from registered users with over a 100 contributions." In other words, a third of all personal attacks come from regular Wikipedia editors who contribute several edits per month. Personal attacks seem to be baked into Wikipedia culture.

      Personal attacks come from frequent editors.

    1. The North

      Generally, when Canadians spoke or speak of "the North," they are referring to both a particular geographical region as well as an idea with rich symbolic value. Geographically, "the North" usually references the area within Canada that lies above the 60th parallel, which roughly corresponds with the territories of the Yukon Territory, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut. Sometimes, commenters distinguish between this "territorial north" and the "provincial north," since there are lands within the Canadian provinces (and thus below the 60th parallel) that have features typically considered "northern": sparsely populated, vegetation and animals common in boreal and tundra environments, and infrastructures that are more common in rural rather than urban settlements. Canadians also have historically viewed "the North", as Berger says here, as a frontier, and thus imbued it with rich symbolic value. Since the confederation of Canada in 1867, "The North" has figured prominently in nationalist views of progress, usually in the context of economic development, defense and geopolitics. Over the 20th century, Canadians began including ideas associated with "the North" into expressions of their national identity. For instance, the lyric "the true north strong and free" can be found in the national anthem. Berger's foregrounding and usage of "the North" here is meant to bring the reader into what will be a very different view of a place that many people think they know well.

      Annotation drawn from Sherrill Grace, Canada and the Idea of North (Toronto: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007).

  7. Jan 2017
    1. Despite all evidence to the contrary, blaming black culture for racial inequality remains politically dominant. And not only on the Right.
    1. The point is that all universities are deeply embedded in specific cultures and societies, which are also interconnected with other societies and cultures: this is the condition of globality today. The digital slips and slides across national and international borders, and changes or re-infuses national cultures with pan-global aspirations. The national mission of education has not become redundant but is in constant interplay and tension with the reach and impact of the digitally global. Studying such contradictions and developing the intellectual and cultural wherewithal to engage them in the pursuit of equality, justice, and peace can be a promising undertaking for the digital humanities within and beyond the university.
    1. Punctually at midday he opened his bag and spread out his professional equipment, which consisted of a dozen cowrie shells, a square piece of cloth with obscure mystic charts on it, a notebook and a bundle of palmyra writing. His forehead was resplendent with sacred ash and vermilion, and his eyes sparkled with a sharp abnormal gleam which was really an outcome of a continual searching look for customers, but which his simple clients took to be a prophetic light and felt comforted. The power of his eyes was considerably enhanced by their position—placed as they were between the painted forehead and the dark whiskers which streamed down his cheeks: even a half-wit’s eyes would sparkle in such a setting. To crown the effect he wound a saffron-coloured turban around his head. This colour scheme never failed. People were attracted to him as bees are attracted to cosmos or dahlia stalks. He sat under the boughs of a spreading tamarind tree which flanked a path running through the Town Hall Park. It was a remarkable place in many ways: a surging crowd was always moving up and down this narrow road morning till night. A variety of trades and occupations was represented all along its way: medicine-sellers, sellers of stolen hardware and junk, magicians and, above all, an auctioneer of cheap cloth, who created enough din all day to attract the whole town. Next to him in vociferousness came a vendor of fried groundnuts, who gave his ware a fancy name each day, calling it Bombay Ice-Cream one day, and on the next Delhi Almond, and on the third Raja’s Delicacy, and so on and so forth, and people flocked to him. A considerable portion of this crowd dallied before the astrologer too. The astrologer transacted his business by the light of a flare which crackled and smoked up above the groundnut heap nearby. Half the enchantment of the place was due to the fact that it did not have the benefit of municipal lighting. The place was lit up by shop lights. One or two had hissing gaslights, some had naked flares stuck on poles, some were lit up by old cycle lamps and one or two, like the astrologer’s, managed without lights of their own. It was a bewildering crisscross of light rays and moving shadows. This suited the astrologer very well, for the simple reason that he had not in the least intended to be an astrologer when he began life; and he knew no more of what was going to happen to others than he knew what was going to happen to himself next minute. He was as much a stranger to the stars as were his innocent customers. Yet he said things which pleased and astonished everyone: that was more a matter of study, practice and shrewd guesswork. All the same, it was as much an honest man’s labour as any other, and he deserved the wages he carried home at the end of a day.He had left his village without any previous thought or plan. If he had continued there he would have carried on the work of his forefathers—namely, tilling the land, living, marrying and ripening in his cornfield and ancestral home. But that was not to be. He had to leave home without telling anyone, and he could not rest till he left it behind a couple of hundred miles. To a villager it is a great deal, as if an ocean flowed between.He had a working analysis of mankind’s troubles: marriage, money and the tangles of human ties. Long practice had sharpened his perception. Within five minutes he understood what was wrong. He charged three pies per question and never opened his mouth till the other had spoken for at least ten minutes, which provided him enough stuff for a dozen answers and advices. When he told the person before him, gazing at his palm, ‘In many ways you are not getting the fullest results for your efforts, ’ nine out of ten were disposed to agree with him. Or he questioned: ‘Is there any woman in your family, maybe even a distant relative, who is not well disposed towards you?’ Or he gave an analysis of character: ‘Most of your troubles are due to your nature. How can you be otherwise with Saturn where he is? You have an impetuous nature and a rough exterior.’ This endeared him to their hearts immediately, for even the mildest of us loves to think that he has a forbidding exterior.

      Using Durkheim's concepts of the "sacred" and the "profane", what do these paragraphs reveal about what Narayan is saying about India?

      Or in short, how are the paragraphs like the image below?

  8. Dec 2016
    1. You gotta go for what you knowMake everybody see, in order to fight the powers that beLemme hear you sayFight the Power

      This shows how Public enemy started a physical movement among the people. Many took to the streets to participate in non-violent protests for the cause. Many were forced to hear what they had to say and there was a push for change. Public Enemy never wanted the protest to be violent, they just wanted change.

  9. Nov 2016
    1. Uberisation is basically known as the application age or the advanced age where people are becoming advanced and using the applications for everything. This application culture is known as the uberisation culture. http://blog.selectmytutor.co.uk/tutoring-becomes-part-rising-uberisation-culture/

    1. Americans celebrate Halloween on October 31 by trick-or-treating, displaying jack-o’-lanterns (carved pumpkins) on their porches or windowsills, holding costume parties, and sharing scary stories.

      Is this another reference to Western culture influence on the rest of the world?

  10. Oct 2016
    1. The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf Clutch and sink into the wet bank.

      The "magic" is now gone from a "magical" place that once inspired poets to write about love and beauty- now it's empty and becoming polluted.

    2. “Jug Jug” to dirty ears.

      Refers to someone who is uneducated. Already, Eliot has referred to "Classic Literature" that most people in today's modern society aren't aware of. This is his way of mocking those people.

  11. Sep 2016
    1. If "social memory" can be defined as "how and what social groups remember," then digital culture, as Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito point out, changes both the how and the what of social memory.
    1. tend to identify themselves more by their ethnicity, meaning a shared set of cultural traits, like language or customs

      refer to background of their culture as a everyday thing

    2. language or customs.

      these are examples of explicit culture. Something in a culture that you can't actually touch or feel but helps you learn about the culture for example language and traditions.

    1. Ethnography

      Ethnography is the work of describing a culture. The work that cultural anthropologists do.

    2. Then they had to learn what the little marks on paper represented. They also had to know the meaning of space and lines and pages. They had learned cultural rules like “move your eyes from left to right, from the top of the page to the bottom.” They had to know that a sentence at the bottom of a page continues on the top of the next page.

      cultural knowledge

    3. a large portion of our cultural knowledge remains tacit, out-side our awarenes
      • definition of tacit culture
      • what we don't know
    4. Explicit culture makes up part of what we know, a level of knowledge people can communicate about with relative ease.
      • definition of explicit culture
    5. She would have to listen to the members of this college community, watch what they did, and participate in their activities to learn such meanings.

      To fully grasp someone's culture, you would have to learn the meanings of real world objects such as love, marriage, animals etc. of that culture

    6. Ethnographic fieldwork is the hallmark of cultural anthropology
      • Ethnographic fieldwork is the greeting card to cultural anthropology
      • Cultural anthropology is when someone goes to another community and studying the culture
      • ethnographic fieldwork is the work of describing a culture and the fieldwork is what they learn from the people rather than just studying them
    7. we think of culture as a cogni-tive map

      Culture has directions, but does not have requiements

    8. three fundamental aspects of human experience: what people do, what people know, and the things peo-ple make and use

      Staple aspects of different cultures

    9. obligations they felt toward kinsmen and discover how they felt about friends.

      Obligations: social expectations which change between cultures and social positions, as well as microcultures

    10. tores and storekeepers were at the center of the val-ley’s communication system

      Gathering places differ in different places with different social statures. Culture of communication and social communicating expectations.

    11. We need a theory of meaning and a spe-cific methodology designed for the investigation of it
    12. Without realizing that our tacit culture is operating, we be-gin to feel uneasy when someone from another culture stands too close, breathes on us when talking, touches us, or when we find furniture arranged in the center of the room rather than around the edges

      complicated communication and observing others

    13. Explicit culture makes up part of what we know, a level of knowledge people can communicate about with relative ease.

      easy communication

    14. culture as the acquired knowledge people use to interpret experience and generate behavior

      culture isn't an observance. Culture is found by putting yourself in others shoes to understand their life

    15. cultural knowledge

      what people know ex knowing how to read

    16. cultural artifacts, the things people shape or make from natural resources

      what people make make and use

    17. common form of cultural behavior: reading

      what people do

    18. When ethnographers study other cultures, they must deal with three fundamental aspects of human experience: what people do, what people know, and the things peo-ple make and use

      three types of ways to study culture

    19. Culture, as a shared system of meanings, is learned, revised, maintained, and defined in the context of people interacting.

      culture is shared and maintained

    20. Explicit culture

      explicit culture

    21. Culture

      Culture behavior, cultural artifacts

    22. Ethnography is the work of describing a culture.

      understand another way of life from the native point of view

    23. Ethnography is the work of describing a culture

      Ethnography definition

    24. nthropologist goes to where peo-ple live and “does fieldwork.”

      anthropologists participate in many activities and things that the culture does.

    1. Finally, in order for data-driven interventions to be wide-spread, institutions must sustain a culture that embraces the use of data, and create incentives for data-driven activities amongst administrators, instructors and student support staff. Large-scale, data-driven policy changes are implemented with minimal friction and maximal buy-in when leaders demonstrate a commitment to data-informed decision-making, and create multiple opportunities for stakeholders to make sense of and contribute to the direction of the change. Users not only need to be trained on the proper ways to use these tools and communicate with students, they also require meaningful incentives to take on the potentially steep learning curve.[40]

      Thankfully, this paragraph isn’t framed as a need for (top-down) “culture change”, as is often the case in similar discussions. Supporting a culture is a radically different thing from forcing a change. To my mind, it’s way more likely to succeed (and, clearly, it’s much more empowering). But “decision-makers” may also interpret active support as weaker than the kind of implementation they know. It’s probably a case where a “Chief Culture Officer” can have a key role, in helping others expand their understanding of how culture works. Step 1 is acknowledging that culture change isn’t like a stepwise program.

    1. But fandom without limits makes Team Internet vulnerable.
    2. This kind of dynamic -- between a digital influencer and a fan -- has become commonplace in the “Team Internet” community. Over the last few years, dozens have come forward to share stories of creators who have had inappropriate relationships with those who see them as bona fide celebrities.
  12. Aug 2016
    1. Shawn and Cory and Tom are three of my best friends in the universe, they know me better than I know myself, and I met them online, thirteen years ago, on an Animal Crossing message board. Like, what the fuck is that? That’s beautiful.
    2. We were all about authenticity, but we were also brilliant fabulists. We were the first generation to really be born into the internet. Everybody had sixteen fake accounts on every website. It used to be so easy to lie — all you had to do was log onto the Neoboards and post a message that said “hi im hilary duff” and voila, you were Hilary Duff, at least for the next three hours. I had a sock account that was supposedly my French friend Lucie. I would have two-way “conversations” with myself that I just ran through Google Translate, and nobody ever busted me. We were kids; we were catfishing before catfishing was a thing. Nobody knew how to investigate anything.
    3. We were thirteen, fourteen, and we were reaching into this shimmering expanse, and other girls were reaching back. They could be across the world or in the next town over, and they were just like us.
    1. Boy George turned 55 this year, an age so many men of my generation—friends who taught me to feel proud when I proclaimed "I'm gay"—never lived to see. The world needs smart, mouthy, middle-aged queers.
  13. Jul 2016
    1. Google’s chief culture officer

      Her name is Stacy Savides Sullivan. She was already Google’s HR director by the time the CCO title was added to her position, in 2006. Somewhat surprising that Sullivan’d disagree with Teller, given her alleged role:

      Part of her job is to protect key parts of Google’s scrappy, open-source cultural core as the company has evolved into a massive multinational.

      And her own description:

      "I work with employees around the world to figure out ways to maintain and enhance and develop our culture and how to keep the core values we had in the very beginning–a flat organization, a lack of hierarchy, a collaborative environment–to keep these as we continue to grow and spread them and filtrate them into our new offices around the world.

      Though “failure bonuses” may sound a bit far-fetched in the abstract, they do fit with most everything else we know about Googloids’ “corporate culture” (and the Silicon Valley Ideology (aka Silicon Valley Narrative), more generally).

    1. One way to do this is to bring someone into the C-Suite whose job it is to keep an eye on culture. The best-known example of this approach is Google GOOG 3.07% , which added “chief culture officer” to head of HR Stacy Sullivan’s job title in 2006. Part of her job is to protect key parts of Google’s scrappy, open-source cultural core as the company has evolved into a massive multinational.

      Interesting that the title would be appended to the HR director position, instead of creating a new position. Stacy Savides Sullivan has been with the Goog’ since 1999, so pretty early in the company’s history. Not sure if her job is specifically with Google or if covers Alphabet more generally. It does sound like Sullivan’s ideas clashed with Astro Teller’s.

    2. Ha! This was before Grant McCracken wrote his famous book!

    1. un système conversationnel alimenté par le traitement algorithmique de métadonnées
    2. mécanismes de codage, d’indexation et de traçabilité qui sont le propre d’Internet

      codage, indexation, traçabilité + calculabilité : distinguent Internet des médias de masse

    3. les effets de profondeur, d’opacité, d’éclatement, de persistance et de calculabilité qui font tout l’enjeu des modes d’existence numériques
    1. How has learning already been changed by the tracking we already do?

      Alfie Kohn probably has a lot to say about this. Already.

    2. ensure that students feel more thoroughly policed

      That ship has sailed.

    1. But this was before Facebook. It was before we all started merging our online and offline lives. The internet hadn’t gone corporate; websites were ephemeral things. Your friendships on a site existed only within the space of that site; if you lost one, you lost the other.
    1. students were being made to take them several times a year, including “benchmark” tests to prepare them for the other tests.

      Testing has gone sentient. Resistance is futile. At least in the US.

  14. Jun 2016
    1. The fact that we joke about it documents an acceptance of a culture of abuse online. It helps normalize online harassment campaigns and treat the empowerment of abusers as inevitable, rather than solvable.
    1. People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement.
    1. What is the difference between an energetic Sunday morning at church and the rapturous hours of dawn spent at the club? To him, they both aspire to the same physical and experiential ends.
    1. Not every perceived ill turns out to be bad. Socrates famously decried the invention of writing. He described its ill effects and never wrote anything, but despite his eloquence, he could not command the tide to stop. His student Plato mulled it over, sympathized—and wrote it all down! We will likely adjust to losing most privacy—our tribal ancestors did without it. Adapting to life without community could be more challenging. We may have to endure long enough for nature to select for people who can get by without it.

      This is a very nice analysis: The technology appropriation is definitely a long-term/cultural question.

  15. Apr 2016
    1. massmediarefers to those means of transmission

      When I ask students to post on Youth Voices, I'm asking them to participate in mass media. It's a big jump for some who do very little by friend-to-friend communication.

    1. one of the annotations is simply a link to a Google search for a phrase that’s been used.

      Glad this was mentioned. To the Eric Raymonds of this world, such a response sounds “perfectly legitimate”. But it’s precisely what can differentiate communities and make one more welcoming than the other. Case in point: Arduino-related forums, in contrast with the Raspberry Pi community. Was looking for information about building a device to track knee movement. Noticed that “goniometer” was the technical term for that kind of device, measuring an angle (say, in physiotherapy). Ended up on this page, where someone had asked a legitimate question about Arduino and goniometers. First, the question:

      Trying to make a goniometer using imu (gy-85). Hoe do I aquire data from the imu using the arduino? How do I code the data acquisition? Are there any tutorials avaible online? Thanks =)

      Maybe it wouldn’t pass the Raymond test for “smart questions”, but it’s easy to understand and a straight answer could help others (e.g., me).

      Now, the answer:

      For me, google found 87,000,000 hits for gy-85. I wonder why it failed for you.

      Wow. Just, wow.

      Then, on the key part of the question (the goniometer):

      No idea what that is or why I should have to google it for you.

      While this one aborted Q&A is enough to put somebody off Arduino forever, it’s just an example among many. Like Stack Overflow, Quora, and geek hideouts, Arduino-related forums are filled with these kinds of snarky comments about #LMGTFY.

      Contrast this with the Raspberry Pi. Liz Upton said it best in a recent interview (ca. 25:30):

      People find it difficult to remember that sometimes when somebody comes along… and appears to be “not thinking very hard”, it could well be because they’re ten years old.

      And we understand (from the context and such) that it’s about appearance (not about “not thinking clearly”). It’s also not really about age.

      So, imagine this scenario. You’re teacher a class, seminar, workshop… Someone asks a question about using data from a device to make it into a goniometer. What’s the most appropriate strategy? Sure, you might ask the person to look for some of that information online. But there are ways to do so which are much more effective than the offputting ’tude behind #LMGTFY. Assuming they do search for that kind of information, you might want to help them dig through the massive results to find something usable, which is a remarkably difficult task which is misunderstood by someone who answer questions about goniometers without knowing the least thing about them.

      The situation also applies to the notion that a question which has already been asked isn’t a legitimate question. A teacher adopting this notion would probably have a very difficult time teaching anyone who’s not in extremely narrow a field. (Those teachers do exist, but they complain bitterly about their job.)

      Further, the same logic applies to the pedantry of correcting others. Despite the fact that English-speakers’ language ideology allows for a lot of non-normative speech, the kind of online #WordRage which leads to the creation of “language police” bots is more than a mere annoyance. Notice the name of this Twitter account (and the profile of the account which “liked” this tweet).

      Lots of insight from @BiellaColeman on people who do things “for the lulz”. Her work is becoming increasingly relevant to thoughtful dialogue on annotations.

  16. Mar 2016
    1. Mariquitas are a traditional Cuban snack. Resembling what many refer to as “chips,” mariquitas are made with green plantains. They are thinly sliced then fried in hot oil and sprinkled with salt, creating an easy snack that Cubans love to enjoy while sitting or grab on the run.

      This page shows how to make mariquitas, a delicious snack made from green plantains in oil.

  17. Feb 2016
  18. Jan 2016
    1. Digital technology has evolved quickly from personal computers and networks to participatory social, academic, and political Web 2.0 environments with a new vocabulary and new temporal and spatial interactions.

      resulting from characteristics of participatory cultures as outlined by Henry Jenkins (Jenkins, Purushotma, Weigel & Clinton (2009), in their book Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, outline the features of a participatory culture.) e.g. low barriers to artistic expression or civic engagement, informal membership, members feel socially connected

    1. To the new culture cops, everything is appropriation Their protests ignore history, chill artistic expression and hurt diversity
    1. New forms of collaboration made possible by the digital medium sharpen the theoretical question of how explanatory authority is established.

      This is really the most interesting aspect of annotation and the digital humanities (to me at least). And it's not really addressed here. The unlimited space of writing online is less of a problem/potential than the lack of limits on who participates in the conversation.

      It'd be interesting to see an academic treatment of reputation systems online and how they do or don't promote democratic knowledge production.

    1. A few years ago I walked into a grocery store

      Dazzled by manufactured images

    2. But even from this remove it was possible to glean certain patterns, and one that recurred as regularly as an urban legend was the one about how someone would move into a commune populated by sandal-wearing, peace-sign flashing flower children, and eventually discover that, underneath this facade, the guys who ran it were actually control freaks; and that, as living in a commune, where much lip service was paid to ideals of peace, love and harmony, had deprived them of normal, socially approved outlets for their control-freakdom, it tended to come out in other, invariably more sinister, ways.
  19. Dec 2015
    1. The modern world offers Unprecedented of opportunities for different relationships & casual hookups that ignite people to experience their relationship choices.

  20. Nov 2015
    1. So far, Layous and Lyubomirsky’s analysis suggests that Westerners benefit more from positive activities than other populations, including Asians. One study conducted at UC Riverside found that Anglo-Americans benefitted more from happiness-increasing activities; however, researchers did see a small trend that Asians gained more from activities directed toward benefitting others’ happiness, like writing a letter of gratitude, than activities strictly intended to benefit the self.
    1. Companies need to have realistic expectations of the work-life balance of open source maintainers.

      When you hire an open source developer, you hire someone who works all the time--not just 8-5, not just at a desk, not just on that one pet project that management's currently excited about. They work on that, they work on the related libraries, they work on projects that use those libraries, they work on the next great version of the libraries the company will need in two more years.

      Plan for your own future by letting your developers explore it for you. They already are...even before you've hired them.

    2. effectively contribute and participate in upstream projects

      If anything is missing with regards to open source within companies (of all sizes), it's this situation.

      Teaching "companies" (or rather the entire management stack/chain) how to "effectively contribute and participate in upstream projects" could change the game for those companies, the projects they interface with, and certainly for the developers (inside and outside of the companies).

    1. One fascinating study in the 1980s found that American men were less likely to regard gratitude positively than were German men, and they viewed it as less constructive and useful than their German counterparts did. Gratitude presupposes so many judgments about debt and dependency that it is easy to see why supposedly self-reliant Americans would feel queasy about even discussing it.
  21. Oct 2015
    1. Thetis Island’s famous ‘Oh-my-God-they’re-on-the-ferry pie’ quick recipe.

      Example of how deeply embedded ferries are in the island culture.

    1. black people keep on making it, white people keep on taking it—a fact of nature.

      A fact of cultural nature? Culture is created by the society that shares a particular set of values, traditions, beliefs... People can change.. Are we capable of changing our culture?

  22. Sep 2015
    1. THE INTERFACE CULTURE

      "The Interface Culture" section of "In the begining was the command line" stands on it's own as an insightful essay on contemporary global culutre.

    1. Ritual performances may also be viewed as the principal mechanism by which meaning in the built environment is activated (175) or as the key to investing domestic spaces with meaning and transforming their meaning

      Can what we build come alive through ritual performances?

    2. Much research in social production has focused primarily on theoretical development, or, when it has focused on empirical details, deals with them at an abstract level.

      This research seems to have a tinge of philosophical influence to it..

    1. Llamarían Rosas a la avenida SarmientoInformación generalSería el tramo que une Plaza Italia con avenida del Libertador; la Legislatura lo aprobó, pero falta una audiencia pública

      Rosas vs. Sarmiento. Still a problem to this day

    1. No culture in history has been more distracted. If you are wondering why there are no more C.S. Lewis’ in the world, no more stories as good as Tolkien’s, no cathedrals as great as the gothic’s, no music as moving as Pachelbel’s, it may be because the writers of these books, the tellers of these stories, the architects of these buildings and the composers of these symphonies are sitting on their couches watching television. I wonder what’s on tonight.

      Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, gothic cathedrals, Pachelbel suddenly represent the essence of the good western culture.

  23. Aug 2015
    1. Developers above the junior level, no matter their demographics, have a huge number of choices. It's rarely worth it to be The First. But now they're not! You've removed a significant barrier to hiring at the upper levels, by hiring first at the lower levels.

      Huge insight here.

  24. Jul 2015
    1. How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?

      Or Restorative Justice these days, I suppose. Yeah, there's something going on here. I need to just listen more.

    2. into the church

      What about school? Can school be a retreat from the culture of the street? Or does it just extend that culture?

  25. Jun 2015
    1. This is important. It means that someone is mixing their public comments related to both their personal views and their work. Effectively, you could say that one is being used to bootstrap an audience for the other. This means that you can't separate these issues by the medium in which they are placed because people are actively mixing their personal and professional speech and benefiting from it in one context while avoiding accountability in the other context.

      A very important point!

    1. You see, along with all the wonderful things our Good White Parents taught us, they also taught us that it was important to be nice and polite and non-confrontational when dealing with the white racists we know. We learned to just ignore grandpa. We were reprimanded when we challenged Aunt Evelyn. We were coached before going into parties that people might be racist, but that was just their “point of view”. We were taught again and again that it was more important to keep the peace with family and friends than it was to stand up to racial injustice. This made sense to us because we understood that arguing with family or friends would likely cause us more immediate discomfort in the short term than racial injustice would.
  26. May 2015
  27. www.jstor.org.mutex.gmu.edu www.jstor.org.mutex.gmu.edu
    1. Annual Reviews is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Annual Review of Anthropology. http://www.jstor.org The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity

      Finally an open-source, open access option for sharing research!

  28. Feb 2015
  29. Nov 2014
    1. If we believe in equality, if we believe in participatory democracy and participatory culture, if we believe in people and progressive social change, if we believe in sustainability in all its environmental and economic and psychological manifestations, then we need to do better than slap that adjective “open” onto our projects and act as though that’s sufficient or — and this is hard, I know — even sound.
  30. Oct 2014
    1. “We should be building platforms to amplify the voices of women in tech, not to cater to the egos of men,” she said. “Men who want to help need to get the hell out of our way, basically. Because we're coming. And we don't need their support.”

      I think this is an immature stance that I cannot support. When you want to be treated with respect by most of the people around you it helps to demand mutual aid and cooperation from 50% of that population rather than telling them to fuck off.

  31. Sep 2014
    1. Avoiding ads doesn't help much either. Because brand images are part of the cultural landscape we inhabit, when we block ads or fast-forward through them, we're missing out on valuable cultural information, alienating ourselves from the zeitgeist. This puts us in danger of becoming outdated, unfashionable, and otherwise socially hapless. We become like the kid who wears his dad's suit to his first middle-school dance.

      Unless you accumulate friends who also avoid ads, who think you're less cool for having allowed yourself to be exposed to them or for deploying them too conspicuous as social signaling, at least when that brand is not favored by that scene. Ironically, of course, most scenes are simply favoring different brands, because it's hard to accumulate any significant set of material trappings that aren't branded.

  32. May 2014
    1. Collaborate for God's sake!: EVERY organization dealing with data is dealing with these problems. And governments need to work together on this. This is where open source presents invaluable process lessons for government: working collaboratively, and in the open, can float all boats much higher than they currently are. Whether it's putting your scripts on GitHub, asking and answering questions on the Open Data StackExchange, or helping out others on the Socrata support forums, collaboration is a key lever for this government technology problem.

      Collaboration is clearly key, but it's not obvious what that means. The suggestion here is a good first step in an organization:

      • scripts on github
      • asking and answering questions on stackexchange
      • and (for data) joining the Socrata support forums

      What does it take to get organizations on this path?

      And what steps are next once the organization has evolved to this point?

  33. Feb 2014
    1. One person who really didn’t seem to understand was Neil’s wife. Somewhat bemused, and referring to us as his “Internet friends,” Neil’s significant other decided tonight was the night for visiting a long-lost (or possibly ignored) relative, rather than sticking around and faking interest.
    2. Community is a funny beast. Most people—the kind who watch talent shows on television and occasionally dip bread in oil in an expensive restaurant—don’t understand people like Neil. Why on earth would this guy decide to open his home, free of charge, to a collection of strangers who met on the Internet? Why would he want to spend an evening drinking tea and making jokes about something called “Emacs”?
    1. The fourth of the theories is as yet the least influential but seems to be gaining strength. Its key ideas are that human nature causes people to flourish more under some conditions than under others, and that social and political institutions should be organized to facilitate that flourishing. What, more specifically, are the conditions or “functionings” that enable people to flourish?
      • Life
      • Health
      • Bodily integrity – protection against physical hazards and against physical and sexual assault
      • Autonomy – in the sense of the ability to choose freely one’s vocations and avocations
      • Competence – the ability to confront and solve problems
      • Engagement – active involvement in professional and leisure activity, as opposed to passive consumption of goods and services
      • Self-expression – the ability to speak one’s mind and express one’s creative impulses
      • Relationships – participation in freely chosen communities
      • Privacy – access to zones of intimacy in which relationships can be nurtured and identity developed
  34. Jan 2014
    1. I frequently see CEOs who are clearly winging it. They lack a real agenda. They’re working from slides that were obviously put together an hour before or were recycled from the previous round of VC meetings. Workers notice these things, and if they see a leader who’s not fully prepared and who relies on charm, IQ, and improvisation, it affects how they perform, too. It’s a waste of time to articulate ideas about values and culture if you don’t model and reward behavior that aligns with those goals.
  35. Sep 2013
    1. ans and counsels them to be of one mind among themselves?

      Tailors argument to audience, appeals to common ideals

    1. Welcome one-on-ones Career planning

      These conversations are important to me. Let's keep having them and having more of them.

    2. Blameless post-mortems

      Tim, thanks for organizing the very first blameless post-mortem-- an important step in our emergency and incident response that will lead to a better system and organization overall.

    3. Create slack time for important improvement projects

      This is one of the intended effects of The Gardener role. By centralizing the duty of interrupt handling into one person's job it will free up time for each of the rest of us to focus on projects most of the time, and only occasionally every couple of months will we each have to worry about interrupts when the role of The Gardener passes to one of us for the week.

    4. They also started to standardize and very deliberately reduce the supported infrastructure and configurations. One decision was to switch everything to PHP and MySQL. This was a philosophical decision, not a technology one: they wanted both Dev and Ops to be able to understand the stack, so that everyone can contribute if they wanted to, as well as enabling everyone to be able to read, rewrite and fix someone else’s code.

      NOTE: "This was a philosophical decision, not a technology one."

    5. and most importantly, a culture that the rest of the world admires.

      Starting with our group here in IDSG, I would like us to lead the way for EECS, CoE, Berkeley, and the UC in fostering a culture that the people around us admire.

    6. Visible Ops Handbook
    7. They have events like “Meetsy” (suggested lunch groups to meet people you may not work directly with) and “Eatsy” (where the entire company eats together).

      Don't eat alone.

      If all we're going to do is talk, let's eat or have a drink in our hands!

    8. Clear documented standards and processes are a must, but they aren’t set in stone. They can and should change as your business grows.
    9. Don’t guess at what’s wrong with your infrastructure–graph it.
    10. The management ideals that started getting formed included: Accept failures but don’t lower standards. Failures happen, and it’s best if they’re visible, understood, and used a springboards to greatness. Trust but verify. Blameless post-mortems Welcome one-on-ones Career planning Happy company = happy community
      • [X] Accept failures but don’t lower standards. Failures happen, and it’s best if they’re visible, understood, and used a springboards to greatness.
      • [X] Trust but verify.
      • [X] Blameless post-mortems
      • [X] Welcome one-on-ones
      • [X] Career planning
      • [ ] Happy company = happy community
    11. They created and implemented the “Developer on Call” program, to address the problem of IT Operations asking, “why should I be the only person waking up at 3am?” To create more developer responsibility and accountability, and to ensure that IT Operations had the necessary resources on hand during deployments, each developer rotated to be on call for one week. With the company’s current size, this translates to one week every three years that a developer would have to be on call 24/7.
    12. They also adopted the mantra, “If it moves, graph it.”
    13. ending the era when management would just say, “Go do this” or “Go do that.” People were happy to come to work, and contribute in ways beyond their job description.
    14. 1) Gain support from the top and bottom to change culture, 2) Increase transparency both within the organization and to the public, and 3) Pay back technical debt as soon as possible.
      • [X] Gain support from the top and bottom to change culture
      • [X] Increase transparency both within the organization and to the public
      • [ ] Pay back technical debt as soon as possible.
    15. We believe that the very first thing that an organization must do when embarking on this journey is to do the following: Create slack time for important improvement projects Keep batch sizes small and the planning horizon short (e.g., weeks, not months) Keep prioritizing higher “the system of work” over “doing work”
      • [X] Create slack time for important improvement projects
      • [X] Keep batch sizes small and the planning horizon short (e.g., weeks, not months)
      • [X] Keep prioritizing higher “the system of work” over “doing work”
    16. My notes are below, but you can find the full recorded video recorded by Damon Edward here and their Slideshare link here.
    17. Community and culture, Rembetsy asserts in the talk, is the foundation of any company. And how does one go about fostering community and encouraging positive culture? You begin by eliminating barriers, getting rid of silos, and encouraging collaboration across the entire company.
      • [X] eliminating barriers
      • [X] getting rid of silos
      • [X] encouraging collaboration across the entire company
    18. At Velocity London 2012, I saw one of the top five presentations I’ve ever seen in my life. In their talk “Continuously Deploying Culture,” Michael Rembetsy @mrembetsy, LinkedIn) and Patrick McDonnell (@mcdonnps, LinkedIn) described the story of their amazing IT transformation that started in 2008.

      @mrembetsy and @mcdonnps