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  1. Oct 2021
  2. Sep 2021
    1. One complicating issue when trying to make sense across multiple communities is that not only do different communities have different cultures and practices, but also different epistemologies: different languages to describe their community and the soci(et)al context it operates in, with often different meanings attached to the terminologies used.
  3. Aug 2021
    1. Voilà ce à quoi doit ressembler un corps beau.

      Dans l’étude des passions de Hume (notamment la passion amoureuse, où la beauté est capitale) :

      [L]’élément principal de la beauté d’une personne tient à son apparence de santé, de vigueur et à <mark>une configuration de ses membres qui annonce la force et l’activité</mark>.

      <footer>David Hume, <cite>Traité de la nature humaine</cite>, livre II, partie II, section V</footer> https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/108/

      Comme quoi la culture physique est importante.

    1. Reactionary training is an expense

      need to move from reactionary training to proactive and anticipatory training

    1. Middleware would reduce both platforms' own power and their function as levers for unaccountable state power, as governments increasingly pressure platforms to "voluntarily" suppress disfavored speech.2

      Tangentially related idea which this sparked:

      Within my beyond the pale thesis, banishing people in smaller social groups is easier, but doesn't necessarily scale well.

      In larger towns, cities, and even states, it may work in some of the smallest and most egregious cases like major crime or murder when carried out by the state, but what about the smaller social infractions?

      Cancel culture is attempting to apply this larger social pressure to bigger public figures in ways that it traditionally has been more difficult to do. It's even more difficult in a highly networked world where globalism has taken hold.

      How do we cater to the centric masses while potentially allowing some flexibility to the cultures considered at the edges? Ethics aren't universal, so there will be friction at a huge number of overlaps.

      Examples:

      • Paula Dean (racism), loses shows, deals, etc. but still has reach in certain sections of the country and online
  4. Jul 2021
    1. Thus we can roughly define what we mean by the art of reading as follows: the process whereby a mind, with nothing to operate on but the symbols of the readable matter, and with no help from outside, 0 elevates itself by the power of its own operations. The mind passes from understanding less to under­standing more. The skilled operations that cause this to hap­pen are the various acts that constitute the art of reading.

      I'm not sure I agree with this perspective of not necessarily asking for outside help.

      What if the author is at fault for not communicating properly or leaving things too obscure? Is this the exception of which he speaks?

      What if the author isn't properly contextualizing all the necessary information to the reader? This can be a particular problem when writing history across large spans of both time and culture or even language.

    1. Sergio: What about school?Rodolfo: School? One of the first memories I have from school, after Phoenix—I wasn't going to school in Phoenix, actually, I think I even skipped kindergarten—we moved to Long Beach, California. And the only thing I remember from school was my mom waking me up probably about four or five in the morning. The sun wasn't even out yet, and she would walk me to this random lady's house. Actually, she wasn't random, but she was just some lady I didn't know. There was two other kids there, and I would be in uniform. That was the first time I actually wore a uniform to go to school. I was there, but I didn't really remember that much. When we moved to Chicago, that's when everything changed.Rodolfo: I was a little bit older. I remember I went to Jordan Elementary. It was in the North side of Chicago. We were there for a very brief moment, because then we moved to Evanston. Evanston was literally right next to Chicago. The school I was attending was called Orrington Elementary. The reason why we moved, once again, is because she wanted a better quality of life for me. Where I was at, it was all English, there was no Spanish. Obviously, there were Hispanic kids who already spoke English, but there wasn't... She, herself didn't know English, so how could she teach me, so how could I be integrated into a school that doesn't even accommodate for individuals or kids who don't know English?Rodolfo: She moved schools, although we were still in Chicago because we needed... what was it? Proof of residency. We lived out of district, and she would get fined or I wouldn't be able to go to school there. The point is I went to school to Orrington Elementary. The program was called the TWI (Two Way Immersion). It was a bilingual program and that's where I learned my English, that school. Friends and everything. I feel as though like, that's why I learned my English so well, because I really, really wanted to learn it. I always heard kids at the park or at the store, at Target, at Jewels, or whatever and everybody spoke English, right? I just felt fascinated, I was intrigued by it.Rodolfo: It was a whole different language that I didn't know, and I wanted to master it. I wanted to be able to talk as they spoke, or talk as they talked. School was a very cool experience. I always had a lot of friends, and I was always the life of the classroom. I wasn't probably the best behaved kid, but I was always integrated in to what was going on with the school.Sergio: Do you remember any teachers or people?Rodolfo: Yeah, absolutely. Ms. Mule, Ms. Mule was my second or third grade teacher, I'm not sure which one it was. She was awesome, she always help me out with the English, always. Even in parent teacher conferences, she would literally always talk to my mom as if she'd be really interested. She would show genuine interest in what was going on with, not just me, but with the Hispanic kids. Kids who had trouble with English or weren't doing the best academically. She always would tell me, "Don't worry, you're gonna get it. You're gonna learn it." She had such a big heart.Rodolfo: Still even, my mother and I still talk about the teacher to this point in time. She tells me, "I remember Ms. Mule and she used to use hand gestures. She would always be like, 'Yeah, for this or for that.'" Even though I knew I wasn't the smartest or the most best behaved kid, she would always have that initiative to get us there. Get us to that point. Yeah, that was one of my favorite teachers. Man, I value that so much actually now. I miss that teacher. Another teacher was in fifth grade, his name was Mr. Stoom. He was Argentinian, he was from Argentina. He was another great teacher. He always told us, "Don't ever forget where you came from. Your roots are who you are, even though you all are coming from different parts of the world, don't ever forget who you are and where you come from." That's one of the biggest things right now, I'm kind of ashamed of.Rodolfo: I'm not, because I was so... What do they say, "Americanized." In Chicago, I was so in America. I never dedicated the time to open a book or even Google something of my home country. Now that I get here, I don't know what is going on. Just barely a couple of months ago, I found out Mexico is a third-world country. I didn't know that. I go to Polanco Fendi, Prado, Gucci, Armani, Louis Vuitton boutiques. To me, that's not a third world country. Yeah, that teacher was the one who started opening my eyes up more to my surroundings.

      Time in the US, School, Kindergarten, Elementary, Learning English/ESL, Teachers, Mentors, Cultural acceptance; Reflections, Identity, American; Time in the US, States, Arizona, California, Illinois

      • 'oreit - alright
      • over by there, now in a minute
      • dai shop - colloquial name for tradesperson (john the butcher, eddie the milkman, etc.)
      • year, ear, and here all sound the same
      • thanks drive
      • Twin Town is the best film ever
      • lunch is dinner, dinner is tea with regard to timing
      • daps or trainers - tennis shoes
      • to after where and by before here
      • tuthbrush
      • half and half (half rice, half chips)
      • all explanations begin with "What it is..."
      • call people "mun"
      • your butt is not what you sit on (mate, friend)
      • you don't get cross, you get tampin'; to get tampin' mad
      • cry when you her Hen Wlad fy Nhadau (national anthem)
      • Tescos
      • check the weather back home when on holiday
      • wearing felt leeks
      • cheer when you see the bridge from England back into Wales

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFYZT8pgZNI

      <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OFYZT8pgZNI" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
    1. Billy: And jazz helped me discover that because it's like a chain. African American people help each other out through their music, that helped other people out, that helped me out. Eventually I took my friend out of a heroin addiction because of that, because of the music. And I started crying when he told me. He was like, "Dude, I just wanted to thank you because you took me out of my heroin addiction." I actually did something. So that music was really important for me. It gave me an identity.Anita: So, you were attracted to African American blues and jazz?Billy: Yeah, because my brother was listening to it and so I'm like, "Dude, what are you listening to? This is weird We usually listen to rock." He's like, "Man, this is called blues, bro. This is a really cool music, and it has to do with African American people back in the day and it tells the story of America."Billy: So, I just looked into it and I became obsessed with it. I couldn't stop. Once I discovered Louis Armstrong, that was just it. I could not stop playing jazz and so yeah, in North Carolina, I was just feeling kinda crappy and that music came at the perfect time.

      Time in the US, Pastimes, Music; Feelings, Despair, Hope

    2. Anita: That's pretty cool.Billy: Yeah, I'm sorry for doing that just, I have to burst out and sing.Anita: Yeah, no that was great. That was fantastic. So, as you can tell, Billy is a musician.Billy: I love music, I love to sing. It's just... it's like a form of therapy for me. Yeah. It really is.Anita: Do you sing Mexican stuff or just...?Billy: You know what, it's embarrassing because a lot of people tell me, "Oh, sing this Jose, Jose song or Mexican traditional songs,” and I don't know them and so it's like, "Bro, I'm sorry. I don't know it." I only play grandpa music.Anita: But it's grandpa American music?Billy: It's American music history and if it wasn't for that there wouldn't be a lot of genres today. I really like that old stuff, for sure.Anita: And how did you get exposed to that old stuff?Billy: So, that was in North Carolina. I was actually going through a really big depression. I didn't know what to do anymore, being illegal in the U.S, not being able to find jobs, not being able to go into college was difficult for me so I was falling into a depression. And then I came across this guy called Robert Johnson. Robert Johnson is the king of the Delta blues. He's one of the most important American musicians, ever.Billy: So, I started listening to his music and just the pain and the story of him uplifted me. He was letting me know, "You know what, you're healthy. You're young. Look at these African American people back in the day, what they went through and compared to what you're going through? Don't be a sissy and don't complain."Billy: So that music just uplifted me, and it gave me energy and it let me know, "Bro, you don't have to just be this kid with”—because I had a lot of anxiety—"This kid with anxiety. You can play music and make people feel good." And so that helped me out a lot and eventually that led me to, and this is going to sound weird but, it led me to discover the purpose of what a human is because, listen to this, when you play music, you're helping other people out, right? And you're really contributing to the change that you want to live in the future.Billy: And I was, like, "Dude, what's the purpose of a human being? Why are we here?" And it's simply to help others. That's all it is. It is to contribute to the change you want to live in and it's very fulfilling when you help somebody. And so that let me know, "Dude, you're here to help others and, yeah, just do it."

      Time in the US, Pastimes, Music, Playing, Favorite; States, North Carolina

  5. Jun 2021
    1. We live in a moment where censorship and free speech are hot button topics. So it’s all the more striking that these anti-CRT bills, with clear intent to limit a discussion of the basic facts of American history and society, are being made into law all over America with minimum protest from the people who yelp the loudest about cancel culture. 

      This is another solid example of the hypocrisy of large portions of the Republican party. Do as we say, not as we do. How far can these laws drift from our overarching principles before there is a schism?

      How does this fit into the [[beyond the pale]] idea going from small communities to a much larger internet-connected society?

    1. Tweet Post Share Save Get PDF Buy Copies Print Idea in Brief The Situation The fast-changing nature of business today means that employees’ continual learning is vital for organizational success. The Response Chief learning officers are assuming a more expansive role, aiming not only to train employees but also to transform their organizations’ capabilities and make learning an integral part of the company’s strategic agenda. The Specifics Extensive interviews at 19 large companies revealed that “transformer CLOs”—those who are embracing this expanded role—are driving changes in their enterprises’ learning goals, learning methods, and learning departments. In today’s dynamic business environment, workplace learning has become a key lever for success. And with that shift, the traditional role of the chief learning officer is changing. No longer are CLOs responsible just for training—making skills-based and compliance-oriented courses available to employees and perhaps running leadership-development programs. Instead, they’re embracing a more powerful role in which they reshape capabilities and organizational culture. We call this new type of leader the transformer CLO. Transformer CLOs are strong senior managers whose mission is to help their companies and their employees thrive, even as technologies, business practices, and whole industries undergo rapid change. The transformer CLO role is not reserved for the lucky few whose CEOs see learning and development as essential; any CLO can take steps to fundamentally change the nature of learning in an organization. We recently conducted extensive interviews with 21 senior learning officers at 19 large companies to find out how they conceive of their roles and organizations. This research, which builds on our prior work on digital leadership and culture, revealed that transformer CLOs are driving three principal types of change in their enterprises. They’re transforming their organizations’ learning goals, shifting the focus from the development of skills to the development of mindsets and capabilities that will help workers perform well now and adapt smoothly in the future. They’re transforming their organizations’ learning methods, making them more experiential and immediate, and atomizing content for delivery when and where it’s needed. And they’re transforming their organizations’ learning departments, making them leaner, more agile, and more strategic. Transforming Learning Goals The need for organizations to become more adaptable means changing the goals of corporate learning. Instead of narrowly focusing on job- or compliance-related training for all but their high-potential leaders, organizations should cultivate every employee’s ability to explore, learn, and grow. The objective is not only to train people but also to position the company for success. To achieve this, CLOs should strive to do the following: Reshape leadership development. Creating a true learning organization starts at the top, with preparing executives to lead in new ways. One company that has done this well recently is Standard Chartered, a multinational financial-services company. Three years ago, under a new CEO, Standard Chartered launched a strategy that fundamentally changed the way it does business—and required its leaders to build new strengths. “We’d been doing executive development for years,” said Ewan Clark, the company’s global head of leadership effectiveness and organizational development. “But a lot of it had been about either pure self-actualization or aspects of coaching. This time we’ve put the organizational agenda right in the center of executive development, and we’ve said that leadership is about developing the skills, capabilities, and value behaviors to lead this agenda.” As part of that effort, the company began teaching leaders to augment their experience and intuition with investigation, experimentation, and data-driven analysis when making decisions about their parts of the organization. Their instructions, according to Clark, were straightforward: “Articulate a hypothesis. Go out and experiment. And if it doesn’t work, then why not? What did you learn? Add to it. Capture your learning. Share it with other people.” This new approach required changes in the leaders’ mindsets, not just their skills and procedures. Organizations should cultivate every employee’s ability to learn and grow. It’s not enough, though, to improve leadership capabilities at the very top of the organization. To effect widespread change, organizations need strong leadership to cascade down. Cargill, a privately held food and agriculture business, achieved this by democratizing learning. As Julie Dervin, the company’s global head of corporate learning and development, told us, “We really only had the capacity to reach about 10% to 15% of the total relevant population in a given year when delivering a particular learning program. Unintentionally, we were creating a learning culture where only a select few got access to high-quality training.” Dervin and her team resolved to fix that problem. “We’ve been fundamentally changing how we design, deliver, and shape those learning experiences to be able to reach exponentially more learners with high-impact learning,” she said. Concentrate on capabilities, not competence. In their change programs, transformer CLOs focus less on teaching currently needed skills and more on developing mindsets and behaviors that can enable employees to perform well in tasks that may not yet be defined. This shift may also mean moving away from comprehensive skills inventories and competency maps, which can lead people to check boxes rather than build capabilities. “We don’t really know enough about what the world will look like in the next couple of years to be able to predict exactly what skills we will need,” said Amelie Villeneuve, the head of the corporate university at UBS, the multinational financial-services firm. “If you focus on building individual microskills, you may be missing the bigger picture.” Emphasize digital thinking. The transformer CLOs we interviewed have sought to develop digital awareness and aptitude in their employees. Singapore-based DBS Bank, for example, created a learning curriculum that aims to build seven priority skills for digital-business success. “While not everyone needs to be an expert at each of these,” said David Gledhill, who served as the company’s chief information officer until August 2019, “we want them to know enough so that they understand the transformation we’re driving and contribute great ideas.” Vital Skills for a Digital World To equip its employees for success in today’s digital business environment, DBS Bank focuses on imparting skills ... One priority, for instance, is to get people more comfortable using data in decision-making. Data-driven thinking is key for almost everyone in an organization, but in different ways. Frontline sales and service reps need to be aware of information about customer preferences and behaviors. Executives must learn to trust and value data even when it contradicts their past experiences and gut feelings. Leaders often don’t know what to do with all the data that digital innovations are making available to them, said Nancy Robert, who, as the executive vice president of the American Nurses Association, led the design and delivery of training for millions of the organization’s members. As Robert put it, nurses don’t necessarily have the “digital-data competency” to answer the questions that confront them. “How am I going to interpret that data and integrate it into the rest of the care?” she said. “That takes a very different cognitive skill.” Cultivate curiosity and a growth mindset. CLOs can amplify their teams’ energies and capabilities by fostering a “pull” model of learning, in which employees set their own agendas for gaining knowledge and skills. Doing that, however, requires an environment that sparks employees’ curiosity and ignites in them the desire to learn and grow. Villeneuve has worked on this at UBS and previously at Google, where, she said, she learned how it is possible to “accelerate wisdom more effectively by providing a series of contexts where people can play and learn at the same time.” Leaders at DBS Bank launched a number of programs to find out what would inspire curiosity among their employees. One notable success is GANDALF Scholars, in which employees can apply to receive grants of $1,000 toward training on any work-related topic, as long as they agree to teach what they learn to at least 10 other people. When you engage employees in teaching, as DBS is doing, you expand and deepen learning. Rahul Varma, the senior managing director for talent at Accenture, calls this a “leaders teaching leaders” philosophy. “You learn the most,” he said, “when you actually have to teach somebody what you learn.” This approach turns the natural curiosity and energy of any single employee into learning opportunities for many others. It certainly seems to be working at DBS: As of early 2019, 120 grant recipients had gone on to train more than 13,500 people—4,000 in person and the rest through digital channels. According to Gledhill, many GANDALF Scholars report that the teaching component of the program is their favorite part. “What they enjoyed most,” he said, “was the empowerment.” Transformer CLOs are personalizing, digitizing, and atomizing learning. UBS, DBS, Accenture, and other companies that have embraced a growth mindset subscribe to two beliefs: that everyone’s abilities can and must be developed if the organization is to thrive in a fast-moving environment, and that innate talent is just the starting point. But for a growth mindset to become part of the company’s culture, all employees must internalize those beliefs. That won’t happen unless learning is pervasive, available to everybody who might benefit from it. And that requires rethinking the way learning is delivered. Transforming Learning Methods Until recently, providing learning to all employees was too expensive, and there weren’t enough trainers. Employees almost always had to be physically present at training sessions, which often meant traveling and missing time at work. That naturally limited the number of participants, making learning an exclusive rather than a democratic opportunity. Now things have changed. Peer teaching greatly expands the number of trainers and expert content developers. And digital instruction expands the reach of learning opportunities to more employees without the company’s having to worry about enrollment numbers, scheduling conflicts, or travel costs. Employees can access learning when and where they need it, often from colleagues who live the topic every day. Transformer CLOs are taking advantage of all these developments. Perhaps most visibly, they are moving away from traditional classroom training in which people are exposed to the same content for the same amount of time regardless of their particular needs and levels of understanding. Instead, these CLOs are personalizing, digitizing, and atomizing learning. They are shifting their attention from specific courses to the whole learning experience. To accommodate the different preferences employees have for how they consume and absorb information, a growing number of companies now make training available through a variety of media—text, audio, video, and more. Transformer CLOs go even further. They’re introducing innovations such as programs that set aside learning time on people’s calendars, and mobile apps that pose leadership questions to managers during their day. They’re offering games and simulations and encouraging the company’s own subject-matter experts to produce YouTube-type instructional videos. They’re even exploring the use of artificial intelligence to develop recommendation engines that, guided by individual and peer behavior, will suggest tailored learning activities to employees. In short, transformer CLOs do everything possible to create engaging and effective experiences that meet employees wherever they happen to be, geographically, temporally, or intellectually. Optimize the inventory of learning resources. CLOs need to be selective about what learning materials to stock and how to supply them. At GE Digital, Heather Whiteman, the company’s former head of learning, used analytics with her team to study hundreds of courses taken by thousands of employees—and then systematically rooted out those found lacking, not just in terms of usage and ratings but in their effects on employee growth. “If a course didn’t move the dial for capabilities that lead to performance,” she told us, “we would drop it in favor of one that did.” Similarly, Villeneuve and her team at UBS used analytics to optimize the learning inventory. The bank had a wealth of training materials online, but analysis showed that many employees who searched for those materials gave up before finding what they needed. Armed with that knowledge, Villeneuve and her team focused on developing a core of fewer but better resources. Then, applying principles of behavioral science, they designed a user interface that put no more than six items on a page, with no more than three clicks needed to get to any item. The results have been remarkable: Ten times more employees now engage with the materials on the company’s core learning shelf. Balance face-to-face and digital learning. CLOs should experiment to get the right mix of face-to-face and digital learning. Cargill, which until recently allocated 80% of its budget to in-person training and only 20% to digital training, is in the process of flipping that ratio around. Dervin and her team have redesigned the company’s leadership-development programs to put some of the coursework online. Senior leaders initially had reservations about the effectiveness of digital instruction and worried about losing opportunities to network and build relationships. But those misgivings were short-lived. The first three cohorts who tried the online learning ended up enjoying the experience so much that they engaged in more training than was required. “What we’re seeing,” Dervin said, “is that this goes hand in glove with the pace and the rhythms of their day-to-day, and they’re loving the flexibility it provides.” Deutsche Telekom, for its part, has developed a matrix to help determine whether a given offering might be better handled with face-to-face instruction, a purely digital approach, or a blend of the two. The matrix helps leaders weigh multiple factors: the type of content, the target audience, and development and delivery considerations. Digital or Face-to-Face Training? Deutsche Telekom considers a number of factors when deciding how best to present specific learning programs. FORMAT CONTENT TARGET AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT AND DELIVERY CONSIDERATIONS Purely digital formats Best suited for: Hard skills Mandatory training Simple topics Durable, reusable material Larger groups Geographically dispersed or mobile employees, such as those in sales and field service More time required to produce nonstandard material Higher up-front cost to produce nonstandard material Lower cost to deliver per user No need for trainers or videoconferencing facilities at the location Face-to-face or blended formats Best suited for: Soft skills Ad hoc training Complex topics Material that changes frequently Smaller groups Geographically concentrated employees Employees being onboarded Less time required to produce nonstandard material Lower up-front cost for course preparation Potential higher cost to deliver, but possibility of using existing staff as trainers Need for training rooms or videoconferencing at the location   Source: Adapted from company documents © HBR.org Rethink face-to-face learning. As engaging and effective as digital learning experiences can be, face-to-face learning is still important—although it may take new forms. Accenture employs some very sophisticated digital learning platforms and tools and has a vast library of online content, but Varma’s experience is that digital learning goes only so far. “What we’ve found,” he said, “is that there is no substitute for getting people together in cohorts that are cross-cultural and cross-functional.” To achieve that without requiring employees to be in the same physical space, Accenture has created more than 90 “connected classrooms” around the world. These enable the company to offer all employees some types of training—classes in design thinking, for example—that are taught by in-house experts in several different locations. “One facilitator could be in Bangalore, another could be in Manila, and another in Dalian, China,” Varma told us. People are still learning from people, but thanks to videoconferencing and other interactive technologies, along with more-collaborative approaches to learning, traditional geographic constraints no longer apply. Teams all over the world now coach one another and solve problems together. “That is how we do learning, every single day,” Varma said. Some companies have pursued another approach for their face-to-face learning: They’ve created hands-on simulations in which participants must solve real-life problems. At UBS, employees take part in “three-dimensional case studies” in order to develop key capabilities, such as the ability to influence stakeholders or rethink a company product. The interactive case studies test not only their knowledge and intellectual skills but also how they engage with others and react as the situation unfolds. As Villeneuve told us, “They have to do it all together, and they get feedback on everything at the same time.” Face-to-face learning is still important—although it may take new forms. Similarly, operational professionals at DBS spend three days in a simulation exercise that involves transforming a hypothetical old-school bank into a full-fledged digital bank. They work with trainers and colleagues from other parts of the business to tackle staffing and resourcing issues and handle crisis situations unique to the digital world. An element of competition heightens the intensity and engagement. Go beyond instruction. Transformer CLOs believe that instruction alone is not sufficient for meaningful learning. Accenture’s Varma anchors his approach in what he calls the three I’s: instruction, introspection, and immersion. Instruction comes first, of course. But then trainees need to engage in reflection—the introspection part of Varma’s three I’s. This might involve giving employees time to privately mull over what they’ve learned, having them talk it over with a fellow trainee on a walk, or providing a formal opportunity during class to discuss it with a whole cohort.

      This is something I've thought about before - is that often people are continually learning on the job, but there is not enough slack-time in the day to allow for people to engage with reflection

    1. As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

      I'd prefer to be a "cake person".

    1. Mike: I feel like I'm a Mexican American. You learn to love your country when you're young, because of your parents and your culture, but at the same time you see all these opportunities that are given to you by going to the United States. And a lot of things that people say in the United States is bullshit.

      Reflections, Identity, Mexican/ American

    1. Luisa: [Sniffles] Because of my mom, I got to meet extremely interesting people that opened up my worldview more so than it already was, because reading transports you to different places and different languages and cultures and you learn so much, and you feel like you have actually been there, but you've never been. It's funny, but that's how it works. My mom, she started working for this store [unclear] and she was doing her design school, and they specialized in Muslim attire and my mom was like, "You know what? I'm going to be independent," so she moves aside. She starts her own thing, and she starts making a bunch of clothes.

      Time in the US, Homelife, Parents, Jobs

    1. They pay lip service to multiculturalism and diversity and non-judgmentalness, but they don't raise their own children that way.
  6. May 2021
    1. So the truth is that the influencer economy is just a garish accentuation of the economy writ large. As our culture continues to conflate the private and public realms—as the pandemic has transformed our homes into offices and our bedrooms into backdrops, as public institutions increasingly fall prey to the mandates of the market—we’ve become cheerfully indentured to the idea that our worth as individuals isn’t our personal integrity or sense of virtue, but our ability to advertise our relevance on the platforms of multinational tech corporations.
    2. For the past twenty-four hours, I’ve been dwelling among the influencers at Clubhouse FTB, enduring bouts of dick jokes and long glugs of White Claw, the sort of chaffing male camaraderie you’re apt to find in frat houses or hunting lodges.

      We've come so far from the time when the young and wealthy went on the Grand Tours of Italy and various parts of Europe.

    1. "alright or what" as a greeting

      • "alright" means hi/hello (in South Wales)

      "Ychafi" - horrible or disgusting

      cwtch is a Welsh hug

      Conversation beginnings:

      • What it is...
      • See...

      "Tidy butt" as a response to how are you? (translates as good friend)

      Baaard (sick)

      bog snorkeling

    1. If this is so, we literati must surrender certain cherished assumptions: that litera ture is inextricably associated with reading and writing, that lack of literacy means lack of culture.

      Lack of literacy definitely does not mean lack of culture.

      Reminder to self: I've got a strong suspicion that the Hebrew bible was transmitted orally for generations prior to being written down in a similar manner. I need to collect some additional evidence to build this case. The arc of the covenant is a first potential piece of evidence.

    1. I’ve probably spent too much time standing around at receptions, drinking bad white wine to get me through yet another twenty-eight year old from the Cato Institute droning about how the completely new paradigm of data-ownership is going to ‘fix privacy’. (These guys are a menace. Even in Brussels!)

      A set related to the tech bro toxic culture.

      Interesting that libertarianism only seems to liberate a select few and not all.

    1. Our institutions are colonial systems, the ivory towers render the people leading and running them to become disconnected from the very public they are supposed to be representing, ending up only serving themselves. “Do we have to burn it down and start again? Do we have to completely recalibrate it from the inside?

    1. 130 years on, privacy is still largely conceived of as an individual thing, wherein we get to make solo decisions about when we want to be left alone and when we’re comfortable being trespassed upon.

      How could one design a mathematical balancing system to help separate individuals embedded within a variety of societies or publics to enforce a balance of levels of privacy.

      • There's the interpersonal level between the individuals
      • There's the person's individual privacy and the public's reaction/response to the thing captured, for which the public may shun or not
      • There's the takers rights (possibly a journalist or news outlet) to inform the broader public which may shame or not
      • There's the publics' potential right to know, the outcome may effect them or dramatically change society as a whole
      • others facets?
      • how many facets?
      • how to balance all these to create an optimum outcome for all parties?
      • How might the right to forget look like and be enforced?
      • How do economic incentives play out (paparazzi, journalism, social media, etc.?)
    1. You don't have to be a Welsh speaker to realise these place names make Wales different.They connect us to our history and our shared identity.
    1. Park, J. J. H., Grais, R. F., Taljaard, M., Nakimuli-Mpungu, E., Jehan, F., Nachega, J. B., Ford, N., Xavier, D., Kengne, A. P., Ashorn, P., Socias, M. E., Bhutta, Z. A., & Mills, E. J. (2021). Urgently seeking efficiency and sustainability of clinical trials in global health. The Lancet Global Health, 9(5), e681–e690. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(20)30539-8

  7. Apr 2021
    1. While it is impossible to imagine surveillance capitalism without the digital, it is easy to imagine the digital without surveillance capitalism.

      Important point: this is not the only version of digital culture that is possible.

    1. Binstock: You once referred to computing as pop culture. Kay: It is. Complete pop culture. I’m not against pop culture. Developed music, for instance, needs a pop culture. There’s a tendency to over-develop. Brahms and Dvorak needed gypsy music badly by the end of the nineteenth century. The big problem with our culture is that it’s being dominated, because the electronic media we have is so much better suited for transmitting pop-culture content than it is for high-culture content. I consider jazz to be a developed part of high culture. Anything that’s been worked on and developed and you [can] go to the next couple levels. Binstock: One thing about jazz aficionados is that they take deep pleasure in knowing the history of jazz. Kay: Yes! Classical music is like that, too. But pop culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you’re participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future—it’s living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from]—and the Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.

      This is a great definition of pop culture and a good contrast to high-culture.

      Here's the link to the entire interview: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bbm%3A978-3-319-90008-7%2F1.pdf

    1. Here are the economics: The cost of recruiting a midcareer software engineer (who earns $150,000- 200,000 per year) can be $30,000 or more including recruitment fees, advertising, and recruiting technology. This new hire also requires onboarding and has a potential turnover of two to three times higher than an internal recruit. By contrast, the cost to train and reskill an internal employee may be $20,000 or less, saving as much as $116,000 per person over three years.  The net savings: it can cost as much as 6-times more to hire from the outside than to build from within.
      • the cost of hiring talent vs upskilling talent
    1. This new direct-to-consumer media also means that battles over the boundaries of acceptable views and the ensuing arguments about “cancel culture” — for instance, in New York Magazine’s firing of Andrew Sullivan — are no longer the kind of devastating career blows they once were. (Only Twitter retains that power.) Big media cancellation is often an offramp to a bigger income
    1. he Rebellion of 1857—-was the “greased cartridge” controversy.
      • In 1857, a rumor was spread that the British were using cow and pig fat in the cartitriges Indian soldiers had to bite off which caused a rebellion of soliers who believed this meant the British were trying to convert them to Christianity.
      • This event demonstrates that there was massive distrust in the British as well
      • People would not start a huge rebellion based on a small rumor if they were not already angry with the status quo and were waiting for the last straw.
    2. changes in Indian culture.
      • Over the course of British imperialism, Brits seeked to replace traditional Indian cultures and religions with British culture
      • An example is Lord Macaulay in 1835 looking to make English the government language and Western education central.
    1. While there are certain things most users will anticipate with any interface, there may be expected affordances that are unique to your users and the cohort they represent
    1. And, Eichhorn notes, there’s been surprisingly little written about the specific impact of our digital culture on memory.

      This is definitely a ripe area for research.

  8. Mar 2021
    1. Americans worked together: “As soon as several of the inhabitants of the United States have conceived a sentiment or an idea that they want to produce in the world, they seek each other out; and when they have found each other, they unite.”

      The IndieWeb is very much this.

    1. Who owns and controls it?

      This is worth discussion. Specifically the ownership part and it may be surprising to uncover how little control there has been and how that is changing in 2021 as ISPs and hosting companies refuse or welcome radical platforms and groups, https://www.npr.org/2021/02/15/968116346/after-weeks-of-being-off-line-parler-finds-a-new-web-host

    1. A lot of similarity to Caitlin Flanagan's article after the Oprah interview. Almost as if this was much the same, just shortened and the Oprah pieces fitted in. Still some excellent writing about the cultural changes of the people and their time.

    1. It’s the usual Silicon Valley sleight-of-hand move, very similar to Uber reps claiming drivers aren’t “core” to their business. I’m sure Substack is paying a writer right now to come up with a catchy way of saying that Substack doesn’t pay writers.
    2. So Substack has an editorial policy, but no accountability. And they have terms of service, but no enforcement.

      This is also the case for many other toxic online social media platforms. A fantastic framing.

    3. Substack is taking an editorial stance, paying writers who fit that stance, and refusing to be transparent about who those people are.
    1. JavaScript, as a language, has some fundamental shortcomings — I think the majority of us agree on that much. But everyone has a different opinion on what precisely the shortcomings are.
    2. As to opinions about the shortcomings of the language itself, or the standard run-times, it’s important to realize that every developer has a different background, different experience, different needs, temperament, values, and a slew of other cultural motivations and concerns — individual opinions will always be largely personal and, to some degree, non-technical in nature.
    1. Stuart relied heavily on the rural locale of northeastern Kentucky for his writings.[1]

      Stuart was not only influenced by Kentucky culture; he traveled extensively and taught at the American University in Cairo, Egypt from 1960-1961 .

  9. Feb 2021
    1. And essentially, we became what’s called a rent-seeking economy, not a productive economy. So, when people in Washington talk about American capitalism versus Chinese socialism this is confusing the issue. What kind of capitalism are we talking about?

      What kind of capitalism are we talking about?

      We are starting to see critical thinking and discussion around "hard" but necessary truths. These truths center around complicated concepts, controlled by politicians, MSM and others who would rather not have this discussion. America's general population seems lost, gorging on the dumb-down need to know culture (those that have and can dictate what the rest need to know) and group think, herd mentality.

    1. Why pause over this arcane, forgotten book? Because it shows how an archaic genre could be used to impose order on experience in modern times. Commonplace books served far more effectively in this manner several centuries earlier, when they were standard tools of readers. By studying them, historians and literary scholars have come closer to understanding reading, both as a specific cultural practice and as a general way of construing the world. But it is a tricky business, especially when the researcher moves from questions about who readers were and what they read to the problems of how they made sense of books.

      To some extent, this same thing will very likely be done with social media in 50 or 100 years' time.

    2. Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities.

      Overview of reading patterns by early modern Englishmen.

    1. Consensus-driven decision making may be good at some stages, especially if paired with good processes around meetings but it can lead to gridlock.

      Agreed, and this can be deceptively hard to enforce or change if the culture tends to be consensus-driven and adversarial.

  10. Jan 2021
    1. Culture numérique, au singulier, traduit une culture issue de la médiation du numérique tandis que cultures numériques au pluriel a le mérite de mettre l'accent sur une diversité et une richesse d'approches qui démontrent une richesse et une diversité. Il s'agit clairement de cultures de l'information, en considérant l'information dans toutes ses formes qu'elles soient informatiques, médiatiques, documentaires, éducatives, liées à l'actualité ou élément de distraction. Il s'agit aussi sans doute, comme le préconise le philosophe Bernard Stiegler, d'une culture des hypomnemata, c'est-à-dire ces supports de mémoire et d'informations, qui prennent de l'essor avec les réseaux sociaux
    2. l’ensemble des traits distinctifs, spirituels et matériels, intellectuels et affectifs, qui caractérisent une société. Elle englobe, outre les arts et les lettres, les modes de vie, les droits fondamentaux de l’être humain, les systèmes de valeurs, les traditions et les croyances.

      Définition CULTURE

      UNESCO - 1982 - déclaration de mexico

      https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000127162_fre

    1. None of the caterwaulers we hear crying about cancel culture have been canceled. We know that because we can still hear them.
    2. There is no such thing as “cancel culture” — there is only culture.
    1. Here, we present the development and application of the BioMe plate, a redesigned microplate device in which pairs of wells are separated by porous membranes
    1. We also have an “anti-overtime” rate: past twenty hours a week, people can continue to work at an hourly rate of 50 percent. This allows us to have a high hourly rate for the highest leverage work and also allows people to work more per week if they wish.

      anti-overtime... love it.

  11. Dec 2020
    1. SOC is added to E. coli cells to aid recovery after exposure to high salt concentrations and heat shock in many chemical-based DNA transformation protocols

      Elbing and Brent, 2002, Green and Sambrook, 2012

    1. But being a “culture of yes” had a toxic edge. “In the beginning, that meant you give the socks off your feet to a rider if they forgot their socks,” Rachel explains. “I’ve literally seen people do that. That built that sense of community — ‘We would do anything for you’ — but what that became actually was something sort of abusive internally and externally.”

      Documentation of the problems of yes, but of always yes. Some interesting thought experiments could be done with this.

    2. SoulCycle was never built to be for the masses. Keeping people out was, it seems, just as important to the business as loyal riders. The bigger SoulCycle got, the less desirable it became. The less desirable it became, the less people had tolerance for the culture it fostered. The minute the company became mainstream, the magic dissolved. It’s impossible to scale exclusivity.
    1. The wise possum had never read Alexis de Tocqueville’s master work Democracy in America (1835). But whoever wants to understand what is afflicting Western postmodernity—with the U.S. going first and Europe following—should read the two chapters on the tyranny imposed not by an oppressive regime, but by a free society. 200 years ago, the young Frenchman praised America’s “extreme liberties” only to warn of a deadly downside: Nowhere else, he wrote, was there “less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America.”

      The hegemony of the minority. A danger of public schooling that we never saw coming. This hegemony came about by sacrificing the potential of black america. The school system the greatest source of systemic racism..

  12. Nov 2020
    1. Moreover, there are strikingly contrasting presuppositions within the social sciences toward culture: Too often, culture is treated as a residual once the “hard” economic, political, and sociological factors are considered. Alternatively, it can become the all-encompassing construct that supposedly explains everything. Similarly, culture is seen as something that either prohibits or accelerates progress, or it becomes a politically innocent reference category to paint over increasingly absent shared values and common narratives

      Culture as a site of contestation!

    1. If you get a positive PCR test and you want to be sure that what you’re finding is a true positive, then you have to perform a viral culture. What this means is that you take the sample, add it to respiratory cells in a petri dish, and see if you can get those cells to start producing new virus particles. If they do, then you know you have a true positive result. For this reason, viral culture is considered the “gold standard” method for diagnosis of viral infections. However, this method is rarely used in clinical practice, which means that in reality, a diagnosis is often made based entirely on the PCR test.

      [[Z: A positive PCR should be followed by a viral culture test to see if you're dealing with a live infection]]

      After a positive PCR test, you don't know if the virus is alive or not. To find this out you can add it to respiratory cells (in the case of a respiratory virus) and see if they start producing virus particles).

      [[Z: Viral culture tests are rarely used in clinical practice]]

      Positive diagnoses of COVID-19 are done base on PCR only.

    1. Anditisclearthatthislackofsocialconsciousnessisinfactadistincteconomiclossinaveryconcretesense,aswellofcourseasalossinthepossiblewell-runningofapoliticalsystem.IapproachthisfromthepointofviewofaneconomistsoIspeakofthefail-uresofthepricesystem;Iamsureonecouldcometothesameendfromotherpointsofview.Butstartingfromthispointofview,thefactthatwecannotmediateallourre-

      And continues:

      sponsibilitiestoothersthroughprices,throughpayingforthem,makesitessentialintherunningofsocietythatwehavewhatmightbecalled“conscience,”afeelingofresponsibilityfortheeffectofone’sactionsonothers.

      The crucial sentences ...

      we cannot mediate all our responsibilities to others through prices, through paying for them, makes it essential in the running of society that we have what might be called “conscience,” a feeling of responsibility for the effect of one’s actions on others.

      Why economics 101 misses so much.

    2. Thereisstillanothersetofinstitutions,ifthatistherightword,Iwanttocalltoyourattentionandmakemuchof.Theseareinvisibleinstitutions:theprinciplesofethicsandmorality.Certainlyonewayoflookingatethicsandmorality,awaythatiscompatiblewiththisattemptatrationalanaly-sis,isthattheseprinciplesareagreements,consciousor,inmanycases,unconscious,tosupplymutualbenefits.Theagreementtotrusteachothercannotbebought,asIhavesaid;itisnotevennecessarilyveryeasyforittobeachievedbyasignedcontractsayingthatwewillworkwitheachother.

      This is a form of cultural functionalism.

      Personally, I would term these as culture distinct from institutions. Institutions may formalize culture -- and support it. But they are outward manifestations of something deeper.

      I return now to my developing archaeological layering of of socio-ecology. Each layer interacts with the other but the lower ones are more "fundamental":

      Outcomes
         ---
      Technology
         ---
      Institutions
          ---
      Culture
           ---
      Pyscho-Ontology
      
    3. Societiesintheirevolutionhavedevelopedimplicitagree-mentstocertainkindsofregardforothers,agreementswhichareessentialtothesurvivalofthesocietyoratleastcontributegreatlytotheefficiencyofitsworking.Ithasbeenobserved,forexample,thatamongthepropertiesofmanysocietieswhoseeconomicdevelopmentisbackwardisalackofmutualtrust.

      And this takes us exactly into the realm of culture.

      Now we could expand economics to include this area -- and a brilliant polymathic character like Arrow would doubtless wish to and be able to do this. But it is not common in the profession and seems to me that the conventional economic tools are of limited usefulness.

      We are more in the realm of anthropology, sociology etc.

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. simply assuming that humans adopt norms, however, is not sufficient to predict behavior in a social dilemma, especially in very large groups with no arrangements for communication. even with strong preferences to follow norms, “observed behavior may vary by context because the perception of the ‘right thing’ would change” (de oliveira, croson, and eckel 2009: 19). various aspects of the context in which individuals interact affect how indi-viduals learn about the situation they are in and about the others with whom they are interacting. individual differences do make a difference, but the context of interactions also affects behavior over time (Walker and ostrom 2009). Biologists recognize that an organism’s appearance and behavior are affected by the environment in which it develops.for example, some plants produce large, thin leaves (which enhance photosynthetic photon harvest) in low light, and narrow, thicker leaves (which conserve water) in high light; certain insects develop wings only if they live in crowded conditions (and hence are likely to run out of adequate food in their current location). such environmentally contingent development is so commonplace that it can be regarded as a universal property of living things. (Pfennig and ledón-rettig 2009: 268)social scientists also need to recognize that individual behavior is strongly affected by the context in which interactions take place rather than being simply a result of individual differences.

      +10 and this is culture!

    1. Why Hiring for Culture Fit No Longer Fits

      [[culture fit]] falls short, and can end up with a group of people just like you, looking for a [[culture add]] and what people can bring is better.

  13. Oct 2020
    1. Human evolution produced gossip. Cultural anthropology sees gossip as an informal way of enforcing group norms. It is effective in small groups.

      Gossip evolved as a strategy to enforce group norms and it is effective in small groups.

    1. Good article about the importance of Universal Design when designing learning opportunities. The authors use plenty of strong sources to back their findings and keep the information concise.

      9/10

    1. Critics, including Sarah Posner and Joe Conason, maintain that prosperity teachers cultivate authoritarian organizations. They argue that leaders attempt to control the lives of adherents by claiming divinely-bestowed authority.[63] Jenkins contends that prosperity theology is used as a tool to justify the high salaries of pastors.

      This would seem to play out in current American culture which seems to be welcoming of an authoritarian president.

    1. many Indians continue to defecate in the open. Bangladesh’s government and charities have built latrines, too, but they have worked harder to stigmatise open defecation. Often they install latrines for the poor and then prod richer folk into following their example. A new, surprising, finding is that this works better than expecting people to copy their social superiors.
    1. Some (36%) said they agreed that the threat of “‘fake news’ had made them distrust the credibility of any news.” Almost half (45%) lacked confidence with discerning “real news” from “fake news,” and only 14% said they were “very confident” that they could detect “fake news.”

      These numbers are insane!

    1. The American Bible Society, t he American Sunday School Union, and the American Tract Society were all established in this period, and they each used the printing press to besiege the nation with Bibles, t racts, pictures, and picture cards t hat would help to create a strong, unified, J esus-centered national i dentity. A good tract “should be entertaining,” announced the American Tract Society in 1824. “ There must be something to allure the listless to read.”

      This is also the same sort of cultural movement to happen to journalism with Hard Copy in the early 1980's.

    1. an enthusiastic band of hobbyists with a taste for the retro and a fondness for old-school fan pages.

      While this may describe a few people within the group and it could be a stereotypical perception for those old enough to remember the "old" web, I'd have to push back on this perception. While many of us do come from the old web, we realize how much we've given away (including our agency) and we're attempting to create a web renaissance or even a neo-web. There is honestly very little that is very retro about this and in fact it is quite forward thinking.

      I suspect that Desmond is simply using this description here to set up his story.

    1. The prevalent practice of damaging images of the human form—and the anxiety surrounding the desecration—dates to the beginnings of Egyptian history. Intentionally damaged mummies from the prehistoric period, for example, speak to a “very basic cultural belief that damaging the image damages the person represented,” Bleiberg said. Likewise, how-to hieroglyphics provided instructions for warriors about to enter battle: Make a wax effigy of the enemy, then destroy it. Series of texts describe the anxiety of your own image becoming damaged, and pharaohs regularly issued decrees with terrible punishments for anyone who would dare threaten their likeness.
    1. Henrich, who directs Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, is a cultural evolutionary theorist, which means that he gives cultural inheritance the same weight that traditional biologists give to genetic inheritance. Parents bequeath their DNA to their offspring, but they—along with other influential role models—also transmit skills, knowledge, values, tools, habits. Our genius as a species is that we learn and accumulate culture over time. Genes alone don’t determine whether a group survives or disappears. So do practices and beliefs. Human beings are not “the genetically evolved hardware of a computational machine,” he writes. They are conduits of the spirit, habits, and psychological patterns of their civilization, “the ghosts of past institutions.”
    2. By the time Protestantism came along, people had already internalized an individualist worldview. Henrich calls Protestantism “the WEIRDest religion,” and says it gave a “booster shot” to the process set in motion by the Catholic Church. Integral to the Reformation was the idea that faith entailed personal struggle rather than adherence to dogma. Vernacular translations of the Bible allowed people to interpret scripture more idiosyncratically. The mandate to read the Bible democratized literacy and education. After that came the inquiry into God-given natural (individual) rights and constitutional democracies. The effort to uncover the laws of political organization spurred interest in the laws of nature—in other words, science. The scientific method codified epistemic norms that broke the world down into categories and valorized abstract principles. All of these psychosocial changes fueled unprecedented innovation, the Industrial Revolution, and economic growth.

      Reading this makes me think about the political break in the United States along political and religious boundaries. Some of Trumps' core base practices a more personal religion and are generally in areas that don't display the level of individualism, but focus more on larger paternalistic families. This could be an interesting space for further exploration as it seems to be moving the "progress"(?) described by WEIRD countries backward.

  14. Sep 2020
    1. Authorship is a much more complex issue in interpreting code than in traditional writing. Code frequently has multiple authors, mostly uncited, and large portions of code are adapted from previous code or code found online.

      Tiens, voilà qui me rappelle la littérature médiévale, je me demande bien pourquoi...

      Le poète s’introduit dans son langage au moyen de procédés transmis par le groupe social. C’est ce groupe qui, des signes formant le poème, détient les motivations. L’individu s’enracine dans le milieu humain et y justifie sa présence en restructurant à sa façon un Imaginaire dont les éléments lui sont fournis, déjà bien élaborés, par ce même milieu. (Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale, Paris, Seuil, « Poétique », 1972, p. 69.)

      C'est-à-dire que, comme le poète médiéval, le codeur du 21e siècle s'approprie, recompose, reprend, mélange, etc. des éléments qui lui préexistent, qui ne viennent pas de lui, mais identifiables pour ceux qui les ont déjà vus par ailleurs. Ces éléments appartiennent à une forme de culture propre que doit connaître et maîtriser celui qui écrit... qu'il s'agisse (d'une) de la Bible ou de Stack Overflow.

    2. vocabularies, and shared tools. As a result, any artifact, object, or text offers a glimpse of the cultures in which it was produced and circulated.

      Mais la plupart des participants ne réalisent que très en surface les ramifications de cette culture.

    1. Many of us hear this attack as saying that the four embody a fundamental otherness, and their true membership as “one of us” is fragile and even cancelable.
    1. reminding your students that you value and respect their privacy and their culture.

      This constant reminder will make students feel inclusive and reduce the chances of unintended harm.

    1. Nutrient Agar is a general purpose, nutrient medium used for the cultivation of microbes supporting growth of a wide range of non-fastidious organisms.
    1. Different nutrient media were used for selective cultivation of bacteria: kanamycin esculin azide (KAA, Merck Eurolab, Darmstadt, Germany) for enterococci, and Chromocult® agar (Merck) as a selective agent for Enterobacteriaceae. For the heterotrophic plate count the bacterial dilutions were plated on R2A agar
    1. R-2A Agar is formulated as per Reasoner and Geldreich (5). Stressed or injured organismsduring water treatment are unable to grow on high nutrient media, since the faster growing organisms outgrow the former(2). Therefore the use of a low nutrient medium like R-2A Agar incubated for longer incubation periods allows these stressedorganisms to grow well.
    1. MacConkey agar is selective for Gram-negative organisms and helps to differentiate lactose fermenting gram-negative rods from non-lactose fermenting gram-negative rods. It is primarily used for the detection and isolation of members of family enterobacteriaceae and Pseudomonas spp.
    1. Many factors have conspired to make us bad at solitude. They’re mostly not our fault. As Jenny Odell lays out in her book How to Do Nothing, we live in a culture where sociability and constant connectivity are rewarded, and where choosing to be by yourself marks you out as a loser, crazy, possibly immoral.

      Constant pressure to have every side-hustle and hobby also be something productive, and not valuing doing something just for the sake of the enjoyment of it.

    1. This super-sketchy experiment had one final phase, how-ever: reconciliation. After successive scenarios were deployed where the Rattlers and the Eagles had common goals (unblock-ing a shared water supply, repairing a truck, etc.) they grew closer, even splitting drinks at the end (malts, come on people). In our work, we may not call them Rattlers and Eagles. Instead, we may call them IT and Legal and Marketing. Or “weird-code-name product-team one” versus “weird-code-name product-team two”. But if organizations incentivize based on scarcity and self-interest, we might as well just call it what it is, a scaled version of the Robbers Cave experiment. And to mitigate the siloing and combat ingroup bias, we’ll have to consider following a different approach.

      How can we do this for the democrats and the republicans?

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. He refutes genetic theories of European superiority and makes a good case against economic determinism. His quarry are the “enlightened” Westerners—would-be democratizers, globalizers, well-intended purveyors of humanitarian aid—who impose impersonal institutions and abstract political principles on societies rooted in familial networks, and don’t seem to notice the trouble that follows.
    2. Toppling the accomplishments of Western civilization off their great-man platforms, he erases their claim to be monuments to rationality: Everything we think of as a cause of culture is really an effect of culture, including us.
    1. However, very little has been published in the academic literature about the factors that influence people to take part in citizen science projects and why participants continue their involvement, or not.

      What do we know so far? Where are clear areas where research can be done to improve our understanding of this?

    1. As Laura Turner notes in an excellent piece for BuzzFeed, no theological tradition is as rife for accusations of hypocrisy as the “prosperity gospel,” a distinctively American theological tradition. While it’s popular among many evangelical Protestants, it’s been condemned by many others. But to many of its critics, especially since the election of Donald Trump, this tradition has come to represent the worst of the conflation of American-style capitalism, religion, and Republican party politics.
  15. Aug 2020
    1. “Between 1780 and 1850, there is an increasing aestheticization of tuberculosis that becomes entwined with feminine beauty,” says Carolyn Day, an assistant professor of history at Furman University in South Carolina and author of the forthcoming book Consumptive Chic: A History of Fashion, Beauty and Disease, which explores how tuberculosis impacted early 19th century British fashion and perceptions of beauty.
    1. That restructuring of societies in Western Europe in turn also benefited the church, notes Henrich. "In some sense, the church is killing off clans, and they're often getting the lands in wealth," he says. "So this is enriching the church. Meanwhile, Europeans are broken down into monogamous, nuclear families and they can't re-create the complex kinship structures that we [still] see elsewhere in the world."

      If true, this is an astounding finding.

  16. Jul 2020
    1. The following month, another YA author, Kosoko Jackson, likewise pulled his debut novel after a Twitter mob savaged it for featuring “privileged” protagonists and casting a Muslim character as a villain. Ironically, Jackson, who is black and gay, had worked as a “sensitivity reader” for publishing houses, screening manuscripts for just such politically incorrect content, and on Twitter, like Zhao, he had waged identitarian turf wars. “He was Robespierre,”
    2. In January 2019, debut author Amélie Wen Zhao found herself the subject of such intense criticism—largely for making slavery a feature of her fictional world—that she pulled her YA fantasy novel, Blood Heir
    1. when some listeners hear poets read with one or more of these characteristics—slow pitch speed, slow pitch acceleration, narrow pitch range, low rhythmic complexity, and/or slow speaking rate—they hear Poet Voice.”
  17. Jun 2020
    1. A word deployed in academe to curb racialist denotations is often used today inside and outside of academe with racialist con-notations. A word intended to promote pluralism often becomes a trope in con-servative agendas or in late liberal versions of the civilizing project.

      This is a fundamental aspect of the historical development of the concept of culture. As seen, for example, in racist statements from physicians in the book Reproducing Race, where they ascribe differential treatment of patients by means of different cultures. It is also the idea of "racism without races" of Etienne Balibar

    1. Mr. Speyer was critical of American home-building bombast, declaring in a 1986 interview conducted by the Art Institute of Chicago shortly before his death, “I think the typical suburban style is really not at all based in comfort, it’s based in ostentation,” he said. “Everybody,” he added, is “putting a centerpiece on the table.”
    1. On November 19, 1814, P arisians s trolled i nto t he Vaudeville Theater a cross from the Palais-Royal to view the opening of La Venus Hottentote, ou Haine aux Fran-cais (or the Hatred of French Women). I n the opera’s plot, a young Frenchman does not find his s uitor s ufficiently exotic. When she appears disguised as t he “Hottentot Venus,” he falls i n love. Secure i n his attraction, s he drops t he disguise. The Frenchman drops t he ridiculous attraction to the Hottentot Venus, comes t o his s enses, and the couple marries. The opera revealed Europeans’ i deas about Black women. After all, when Frenchmen are seduced by the Hottentot Venus, t hey are acting like animals. When Frenchmen are attracted to Frenchwomen, t hey are acting rationally. While hypersexual Black women are worthy of s ex-ual a ttraction, a sexual F renchwomen are worthy of l ove and marriage.
    2. Master/slave sex fundamentally acknowledged the humanity of Black and biracial women, but it simultaneously reduced that human-ity to their sexuality. I n the Christian world, s exuality was believed to be the animal t rait of humans.
  18. journals.sagepub.com journals.sagepub.com
    1. Sorokowska, A., Sorokowski, P., Hilpert, P., Cantarero, K., Frackowiak, T., Ahmadi, K., Alghraibeh, A. M., Aryeetey, R., Bertoni, A., Bettache, K., Blumen, S., Błażejewska, M., Bortolini, T., Butovskaya, M., Castro, F. N., Cetinkaya, H., Cunha, D., David, D., David, O. A., … Pierce, J. D. (2017). Preferred Interpersonal Distances: A Global Comparison. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 48(4), 577–592. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022117698039

  19. May 2020
    1. Human progress isn’t measured by industry. It’s measured by the value you place on a life. An unimportant life. A life without privilege. The boy who died on the river, that boy’s value is your value. That’s what defines an age, that’s… what defines a species. 
    1. Jennifer 8. Lee @XOXO: when I was in college all my classmates were all dreaming of a New York Times wedding announcement, and I was dreaming of a New York Times obituary you can join the Unicode Consortium as a non-voting member for $75 Emoji is OK at nouns, emotions and active verbs, but it has no notion of I or You in 2015 there were only 4 roles women could play on the emoji keyboard - Princess, Bride, Dancer or Playboy Bunny I have a female friend who is also a CEO who says "I can't see the point of being a mom - it doesn't scale" children now talk with emoji before they use words - it is a pidgin now, but they will make it a creole people pushing back on emoji that represent others is a failure of theory of mind
    1. In medieval learned cultures (all the material in this volume was producedin learned, even academic circles for purposes of reading and new compo-sition), such a thorough mixing of media, especially the visual and the ver-bal, was commonplace

      This sounds much more like the "learned" world in the modern era using multi-media on the internet.

  20. Apr 2020
    1. I chose to go to Compton and Watts for a specific reason, which offers a way forward. Harvard economist Raj Chetty recently led a study that showed that though these two neighborhoods are demographically similar and only 2.3 miles apart, 44 percent of the black men who grew up in Watts were incarcerated on April 1, 2010, compared with only 6.2 percent of the black men who grew up in families with similar incomes in Central Compton. Similarly, social mobility was much lower in Watts than in Compton.Why are some neighborhoods, including some in Compton, able to give their kids better chances in life despite so many disadvantages? Chetty points to several factors: better schools, more fathers present in the neighborhoods and more cohesive community organizations.I found all those things in my reporting in Compton — and something else. Watts is part of Los Angeles. Compton is its own city with its own mayor. I met a lot of great people in Watts, but Compton has more civic infrastructure — community groups and locally controlled government agencies. Compton has a lot of homegrown civic reformers, like Rafer Owens, who is a deputy Los Angeles County sheriff and pastor at a Baptist church. There’s also a mentality: We have faith in our ability to take care of ourselves; only people in the neighborhood really know what’s going on.

      Fascinating but be careful of descending into structural-solutionism vs the culture. cf Putnam and Italy. Structures arise from (and also, of course, create and sustain) culture.

    1. All startups say they’re ambitious. You better be if you take venture funding!

      Stripe’s insight was that tackling ambitious problems doesn’t just make the potential prize bigger. Ambitious efforts are often more feasible than smaller ones, because the strongest people want to work on the most ambitious efforts. In our experience this positive talent effect was stronger than the negative effect of problem difficulty. So, paradoxically, tackling a bigger problem could be both more rewarding for the company and in a sense more tractable.

      This probably needs to be qualified. Stripe is set up so that we’re successful when our customers are successful (in real, economic terms). Ambitious problems for Stripe look like enabling more internet businesses and supporting entrepreneurs in more countries, not getting more ad clicks. The talent effect of ambition certainly applies to Stripe-style problems, but I’m not sure if it’d work for something like ads.

      Again all startups say “our team is our most important asset”; leaders say “the hardest part of my job is hiring good people”. But what most companies actually do day-to-day on recruiting is disastrous: generic job ads, clueless outside recruiters, screening on brand name, candidate-hostile interview processes, slow response times, etc. The poor recruiting results of most companies reflect the work they put in.

      Stripe was different in two respects: effort and thoughtfulness.

      In terms of effort, Stripe’s recruiting was absolutely relentless. On the front of the pipeline this meant investing in potential candidates that wouldn’t apply for years, through genuine 1:1 relationships as well as many small events that introduce Stripe and its team. Once candidates were active, Stripe tried to move very quickly. Ideally we'd turn around recruiting steps on the same day: respond to the candidates inbound email the same day, and even decide on and give them an offer on the same day as their interviews. We could close candidates before Google replied to their initial emails.

      Stripe was also thoughtful in recruiting processes. This signaled to candidates that the company was clueful and understood the candidate’s perspective. One example is Stripe’s capture the flag program, which not only put Stripe on the radar of a lot of candidates, but also gave them a sense of the strength of the engineering team. Another example was Stripe’s guidance on what to expect for interviews. We’d send candidates a PDF describing exactly how their interviews would be conducted, how they’d be evaluated, and how to prepare. These certainly helped candidates present their best work in the interviews. But they also showed that Stripe actually cares about this, which candidates knew from experience many other companies did not.

    1. Whenever I think of entrepreneurship, I'm drawn to a few of the slides (23, 24, 34) from Eric Schmidt's "How Google Works"

      First you have to attract your smart creatives. They aren't easily fooled.

      This starts with culture. Smart creatives need to care about the place they work.

      Never forget that hiring is the most important thing you do.

      I also think back to how Jack Welch was famous (ignoring what he was infamous / the final performance of GE) for was spending more than 50% of his time:

      getting the right people in the right places and then helping them to thrive. He would involve himself in hiring decisions that most global CEOs would delegate.

    1. la destruction de savoirs techniques permettait aussi de faire disparaître certains pratiques sociales, religieuses et culturelles

      technique et culture (au sens de l’identité d’un peuple) sont donc inextricablement liées

    1. En Italie, on est habitué à penser que défier les lois est un bien, mais pas en France, par exemple.

      le hacking, question de culture<br> (acceptée en Italie, moins en France)

    2. Dans l’espace numérique, on est toujours appelé à être des hackers : comprendre le code et le détourner — pas nécessairement de façon très technique : la création d’un profil littéraire fictif sur Facebook est une forme d’hacking. Mais cela implique un vrai digital divide, qui n’est pas celui entre les pays pauvres et les pays riches, mais celui entre ceux qui possèdent une digital literacy et ceux qui n’en possèdent pas.

      le hacker, c’est celui qui cherche à comprendre le monde dans ses moindres détails; celui qui cherche à craquer les codes du monde, grâces à ses connaissances et compétences techniques (digital literacy).

  21. Mar 2020
    1. Basecamp has dedicated channels where no work-related discussion is allowed, including message boards for workers to chat about personal interests like food, sports and pets: “just for social stuff, funny things, whatever people want to talk about,” Fried says.
    2. In recent days, if a meeting ends early, employees at GitLab will invite their children to take over for a bit.“People will throw out, ‘Anyone have kids home from school who want to chat with my kids?’” says Darren Murph, who leads employee culture and onboarding at GitLab.
    3. Around 5 or 6 p.m., a trivia emcee will pose one question to the group, and employees submit guesses in a Slack thread until someone responds with the correct answer. The emcee continues this way for four more questions, and the competition can get fierce.
    1. A healthy company culture is one where empathy and inclusivity are values of the organization. The real value of employee empowerment and engagement in such an organization results in empathy and a healthy company culture. Due to the increased impact of their work through optimization and innovation, employees can feel empowered enough to re-connect with their team, their coworkers and the organization. These empowered workers are excited to help others and to be empathetic to others. 
    2. The truth is that building an innovative organization from top-down is a dynamic process.  It often involves people at all levels of the company. But, the fundamental narrative across the board with innovative organizations is the culture. The company culture has to include employees who feel connected to the organization and want to contribute value.
    3. In our age of innovation, most organizations realize the need to innovate. According to entrepreneur coach Theodore Henderson, innovation is often crucial in being able to stay competitive long term in the marketplace. Innovation doesn’t just mean technology innovation. It can be company culture innovation, process innovation, management innovation, data innovation and much more.
  22. Feb 2020
    1. These foods are convenient, affordable, highly profitable, strongly flavoured, aggressively marketed – and on sale in supermarkets everywhere. The foods themselves may be familiar, yet the term “ultra-processed” is less so.

      This idea is immediately familiar to me despite hearing it rarely.

      I commented to an acquaintance just the other day that it seems like a cultural touchstone of American grocery stores that all the processed foods can be found in the center while all the actual foods are found on the outside.

      I make it a point to try to shop only on the outside.

  23. Jan 2020
  24. Dec 2019
    1. Its extremism goes straight back to Flake’s hero, Senator Barry Goldwater, who saw mainstream liberals as subversive socialists and opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on states’-rights grounds. In that year’s Presidential election, Goldwater received potent support from the best-selling writers Phyllis Schlafly, whose book “A Choice Not an Echo” imagined cabals of liberal Republicans plotting against the Party’s base, and John Stormer, who, in “None Dare Call It Treason,” warned that pro-Communist élites were infesting American institutions. Reagan’s famous half-hour commercial for Goldwater described the welfare state as the path to totalitarianism. Apocalyptic thinking, conspiracy theories, and bigotry haunted the movement from the start.

      And this goes deep into US history and culture. cf Hackett Fischer. The violent distrust and dislike of the state was baked into Appalachian (which is a large part of the extreme republican southern culture) from its transplant from the borderlands of England.

      The federalism and states rights was what kept the deeply intorelant and different initial 13 states together. The US never reached a reckoning on national culture and the accelerating centralization and homogenization of the 20th century was all but guaranteed to stir up a hornets nest.

      Remember New England (itself much less violent, equitable, intelligent etc than Appalachian) flogged quaker preachers who came to Boston in the 17th centuries. They even hung them. This was an intolerant land united only in their shared obsession with liberty born of oppression back home (in England).

    1. The written records of popular culture included awide range, from almanacs to the scriptures of religious sects. Localoperas or other dramas were organized and enacted at market towns orat the village level or often by lineages. But throughout the popular cul-ture dissident voices were not permitted to be heard and were destroyedif possible.

      Dissidence not permitted.

    2. With this wide support of morality went the menace of the criminallaw and punishment of malefactors against morality, especially againstthe dynasty. This application of the law against evildoers or the merethreat of evildoing included the uninhibited investigation of people intheir households and personal lives and the use of judicial torture to en-courage confessions. The ankle squeezer used in court was stepped up soas to maximize pressure, and it could turn bones into jelly when skillfullyapplied. When in doubt as to what law had been violated, the magis-trate-judges could fall back on the statute against “doing what ought notto be done,” whatever it might have been.By these rewards and punishments it was hoped the common peoplecould be kept in the proper path. The punishment of relatives was a reg-ular part of the punishment of the criminal. The ancient device of groupresponsibility meant in effect guilt by association.In the theocratic Chinese state that extolled the emperor as Son ofHeaven, heterodoxy was perpetually guarded against. The strategic elitestratum was the local leadership that began with the roughly one millionlower gentry or holders of the first-level (shengyuanorjiansheng)de-grees, which did not qualify one for official appointment but conferred aprivileged status and opportunity to seek higher degrees. To these wereadded possibly five million male commoners, more or less, who hadachieved some amount of classical education. With their help, the indoc-trination of the common people was pursued by the elite as a Neo-Con-fucian duty.As an example let us cite the use of theSacred Edict (shengyu)of theKangxi Emperor issued in 1670 as 16 maxims for the guidance of dailyconduct. Each maxim seven characters long, they conveyed, as VictorMair (in Johnson et al., 1985) says, “the bare bones of Confucian ortho-doxy as it pertained to the average citizen.” After 1670 appeared com-mentaries, paraphrases, adaptations, and so on, in a considerable liter-ature. The idea of explicating classical texts in written colloquialversions seems to have begun in the Yuan dynasty.

      Punishment and indoctrination. Key aspects of approach

      • Detailed investigation
      • Arbitrary power for magistrates as representatives of the imperial authority
      • Group responsibility
      • Standard maxims circulated for enculturation (cf Mao's Little Red Book)
    3. In today’s media environment where citizens observe events directlywith less need but more supply of symbols, it is not easy to appreciate theimportance of ritual and ceremony in an earlier time. One basis of thegovernment of imperial China was the proper performance of ceremo-nies at all levels of society. The son kowtowed to his father as his fathermight do toward the emperor and his officials, for the essence of the civilorder was to differentiate the hierarchy of relationships. Proper conduct,it was hoped, externalized one’s inner values; but even in the absence ofinner feelings, one’s performance of ritual could provide a common for-mal bond with others. In this way the appearance of harmony could as-sure it. As Naquin and Rawski (1987) put it, “luanwas the disorder thatcould arise within the state, the community, the household or the indi-vidual when ethical norms and correct ritual were not followed. The de-sire to promote order and preventluanpermeated Chinese society fromtop to bottom.”

      Promoting order and avoiding luan

    4. In the domain of literati thinking, the ideas of the statesman-philosopherWang Yangming (Wang Shouren, 1472–1529) gained many adherentsand inspired scholars to follow a new bent in Neo-Confucianism. Wangwas a very competent scholar-official and general who suppressed rebel-lions over a number of years and also devoted himself to building up thelocal community through the use of the Community Compact(xiang-yue).This institution was one of Confucianism’s closest approaches torevivalism. As a philosopher, Wang pursued the idea of Zhu Xi’s contem-porary, Lu Xiangshan, in developing a less practice-centered and morecontemplative approach to moral training and self-cultivation. Wangtaught that the world of principle is a unity and lies within as well as out-side one. Therefore, one should learn to be guided by intuitive knowl-edge achieved through careful thought and meditation. This had Bud-dhist overtones. Wang’s famous insistence on the unity of theory andpractice really demanded, as Willard J. Peterson (1979) notes, “the unityofmoralknowledge andsocialaction.” Wang Yangming’s teaching hadwide influence in Japan as well as in China.

      Scholar-officials to the fore once again.

    Tags

    Annotators

  25. Nov 2019
    1. To reach the populace, Zhu Xi used the vernacular and also advo-cated using the periodic local residents’ meeting known as the Commu-nity Compact(xiangyue).Although it came into general use only in theMing dynasty after 1368, this institution originated in a prototype estab-lished in 1077 by the Lü family. It consisted of a monthly assemblywhere food was eaten and a record of proceedings kept. One or twoheads were elected, and quite detailed regulations regarding behaviorwere adopted. Zhu Xi produced an amended version of the Lü family’sregulations that was even more detailed. It stressed hierarchy, for exam-ple by establishing five age-grades with rules for the conduct of all mem-bers of different categories. The aim was obviously to tell educated elitefamilies how to behave. Zhu assumed that the ordinary dress and majorrituals would be those of the elite. Seating by seniority would not applyto the non-elite, if they ventured to be present. Zhu Xi’s amendmentsalso contained detailed instructions on the way to greet a fellow compactmember, when to make calls on fellow compact members, how to invitethem to banquets, and how to conduct banquets—what to wear, whatname cards to use, and so on. What an organization man

      What an epitome of cultural-institutional structure. cf the kind of discussion we have in Albion's Seed of food, manners, dress, social organization.

      The community compact is also interesting in itself.

    2. The examination system became an enormous and intricate institu-tion central to upper-class life. During a thousand years from the Tang to1905 it played many roles connected with thought, society, administra-tion, and politics.

      And it is education in a particular form: highly ritualized (examinations are a ritual!), narrow, learned.

      It is a particular kind of education and learning. Deep and rich as well as narrow and limited.

    3. nized in gradations of inferiority and superiority. This hierarchic princi-ple in turn was the basis for a stress on duties rather than rights, on theevident assumption that if everyone did his duty everyone would getwhat he deserved. Thus, the filial son obedient to his parent would baskin the parent’s approval. With all duties performed, society would be inorder to everyone’s benefit.

      The hierarchic principle again

    4. Early China’s cosmology (her theory of the universe as an orderedwhole) shows striking points of difference with Western thought. Forexample, the early Chinese had no creation myth and no creator-lawgiver out of this world, no first cause, not even a Big Bang. As JosephNeedham says, they assumed “a philosophy of organism, an orderedharmony of wills without an ordainer.” This view contrasts with the in-veterate tendency elsewhere in the world to assume a supernatural deity.Westerners looking at China have continually imposed their own pre-conceptions on the Chinese scene, not least because the Chinese, thoughthey generally regarded Heaven as the supreme cosmic power, saw it asimmanent in nature, not as transcendent. Without wading further intothis deep water, let us note simply that Han thought as recorded in classi-cal writings built upon the concept of mankind as part of nature andupon the special relationship between the ruler and his ancestors, con-cepts that were already important in Shang thought over a millenniumearlier.

      Fascinating. Such a profound difference in thinking (and the Chinese is much more accurate in base intuiton, i think).

      Western thought got trapped in causation, in division, the law of the excluded middle, in agency.

      That quote: "a philosophy of organism, an ordered harmony of wills without an ordainer."

      No wonder Buddhism found such fertile soil in China.

    5. Here lies one source of China’s “culturalism”—that is, the devotionof the Chinese people to their way of life, an across-the-board sentimentas strong as the political nationalism of recent centuries in Europe.Where European nationalism arose through the example of and contactwith other nation-states, Chinese culturalism arose from the differencein culture between China and the Inner Asian “barbarians.” Because theInner Asian invaders became more powerful as warriors, the Chinesefound their refuge in social institutions and feelings of cultural and aes-thetic superiority—something that alien conquest could not take away.

      Another aspect of Chinese culture is its culturalism: its totemization of "culture" (in the specific self-conscious sense).