1,017 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2022
    1. https://web.archive.org/web/20220901150728/https://flowingdata.com/2022/09/01/looking-for-meaning-in-the-everyday/

      Self assessment Vgl [[Self Pni 20141228171006]]

      Rest self care rated less meaningful. Vgl [[Rest by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang]] and eg Covey's 7th.

      Data is available, Nathan Yau made the graph from raw data.

      I wonder about the self assessment as meaningful. Meaningful to themselves or meaningful they'd expect others to perceive it as. Rest might be important, but watching tv generally seen as not meaningfull. The activity might be seen as meaningless but the purpose might be nonetheless meaningful. This is not a straightforward evaluation to make. Wonder about the actual questions asked, and how it might impact data.

  2. Aug 2022
    1. Mob requires good communication skills. There is no space for passive-aggressiveness; or arrogance. If You want to show You are better than Your colleagues, You aren’t a candidate for Mob.

      Main requirement of effective mob programming

    1. Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, Square and Slack have all announced that they will allow employees to work from home permanently. But for all their talk of boosting productivity and creating a better work-life balance, the move to hybrid work can come with a cost – literally. Facebook and Twitter will pay less for certain work-at-home staff, and Google could slash their salaries by up to 25 per cent.

      Claro. Las empresas buscan maximizar a como de lugar. He ahí donde son antagonistas con los empleados, no por decisión de éstos.

    1. Sometimes, I find digital apps urging me to integrate with another application or extension: connect to calendar, install this, install that (and sure, it may also be my own damn fault). They force me to get into a “system” rather than focus on what the tool provides. It’s overwhelming. Over-optimization leads to empty work, giving me a feeling of productivity in the absence of output, like quicksand. It hampers me from doing actual work.
    1. But, let's turn our attention to HyFlex for a moment.

      Great points here! How many of our experiments with hybrid online-F2F experiences failed fundamentally because of bad design? "No boundaries" is not a design, and "all things to all people" is not inclusion.

    2. You can have the illusion that watercooler talk "just happens," hence cultivating a community seems seamless in a F2F context, but you're really not examining the factors that lead you there, and how's privileged.

      Enormously important. Thought exercise: who is left out of your "seamless" interactions because of design factors like space and time? (And that's before we even get into the questions of for whom a community is cultivated.)

  3. Jul 2022
    1. Many other investors are also working to broaden ownership of their companies. Insight Global, a staffing company owned by Harvest Partners and Leonard Green, gave each of its 4,500 employees a pathway to ownership: the quit rate fell from 45 per cent in 2017 to 14 per cent today. Similar results have been seen at SRS, a roofing products distributor owned by Berkshire Partners and Leonard Green. Ownership was broadened, employee engagement improved and the quit rate declined by three quarters.

      it seems like the benefits of employee ownership are the highest when... * engagement is low * you have a high cashflow / profitable business that someone would actually want to buy

    2. Ingersoll Rand shared ownership with all of its 16,000 employees across more than 80 countries. Over time, the company’s quit rate has dropped from 20 per cent to below 3 per cent. Employee engagement scores from internal company data rocketed from the 20th percentile to the 90th percentile
    3. Gallup surveys show that only 20 per cent of the global workforce is constructively engaged at work
    1. The goal of this project is to have a single gem that contains all the helper methods needed to resize and process images. Currently, existing attachment gems (like Paperclip, CarrierWave, Refile, Dragonfly, ActiveStorage, and others) implement their own custom image helper methods. But why? That's not very DRY, is it? Let's be honest. Image processing is a dark, mysterious art. So we want to combine every great idea from all of these separate gems into a single awesome library that is constantly updated with best-practice thinking about how to resize and process images.
  4. bafybeicyqgzvzf7g3zprvxebvbh6b4zpti5i2m2flbh4eavtpugiffo5re.ipfs.dweb.link bafybeicyqgzvzf7g3zprvxebvbh6b4zpti5i2m2flbh4eavtpugiffo5re.ipfs.dweb.link
    1. The Life We Live and the Life We Experience: Introducing theEpistemological Difference between “Lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) and “LifeConditions” (Lebenslage)
      • Title:The Life We Live and the Life We Experience: Introducing the Epistemological Difference between “Lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) and “Life Conditions” (Lebenslage)
      • Author: Bjorn Kraus
      • Date: 2015
      • Source: https://d-nb.info/1080338144/34
      • Annotation status: incomplete
    1. Ein grofer Teil der Regestenarbeit wird neuerdings demForscher durch besondere Regestenwerke abgenommen, nament-lich auf dem Gebiet der mittelalterlichen Urkunden. Daf diesebevorzugt werden, hat zwei Griinde: erstens sind die Urkundenfur die Geschichte des Mittelalters gewissermafen als festesGerippe von besonderer Wichtigkeit; zweitens sind sie so ver.streut in ihren Fund- und Druckorten, da8 die Zusammen-stellung derselben, wie sie ftir jede Arbeit von neuem erforder-lich wire, immer von neuem die langwierigsten und mtthsamstenVorarbeiten n&tig machen wiirde. Es ist daher von griéStemNutzen, da8 diese Vorarbeiten ein fir allemal gemacht und demeinzelnen Forscher erspart werden.

      Ein großer Teil der Regestenarbeit wird neuerdings dem Forscher durch besondere Regestenwerke abgenommen, namentlich auf dem Gebiet der mittelalterlichen Urkunden. Daß diese bevorzugt werden, hat zwei Gründe: erstens sind die Urkunden fur die Geschichte des Mittelalters gewissermafen als festes Gerippe von besonderer Wichtigkeit; zweitens sind sie so verstreut in ihren Fund- und Druckorten, daß die Zusammenstellung derselben, wie sie ftir jede Arbeit von neuem erforderlich wire, immer von neuem die langwierigsten und mtthsamsten Vorarbeiten nötig machen würde. Es ist daher von größtem Nutzen, daß diese Vorarbeiten ein fir allemal gemacht und dem einzelnen Forscher erspart werden.

      Google translation:

      A large part of the regesta work has recently been relieved of the researcher by special regesta works, especially in the field of medieval documents. There are two reasons why these are preferred: first, the documents are of particular importance for the history of the Middle Ages as a solid skeleton; Secondly, they are so scattered in the places where they were found and printed that the compilation of them, as would be necessary for each new work, would again and again necessitate the most lengthy and laborious preparatory work. It is therefore of the greatest benefit that this preparatory work should be done once and for all and that the individual researcher be spared.

      While the contexts are mixed here between note taking and historical method, there is some useful advice here that while taking notes, one should do as much work upfront during the research phase of reading and writing, so that when it comes to the end of putting the final work together and editing, the writer can be spared the effort of reloading large amounts of data and context to create the final output.

    1. 4.2 Meaningful work and meaningful relationships aren’t just nice things we chose for ourselves—they are genetically programmed into us.

      4.2 Meaningful work and meaningful relationships aren’t just nice things we chose for ourselves—they are genetically programmed into us.

    1. that you know was not connected to any kind of military application there were other examples of this and this is something that you could actually put you know 00:07:36 these cards in a smaller deck that you could review i drove to my conference so it would have been a lot harder to review these when i'm driving however if you're flying or taking a train or you 00:07:49 know something where a passenger seat you could potentially just take these cars make a small deck and carry them with you wouldn't need a computer or anything now that was the priming piece 00:08:03 how did it help next step is i actually went to the agenda into the schedule and looked at it typically when you do that there are some some talks that you're going to want to 00:08:16 go to right and some work groups or tracks that are that have a large application to what you're doing your day job is the other piece is if you're presenting

      This is an example about preparation for going into a conference (or battle, which is suggested by this particular conference's topic). The work provides a primer for what is about to happen and can be analogized to ancients taking the ark of the covenant into battle before them. It serves as a cultural talisman representing what they're fighting for, but it also likely served as a mnemonic device for their actual battle strategies and plans from the time. They take it with them as a physical review reminder and device.

    1. Think about the sad essay we all used to write for your (insert language here) class: back then you didn’t have permission to generate original ideas.

      I'm not sure that's the correct diagnosis.

      Alternative take: you were not, at that point in your life, equipped to understand that you could be generating new ideas and that you should walk away from that writing course with an appreciation for writing as a vehicle for what you'd like to accomplish with a given subject/format. It's fine that you didn't—many people don't—and your instructors, institution, parents, community, etc. probably could have done a better job at communicating this to you, but it was there, and it was the point all along.

    1. All students alluded to the need to developnot only academic skills but also self-management. This included skills such asdeveloping work/life balance, self-control,confidence, and become discerning in theirchoices around study

      University life is about developing self and time management skills. Students are expected to be adults, therefore, balacning all aspects of life is an important skills that students will realise and develop in order to servive, progresss and complete their studies.

    1. They are:doers: self-motivated or intrinsically driven to achieve and learndrivers: proactive and decisive; don't wait for orderspromoters: passionate and excited to share what they create for their own benefit and the benefit of others

      3 abilities of great async workers

  5. Jun 2022
    1. All this hoopla seems out of character for the sedate man who likes to say of his work: ''Whatever I did, there was always someone around who was better qualified. They just didn't bother to do it.''
    1. The Essential Habits ofDigital Organizers

      This chapter is too entailed with productivity advice, which can be useful to some, but isn't as note taking focused for those who probably need more of that.

      What is the differentiator between knowledge workers, knowledge creators, students, researchers, academics. How do we even clearly delineate knowledge worker as a concept. It feels far too nebulous which makes it more difficult to differentiate systems for them to use for improving productivity and efficiency.

    2. If we overlay the four steps of CODE onto the model ofdivergence and convergence, we arrive at a powerful template forthe creative process in our time.

      The way that Tiago Forte overlaps the idea of C.O.D.E. (capture/collect, organize, distill, express) with the divergence/convergence model points out some primary differences of his system and that of some of the more refined methods of maintaining a zettelkasten.

      A flattened diamond shape which grows from a point on the left so as to indicate divergence from a point to the diamond's wide middle which then decreases to the right to indicate convergence  to the opposite point. Overlapping this on the right of the diamond are the words "capture" and "organize" while the converging right side is overlaid with "distill" and "express". <small>Overlapping ideas of C.O.D.E. and divergence/convergence from Tiago Forte's book Building a Second Brain (Atria Books, 2022) </small>

      Forte's focus on organizing is dedicated solely on to putting things into folders, which is a light touch way of indexing them. However it only indexes them on one axis—that of the folder into which they're being placed. This precludes them from being indexed on a variety of other axes from the start to other places where they might also be used in the future. His method requires more additional work and effort to revisit and re-arrange (move them into other folders) or index them later.

      Most historical commonplacing and zettelkasten techniques place a heavier emphasis on indexing pieces as they're collected.

      Commonplacing creates more work on the user between organizing and distilling because they're more dependent on their memory of the user or depending on the regular re-reading and revisiting of pieces one may have a memory of existence. Most commonplacing methods (particularly the older historic forms of collecting and excerpting sententiae) also doesn't focus or rely on one writing out their own ideas in larger form as one goes along, so generally here there is a larger amount of work at the expression stage.

      Zettelkasten techniques as imagined by Luhmann and Ahrens smooth the process between organization and distillation by creating tacit links between ideas. This additional piece of the process makes distillation far easier because the linking work has been done along the way, so one only need edit out ideas that don't add to the overall argument or piece. All that remains is light editing.

      Ahrens' instantiation of the method also focuses on writing out and summarizing other's ideas in one's own words for later convenient reuse. This idea is also seen in Bruce Ballenger's The Curious Researcher as a means of both sensemaking and reuse, though none of the organizational indexing or idea linking seem to be found there.


      This also fits into the diamond shape that Forte provides as the height along the vertical can stand in as a proxy for the equivalent amount of work that is required during the overall process.

      This shape could be reframed for a refined zettelkasten method as an indication of work


      Forte's diamond shape provided gives a visual representation of the overall process of the divergence and convergence.

      But what if we change that shape to indicate the amount of work that is required along the steps of the process?!

      Here, we might expect the diamond to relatively accurately reflect the amounts of work along the path.

      If this is the case, then what might the relative workload look like for a refined zettelkasten? First we'll need to move the express portion between capture and organize where it more naturally sits, at least in Ahren's instantiation of the method. While this does take a discrete small amount of work and time for the note taker, it pays off in the long run as one intends from the start to reuse this work. It also pays further dividends as it dramatically increases one's understanding of the material that is being collected, particularly when conjoined to the organization portion which actively links this knowledge into one's broader world view based on their notes. For the moment, we'll neglect the benefits of comparison of conjoined ideas which may reveal flaws in our thinking and reasoning or the benefits of new questions and ideas which may arise from this juxtaposition.

      Graphs of commonplace book method (collect, organize, distill, express) versus zettelkasten method (collect, express, organize (index/link), and distill (edit)) with work on the vertical axis and time/methods on the horizontal axis. While there is similar work in collection the graph for the zettelkasten is overall lower and flatter and eventually tails off, the commonplace slowly increases over time.

      This sketch could be refined a bit, but overall it shows that frontloading the work has the effect of dramatically increasing the efficiency and productivity for a particular piece of work.

      Note that when compounded over a lifetime's work, this diagram also neglects the productivity increase over being able to revisit old work and re-using it for multiple different types of work or projects where there is potential overlap, not to mention the combinatorial possibilities.

      --

      It could be useful to better and more carefully plot out the amounts of time, work/effort for these methods (based on practical experience) and then regraph the resulting power inputs against each other to come up with a better picture of the efficiency gains.

      Is some of the reason that people are against zettelkasten methods that they don't see the immediate gains in return for the upfront work, and thus abandon the process? Is this a form of misinterpreted-effort hypothesis at work? It can also be compounded at not being able to see the compounding effects of the upfront work.

      What does research indicate about how people are able to predict compounding effects over time in areas like money/finance? What might this indicate here? Humans definitely have issues seeing and reacting to probabilities in this same manner, so one might expect the same intellectual blindness based on system 1 vs. system 2.


      Given that indexing things, especially digitally, requires so little work and effort upfront, it should be done at the time of collection.


      I'll admit that it only took a moment to read this highlighted sentence and look at the related diagram, but the amount of material I was able to draw out of it by reframing it, thinking about it, having my own thoughts and ideas against it, and then innovating based upon it was incredibly fruitful in terms of better differentiating amongst a variety of note taking and sense making frameworks.

      For me, this is a great example of what reading with a pen in hand, rephrasing, extending, and linking to other ideas can accomplish.

    3. We’ve been taught that it’s important to work “with the end inmind.” We are told that it is our responsibility to deliver outcomes,whether that is a finished product on store shelves, a speechdelivered at an event, or a published technical document.

      Example of someone else saying this...

      We focus too much on the achievement and the end goal and the work and process doesn't receive its due.

    4. There is one more layer we can add, though

      This four layer processing thing is painful and I suspect few are going to spend this much time on so many potential ideas.

      Ahren's framing of fleeting notes and permanent notes is quicker and easier.

      Also missing is any sort of inherent link to any other ideas or even to a broader index to make it somewhat easier to find/use. Simply filing it into a folder, even an "important" one seems fairly useless and make-work.

    5. When you use up too much energy taking notes, you havelittle left over for the subsequent steps that add far more value:making connections, imagining possibilities, formulating theories,and creating new ideas of your own

      The most valuable work one can do in note taking is creating active links from one piece of knowledge to another, particularly if they're both surprising.

      Anecdotally I do see a lot of people putting all of their work into collecting notes, and none of it rephrasing things into their own words to improve understanding or linking ideas together to create new ideas. The latter are both far superior to the former.

    1. So when we struggle – like when we have difficulty making sense of a math review problem, or when we can’t seem to get a note to speak in quite the right way in a run-through – it appears that we misinterpret greater effort as an indication of reduced learning. And that this is why we tend to gravitate to activities like re-reading the textbook, which feels easier and more productive than struggling for five minutes to solve a review problem and still getting it wrong. 

      Re-reading a text or our notes may seem like it's an easier and more productive review strategy for tests, but working through more difficult problems that require one to do work to come up with an answer are much more effective.

    2. the more effort they had to put into the study strategy, the less they felt they were learning.

      misinterpreted-effort hypothesis: the amount of effort one puts into studying is inversely proportional to how much one feels they learn.


      Is this why the Says Something In Welsh system works so well? Because it requires so much mental work and effort in short spans of time? Particularly in relation to Duolingo which seems easier?

    1. the research says is that students often

      the research says is that students often don't use the right learning strategy because they react negatively to effort in fact it even is so well demonstrated that it has its own name it's called the ==misinterpreted effort hypothesis== it says that students tend to see a learning strategy feel that it is more effortful more challenging and as a result they will veer away from that because they feel that that effort means that they're either doing it wrong or that the technique is bad they consider more effortful learning with being a bad thing

      Students will perceive learning strategies that require more effort and work on their part to be less productive in the long term, often when the opposite is the case. This phenomenon is known as the misinterpreted effort hypothesis.

      Link to: - research in Ahrens that rereading and reviewing over material seems easy, but isn't as effective as directly answering questions and performing the work to produce one's own answer. - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010028519302270

    1. The box is not a substitute for creating. The box doesn’t compose or write apoem or create a dance step. The box is the raw index of your preparation. It is therepository of your creative potential, but it is not that potential realized.

      Great quote about what a zettelkasten isn't. This is also one of the reasons why I've underlined the amount of work that one must put into the box to get productive material back out the other end.

    2. you should never save for two meetingswhat you can accomplish in one.
    1. The evidence is in: working from home is a failed experiment

      Nowhere in this article is any attention paid to how "hybrid work" would be implemented, the variable implementations that might be offered by different organizations, and the influence of corporate culture on the success of a hybrid work implementation.

    2. That’s because there’s this illusion of more independence, flexibility and control over one’s life which is probably why 70% of the workers who participated in the Microsoft survey, despite all their concerns, still desire some type of flexible work options in the future.

      The use of the word "illusion" is a bald assertion. None of the studies I've seen have examined "independence, flexibility and control" to see (a) what workers mean by these terms, and (b) how they measured those terms, and (c) whether there's any factual basis in calling it an "illusion".

    1. Blockchains address this problem in two ways. First, they enforce a complete ordering on all transactions, which generates a tree of alternative views of history. Second, they define canon for histories, along with a fork-choice rule that selects the canonical branch from the tree of histories.

      Blockchains solve the double spending problem in two ways.

      (1) They enforce a complete ordering of all transactions, which results in a tree of possible histories. (2) They define a fork-choice rule that selects the canonical branch from the tree of all possible histories.

    1. Many believe that companies should give more time to employees to contribute to open source, with 79% agreeing or strongly agreeing that companies should give time during work hours to contribute.
    2. while just 20% have been paid for their contributions to open source, 53% agree or strongly agree that individuals should be paid for open source contributions
  6. May 2022
    1. By offering to have a real-time technical discussion, you are reframing the code review process away from an 'instructor correcting student' dynamic and into a 'colleagues working together' mindset.
    1. Each developer on average wastes 30 minutes before and after the meeting to context switch and the time is otherwise non-value adding. (See this study for the cost of context switching).
    1. The second way that people use their Second Brain is to connectideas together. Their Second Brain evolves from being primarily amemory tool to becoming a thinking tool. A piece of advice from amentor comes in handy as they encounter a similar situation on adifferent team. An illuminating metaphor from a book finds its wayinto a presentation they’re delivering. The ideas they’ve capturedbegin gravitating toward each other and cross-pollinating.

      Missing from this description is the work that is involved in revisting, re-reading, and interacting with your notes. This is not an easy process, but this paragraph belies the work involved and makes it seem "magical" with the use of the words 'illuminating', 'gravitating', 'cross-pollinating' which are all external processes or forces that don't require work from the individual.

    2. This isn’t the same notetaking you learned in school

      Most people weren't taught positive or even useful note taking skills in school, and this is a massive problem in a knowledge-based and knowledge privileged society.

    3. For the first time in history, we have instantaneous access to theworld’s knowledge.

      While we may have the impression of instant access to the world's knowledge, this is really far from the truth. It's all there, but being able to search through it for what we want or being able to find or generate insight from it involves a massive mountain of hidden work that no one really wants to do in practice.

    1. It's also strategic work. Setting the appetite and coming up with a solution requires you to be critical about the problem.

      • What are we trying to solve?
      • Why does it matter?
      • What counts as success?
      • Which customers are affected?
      • What is the cost of doing this instead of something else?
    2. Second, we shape the work before giving it to a team. A small senior group works in parallel to the cycle teams. They define the key elements of a solution before we consider a project ready to bet on. Projects are defined at the right level of abstraction: concrete enough that the teams know what to do, yet abstract enough that they have room to work out the interesting details themselves.

  7. Apr 2022
    1. https://warrenellis.ltd/jot/morning-routine-and-work-day-spring-2022/

    2. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Winnie Lim</span> in peeking into people’s routines (<time class='dt-published'>04/24/2022 02:40:01</time>)</cite></small>

  8. www.goodreads.com www.goodreads.com
    1. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Winnie Lim</span> in peeking into people’s routines (<time class='dt-published'>04/24/2022 02:40:01</time>)</cite></small>

    1. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Winnie Lim</span> in peeking into people’s routines (<time class='dt-published'>04/24/2022 02:40:01</time>)</cite></small>

    1. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Winnie Lim</span> in peeking into people’s routines (<time class='dt-published'>04/24/2022 02:40:01</time>)</cite></small>

    1. A common frustrating experience was associated with a poor work ethic and with some members who did not fulfill their obligations. Creating more work for the other members in the group is the direct consequence.

    1. For this reason, the Secretary of State set out a vision1 for health and care to have nationalopen standards for data and interoperability that are mandated throughout the NHS andsocial care.
    1. A filing system is indefinitely expandable, rhizomatic (at any point of timeor space, one can always insert a new card); in contradistinction with the sequen-tial irreversibility of the pages of the notebook and of the book, its interiormobility allows for permanent reordering (for, even if there is no narrative conclu-sion of a diary, there is a last page of the notebook on which it is written: its pagesare numbered, like days on a calendar).

      Most writing systems and forms force a beginning and an end, they force a particular structure that is both finite and limiting. The card index (zettelkasten) may have a beginning—there's always a first note or card, but it never has to have an end unless one's ownership is so absolute it ends with the life of its author. There are an ever-increasing number of ways to order a card index, though some try to get around this to create some artificial stability by numbering or specifically ordering their cards. New ideas can be accepted into the index at a multitude of places and are always internally mobile and re-orderable.

      link to Luhmann's works on describing this sort of rhizomatic behavior of his zettelkasten


      Within a network model framing for a zettelkasten, one might define thinking as traversing a graph of idea nodes in a particular order. Alternately it might also include randomly juxtaposing cards and creating links between ones which have similarities. Which of these modes of thinking has a higher order? Which creates more value? Which requires more work?

    1. The Card Index as Creativity Machine

      Rowan Wilken admits that Cornelia Vismann's use of files for transmission, storage, cancellation, manipulation, and destruction are remarkable, but that the key feature of the card index as a file type is its use for creative production.

    1. crucial difference between traditional apprenticeships and modern schooling: inthe former, “learners can see the processes of work,” while in the latter, “theprocesses of thinking are often invisible to both the students and the teacher.”Collins and his coauthors identified four features of apprenticeship that could beadapted to the demands of knowledge work: modeling, or demonstrating the taskwhile explaining it aloud; scaffolding, or structuring an opportunity for thelearner to try the task herself; fading, or gradually withdrawing guidance as thelearner becomes more proficient; and coaching, or helping the learner throughdifficulties along the way.

      This is what’s known as a cognitive apprenticeship, a term coined by Allan Collins, now a professor emeritus of education at Northwestern University. In a 1991 article written with John Seely Brown and Ann Holum, Collins noted a

      In a traditional apprenticeship, a learner watches and is able to imitate the master process and work. In a cognitive apprenticeship the process of thinking is generally invisible to both the apprentice and the teacher. The problem becomes how to make the thinking processes more tangible and visible to the learner.

      Allan Collins, John Seely Brown, and Ann Holum identified four pedagogical methods in apprenticeships that can also be applied to cognitive apprenticeships: - modeling: demonstrating a task while focusing on describing and explaining the steps and general thinking about the problem out loud - scaffolding: structuring a task to encourage and allow the learner the ability to try it themself - fading: as the learner gains facility and confidence in the process, gradually removing the teacher's guidance - coaching: as necessary, the teacher provides tips and suggestions to the learner to prompt them through potential difficulties

    1. Interested in launching a similar experiment in your organization?

      The model really assumes a work environment where a whole team can be compelled to participate. Can you make this kind of culture change with a coalition of the willing? For the participants, is a cohort enough? Or does a partial attempt just reinforce the divisions between groups in the organization?

  9. Mar 2022
    1. The 1911 census recorded 98,128 female servants, 20,357 female dressmakers and seamstresses, and 5,269 women working in clothing factories; teaching and nursing were other common forms of female waged labour.[3]

      work stuff

    2. More than half the Canadian population lived in rural areas, and farm women not only worked inside their homes, but also engaged in gardening, dairying, and other outdoor work to supplement the family diet and income.

      work

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x22OB55bysc

      Hilarious clickbait title for someone who makes productivity videos on YouTube, but she talks about finding some balance.

      She's definitely selling something though...

    1. it's 00:59:37 a lot about unlearning and that is sometimes more difficult [Music] and it's probably one of these 00:59:50 simple but not easy easy things

      Using a zettelkasten is a bit about unlearning how you used to do things, but most importantly it requires the work input and following the process to get the "magical" outputs.

    1. https://every.to/letter

      A manifesto about what the Every platform is all about. They're trying to create a new(?) economic model for writers working together.

      I'm not really sure how this is dramatically different from prior efforts or if the economic incentives are actually properly aligned here. Many writers without critically looking at the whole may be led here as much by marketing hype as anything else. It almost sounds like they're recreating The Huffington Post, but giving away some of the value up front instead of leaving all the value in one person's hand for a future sale.

      Who owns the copyright of the created works? Are editors and proofreaders just work for hire here? What about their interests?

    1. This isn’t MAIN_PRIORITY, so we aren’t going to do it until at least ESTIMATED_DONE_DATE. Right now our priority is MAIN_PRIORITY because of ONE_SENTENCE_JUSTIFICATION, and this is 100% our shipping focus. I agree this sounds like a really useful feature - once we finish MAIN_PRIORITY, should we consider dropping SECOND_PRIORITY and do it?

      Templates for saying NO

    1. Creative work is not complete until it is disseminated

      This is an interesting perspective, but are there cases where it's false?

      Link to the idea at CAA that you haven't really read a script unless you've actively acted upon what you've read.

    2. Users who expe rience empowering designs that are comprehensible, predictable, and controllable, may be inspired to pursue quality in their work products.

      This sounds a lot like the management philosophy of W. Edwards Deming who encouraged managers to empower workers to take ownership of their craft and work.

    1. RichardFeynman once had a visitor in his office, a historian who wanted tointerview him. When he spotted Feynman’s notebooks, he said howdelighted he was to see such “wonderful records of Feynman’sthinking.”“No, no!” Feynman protested. “They aren’t a record of my thinkingprocess. They are my thinking process. I actually did the work on thepaper.”“Well,” the historian said, “the work was done in your head, but therecord of it is still here.”“No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work onpaper, and this is the paper.”[33]

      Genius: The Life And Science of Richard Feynman,” James Gleick, Pantheon Books, 1992 (see pg. 409).

  10. Feb 2022
    1. First, consider who gets to make the rules. Tenured scholars who, as we’ve noted, are mostly white and male, largely make the rules that determine who else can join the tenured ranks. This involves what sociologists call “boundary work,” or the practice of a group setting rules to determine who is good enough to join. And as such, many of the rules established around tenure over the years work really well for white scholars, but don’t adequately capture the contributions of scholars of color.

      Boundary work is the practice of a group that sets the rules to determine who is and isn't good enough to join the group.

      Link to Groucho Marx quote, "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member."

    1. Without meeting notes and documentation, companies become reliant on unreliable verbal accounts, 1:1 updates, and needing to be in the room to get things done.
    1. If we put effort into the attempt of retrievinginformation, we are much more likely to remember it in the long run,even if we fail to retrieve it without help in the end (Roediger andKarpicke 2006)
    2. Learning requires effort, because we have to think to understandand we need to actively retrieve old knowledge to convince ourbrains to connect it with new ideas as cues. To understand howgroundbreaking this idea is, it helps to remember how much effortteachers still put into the attempt to make learning easier for theirstudents by prearranging information, sorting it into modules,categories and themes. By doing that, they achieve the opposite ofwhat they intend to do. They make it harder for the student to learnbecause they set everything up for reviewing, taking away theopportunity to build meaningful connections and to make sense ofsomething by translating it into one’s own language. It is like fastfood: It is neither nutritious nor very enjoyable, it is just convenient

      Some of the effort that teachers put into their educational resources in an attempt to make learning faster and more efficient is actually taking away the actual learning opportunities of the students to sort, arrange, and make meaningful connections between the knowledge and to their own prior knowledge bases.

      In mathematics, rather than showing a handful of methods for solving a problem, the teacher might help students to explore those problem solving spaces first and then assist them into creating these algorithms. I can't help but think about Inventional Geometry by William George Spencer that is structured this way. The teacher has created a broader super-structure of problems, but leaves it largely to the student to do the majority of the work.

    3. A coach is not there to do the work,but to show us how to use our time and effort in the most effectiveway.

      Much as coaches help their athletes become better, teachers are there to help students use their time and work efforts in the most effective ways.

    4. Writing is not what follows research, learning or studying, it is themedium of all this work. And maybe that is the reason why we rarelythink about this writing, the everyday writing, the note-taking anddraft-making.

      Here in a nutshell is the thrust of the entire book to come!


      Notes allow one to do small pieces of work over time, then by editing one's notes together to weave a story or create a broader thesis, one is primarily ordering and editing their prior work which isn't as difficult as staring at a blank piece of paper and wondering where to begin.

    1. Because of the constantly growing number of volumes, and to minimize coordination issues, Gottfried van Swieten emphasizes a set of instructions for registering all the books of the court library. Written instructions are by no means common prior to the end of the eighteenth century. Until then, cataloging takes place under the supervision of a librarian who instructs scriptors orally, pointing out problems and corrections as every-one goes along.

      Unlike prior (oral) efforts, Gottfried van Swieten created a writtten set of instructions for cataloging texts at the Austrian National Library. This helped to minimize coordination issues as well as time to teach and perfect the system.


      Written rules, laws, and algorithms help to create self-organization. This is done by saving time and energy that would have gone into the work of directed building of a system instead. The saved work can then be directed towards something else potentially more productive or regenerative.

    1. A couple of weeks ago I did a mock interview with an executive I’m coaching. One of the interview questions I posed was this: “You have employees, external customers, internal customers (stakeholders or peers), and your boss. Put them in order of priority in terms of serving their needs.Regardless of the type of company or organization, here’s the answer and why:1. External customersThe purpose of any company or business is to win and keep customers. Without customers, there’s no business, no shareholder value, and no jobs. Since there are a finite number of customers, in practical terms, they are irreplaceable. They’re always the highest priority.2. Your bossYour boss is more important to the success of the company than you and your peers. You may not like hearing that, but in just about every case, it’s true. You may think you’re more competent than your boss and you might even be right. But that doesn’t change the fact that his function incorporates yours and is higher up on the org chart so, by definition, his needs top yours or your peers.3. Internal customers (stakeholders or peers)Each and every one of you has peers, stakeholders, internal customers whose functions are intertwined with yours and whose needs are important. Marketing folks, for example, should count product groups and sales as their stakeholders. You should make it a priority to meet with them periodically and ask them how you’re doing. Next to paying customers and your boss, they’re needs matter most.   4. EmployeesSo, here we are. The dirty little secret no executive, business leader, or manager ever wants to admit. Nevertheless, it’s true. Employees are at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of how important their needs are to their management. That’s all there is to it.Don’t get me wrong. Creating a culture where employees are empowered, challenged, and supported, where they can really make a difference, should be huge for any company. But all things being equal, as priorities go, employees come in dead last on that list. Sobering as that sounds, it’s entirely as it should be.

      This really gets to the heart of the matter, it is justifiable that Employees are the lowest of the priorities for an executive.

      Based on the article priorities are: 1. External Customers - They bring money into the company 2. Your boss - They being money into you 3. Internal Customers (stakeholders or peers) - They make things work for external customers and your boss 4. Employees - They are paid to work for the company and are the lowest of the four priorities if you have to stack rank

    1. Many American employers continue to make their job offers contingent on fine-print conditions, such as noncompete clauses and forced arbitration, that can make it almost impossible to jump to a better workplace or hold management accountable when things go wrong. They seek out foreign workers who often, in theory or practice, lack the legal protections of U.S. citizens. They argue that they aren’t liable for any mistreatment of their subcontracted staff by the companies that technically employ those workers. And they charge staff for equipment or training essential to their duties, establishing a cycle of debt that, in conjunction with low wages, tends to build on itself
  11. Jan 2022
    1. Exposing myself to addictive interactions trained me to self-interrupt - whenever I encountered a difficult decision or a tricky bug I would find myself switching to something easier and more immediately rewarding. Making progress on hard problems is only possible if I don't allow those habits to be reinforced.

      Highlighting this, but really the whole section is almost perfectly written. Hardest is achieving your desired inner discipline and then having to fight with people who don't understand this shit (because their performance never matters, or they don't give a damn).

    1. Over the past several weeks, I’ve seen more faculty declining learning opportunities and expressing a need to protect their time than ever before in fifteen years of doing this work.

      Protect their time for what, I wonder?

    1. One could say: there must be a local solution (i.e. connection or internal fit)only. This indicates, accordingly, that the positioning of a special subject within this system of organizationreveals nothing about its theoretical importance — for there are no privileged positions in this web of notes:there is no top and no bottom

      While it may be important that there are no privileged positions, hierarchies, or immediate structures within Luhmann's (or others') zettelkasten, this belies the value of making (even by force) at least one link from each new note to the other notes. This helps begin to create the valuable interconnections of the system which are crucial for later use. Without this "linking hierarchy" one is left with just a pile of notes which will need the aforementioned additional work and context.

    2. Furthermore thistechnique enabled the collection not only to grow in absolute numbers, but to grow “inwardly” withoutthe limitations of a systematically order

      Previous historical examples of note taking ended up in large scrap heaps that provided value only to their creators, who had at least some knowledge of their context. Those who inherited them found them relatively useless because they required vast amounts of work to make useful. Linking notes and cross referencing or indexing them with subject headings and links to their sources can go a long way to immeasurably increase their value both to the initial user, who may forget these things, but also to subsequent users. The small amounts of work required upfront when making one's notes will pay off immeasurably in the long term.

      Link this to the specific examples in Paper Machines (chapter 2) just before the time of Vincentius Placcius.

    1. The script is in batch with some portions of powershell. The base code is fairly simple and most of it came from Googling ".bat transfer files" followed by ".bat how to only transfer certain file types" etc. The trick was making it work with my office, knowing where to scan for new files, knowing where not to scan due to lag (seriously, if you have a folder with 200,000 .txt files that crap will severally slow down your scans. Better to move it manually and then change the script to omit that folder from future searches)
    2. It essentially scans the on-site drive for any new files, generates hash values for them, transfers them to the Cloud, then generates hash values again for fidelity (in court you have to prove digital evidence hasn't been tampered with).

      Script to automate an 8 hour job: The firm gets thousands of digital documents, photos, etc on a daily basis. All of this goes on a local drive. My job is to transfer all of these files to the Cloud and then verify their fidelity.

    1. Yes, precisely because I've been involved in maintaining codebases built without real full stack frameworks is why I say what I said.The problem we have in this industry, is that somebody reads these blog posts, and the next day at work they ditch the "legacy rails" and starts rewriting the monolith in sveltekit/nextjs/whatever because that's what he/she has been told is the modern way to do full stack.No need to say those engineers will quit 1 year later after they realize the mess they've created with their lightweight and simple modern framework.I've seen this too many times already.It is not about gatekeeping. It is about engineers being humble and assume it is very likely that their code is very unlikely to be better tested, documented, cohesive and maintained than what you're given in the real full stack frameworks.Of course you can build anything even in assembler if you want. The question is if that's the most useful thing to do with your company's money.
    1. The spider web system was, in fact, a work in progress; the resulting hypertext was designed to be open-ended.

      One's lifetime of notes could be thought of as a hypertext work in progress that is designed to be open-ended.

    1. Interestingly, early French observers attached little importance tosuch economic distinctions, especially since foraging or farming was,in either case, largely women’s work

      Note the erasure of women's work by the hierarchical society.

    1. 我们来看filebeat的启动过程。 1、执行root命令 在filebeat/main.go文件中,main函数调用了cmd.RootCmd.Execute(),而RootCmd则是在cmd/root.go中被init函数初始化,其中就注册了filebeat.go:New函数以创建实现了beater接口的filebeat实例 对于任意一个beats来说,都需要有: 实现Beater接口的具体Beater(如Filebeat); 创建该具体Beater的(New)函数。 beater接口定义(beat/beat.go): type Beater interface { // The main event loop. This method should block until signalled to stop by an // invocation of the Stop() method. Run(b *Beat) error // Stop is invoked to signal that the Run method should finish its execution. // It will be invoked at most once. Stop() } 2、初始化和运行Filebeat 创建libbeat/cmd/instance/beat.go:Beat结构 执行(*Beat).launch方法 (*Beat).Init() 初始化Beat:加载beats公共config (*Beat).createBeater registerTemplateLoading: 当输出为es时,注册加载es模板的回调函数 pipeline.Load: 创建Pipeline:包含队列、事件处理器、输出等 setupMetrics: 安装监控 filebeat.New: 解析配置(其中输入配置包括配置文件中的Input和module Input)等 loadDashboards 加载kibana dashboard (*Filebeat).Run: 运行filebeat 3、Filebeat运行 设置加载es pipeline的回调函数 初始化registrar和crawler 设置事件完成的回调函数 启动Registrar、启动Crawler、启动Autodiscover 等待filebeat运行结束 我们再重代码看一下这个启动过程

      filebeat启动过程

  12. Dec 2021
    1. I think one of the ways that remote work changes this is that I can do other things while I think through a tricky problem; I can do dishes or walk my dog or something instead of trying to look busy in a room with 6-12 other people who are furiously typing because that's how the manager and project manager understand that work gets done.

      Way work often looks like during remote dev work

    1. we found this extraordinary paper from 1951 I think by Goldschmidt Walter Goldschmidt which nobody's read it has 00:29:14 got a very strange title something like a contribution to ethical and philosophical sociology or something which tells you very little about its content but it's about these Californian foragers who live next door to the 00:29:27 highly aristocratic slave keeping fishermen of the northwest coast and what Goldschmidt who was a student of Alfred Kroeber I believe the great sort of Dayan of 00:29:40 California anthropology what he argues there point four point is that these Californian hunter-gatherers actually had a kind of work ethic which is remarkably similar to what Max Weber 00:29:54 classically described as the Protestant work ethic of central and northern Europe

      Walter Goldschmidt had a 1951 paper about coastal Californian foragers next to aristocratic slave keeping fishermen. These hunter-gatherers apparently had a work ethic similar to that of Max Weber's Protestant work ethic.

      Did these fishermen have totem poles (aka decorated wood


      Goldschmidt was a student of Alfred Kroeber. Would he have known or worked with Milman Parry?


      Kroeber received his PhD under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1901, the first doctorate in anthropology awarded by Columbia.

    1. The card index appeared to be simply what it was: a wooden box for paper slips. On one of these file cards, Luhmann once summarized his own reflections on just such an experience: ‘People come, they see everything and nothing more than that, just like in porn movies; consequently, they leave disappointed’ (Figure 1).8
      1. Cf. Schmidt, ‘Luhmanns Zettelkasten’, 7. The heading of this file card is formulated in form of a question: ‘Geist im Kasten?’ (‘Does Spirit hide in the filing cabinet?’). Obviously, the answer is no. Many thanks to Johannes Schmidt for providing the image of this file card.

      In a zettel in his system entitled "Does Spirit hide in the filing cabinet", Niklas Luhmann wrote the note: "People come, they see everything and nothing more than that, just like in porn movies; consequently, they leave disappointed." This is a telling story about the simplicity of the idea of a slip box (zettelkasten, card catalog, or commonplace book).

      yellowed index card with the identifier 9/8,3 with almost illegible handwriting in German Niklas Luhmann, Zettelkasten II, index card no. 9/8,3

      It's also a testament to the fact that the value of it is in the upfront work that is required in making valuable notes and linking them. Many end up trying out the simple looking system and then wonder why it isn't working for them. The answer is that they're not working for it.

  13. Nov 2021
    1. Leaders need to continue that communication and develop those relationships in remote and hybrid working environments, whether those environments become an ongoing fixture of the institution or are only part of a business continuity plan.

      This is the tough bit. Working fully remote for two organizations now, I find it is important to have in-person time with colleagues—meetings, meals, relaxation—to build relationships that can weather rough patches when people aren't face-to-face. In addition to communication plans for remote and hybrid, leaders need to recognize that humans are social creatures and almost all will benefit from having relationship-building time.

    1. Many studies have been undertaken on the value of unpaid domestic and care work, which is also non-market, non-transactional and not included in formal economic accounts. Similarly, the unpaid care work for the wider community is missing off the balance sheet. Both are essential for the functioning of the economy that is counted.In Australia, this was estimated to be almost half of the country’s GDP, with those statistics from over twenty years ago. More recent statistics for the state of Victoria reveal a similar picture.

      These studies illustrate the huge under appreciation of the value contribution of the commons and work not showing up on GDP, the dark matter of GDP.

    1. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/evangelical-trump-christians-politics/620469/

      Evangelical Christians have been held together more by political orientation and sociology than they have by a common theology. This has set them up for a schism which has been exacerbated by Donald J. Trump, COVID-19, and social changes.

      Similar to Kurt's quote, "We go to church to see and be seen", too many churches are focused on entertainment and being an ongoing institution that they aren't focusing on their core mission. This is causing problems in their overall identity.

      Time at church and in religious study is limited, but cable news, social media, and other distractions are always on and end up winning out.

      People are more likely to change their church because of politics than to change their politics because of church.

      The dichotomy of maleness and femaleness compound the cultural issues of the evangelical church.

      Southernization of the Church

      Pastors leaving the profession due to issues with a hostile work environment. Some leaving because parishioners are organizing and demanding they be fired.

      Peter Wehner looks at the rifts that are appearing in the Christian evangelical movement in America, some are issues that have been building for a while, while others are exaggerated by Donald J. Trump, the coronavirus, the culture wars, political news, political beliefs, and and hypocrisy.

    1. I watched Christian from Zettelkasten.de taking notes from a book. He’s a professional note-taker, and it still took him two hours to take four notes in the first video - it does take forever to make good permanent notes.

      An example of someone taking notes in public to model the process. Also an example of the time it takes to make notes.

      Has Dan Allosso (@danallosso) done something along these lines as an example on his YouTube channel?

    2. But was it worth three hours of my time?

      Here's a good example of someone asking if the time it takes to make good reading notes is worth it.

    1. Excerpting requires effort and thus combats natural laziness; inhis regimen there is no reading without taking notes, which would be idleand vain, and no time wasted because every free moment can be put to usereading over one’s notes (seeA,p. 84).

      Even early in the history of note taking treatises Jeremias Drexel acknowledges the idea that good note taking, and particularly excerpting, takes work.

      Modern students seem to have now lost both the ars memoria as well as the note taking arts which helped supplant it. We really need to be able to regain both of these traditions, but it will obviously take commitment to do the work.

  14. Oct 2021
    1. Professor Lucy Easthope. (2021, October 20). WFH really is only for a very privileged few now. Not sure how that can stay a “thing” as an NPI. Too many harms being done by a fractured society where people are thriving by getting other people to bring them stuff/ make them things/ look after their family members for them [Tweet]. @LucyGoBag. https://twitter.com/LucyGoBag/status/1450842213613772802

    1. The references were probably worth more than reading the article. I can't say that there is anything new here to take away - who would reference wikipedia or the encyclopedia britannica these days? - as there is plenty of literature on Stoicism. Pigliucci is a central figure in modern Stoicism, but his tweets are not very scholarly, to be honest.

    1. So in a 2013 study, Ting’s team accelerated the process and boosted cyanide production by creating two new strains of the bacteria, each of which had an extra copy of the genes controlling enzyme production (2). The researchers included a new DNA sequence, called a promoter, which allowed them to trigger enzyme production by adding a chemical. The engineered strains cranked out 51 to 68% more cyanide, and the fraction of gold recovered rose from 11% to 25 to 30%.

      Genetic engineering and optimization of the process.

    2. Although the handling and processing of e-waste are hard to track, government documents and scientific reports suggest that only 20% of it is being properly recycled worldwide (1).

      Estimates of e-waste that is properly recycled.

    1. Rachel Quednau is the program director for Strong Towns, an urban planning think tank focused on incremental development. She writes that Spirit Halloween's business model is based on utilizing otherwise unusable retail space. "Today's Spirit is pretty much a bottom-feeder business that works only at the expense of other stores," Quednau writes. "If there weren't vacant storefronts, this business wouldn't exist."

      This is awfully inflamatory. Why exactly is this company a bottom-feeder? How does it work at others' expense? It's utilizing an underutilized resource and providing some income to landlords that they otherwise wouldn't have.

      That I can see there's nothing bad or predatory about what they're doing. If they didn't have physical space, they would (and probably are) sell directly online or pay larger rents in other spaces.

      Thousands of pumpkin patches and Christmas tree lots follow the same pattern for ages.

    1. Cost — it’s by far the most affordable headset in its class, and while I have a tendency to be lavish with my gadgetry I’m still a cheapskate: I love a good deal and a favorably skewed cost/benefit ratio even more.

      Oculus seems to be offering a good quality/cost ratio

    2. Adapting to the new environment is immediate, like moving between rooms, and since the focal length in the headset matches regular human vision there’s no acclimating or adjustment.

      Adaptation to VR work should be seamless

    3. I do highly contextual work, with multiple work orders and their histories open, supporting reference documentation, API specifications, several areas of code (and calls in the stack), tests, logs, databases, and GUIs — plus Slack, Spotify, clock, calendar, and camera feeds. I tend to only look at 25% of that at once, but everything is within a comfortable glance without tabbing between windows. Protecting that context and augmenting my working memory maintains my flow.

      Application types to look at during work:

      • work orders and their histories
      • supporting reference documentation
      • API specs
      • areas of code (and calls in the stack)
      • tests
      • logs
      • databases
      • GUIs
      • Slack
      • Spotify
      • clock
      • calendar
      • camera feeds

      With all that, we may look at around 25% of the stuff at once

    4. Realism will increase (perhaps to hyperrealism) and our ability to perceive and interact with simulated objects and settings will be indistinguishable to our senses. Acting in simulated contexts will have physical consequences as systems interpret and project actions into the world — telepresence will take a quantum leap, removing limitations of time and distance. Transcending today’s drone piloting, remote surgery, etc., we will see through remote eyes and work through remote hands anywhere.

      On the increase of realism in the future

    5. It has a ton of promise, but… I don’t really care for the promise it’s making. 100% of what you can do in Workrooms is feasible in a physical setting, although it would be really expensive (lots of smart hardware all over the place). But that’s the thing: it’s imitating life within a tool that doesn’t share the same limitations, so as a VR veteran I find it bland and claustrophobic. That’s going to be really good for newcomers or casual users because the skeuomorphism is familiar, making it easy to immediately orient oneself and begin working together — and that illustrates a challenge in design vocabulary. While the familiar can provide a safe and comfortable starting point, the real power of VR requires training users for potentially unfamiliar use cases. Also, if you can be anywhere, why would you want to be in a meeting room, virtual-Lake Tahoe notwithstanding?

      Author's feedback on why Workrooms do not fully use their potential

    6. For meeting with those not in VR, or if I have a video call that needs input rather than passive attendance, I’ll frequently use a virtual webcam to attend by avatar. It’s sufficiently demonstrative for most team meetings, and the crew has gotten used to me showing up as a digital facsimile. I’ll surface from VR and use a physical webcam for anything sensitive or personal, however.

      On VR meetings with other people while they are using normal webcams

    7. Meetings are best in person, in VR, in MURAL, and in Zoom — in that order. As a remote worker of several years, “in person” is a rarity for me — so I use VR to preserve the feeling of shared presence, of inhabiting a place with other people, especially when good spatial audio is used. Hand tracking enables meaningful gestures and animated expression, despite the avatars cartoonish appearance — somehow it all “just works”, your brain accepts that these people you know are embodied through these virtual puppets, and you get on with communicating instead of quibbling about missing realism (which will be a welcome improvement as it becomes available but doesn’t stop this from working right now).

      Author's shared feeling over working remotely

    8. What’s it like to actually use? In a word: comfortable. Given a few more words, I’d choose productive and effective. I can resize, reposition, add, or remove as much screen space as I need. I never have to squint or lean forward, crane my neck, hunt for an application window I just had open, or struggle to find a place for something. Many trade-offs and compromises from the past no longer apply — I put my apps in convenient locations I can see at a glance, and without getting in my way. I move myself and my gaze enough throughout the day that I’m not stiff at the end of it and experience less eye strain than I ever did with a bunch of desk-bound LCDs.

      Author's reflections on working in VR. It seems like he highly values the comfortability and space for multiple windows

    9. Since all I need is a keyboard, mouse, and a place to park myself, I’ve completely ditched the traditional desk. I can use a floor setup for part of the day and mix it up with a standing arrangement for the rest.

      Working in VR, you don't need the screens in front of your eyes

  15. Sep 2021
    1. It is also why it's implementation in firefox is completely useless, considering that windows/osx/most linux distros plan to add support for DoH/DoT/DNScrypt resolvers in the near future, so firefox doing it itself will provide no additional benefit.
    1. forced swim test (FST)

      In 1977, Porsolt et al. described a new method for assessing the effectiveness of antidepressent treatments, in which mice are dropped into a cylinder of water with a diameter of 10 cm, height of 25 cm, and water height of 6 cm. Porsolt et al. had observed that most mice are able to find the exit within 10 minutes, but some display a "state of despair", where they believe there is no escape from the situation, and resort to simply floating, only making movements that are needed to keep their head above the water. Porsolt et al. used this method to test a large range of antidepressants by injecting the mice intraperitoneally 1 hour before the forced swim test. In Porsolt et al.'s results, three drugs known to be therapeutic in depression (iprindole, mianserin, and viloxazine) resulted in a reduction in immobility of the mice (32).

    2. elevated plus maze (EPM)

      The elevated plus maze has been widely used to assay the anti-anxiety effects of certain drugs on rodents. The EPM is comprised of four arms that are oriented in an "X"; two of the arms are open/without walls and two are enclosed by walls. The rat would be placed at the junction of those four arms, with a starting position that has them face an open arm. During the course of five minutes, a video-tracking system as well as the observer will record the number of entries and duration the rodent spends in each arm. An increase in open arm activity (duration or entries) is viewed as anti-anxiety behavior (31).

    3. We hypothesized that levels of CRF in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) would decrease as a result of increased inhibition resulting from exposure to the short-day photoperiod that leads to coexpression of D2R with SST2/4R

      Since D2R and SST2/4R are linked to inhibitory effects, there increased coexpression in CRF neurons might inhibit CRF production.

    4. consistent with increased SST transcripts in PeVN neurons after exposure to stressors

      Previous work establishes that somatostatin signaling is activated by different stressors, and describes somatostatin as having anti-stress effects by blunting endocrine, autonomic, behavioral, and visceral gastrointestinal motor responses (24). Nocturnal animals function optimally in dark conditions; thus, an increase in day exposure would be considered a stressor for them. Somatostatin is, therefore, expected to be elevated in the long day exposure condition.

    5. reserve pool of cells

      In a review article on reserve pool neuron transmitter respecification, Dulcis et al. provide a helpful analogy for understanding reserve pools. In this analogy, the role of reserve pools is compared to having two jobs, and following certain physiological stimuli, one of those jobs is relinquished. Dulcis et al. defines reserve pool neurons as "cells that share inputs and outputs with adjacent core pools of neurons but express different neurotransmitters." In one situation, the neurons from both pools could be expressing the same transmitters, but the core neurons also express a secondary transmitter; following the change in circuit activity, the neurons of the reserve pool will stop expressing the transmitter that it has in common with the core pool of neurons. In an alternative scenario, these two pools of neurons could be expressing different neurotransmitters, and the change in circuit activity results in the neurons of the reserve pool acquiring the expression of the transmitter that is already expressed by the core neurons (23).

    6. To determine whether these reciprocal changes result from adult neurogenesis

      A study elucidating the counter-regulatory mechanisms used to maintain energy balance in response to environmental or physiological stressors revealed that neurons important for energy homeostasis can be regenerated in adult feeding centers (a region of the hypothalamus). The results of Kokoeva et al. indicate that de novo neurogenesis might serve as a compensatory mechanism to regulate energy balance in the presence of environmental or physiological insults (22). Based on previous work, the researchers have decided to examine whether the inverse relationship they have found between somatostatin and dopamine numbers in the three photoperiods is due to neurons forming or from the neuron switching to produce more SST and less dopamine, or vice versa.

    7. To assess the functional status of TH-IR neurons, we examined uptake and release of fluorescent false neurotransmitter 511 (FFN511)

      During synaptic vesicle fusion, the nervous system relies on neurotransmitters to transmit signals between neurons. Fluorescent false neurotransmitters have previously been used as substrates for VMAT2, and have served as probes for the imaging of dopamine release in the striatum (17).

    8. Alterations in photoperiod, circadian rhythm, and light exposure can each cause anxiogenic and depressive behavior in diurnal adult mammals

      In 2009, Ashkenazy et al. performed experiments on Sand rats, diurnal animals, and showed that shortening their exposure to daylight resulted in anxious and depressed behaviors (11). In 2006, there was a study conducted at four Canada centers to compare the effectiveness of light therapy versus the antidepressant fluoxetine for patients with winter seasonal depression. The study suggested that exposure to placebo light 30 minutes/day had similar efficacy to the administration of fluoxetine (12). Since previous work had shown that for diurnal animals, shorter photoperiods can be anxiety or depression inducing (11), and longer light exposure can have anti-depression effects (12), the researchers have proceeded to hypothesize that longer photoperiods will have the opposite effect on nocturnal adult mammals.

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ7CyM1Zrqc

      An interesting experiment to change one's schedule this way.

      I feel like I've seen a working schedule infographic of famous writers, artists, etc. and their sample work schedules before. This could certainly fit into that.

      One thing is certain thought, that the time of waking up is probably more a function of the individual person. How you spend your time is another consideration.

      “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.” ― Picasso

      “Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways. I bring mine to bear on one thing only: my paintings, and everything else is sacrificed to it...myself included.” ― Picasso

      Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. —Picasso

      see also: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/03/07/child-art/

    1. committing ourselves to difficult and uncomfortable work to make change

      One of the changes I've been trying to make is to listen more and talk less — which is hard for a blabbermouth like me. Rather than have my voice continue to take up the great space it so often does, I instead try to focus on how I can hear and amplify other voices — especially voices so often marginalized by those like mine.

      For example: Rather than weigh in on a tweet that resonates with me, I simply retweet it, hopefully spreading its message and letting it speak for itself, making its own connections.

      What "difficult and uncomfortable work" have you been taking on?

    1. Building upon Sweeney and Rhinesmith’s approach, and bringing the conceptualizations of care [14,33,34], I propose the following framework:I define social practices as the acts of care performed by individuals and afforded by CTCs in order to promote self and community needs;Based on this study’s ethnography, I categorize social practices into three groups:Care work: the invisible work performed by the infomediaries, or any CTC worker, as described by Sweeney and Rhinesmith;Peer-to-peer care: individuals (CTC users) collaborating with each other so they can inform, take decisions, and strive towards their individual needs; andCommunity care: individuals (CTC users and infomediaries) acting collaboratively or individually in order to promote community wellbeing.It is important to emphasize that social practices also include other social acts that are not necessarily “care”, but given the interactions observed in the CTCs in the favelas, I chose an explicit care-focused lens as the basis of this framework in order to breakdown the social practices in a way that could help make a case for the importance of the CTCs beyond their ICT-focused roles.
    1. The phenomenon of work for its own sake is familiar enough to all of us, when the timing is controlled by the worker himself, when "work" is not defined as referring alone to activity imposed from without. Intellectual work may take the form of trying to understand what Robert Browning was trying to say (if anything), to discover what it is in Dali's paintings that can interest others, or to predict the out- [p. 247] come of a paperback mystery. We systematically underestimate the human need of intellectual activity, in one form or another, when we overlook the intellectual component in art and in games. Similarly with riddles, puzzles, and the puzzle-like games of strategy such as bridge, chess, and go; the frequency with which man has devised such problems for his own solution is a most significant fact concerning human motivation. It is, however, not necessarily a fact that supports my earlier view, outlined above. It is hard to get these broader aspects of human behavior under laboratory study, and when we do we may expect to have our ideas about them significantly modified. For my views on the problem, this is what has happened with the experiment of Bexton, Heron, and Scott (5). Their work is a long step toward dealing with the realities of motivation in the well-fed, physically comfortable, adult human being, and its results raise a serious difficulty for my own theory. Their subjects were paid handsomely to do nothing, see nothing, hear or touch very little, for 24 hours a day. Primary needs were met, on the whole, very well. The subjects suffered no pain, and were fed on request. It is true that they could not copulate, but at the risk of impugning the virility of Canadian college students I point out that most of them would not have been copulating anyway and were quite used to such long stretches of three or four days without primary sexual satisfaction. The secondary reward, on the other hand, was high: $20 a day plus room and board is more than $7000 a year, far more than a student could earn by other means. The subjects then should be highly motivated to continue the experiment, cheerful and happy to be allowed to contribute to scientific knowledge so painlessly and profitably. In fact, the subject was well motivated for perhaps four to eight hours, and then became increasingly unhappy. He developed a need for stimulation of almost any kind. In the first preliminary exploration, for example, he was allowed to listen to recorded material on request. Some subjects were given a talk for 6-year-old children on the dangers of alcohol. This might be requested, by a grown-up male college student, 15 to 20 times in a 30-hour period. Others were offered, and asked for repeatedly, a recording of an old stock-market report. The subjects looked forward to being tested, but paradoxically tended to find the tests fatiguing when they did arrive. It is hardly necessary to say that the whole situation was rather hard to take, and one subject, in spite of not being in a special state of primary drive arousal in the experiment but in real need of money outside it, gave up the secondary reward of $20 a day to take up a job at hard labor paying $7 or $8 a day.

      Seems that the author is saying that as long as we are choosing to work, we will pick that over other things.

      An experiment that was done by Bexton, Heron, and Scott where they paid college students (around 20$) to do nothing, showed that at first those students were content for a period of time, but that the longer they did nothing the less happy they became. Then they would start asking for some sort of stimulation (music, talking to others etc.). These students found this very fatiguing, and some actually left the experiment giving up the 20$ a day! I think this shows that we as humans need interaction of some sort, we need some sort of stimulation to keep our brains active and happy, give it something to focus on.

    2. It was in this conceptual frame that the behavioral picture seemed to negate the notion of drive, as a separate energizer of behavior. A pedagogical experiment reported earlier (18) had been very impressive in its indication that the human liking for work is not a rare phenomenon, but general. All of the 600-odd pupils in a city school, ranging from 6 to 15 years of age, were suddenly informed that they need do no work whatever unless they wanted to, that the punishment for being noisy and interrupting others' work was to be sent to the playground to play, and that the reward for being good was to be allowed to do more work. In these circumstances, all of the pupils discovered within a day or two that, within limits, they preferred work to no work (and incidentally learned more arithmetic and so forth than in previous years).

      Seems crazy that children would pick work over no work, however in this we can see that behavior negates the notion of drive (as stated in the paragraph) but seems to act separate. The experiment seems to show that people actually like work over no work!

  16. Aug 2021
    1. There are two ways for someone to be in this quadrant. The unhealthy way, as a people pleaser, with associated resentment and chaos. In a healthy way, everything feels very clear. It’s easy to fit feedback into their mental model, and adjustments feel natural and build on what they are currently working on. This comes from having a good idea themselves about what is happening and how they think they can improve.

      good point on the people-pleaser mindset, also worth considering with ADHD/ASD employees - try and foster more curiosity than chaos

    1. Pham, Q. T., Le, X. T. T., Phan, T. C., Nguyen, Q. N., Ta, N. K. T., Nguyen, A. N., Nguyen, T. T., Nguyen, Q. T., Le, H. T., Luong, A. M., Koh, D., Hoang, M. T., Pham, H. Q., Vu, L. G., Nguyen, T. H., Tran, B. X., Latkin, C. A., Ho, C. S. H., & Ho, R. C. M. (2021). Impacts of COVID-19 on the Life and Work of Healthcare Workers During the Nationwide Partial Lockdown in Vietnam. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 563193. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.563193

    1. Work From Home Trends: Future of Remote Working in Post Covid-19 WorldDmitry ChekalinChief Executive OfficerTrendsHomeBlogTechnologyWork From Home Trends: Future of Remote Working in Post Covid-19 WorldFeb 10, 202111 min readGlobal lockdown due to Covid-19 made companies extensively shift to working from home. Apparently, telecommuting integration turns out to be deeper than we all expected. It is clear now that online work from home is going to be the “new normal” in 2021 and beyond. As such, to stay on track, you need to keep your eye on upcoming changes. In this article, we collected the main remote work trends to help you better adapt to the post-pandemic era. Here, you will also learn the key reasons why remote working is the future.

      Global lockdown due to Covid-19 made companies extensively shift to working from home. Apparently, telecommuting integration turns out to be deeper than we all expected.

      It is clear now that online work from home is going to be the “new normal” in 2021 and beyond. As such, to stay on track, you need to keep your eye on upcoming changes.

      In this article, we collected the main remote work trends to help you better adapt to the post-pandemic era. Here, you will also learn the key reasons why remote working is the future.

    1. we first thought about starting a reading group, as many other institutions and departments have done. But we wanted to make the barrier to joining the conversation as low as possible

      This is an interesting point. Faculty members take reading assignments seriously; some folks will skip events rather than show up unprepared. Starting with a facilitator's presentation is an interesting way over that barrier.

  17. Jul 2021
    1. https://theamericanscholar.org/blue-collar-brilliance/

      Acknowledging the work and art that blue collar workers do is an important thing.

    2. When we devalue the full range of everyday cognition, we offer limited educational opportunities and fail to make fresh and meaningful instructional connections among disparate kinds of skill and knowledge. If we think that whole categories of people—identified by class or occupation—are not that bright, then we reinforce social separations and cripple our ability to talk across cultural divides.
    3. If we believe everyday work to be mindless, then that will affect the work we create in the future.
    1. How should thinkers respond to monstrous lies? Should we mostly ignore the critics as Matsuda has, as I have? Because restating facts over and over again gets old. Reciting your own work over and over again to critics who either haven’t read what they are criticizing or are purposefully distorting it gets old. And talking with people who have created a monologue with two points of view, theirs and what they impute to you, gets old.

      Too many Republicans just aren't doing the work. They're spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt in order to attempt to win their arguments. They're going to be painfully disappointed should they "win".

    1. ll these tools help with organizing and analyzing and thus facilitate the real work of the humanist, which, as noted, is to interpret the evidence of human lives, thoughts and actions.

      This definition of the work of the humanist is interesting to me. The question it creates for me is how the tools themselves dictate or influence the humanists' 'interpretation of human lives, thoughts and actions'? There are so many digital tools and and platforms that allow for expression of ideas but inherently must limit this expression based on their design. As well the tools the humanist chooses are also an expression of their personal bias potentially affecting what they communicate to the reader/viewer.

    1. 1. It’s not about physical vs. digital, but synchronous vs asynchronousIn L&D teams’ minds, the big split used to be between training that happened in-person and training that happened online. 

      In general, being able to adapt to asynchronous styles of working and learning will be important

  18. Jun 2021
    1. How to work hard with clearly defined, externally imposed goals?

      1. learn not to lie to yourself (i.e. avoid the truth) (e.g. procrastinate is a form of refusing to acknowledge the deadline)
      2. not to get distracted
      3. not to give up when things go wrong
    1. More points were awarded to candidates with master’s degrees and more years of experience in similar fields. While this approach seemed to provide a neutral method for evaluating candidates based on qualifications, it soon became apparent that the process, with its reliance on education and experience to the exclusion of other important qualities, was deeply flawed and created barriers to hiring talented, diverse candidates

      Historical inequity is fueled by historical practices. "The way we've always done it" can feel perfectly innocuous while at the same time actually be massively harmful. We know things aren't right, inquiry into what is wrong is our path to a more just world.

    1. I’d still argue that offices can and do produce spontaneous, productive encounters.

      But so does any other form of collaboration. Most of the internet is run by code that was written by people communicating over email and IRC. There was no "open source office" that these people collaborated in.

    1. The eight-hour working day is a relatively new concept, widely accepted to have been cemented by Ford Motor Company a century ago as a means of keeping production going 24 hours a day without putting undue demands on individual members of staff.

      Yep - this wasn't made to help people improve work/life balance, but was made to split the 24hr day into three 8hr shifts.

    1. A Harvard Business Review survey found that 62 percent of high-earning individuals work over 50 hours a week, more than a third work over 60 hours a week, and one in 10 work over 80 hours a week. According to Markovits, elites today work an average of 12 more hours per week than middle-class workers (the equivalent of 1.5 additional workdays).

      This may be the case for high-earners, but where do these people sit with respect to the higher elite or "leisure class"?

      Are these hard working high-earners a new class of people that has emerged that aren't the previous elite of the mid-1900s?

      What effect does the rise of finacialization (versus manufacturing or service sectors) since the 1970's have on this shift? Did these high-earners arise out of a hole in the market to service the elites on the highest rung up to make their wealth grow faster?

      There seems to be a hole in this argument with respect to the prior quote:

      Fifty, 60, 70 years ago, you could tell how poor somebody was by how hard they worked. Today, that relationship has been completely reversed. Elites work for a living. They work harder than they used to. They work harder in terms of brute hours than the middle class on average, and they get most of their income by working.

    1. Rather than write new tooling we decided to take advantage of tooling we had in place for our unit tests. Our unit tests already used FactoryBot, a test data generation library, for building up test datasets for a variety of test scenarios. Plus, we had already built up a nice suite of helpers that we coud re-use. By using tools and libraries already a part of the backend technology’s ecosystem we were able to spend less time building additional tooling. We had less code to maintain because of this and more time to work on solving our customer’s pain points.
    1. These tests should be isolated as much as possible. For example, model methods that don’t do anything with the database shouldn’t need a DB record. Classes that don’t need database records should use stubs/doubles as much as possible.
    1. A common cause of a large number of created factories is factory cascades, which result when factories create and recreate associations.
    2. :js is particularly important to avoid. This must only be used if the feature test requires JavaScript reactivity in the browser. Using a headless browser is much slower than parsing the HTML response from the app.
    3. Use Factory Doctor to find cases where database persistence is not needed in a given test.
    1. Jed Kolko. (2021, June 4). Steady gains in high work-from-home (and better-paid) sectors, now just 1.6% below pre-pandemic employment. After initial slow rebound, now moving back to baseline. In low work-from-home sectors, jobs still way below pre-pandemic baseline. Https://t.co/6zC3RBfek9 [Tweet]. @JedKolko. https://twitter.com/JedKolko/status/1400797111067627520

    1. Butler then moves on toquote—not Cicero, as Wilson does—but Quintilian, who among classical authorities is the mostskeptical about the art of memory’s efficacy (see endnote 4). Echoing Quintilian’s complaint, Butlersays that it is probably more difficult to construct a memory palace than simply to remember thingsby rote (54–55).

      Construction is definitely work. The question about how much it may be should be addressed on a continuum of knowing or understanding particular concepts as well.

      Creating palaces for raw data de-novo, as in a memory championship, takes a lot of practice for speed and the lack of relationships. However in a learning setting, it may be better to read, grasp, and understand material and then create a palace to contain the simple raw facts which might then also bring back other bits of the knowledge and understanding.

      This might be a useful idea to explore further, gather some data, and experiment with.

  19. May 2021
    1. They have to ask you the dumb questions, either because their employer demands they do, or sometimes because their computer system doesn't let them get to the next part of the script unless they play ball.
    2. Another will employ smart people who apologise to you profusely for having to go through all the pointless steps, but that's just what they have to do!
    1. Being opportunistic can be useful, but having a big positive impact often requires doing something unusual and on developing strong skills, which can take 10+ years.

      Academics (and other knowledge workers) tend not to focus too much attention on getting better. Skills development happens in an ad hoc way rather than a structured and focused approach to improvement.

    2. career capital

      You must first generate this capital by becoming good at something rare and valuable. It is something that makes you hard to replace and is therefore the result of putting effort into developing skills that differentiate you from others.

      Newport, C. (2016). Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (1 edition). Grand Central Publishing.

    1. From an employers perspective, I believe there are many advantages:

      List of advantages for working 4 days per week (instead of 5)

    1. The research found that working 55 hours or more a week was associated with a 35% higher risk of stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from heart disease, compared with a working week of 35 to 40 hours.
    1. Talk Abstract:Your job title says "software engineer", but you seem to spend most of your time in meetings. You'd like to have time to code, but nobody else is onboarding the junior engineers, updating the roadmap, talking to the users, noticing the things that got dropped, asking questions on design documents, and making sure that everyone's going roughly in the same direction. If you stop doing those things, the team won't be as successful. But now someone's suggesting that you might be happier in a less technical role. If this describes you, congratulations: you're the glue. If it's not, have you thought about who is filling this role on your team?Every senior person in an organisation should be aware of the less glamorous - and often less-promotable - work that needs to happen to make a team successful. Managed deliberately, glue work demonstrates and builds strong technical leadership skills. Left unconscious, it can be career limiting. It can push people into less technical roles and even out of the industry.Let's talk about how to allocate glue work deliberately, frame it usefully and make sure that everyone is choosing a career path they actually want to be on.

      ooh, great examples of the types of things that goes into glue wrok

    1. Prof. Christina Pagel. (2021, April 15). THREAD on VACCINATION & EQUITY in ENGLAND: I know I’ve tweeted about this before, but now we can look at how gaps by deprivation and ethnicity change with age groups and what that might mean... TLDR: widening gaps but access and communication will be key I suspect 1/5 [Tweet]. @chrischirp. https://twitter.com/chrischirp/status/1382725119773134848