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

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.

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".

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

whose story are we telling 'objectively'?

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

strangers in their own land

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

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.

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

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.

The North

Despite all evidence to the contrary, blaming black culture for racial inequality remains politically dominant. And not only on the Right.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

“Jug Jug” to dirty ears.

We all know what an out-of-focus Christmas tree looks like

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.

tend to identify themselves more by their ethnicity, meaning a shared set of cultural traits, like language or customs

language or customs.

Ethnography

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.

a large portion of our cultural knowledge remains tacit, out-side our awarenes

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

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.

Ethnographic fieldwork is the hallmark of cultural anthropology

we think of culture as a cogni-tive map

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

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

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

We need a theory of meaning and a spe-cific methodology designed for the investigation of it

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

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

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

cultural knowledge

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

common form of cultural behavior: reading

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

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

Explicit culture

Culture

Ethnography is the work of describing a culture.

Ethnography is the work of describing a culture

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

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]

But fandom without limits makes Team Internet vulnerable.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Google’s chief culture officer

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.

un système conversationnel alimenté par le traitement algorithmique de métadonnées

mécanismes de codage, d’indexation et de traçabilité qui sont le propre d’Internet

les effets de profondeur, d’opacité, d’éclatement, de persistance et de calculabilité qui font tout l’enjeu des modes d’existence numériques

How has learning already been changed by the tracking we already do?

ensure that students feel more thoroughly policed

testing industry programming the child

that learning is defined by “student achievement,”

assess the stuff that’s easy to measure

One of the open secrets of working in technology

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.

students were being made to take them several times a year, including “benchmark” tests to prepare them for the other tests.

This experience of male internet commenters infiltrating what is meant to be female or neutral online space isn’t unique.

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.

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.

change stereotypes

we need to broaden perceptions and stereotypes of CS

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.

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.

massmediarefers to those means of transmission

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

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.

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.

To the new culture cops, everything is appropriation Their protests ignore history, chill artistic expression and hurt diversity

New forms of collaboration made possible by the digital medium sharpen the theoretical question of how explanatory authority is established.

A few years ago I walked into a grocery store

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.

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.

Companies need to have realistic expectations of the work-life balance of open source maintainers.

effectively contribute and participate in upstream projects

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.

Thetis Island’s famous ‘Oh-my-God-they’re-on-the-ferry pie’ quick recipe.

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

THE INTERFACE CULTURE

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

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.

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

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.

Connected Learning, has emerged as a powerful way to connect fragmented spheres of a young person’s life—interests, academic and work opportunities, and peer culture.

The countercultural trickster has been pressed into the service of the preppy tech entrepreneur class.

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.

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

into the church

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.

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.

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

Hispanic culture

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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”?

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?

at its core, DevOps is about culture

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.

ans and counsels them to be of one mind among themselves?

Welcome one-on-ones Career planning

Blameless post-mortems

Create slack time for important improvement projects

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.

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

Visible Ops Handbook

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).

Clear documented standards and processes are a must, but they aren’t set in stone. They can and should change as your business grows.

Don’t guess at what’s wrong with your infrastructure–graph it.

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

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.

They also adopted the mantra, “If it moves, graph it.”

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.

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.

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”

My notes are below, but you can find the full recorded video recorded by Damon Edward here and their Slideshare link here.

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.

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.