tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26697842384495247962024-03-21T11:51:43.483-04:00Tiempo LibreOpen thoughts on culture & technology.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger123125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2669784238449524796.post-11001339097120094602016-10-04T23:45:00.003-04:002016-10-10T00:34:25.994-04:00Hiding In Plain Fictional Sight<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Anita Raja / Elena Ferrante <a href="http://nyti.ms/2d1eqh1" target="_blank"><span style="color: #0b5394;">should have the right</span></a> to create any sort of characters for her novels; should she also have the right to create any sort of story for her upbringing and background?<br />
There are many ways in which artists can remain anonymous and protect their privacy. Hiding one's name and identity is one of them. Writers, musicians and painters over the centuries have adopted pseudonyms, avoided public appearances, went into exile, to protect their art and, more often than not, their life from censorship, death and torture. Falsifying one's cultural and socio-economic background is another way of ensuring one's anonymity.<br />
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Or is it? Not if you ask Anita Raja after being "outed" a few days ago as being not just the novelist writing under the pseudonym "Elena Ferrante", but also as a privileged middle-class professional claiming to have grown up in the working-class Italian neighborhoods that she'd chosen as the setting for her novels. In her autobiography Anita Raja talked about growing up poor in Naples with a seamstress mother, when in fact, she grew up in a middle-class household in Rome with a magistrate/judge father.<br />
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Anita Raja could have chosen to just write and publish under a pseudonym. Did she really need to also fabricate a cultural and socioeconomic identity for herself in order to remain anonymous? Was it her life that was threatened by her real identity, or just her lifestyle?<br />
Much commentary that I've read online centers on the question of cultural appropriation, ie. whether artists should write/compose/paint characters from cultures different than their own. <a href="http://nyti.ms/2d1eqh1">http://nyti.ms/2d1eqh1</a><br />
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That's not the issue in Anita Raja's case though. Her right to create characters culturally different from herself (ie her right to cultural appropriation) has nothing to do with the way she chose to protect her anonymity. She didn't just strive to hide her real name and background, she consistently promoted a false story of a working class upbringing that made her similar to her novels' characters. To me, that doesn't sound like an anonymity/privacy protection strategy, but rather, like a publicity story, promoted over decades to maintain the author's professional success.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2669784238449524796.post-30817568759808860982016-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:002016-08-22T01:07:02.807-04:00UX Without Borders<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A borderless yet seamless UX field. Is that a dream, or "is it something worse"? Actually, it's reality, happening right now, among and by those who are concerned less with labeling themselves and others ("designer", "quant. geek", "ethnographer", "design integrator"), and more with pushing against the artificial borders, barriers, and preconceptions in UX that we all have been complicit in preserving even as the field keeps out-growing them and out-distancing them.<br />
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<a href="http://www.frankchimero.com/writing/designing-in-the-borderlands/" target="_blank">F. Chimero</a> says it better:<br />
For a long time, I perceived my practice’s sprawl as a defect—evidence of an itchy mind or a fear of commitment—but I am starting to learn that a disadvantage can turn into an advantage with a change of venue. The ability to cross borders is an asset....These borderlands are the best place for a designer like me, and maybe like you, because the borderlands are where things connect. If you’re in the borderlands, your different tongues, your scattered thoughts, your lack of identification with a group, and all the things that used to be thought of as drawbacks in a specialist enclave become the hardened armor of a shrewd generalist in the borderlands.<br />
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“<a href="http://www.frankchimero.com/writing/designing-in-the-borderlands/" target="_blank">Designing in the Borderlands</a>”, by Frank Chimero, is about design, but the ideas behind it applies to all UX, or anything that happens at the "seams" of disciplines, particularly research! Much like the concept of disciplinary silos, the practice of design is full of artificial and unproductive barriers that designers themselves have erected (with the silent or vocal support of non-designers). The author insists (correctly, I think) that the most inspiring, let alone productive, design happens in the borderlands, at the seams, where these different media and disciplines (dis)connect. That could be the borders between physical and digital media, text vs images, responsive vs. non-responsive design, or larger and more unproductive borders, such as those between design & UI, or UX vs UI, and the list goes on, and on.<br />
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Particularly within UX research, I keep encountering such artificial borders and barriers in people's thinking (both insiders and outsiders to UX), such as quant vs qual research: stupidest interview Q: "are you" an [stats person, ethnographer, X]? The question isn't whether somebody "is" an X type of researcher, but whether they have the skills to use a method and ability to learn from their practice of each method. Nobody should have a a life-long badge of "being" anything, let alone an ethnographer, which is an evolving practice in UX.<br />
So, next time you interview (me or anybody who can think over and above such silly barriers), ask about T-shaped experiences, try and spend an extra minute to figure out whether I can learn fast and think forward vs. what I "am"or have been by training or some other static designation. UX is an evolving field, and to innovate you need to know how to think across, above and over disciplines and silly designations, so your questions should be innovative and push against borders set up by hiring managers and academic courses.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2669784238449524796.post-10250950063489300872016-02-21T17:30:00.000-05:002016-06-20T08:34:13.451-04:00Leaning and Pivoting in UX Research<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
When a new technology first appears, there’s a tendency to see it as a replacement for the previous generation of that tech (horse-less carriages! wireless phones! driverless cars!). Len Epp at TechCrunch, writes about moving past the driver-less car concept and see the possibilities created by autonomous vehicles: “To pick just one example, companies like Walmart will almost certainly let their robot cars drive you to and from their stores for free, as will their competitors.”<br />
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What's the project management takeaway? Innovative product development is done in small cross-functional teams; the overarching goal is to create value (deliver outcomes rather than features), UX researchers test hypotheses and pivot rather than chase statistical significance. Enter Lean UX.<br />
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Lean UX means researching "just enough" to gain confidence in the design direction and manage the ROI. It also means leveraging the context that the participant provides; the Researcher needs to listen to the information the participant is providing, and pivot the conversation as necessary, in order to get the max value from each participant. Nobody is after statistical significance (p values, effect sizes... there's nothing Lean about them), and nobody is stuck with ridiculously rigid protocols much less the users.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2669784238449524796.post-31637278692348682272016-01-29T22:30:00.000-05:002016-06-20T08:58:15.829-04:00"What If" is the Most Beautiful Question<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Warren Berger in "A More Beautiful Question" discusses the why and how of asking questions, which happens to be my number one favorite topic, across contexts and roles I've been in, both personal and professional. Questioning is an inherent skill, according to W. Berger, and we’re quite adept at it during childhood. You can disagree with that (I'm not totally convinced that that's "inherent" or inevitable) but that's not the point. The point is, as W. Berger notes, that children haven’t developed a solid “mental model” of the world, so they [can] question everything. As children grow up and go through standardized education, they begin to suppress their curiosity, however inherent and inevitable it might have been.<br />
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What's really frustrating, and the point of relevant here, is that in certain cultures (US/American being the first on that list), it’s frowned upon to ask too many questions, socially, and also in the workplace. And paradoxically enough, we’re often embarrassed when we don’t have immediate answers. But Berger claims the ability to admit you don’t have all the answers, but can ask better questions, is a superior skill. Actually, he's not a alone in this, and that skill of admitting to uncertainty and open-ended curiosity is hardly original but, unfortunately, rare in the workplace and in multiple non-professional socio-cultural contexts.<br />
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Berger identifies three types of questions that lead to breakthroughs: why, how, what if? The first two are commonsense and often inevitable, but the 3rd one is less often entertained in professional contexts. Asking "what if" and more crucially, encouraging whoever you supervise or manage to ask "what if" questions is really where innovation begins. "What if" is about mashing up ideas, go against common logic, or add/remove factors that make the challenge more interesting. </div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2669784238449524796.post-42399707156075850312015-12-04T06:58:00.000-05:002016-06-22T22:50:29.692-04:00How far/close can prototypes go to replace documentation?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="http://uxmag.com/articles/how-prototyping-is-replacing-documentation" target="_blank">A UX-mag article</a> raises the issue of whether prototypes can replace documentation as client deliverables, and concludes that that's hardly a choice any more as prototype deliverables are increasingly popular, practical, agile, and inevitable. But the real question is when, not whether, prototypes can be used in place of user documentation. That's a question about high/low fidelity, and the relative value of different kinds of prototypes, with paper sketches at one end of the fidelity "spectrum" and detailed documentation at the other.<br />
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Pencil -paper sketches are great for initial, investigatory wireframes assuming that in early design stages, the emphasis is not so much on the proposal but on the conversations the proposal generates among the development team and the client. Fundamental elements of design such as function, behavior and form can be represented with sketches, but software captures them in an explicit way, and that makes software efficient at an engineering level, but cumbersome for design conversations. Unlike sketches, digital prototypes can show design relationships to other elements beneath the visual layer e.g. a navigation link on a global/master layer. Axure can be used to create both prototypes and documentation, and even has some built-in collaboration capability.<br />
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Prototypes will always be faster, leaner, more agile than any sort of documentation. But prototyping, much like designing and documenting (and just plain working), can't be separated from its project management. Nobody likes that (or do they?), and everybody knows that nothing can replace face to face dialogue among designers, developers and clients. From a project management perspective, the prototype vs. documentation issue is an issue of perceived sunk costs. How much, or rather, how little fidelity can be efficiently, not just effectively, invested ("sunk" in PM terms) into the client deliverables?<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2669784238449524796.post-87473924718205334852015-08-11T23:09:00.000-04:002016-06-22T23:11:12.642-04:00Participant Recruiting Tips for UX Studies<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
As UX research expands outside of traditional computing fields and as we seek to design for users who are not like us, recruiting participants can become a really time-consuming and challenging process. A few tips and techniques I've used across quantitative and qualitative studies:<br />
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- Even if you don’t think that your potential participants have a relevant formal organization, try searching for meetup groups that match your target user base. This is best for local recruiting, as there's groups about just about everything, and they're welcoming members with new perspectives and backgrounds. Meetup group organizers will be particularly happy to have somebody who is interested in their issue join their group,as a member or even a speaker, so there's many opportunities to make a connection.<br />
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- Snowball Sampling: ask a participant to recommend other possible participants. A tip here is to asking asking the snowball question twice: once when I follow up with the participant reminding about our scheduled meeting and again after the study is complete. This gives them a chance to think about it a little bit.<br />
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- If a UX study can be done in one session and without special equipment (e.g., an interview), take advantage of the times when you are travelling. Just through posts or meetup groups or connections to friends, I usually get an additional 2 or 3 participants when I visit another state. For some reason, just because I’m there for a limited time, people feel more excited about being in the study (“You came all the way to CA to talk to me?”).<br />
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- Ask widely in your social network to see if anybody can recommend a participant for a specific study. Facebook is actually quite good for this task, but I’ve also found that bringing it up with people face-to-face gets people to think about it harder. I like to do a lot of looking on my own first, so that I can say “I’m having a hard time finding participants. Here’s what I’ve done so far. Do you have any other ideas?”<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2669784238449524796.post-72626522757687061482015-05-05T21:17:00.000-04:002016-06-22T23:11:39.315-04:00Using YouTube: Is There A Generational Gap?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15.4545px; line-height: 25.1136px;">Studies <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/topics/online-video/" target="_blank">of online video users</a> have identified age-related, or rather generational differences, in how adolescents vs. adults are using YouTube and other video apps. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15.4545px; line-height: 25.1136px;">In terms of content, adults were most likely to post videos of friends and family doing everyday things, videos of themselves or others doing funny things, videos of an event they attended, and videos of pets or animals. In a sense, they treat video as an archive to collect and keep memories of everyday life with their family, friends, and pets, humorous moments, and special events. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15.4545px; line-height: 25.1136px;">In contrast, adolescents most often posted videos that were intentionally staged, scripted, or choreographed videos, ie., "video selfies". Basically, children and teenagers are more likely to treat video as a stage to tell their stories and show their talents. Knowing this, we can design systems that support young users not in capturing and archiving, but in planning and performing and editing compelling narratives. A better approach would be to design tools to help them reflect on their online persona and better understand how their videos are viewed and shared by others.</span></span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2669784238449524796.post-49658540170944488612015-04-08T22:26:00.000-04:002016-06-22T22:31:01.867-04:00UX Has Changed Your Life<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Lots of people think about UX as something that just adds a thin veil of “prettiness” on top of existing apps and systems — something that you worry about once you have the tech working, if there’s time. But UX is (or should be) about conceiving and creating user experiences. UX can help you decide what you should actually build, not just how it should look. And that’s not just a veneer, it really changes what users do.<br />
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Some examples of great (and hugely successful) UX:<br />
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Interacting with Data: Dropbox was the original cloud-storage service that came with the "Public Folder" option, but GoogleDrive is servicing the same user needs: easily “cloudify” all sorts of programs such as Zotero libraries and Eclipse workspaces. Even though those two provide their own storage options, but it’s so much easier to just use one place/service.<br />
Mobile Banking: this is increasingly becoming a basic banking need. US banks have started offering mobile deposits, and mobile transfers, so that ATMs will (hopefully) one day become obsolete. PayPal was the leader in online money transfer, and with new services like Paypal Credit, is also driving the ATM-less banking trend.<br />
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Online Customized Food: If only more food services could be like Dominos. While taste-wise, their pizza is basically the same as that of other competitors, their ordering interface and easy customizing made users fall in love with Domino's. Plus, being able to to see the preparation process and interact with staff working on your pizza - it's just the experience of being able to think about my pizza-providers as real people can change customers' relationship to pizza.<br />
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What all of these sites and services have in common is that they’re not about cutting-edge technologies, and their UX isn't about the color of the buttons, or layout of the page, or anything else that can be A/B tested. They are about combining common tech capabilities and great user experiences.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2669784238449524796.post-9711825218478847192014-12-27T09:17:00.000-05:002016-06-26T09:17:31.241-04:00Whose data is easier to find?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The <a href="http://index.okfn.org/" target="_blank">Global Data Index</a> ranks countries based on the availability and accessibility of their data in areas such as government spending, election results, pollution levels, and transportation schedules, among others. The UK is at the top of the list, with a 96% score!<br />
Most interesting, and amazingly, the GDI website compiles country comparisons annually: http://index.okfn.org/.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2669784238449524796.post-27394092149380154302014-12-19T22:43:00.000-05:002016-06-22T22:51:44.010-04:00Predicting the Future in UX<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Paul Kincaid has written about how fiction, and its writers, tries to predict the future: “we began to feel that the present was changing too rapidly for us to keep up with … things are so different that there is no connection with the experiences and perceptions of our present.” So, even science fiction writers now find it difficult to consider what the future may look like. That made me think about how UX-ers (researchers, designers, developers) are also trying to predict the future, sort of.<br />
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When the task is to design something for “three years from now,” we look at how users currently approach a specific challenge, and design to do the same thing better, faster, stronger.That method doesn’t work as well for designing for ten years from now. Designing for ten years from now requires envisioning the infrastructure and complex ecosystem of other technologies that will (likely) be available in the future. Assuming that a nascent technology will be common place, UX researchers and designers need to envision the challenges and opportunities that they may face in that future environment. What would people do if anything could become a display? What would people do if they no longer had to worry about driving themselves from place to place? What would people do if they could instantly connect with anybody in the world? And what would be the best questions to ask, as UX-ers and as future users?</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2669784238449524796.post-67888420854684833172014-11-03T17:56:00.000-05:002016-06-20T07:19:33.878-04:00The Science of Art / The Art of Science<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Math and Literature. What's the connection? What can writers learn from math? Great literature and high math have more in common than they seem to. Their similarity centers on the creation of patterns, argues the author of the New Yorker article: "Why writers should learn math". </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/writers-should-learn-math.html#ixzz2BCP2TFjP" style="color: #003399; font-size: 14.999999046325684px; outline: 0px; text-decoration: none;">http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/writers-should-learn-math.html#ixzz2BCP2TFjP</a><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 15.833333015441895px; line-height: 24.999998092651367px;"><br /></span></span><br />
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Note that it's the creation, not the detection, of patterns that matters. Anybody with a sophisticated software can detect patterns in data, however you choose to define data. Likewise in creative writing, anybody with attention to detail can represent and reflect back to readers some slice of reality, theirs (easier), or that of others (harder, it seems). That's not what math and literature are about. Not really.</span><br />
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"<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14.999999046325684px;">In literature, that big picture means you have to extrapolate to people who are not yourself, which can be a risk as great as the potential reward"</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14.999999046325684px;"><br /></span>"<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14.999999046325684px;">Presently, we have become too enthralled by the notion of literature as Jackson Pollock action painting, the id flung with violence upon the canvas....</span><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14.999999046325684px;">The result can be a suffocating narcissism, a lack of interest in the kind of extrapolation and exploration that is necessary to both mathematics and literature".</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14.999999046325684px;"><br />On chess and literature: "Chess....too [like math]</span><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14.999999046325684px;"> requires great intelligence, but it resolves nothing of the human condition. The same distinction exists in fiction, between the diverting and the serious, the trivial and the universal. In both cases, too, formulas are but guideposts that fall away the higher you climb. In the end, you are left alone with your own variables, your own private equations".</span><span style="font-size: 14.999999046325684px;"><br /></span>I wonder if the reverse has ever been discussed as persuasively: do scientists also need literary skills (beyond the ability to appreciate literature: eg., creative writing). What are the benefits of studying poetry, and even trying to write poetry, for scientists? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A decade before this article came out I was taking classes in a major business school. Everybody was obsessively searching for ways to be more creative, come up with new ideas, new technologies, innovative businesses, innovative research in business etc. Prescriptions by faculty abounded and still do: read X on creativity, read Y on creative destruction, figure out how to creatively self-destruct your prior initiatives as a way of moving on to something even more creative. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Good efforts, but the creative process still eludes many. What nobody ever mentioned, let alone suggested, was study poetry, read literature. No MBA of a standard major business school in the US will probably hear such a thing in their program: "take a poetry class", much as they are encouraged to take acting classes to improve their presentation skills. As a literature major, I found that comical to say the least. Can you really expect people to become creative by reading <b>about</b> it, rather than practicing creativity? By reading standardized business books about "creative destruction" and HBS cases, class after class, semester after semester? Really? I kept thinking, if I were to recommend something, that would be to take a poetry class or workshop. But then again, that's why no business school would ever hire me to make such prescriptions. Definitely not the ones I have attended. Or I might be just wrong.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2669784238449524796.post-89598589492524559072014-08-10T07:40:00.000-04:002016-06-20T07:49:47.185-04:00Ladino Travelogue <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A film made for Spanish TV, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4FWyYYN2_M" target="_blank">“El Ultimo Sefardi”</a> (in Ladino, Spanish subtitles) is a documentary tracing the story of Sephardic Jews through the travels of a young man, Eliezer Papo, born in Sarajevo and now teaching Ladino at Ben Gurion University. Part travelogue, part documentary….even if you do not know Spanish, enjoy the music and the sights.Runs approximately 1.5 hours. Today Ladino is still used in a few communities in the US, Israel, South Africa, South America, those being the most common countries to which Sephardim migrated. It is a language of memory — words and phrases we remember hearing others using even in the context of other languages; sadly, it's nobody's native/first language any more.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2669784238449524796.post-90149622813939216602013-09-01T21:50:00.000-04:002016-06-22T21:51:17.100-04:00Loaded Terms in Socio-Technical Work <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The biggest problems in interdisciplinary work arise not when we don’t know the terms that other scientists are using, but when we use the same terms in different way. A recent <a href="http://www.sociotech.net/2013-digital-societies-and-social-technologies-dsst-summer-institute/" target="_blank">workshop on sociotechnical systems</a> (at Maryland's DSST Institute) targeted such challenges, and as we tired to make sense of them, we realized how common ground, in language and practice, is necessary (but not sufficient) for interdisciplinary teamwork.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Here are some examples:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Problem</b>: In Computer Science, this term often means “research challenge,” as in “I’m working on the problem of how to connect parents and children who live apart.” However, in some Social Science domains the word “problem” may be reserved for situations that are broken or non-normative. Using the word “problem” takes agency away from the people we am trying to support, instead positioning the designer as “the fixer.” Usually, this is not what people who build systems actually mean. This is a loaded term and, for better or worse, social scientists, educators and therapists have replaced it with “challenge.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Theory</b>: In Computer Science, theory is the study of abstract constructs like Algorithms and Data Structures and developed through mathematical proofs. In the Social Sciences, theories are heuristics used to make sense of empirical data, and may or may not need to have strong predictive power. There are many types of theories serving different functions (see Halverston’s “What Does CSCW Need to Do with Theories”)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Social Computing</b>: This is a new term, and the jury is still out on what it does and coul mean, both to designers and researchers ("social technologists"). Social computing at the intersection of social science and computational systems, but what is included or excluded? Some people at the workshop equated Social Computing with large-scale social network analysis (e.g., “we looked at 3 mill Tweets”) or Crowdsourcing (e.g., “we leveraged the crowd to do citizen science”), and broadly, mediated communication for supporting social relationships. Video chat, haptic connectedness devices, online support groups, depending on the research and design goals, can all be aspects Social Computing.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">At the workshop we mapped out the research space of DSST, focusing on how we fit into the research space of many different communities of researchers and practitioners. </span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2669784238449524796.post-10420801194519543152012-09-24T20:13:00.000-04:002016-06-20T07:21:28.792-04:00Power, Pollution and the Internet<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The NYTimes reports on a yearlong investigation into the IT industry's supposed "eco-friendliness". In one sentence: there's nothing "green" about IT companies. "Online companies typically run their facilities at maximum capacity around the clock, whatever the demand. As a result, data centers can waste 90 percent or more of the electricity they pull off the grid". The article notes that the information industry is<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , "times" , serif; font-size: 14.999999046325684px; line-height: 21.999998092651367px;"> "sharply at odds with its image of sleek efficiency and environmental friendliness". </span><br />
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html?ref=global-home">http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html?ref=global-home</a>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2669784238449524796.post-49313017307261795262012-09-05T17:12:00.002-04:002012-09-05T17:49:46.142-04:00Milgram's Obedience to Authority revisited<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Milgram's experiments have been criticised for their methods but no alternative explanations had been offered, until now. A new study recently published in <i>Psychological Science</i> suggests that social identification processes motivate individuals to abuse others in the way examined in Milgram's experiments.<br />
<a href="http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/social-identification-not-obedience-might-motivate-unspeakable-acts.html">http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/social-identification-not-obedience-might-motivate-unspeakable-acts.html</a><br />
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Identifying with the victim or the subjects in the experiment leads to seemingly blind following of orders. Milgram's "guards", it turns out, were not just following orders; the structure of the experiment, or the "situation", led them to identify with the experimenter which made it easier for them to administer shocks to the "prisoners" (experiment subjects).<br />
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There's two things at play here: a) social identification might explain why people follow orders but not necessarily why people commit atrocities. There are two steps from identification --> following orders --> committing crimes, atrocities, abuse. This study addressed the first step but not the second one. That means that in situations that are not structured similarly to Milgram's experiments, e.g. in situations without a clear, uncontested hierarchy of rule-givers and rule-followers, identification alone might or might not lead to abuse. It also means that this study has not disproved Milgram's explanation as obedience to authority still occurred except that its antecedent was social identification. To prove Milgram's explanation wrong one would need to show that abuses were committed even without obedience to authority.<br />
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Absent a rigid social hierarchy, rule-followers can: a) identify with the victim more readily since no status relations prevail that encourage identification with one's higher-ups (experimenters, bosses, etc), and b) challenge the rules or orders or try to change the game, the situation or the social framework itself and assume a role of whistle-blower, activist, aid to the victim. <br />
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The most interesting, and unintended, take-away from this study is what seems to emerge as a deadly recipe for social organization:<br />
rigid social hierarchy + identification with those in higher-status roles = unquestioning committing of abuse, ranging from corporate crimes to genocide.<br />
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A follow-up study of the social identification explanation can be done by asking why subjects in "strong" situations
that seemingly necessitate identifying with rule-givers choose instead
alternative targets of identification (e.g., identify with the victim
rather than the rule-giver). What makes people disidentify with
rule-givers? Does the situation have to be flexible/"weak" and the game
easily change-able? Do the rule-givers need to be given equal status as the rule followers to prevent blind obedience
to the rules? Does pre-existing identification with other targets interact with one's identification choices during the experiment? Studies on whistle-blowing have addressed some of these
questions, but the deeper one probes into the motives and structure of
this phenomenon the more variables seem to be at play.<br />
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It will be interesting to see where this line of research takes us as more studies examine the destructive effects of unquestioning social identification and rigid hierarchies. Notice how crimes ranging from the corporate (Enron, various ponzi schemes) to the social (child abuse at Penn State and the Catholic Church) to the genocidal (murders by Nazi Germany) were committed and enabled in the context of rigid social hierarchies, while status concerns were the prevailing norms that helped sustain and expand the crimes. Perhaps minimizing uncritical identification with higher-ups, or better yet, eradicating the concept of higher-ups, along with creating what W.Michel called "weak situations" that help undermine rigid hierarchies can prevent such crimes in the future.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2669784238449524796.post-36822840497852113692012-08-28T21:48:00.003-04:002012-09-01T15:55:52.126-04:00Tracing the Origins of Indo-European Languages<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yet another study passing its data-crunching off as a great discovery.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/08/24/science/0824-origins.html?ref=science">http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/08/24/science/0824-origins.html?ref=science</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Lol, I didn't know that Greek is supposedly closer to, say, Nepali than it is to Russian...</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I guess I don't know how to read graphs, otherwise I should be able to decipher Nepali better than Russian. Albanian is supposedly older than Sanskrit-based languages, what nonsense! </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Did the authors bother to do any sort of triangulation study or historical validation?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The NYTimes article notes that the data-crunching was based on cognates only, and that morphology should be taken into account too. That is consistent with Linguistics 101: roots matter; if you're trying to compare and contrast languages or assess their evolution, you need to look at roots and morphemes (i.e. etymology & morphology).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Here is the language-development tree: </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://goo.gl/I3hNj">http://goo.gl/I3hNj</a></span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2669784238449524796.post-10790923881285279472012-08-27T12:36:00.002-04:002012-09-01T15:56:55.736-04:00Why study literature?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 22px;">I'm not referring to mainstream hits, "popular" lit, or anything marketing itself as "lit" of any sort. The question was raised in a brief Q&A posted in the New York Times.</span><br />
<span style="line-height: 22px;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/books/review/norton-anthology-of-english-literature-turns-50.html?ref=review"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/books/review/norton-anthology-of-english-literature-turns-50.html?ref=review</span></a><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My response would be: to gain insights into how other individuals, cultures, and ultimately yourself, think. If you want to find out how you think, study literature. Psychology courses are too limited in their focus and too formulaic for that. They only take you so far. I've learned much more about human behavior from undergrad-level literature courses than from graduate-level seminars in social psychology (and countless JPSP articles).</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 22px;">Stephen Greenblatt tells it better: "Literature is the most astonishing technological means that humans have created, and now practiced for thousands of years, to capture experience. For me the thrill of literature involves entering into the life worlds of others. I’m from a particular, constricted place in time, and I suddenly am part of a huge world — other times, other places, other inner lives that I otherwise would have no access to."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 22px;">He also notes an increasing demand among students for survey-type literature courses. The humanities might be dying, their degrees might mean little in the marketplace, but their content continues to be relevant to those seeking an education alongside marketable skills.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2669784238449524796.post-45842591703251538102012-07-13T17:35:00.000-04:002012-07-14T20:29:17.617-04:00How far should a University go to protect its reputation?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWtJo4kCxNkb8Vk_1MqA5CygY76PdUFIRlZ7rG2tVKOPKQAgCp82T4UhJ1C8g14lcmCVIfhAO8Jmn08C1PXSuUB5mwXeuMqPPSr7PT-NwUJhUWHkVm0H70brODuysFtyYUcXrs4U1KZiQr/s1600/blue-ribbon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWtJo4kCxNkb8Vk_1MqA5CygY76PdUFIRlZ7rG2tVKOPKQAgCp82T4UhJ1C8g14lcmCVIfhAO8Jmn08C1PXSuUB5mwXeuMqPPSr7PT-NwUJhUWHkVm0H70brODuysFtyYUcXrs4U1KZiQr/s200/blue-ribbon.jpg" width="100" /></a>“How many know or revere the name of Paul Berg? He's the sole Nobel Prize winner affiliated with Penn State, a graduate who shared in the 1980 Chemistry award for his work on recombinant DNA technology. Demands by alumni for him to be honored with a statue, or to name the main library after him instead of Paterno, are notable by their absence”.<br />
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Those are the words of Jim McLennan, a blogger and sports fan whom I never met, just happened to read about while sifting through news reports and commentary re the Penn State “Scandal” but would like to quote here and give him credit for making me think about this. For full reference, here is the link to his post: <a href="http://www.azsnakepit.com/2012/7/13/1028686/penn-state-college-sports-culture-reform-" target="_blank">http://www.azsnakepit.com/2012/7/13/1028686/penn-state-college-sports-culture-reform-</a><br />
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Consider the above comment in conjunction with the following testimony:<br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">"Janitor B explained to the Special Investigative Counsel that reporting the incident "would have been like going against the President of the United States in my eyes." "I know Paterno has so much power, if he wanted to get rid of someone, I would have been gone." He explained "football runs this University," and said the University would have closed rank to protect the football program at all costs."</span><br />
<em>-- Testimony from the Freeh Report</em><br />
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It’s telling that everybody refers to this as the Penn State “Scandal”, rather than, say, the Penn State Crimes, or Crimes Against Children. Even crimes with small c would have been more decent and accurate description of their actions. “Scandal” leaves open the possibility of exoneration, of not holding the institution itself responsible for its crimes but isolated individuals. Individuals acting in concert, but still, individuals. The University somehow finding itself “in a scandal” vs. Enabling child abuse for 14 years. Think about how your peception of the events changes when you pronounce these phrases aloud to yourself. That’s the key to what happened and also the key to repairing those crimes.<br />
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So far public responses have placed the blame primarily on individual perpetrators, starting with the coach, to the University President, and as of now reaching the Board and the University as an institution that failed to heed and report criminal actions. And rightly so, but that’s only the beginning, the tip of the iceberg. You can condemn and consign to Hell (as you understand it) and prison each one of those individuals, but that won’t do justice to their victims who had to live through hell on earth. The closest we can get to doing justice to them would be to ensure that such abuses are never repeated. And that is not just making them technically impossible on university grounds. Restricting access to locker rooms and increasing oversight and reporting on coaches and sports teams is a patch, a band-aid on a severely damaged body. Abuses of this sort can only be prevented by making them culturally impossible. I would have liked to, and almost did, write “unthinkable” but sadly that’s not realistic. The coach’s behavior alone shows that they are very well thinkable, at least by individual minds; mentally ill minds, but nevertheless human minds. History and the 20th century itself show that horrific crimes, from abuse to genocide are indeed thinkable. Which is why the Paterno’s family statement that he couldn’t have possibly ignored or covered up such abuses because that sort of thing is too horrible and therefore unthinkable at least by him and therefore unlikely to have happened means nothing to me. Nothing is unthinkable.<br />
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To make child abuse on university grounds culturally impossible, Penn State’s culture of football reverence, the school’s dependence on BigSports money, and the culture of discouraging dissent and disagreement among its top officials down to the janitors must change. As the Freeh report notes, Paterno was not the only one aware of the abuses. Janitors who were interviewed reported that they witnessed part of those abuses but were afraid to speak up. A graduate student who did speak up was effectively ignored. That shows not only a criminal lack of concern at the top but also at the institutional level. Institutions, organizations, any kind of group that discourages dissent and disagreement, that cultivates conformity and consent is prone to suffer such crimes whether directly or indirectly by discouraging whistle-blowing and just plain speaking up. The last decade alone has provided us plenty of examples where lack of dissent and a culture of conformity led to institutionally condoned criminal acts: Enron and the Catholic Church being the most prominent ones. Penn State needs to restructure not just its Board of Trustees and locker rooms. Its culture needs a restructuring as well.<br />
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Asking “how could Paterno not have done anything” only scratches the surface. That will prompt the public to re-examine his legacy and university officials to re-evaluate the school’s policies and procedures. What it will not do is make everybody at Penn State re-examine the institution’s culture. Asking “why didn’t witnesses to the crimes speak up”, “why did nobody believe the graduate student who did speak up” will hopefully result to further re-evaluation and policies and educational initiatives that explicitly encourage and reward whistle-blowing (e.g., “if you see something, tell somebody!”, “silence=crime”). Which is not as simple as it sounds and takes effort and time. Will that be enough? <br />
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I don’t think so. Encouraging reporting and rewarding whistle-blowing are tactical measures, not strategies that could, in the long, term overhaul the institutional culture. They will increase crime-reporting, and prevent similar abuses from taking place on university grounds, but will not prevent them from happening altogether in the first place. From a long term perspective they are half-measures. And they do not do justice to the victims. I hope to be proven wrong here. I’d like to hear one of the victims say that such procedural measures make them feel slightly hopeful, that to them such measures are a sufficient response on the part of the university. Common sense and countless studies on institutional corruption and change suggest otherwise. University officials, policy drafters, faculty and students should know that already; because they have taught and studied what basic sociology, organizational psychology, and frankly, humanities courses make plain clear within a few weeks into a semester: abuse is not an individual problem only, it takes a village to do the kind of damage done to Penn State’s victims. This isn’t a case of “bad apples”, much like we’d like it to be. Corrupt individuals survive and thrive in corrupt institutions. Whistle-blowing might be viewed as an act of courage but it is not the answer to this problem. Not only because institutions with a culture of conformity explicitly or implicitly discourage it, but because in and of itself it cannot change the institution itself, not culturally.<br />
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The university, as an institution, did also a disservice to the larger community of families and high-school students and their schools that “supply” talent to its sports program. The abuse cannot be undone, the victims cannot get their childhoods back, but the community of incoming and current students can be served better than with simple procedural measures and board restructurings. No university is an island; which is to say, no university can thrive in isolation from the surrounding community. Penn State owes its community larger initiatives of local development that enable disadvantaged students to attend and graduate from Penn State without depending completely on football. Instead of channeling more funds into sports programs, redirect, reallocate or just plain start development funds or scholarships for high school students from the local community. Without professionalizing the sports or any program itself. Sports can and should be taught, and students with athletic skills should have access to programs that help them develop those skills. But development is not the same as professionalization. And universities should not be the ground for professionalizing sports or anything for that matter. <br />
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How can then Penn State change its culture? How much change is needed and where? The Board of Trustees announced they will take full responsibility of the crimes, one day only after the Freeh report was published. They mentioned reducing the term of board members from 15 to 12 years, as an example of the measures they will take. That’s not enough. Taking responsbility for such crimes involves taking larger and longer-term initiatives to prevent their re-occurence. <br />
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They can start by listening to the community. Current and prospective students, parents, and those whose only chance at higher education is Penn State’s football program need to weigh in too. And they can continue taking responsibility by investing in the community around Penn State. Many members of its football team have and will continue to count on Penn State’s football program as a way out of disadvantaged, non-privileged lives. Scrapping the football program in single stroke is unlikely to help prevent abuses and might be a disservice to that community. Perhaps the school needs to take a sabbatical from its football program as a first step. But in the long term, students whose only ticket to college is sports would be better served by reforming, not removing, college sports. BigSports needs to be reformed into small sports; competitive but secondary to the university’s mission and purpose, which should be to educate, not to professionalize, neither sports nor any other field.<br />
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Figuring out how to make that a reality, how to restructure programs around educational rather than professional goals will take effort, resources, and time. Universities might think they cannot afford to do this, ever. Tuition costs will increase if Penn State’s and any university’s athletics program is decoupled from BigSports. Players and coaches depend on the professionalization of college sports, that’s their livelihood.Why should other colleges with a strong athletics program take the blow because of Penn State’s lack of oversight? <br />
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I find all the above arguments weak. Reasonable but weak in the face of the damage that has been done. Because child abuse was not just a case of lack of oversight, attention, reporting, or whistle-blowing. The university, at the institutional level, as an organization, enabled child abuse by treating its sports program as a stand-alone organization, immune to complaints and challenges from outsiders, such as, say, mothers reporting inappropriate child treatment by its members, and also by fostering a culture of, effectively, worshipping football and, ultimately its football-dependent reputation. To counter-arguments of “lack of funds” and “tuition will increase” and “that’s not realistic” I say: a) funds can be raised; Penn State received [$208 million] in donations in the last year alone. It’s the school’s job, in light of its crimes, to figure out how to direct more funds away from its football-dependent reputation and towards educational goals, b) again, in light of its crimes, the least Penn State can do to give back to the community it so much damaged is to figure out how to stabilize tuition fees while increasing educational non-ahtletic opportunities for children and high school students, and c) words such as “realistic” and “impractical” and “legacy” lose their meaning in the face of child abuse. <br />
Penn State owes its community a different “reality” from the one it offered in the past 14 years. And that reality will need to be reconstructed. That includes things like figuring out how to provide future students educational opportunities while developing the local community, and do all that without increasing tuition fees, and without professionalizing its sport programs. Sounds impossible, it will take years and a lot of collective effort and it might not be completely achieved anytime soon, but then again, the university owes its victims and their community a different “reality” because the one it offered them up to now included and condoned child abuse. If they can do damage, they can do repair. Claiming repair to be impractical, costly and impossible is unjust and, in effect, unethical at this point.<br />
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I’d like to direct those doubting the pervasive culture of football worship to this quote by the State College Police, cited in Jim McLean’s blog:<br />
"After Paterno was fired on November 9th last year, a demonstration took place on the campus, involving 4-5,000 people. According to State College police: "The crowd quickly turned from a peaceful demonstration to a riotous mob. The mob began damaging vehicles and rolled a news van. The mob attempted to light vehicles on fire, and tore down light posts and street signs. The mob threw rocks, bottles and hard objects at the police and citizens. Citizens and officers were injured by the mob's criminal behavior." <br />
Source: <a href="http://www.centrecountycrimestoppers.org/index.phpcontent=crime_detail2&crime_alert_id=407">http://www.centrecountycrimestoppers.org/index.phpcontent=crime_detail2&crime_alert_id=407</a><br />
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“This was not to protest a senior faculty figure's systematic abuse of children. Or even because school executives allegedly "helped cover up suspicions of child abuse to protect the school and its vaunted football program." No, they were rioting solely because Paterno had been fired”, Jim McLennan points out.<br />
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Check the sources, ask alumni and current members of Penn State, friends and football fans. I doubt, but hope, you can prove this description basically inaccurate. <br />
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So instead of erecting statues of coaches on campus, start educating students about Penn State’s academic value. And start building a reputation of academic and community achievements rather than one of professionalization, of any field. I’m not suggesting disregarding athletics or leading academic programs unprofessionally. Professionalism is not the same as professionalization. I’m suggesting stop the professionalization of sports and better still, stop the professionalization, period. What happened at the football program could, theoretically, happen in any other field, whether science, arts or the humanities. Corruption isn’t unique to football programs, to sports, to Penn State or any particular field, program or institution. But it does thrive among those with reputations that are “too big to fail”, too good to be challenged by insiders and outsiders alike. And the pervasive professionalization of any field makes its members, whether individuals or institutions, prone to dependence on reputation. It’s not just football. It’s not just Penn State. Any university or institution with similar dependence on reputation coupled with a culture of worship, whether sports or science or anything really, is at risk. That’s the main lesson those outside Penn State can take from this.<br />
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At least that’s what I’ve learned. When I was in high-school I wrote an essay on child exploitation in the developed world as part of my university entrance exams. I wrote about it being the result of failures in civil society, in moral priorities, even in the democracy itself as an institution. What I did not write about was its presence in educational institutions. To me that was, in effect, unthinkable. The reviewers/graders gave it high marks suggesting it lacked nothing in content at least. Up until the crimes made the news I still thought that higher ed and child abuse do not belong in the same sentence. Try thinking about it without thinking of Penn State. It doesn’t compute. Nothing in the 14 intervening years had changed my high-school views on this. 10 years of graduate school in US universities had given me no reasons let alone occasions to rethink that. Penn State proved me wrong; naive at best and unrealistic at worse. Wherever there are corrupt institutions, wherever there is a reputation at stake that is too big to fail, child exploitation is possible.<br />
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Nevertheless, I hope I’m wrong. I hope Penn State’s crimes are a one-of-a-kind trend of events, the result of corrupt individuals rather than corrupt institutions rather than a culture of misplaced professionalization coupled with reputation-dependence. Perhaps somebody or something that I haven’t considered can prove me wrong. But as of now, everything I heard and read suggest that as long as child abuse happened so easily and for so long in the context of Penn State, it is not only “thinkable” but also sociologically possible that it could happen to any institution with a similar culture.<br />
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See also: Interactive Graphic: Penn State's ridiculous response to the abuse, day by day:<br />
<a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Penn-States-Response-to/132855/">http://chronicle.com/article/Penn-States-Response-to/132855/</a><br />
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Personal Update:<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11.666666030883789px; line-height: 16.66666603088379px;">I posted the question on my facebook wall straight up: Does anybody know who Paul Berg is?". Only 2 people said they didn't know him. I have about 250 “friends” who post quite often, I would say 90% of them are academics and/or students, and since the Freeh report came out NOBODY in my facebook has posted anything related to Penn State, the report, the whole “scandal”. No reactions whatsoever. I saw posts about their workdays, their lunches, their birthday parties, their conferences, but nothing re this despicable thing. If people have enough time and mental energy to post about the things above that they posted they should have had some time to comment on Penn State. I’m baffled by the silence. My guess is nobody wants to go on record expressing their concern, sadness, or worries about this issue. At best they keep such discussions offline. At worst, they have better things to think about.</span>
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<br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2669784238449524796.post-44096917764251264932012-01-18T20:43:00.005-05:002012-01-18T21:35:31.627-05:00Don’t censor the WebIt's been so long since my last post that I almost forgot my password for this blog....sigh. Two bills before Congress, the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, would censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on business. These bills will change the Internet for worse forever. <br />Wikipedia is shutting down for a day in protest of PIPA/SOPA. PIPA is still up and SOPA is rumored to have been withdrawn to only to be reintroduced with some changed technical language. I wonder if there's anyone out there without an obvious conflict of interest who seriously thinks SOPA/PIPA are a good idea? I'd love to hear a coherent argument without an underlying cash motive. In the future, people will examine our decisions at this moment.<br />Too bad Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites did not engage in some type of demonstration as well. These systems have much more to lose than Wikipedia.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2669784238449524796.post-182513243638871952010-09-12T12:41:00.006-04:002010-10-29T11:22:22.953-04:00The End of Tenure?About a week ago the NYTimes ran an <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/books/review/Shea-t.html?src=tp">article-cum-book review on higher education</a> and its latest plight, college's need to cut budgets and make ends meet in ways that they perhaps shouldn't (e.g., increasing tuition fees, cutting course offerings).<br />What's new in this picture is that institutions like tenure itself is being attacked in its role in granting job permanence for, presumably, dubious achievements. As is expected, the humanities and humanities faculty are the prime, and easy, target of the public's complaints against granted, and taken for granted, job security. Nevermind that, as Christopher Shea points out, "nearly two-thirds of all college teachers are non-tenure-track adjuncts like Matt Williams, who told Hacker and Dreifus he had taught a dozen courses at two colleges in the Akron area the previous year, earning the equivalent of about $8.50 an hour by his reckoning".<br />And such complaints against tenure seem to be now coming from, get this, liberal tenured folks ("the higher-ed jeremiads of the last generation came mainly from the right. But this time, it’s the tenured radicals — or at least the tenured liberals — who are leading the charge").<br />I find that almost hard to believe, and more evidence would be welcome, but then again, that's a book review article. What's worrisome, if not frightening, about higher ed's current plight, is that, as Christopher Shea insightfully concludes "it is not news that America is a land of haves and have-nots. It is news that colleges are themselves dividing into haves and have-nots; they are becoming engines of inequality."Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2669784238449524796.post-15400558151669994972010-09-10T16:05:00.003-04:002010-09-12T13:41:46.899-04:00Religion and Visual PerceptionIn an insightful study, reviewed in Science magazine (which doesn't seem to allow online access to it) researchers found that individuals from different religious backgrounds have a different focus in images, with some focusing on the background and others on individuals that are present in an image. This difference parallels the one found across cultures, notably Westerners and Asians, with Westerners focusing less on the context and more on discrete items, such as individual persons, and Asians focusing more on the context rather than individuals in the same image. The interesting part here about religion is that it seems to be a dimension of one's upbringing that conditions visual perception irrespective of culture.<br /><br />the reviewed study in Science appeared in the journal <span style="font-style:italic;">Cognition, 117, 2010</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2669784238449524796.post-29587821377475897822010-09-06T14:01:00.003-04:002010-09-06T14:08:06.218-04:00Higher Education?<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Higher-Education-Colleges-Wasting-Kids/dp/0805087346">"Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — and What We Can Do About It"</a> raises some timely issues about the current state of higher ed; one important of them being the awful administrative glut, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/education/25books-t.html">recently noted in the NYTimes</a>,that's plaguing not just colleges' offices but students' and faculty's lives at school too.<br />A <a href="http://highereducationquestionmark.com/">blog for discussing the book</a> and the issues it raised has been set up, it's worth checking it out. <br />More details will follow after I've had a chance to read the book & blog.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2669784238449524796.post-81860780895164976142010-08-31T14:10:00.000-04:002010-09-15T12:16:30.431-04:00Poem with a Title Longer than its StanzaI love this poem. By David Musgrave; appeared recently in <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/">the New Yorker</a><br /><br />ON THE INEVITABLE DECLINE INTO<br />MEDIOCRITY OF THE POPULAR MUSICIAN WHO<br />ATTAINS A COMFORTABLE MIDDLE AGE<br /><br />O Sting, where is thy death?<br /><br /><br /> - David Musgrave<br /><br /><br />Naive reader's response: Why Sting?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2669784238449524796.post-73142152378075615922010-08-19T11:17:00.003-04:002010-08-19T11:27:39.297-04:00The Rap Guide to EvolutionOR: How Darwin Got It Going On<br /><br /><a href="http://www.babasword.com/index/rge.html">Baba Brinkman</a>, a "lit-hop" artist (yes, that's why I'm making a post of this) raps about evolution and human behavior.<br /><br /><br />"Ooh my<br />I ain't nothing but a <br />tour guide,<br />Using science like an x-ray to see into your mind<br />...Yeah welcome to the future,baby<br />A time when science is even illuminating<br />The roots of human behavior."<br /><br />(from <span style="font-style:italic;">Science magazine</span>)<br /><br />And <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/darwin-got-it-going-on/">here </a>is the NYTimes review.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2669784238449524796.post-30405448292951758302010-08-17T15:47:00.000-04:002010-08-17T18:59:44.628-04:00Karen Russell's The Dredgeman's Revelation (20 under 40)This <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2010/07/26/100726fi_fiction_russell">short story</a> will haunt you. It will first bore you, then shake you out of your complacent boredom with a power of feeling and a sudden realization that what you've been reading all along wasn't what you thought it was. <br /><br />If you read it, that is. While there's so many things that make Kristen Russell's The Dredgeman's Revelation unappealing to post-modern demands, such as psychological realism and an attempt at well -rounded characterization that leaves little of consenquence to the postmodern imagination,its appeal, its pull, and grip on the reader are too powerful to be dismissed as too much realism. And I'm aware that that's something that's thrown at the New Yorker's published fiction quite often, and not without reason, but still, this story, I can't say this enough, surprised me and yanked me out of any expectations I had going into it. I was not interested in the main character (the dredgeman), nor in the setting and period (Ocala swamps,FL; shortly after the Civil War), and the fact that it's told in 3rd person narrative mode didn't help either (but that's my personal preference). <br /><br />No matter. This story is brilliant, unique, and powerful, and that's not something I often say about fiction. My favorite part, one of the most powerfully felt (felt being the keyword for this story's impact)moment is when the main character, Louis (the dredgeman) has, or rather, fails to have, a premonition about his coming violent,undeserved, naturalistic death. Quote: "The woods were deep, but they were neither peaceful nor quiet - they were full of men. [...]Nearly thirteen million job seekers were massing like locust clouds in the cities, but few of these money hunters had made it to the deep glade. [...]When the train had a mechanical problem, the engine cut out and the metal moaned to a full stop in the middle of a wrinkled wood. [...] If he could hear his own death in all that lively hubbub, he ignored it. Home, home, home, the rails sung [...]"<br /><br />Notice how natural, and naturalistic at certain points, the description is of Louis's perceptions and conception of his future. What to others, to 13 million in fact, displaced job seekers and "money hunters", seemed unappealing, the Ocala swamplands, to Louis it is no less than "home, home, home, made so by the train, the 19th century technology that here, in the FL glades fails to work properly, hinting thus at his demise and early helpless death, even as he chooses (we surmise) to ignore that hint (rather than not hear it at all). This being a naturalistic description/writing, Louis, or anybody could not but hear the calling of death in the train's mechanical failure, in the nature's untamed wilderness, in the few human beings and signs of modern civilization he encounters on his way to the swamps.<br /><br />Why he ignored that early calling of death is realistically rendered as a function of his psychologically and culturally deprived upbringing. Or so I thought. On second thought, and second reading, it seems that K.Russell devotes so much energy and realistic description of Louis's background only to suggest, or rather hint, that it's an inadequate lead to the story's end and Louis's demise. There's something else that responsible for that, but the story isn't about explanations, neither doesn it seek to build a full character for the sake of realism. It's about the power of realization that one has or might have at the moment that one realizes he is at the brink of death. At the end of the story, death is a certain outcome, and Louis realizes that, and, more powerfully, realizes that he doesn't want to die, despite the death-like quality of his life up to that point. That's his revelation. Our/my revelation was the brilliance of conveying that experience,unlikely in its realistic parameters for most of us but true in psychological ones. Not everybody gets to be in Louis's place, not "really", but psychologically, the feeling of his revelation is universal, as much as the sudden wish to live in the face of death can be said to be universal.<br /><br />Author info: Karen Russell is 25 yrs old, and a <a href="http://www.randomhouse.com/author/results.pperl?authorid=70463">graduate of Columbia's MFA program</a>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0