- The Obvious? When I was growing up my parents were forever taking us for "trips" whether locally or further afield. They still set off, in their eighties, in my Dad's sports car, to explore Dorset where they now live. My wife Penny shares this inclination to go places and discover new ones we've not been, so we have visited and got to know much of the wonderfully varied countryside of Britain and beyond.
Needless to say the girls are growing up with the same willingness to follow their natural curiosity and see more of the world than is brought to them via their TV screens. In contrast many of their friends it seems never go anywhere except for school, shopping, and the annual foreign holiday. And it's not just going places, it's exploring ideas. This lack of curiosity seems to me to be at the root of so many of our problems. Same old blog, brand new place. In her blog post explaining the Brendan Eich resignation, Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, writes, “We know why people are hurt and angry, and they are right: it’s because we haven’t stayed true to ourselves.”
In Mozilla is Human, Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Foundation, adds, “What we also need to do is start a process of rebirth and renewal. We need to find our soul and our spirit.” That spirit is embodied in the Mozilla Manifesto. But it goes deeper than that: all the way back to Mosaic, the ur-browser from which Firefox is descended by way of Netscape Navigator. Neither Mosaic nor Navigator were instruments of the advertising business. They were boards we rode to surf from site to site across oceans of data, and cars we drove down the information superhighway. Economically speaking, Firefox is an instrument of advertising, and not just a vehicle for users.
This has caused huge conflicts for Mozilla. But so is abuse of users by the advertising industry. Confused of calcutta - a blog about information. Apophenia. Like everyone who cares about Crisis Text Line and the people we serve, I have spent the last few days reflecting on recent critiques about the organization’s practices. Having spent my career thinking about and grappling with tech ethics and privacy issues, I knew that – had I not been privy to the details and context that I know – I would be outraged by what folks heard this weekend.
I would be doing what many of my friends and colleagues are doing, voicing anger and disgust. But as a founding board member of Crisis Text Line, who served as board chair from June 2020 until the beginning of January 2021, I also have additional information that shaped how I thought about these matters and informed my actions and votes over the last eight years. As a director, I am currently working with others on the board and in the organization to chart a path forward. Texters come to us in their darkest moments. First: Why data? Storing data immediately prompted three key questions: I’m a scholar. 1.
The Social Enterprise. If you can get past the slightly rambling intro, this conversation between Jonathan Fields and Tony Schwartz is a fascinating look at what's wrong with the way we currently tend to work. It really starts to get interesting about 8 minutes in. Although very focused on American business and culture, pretty much everything they say relates to British and European work culture. One important idea they discuss, and something I've found essential myself, is the idea of pulsing or sprinting when working: to focus for a while and then relax for a bit. This idea is common in athletics, where it's called the work-rest ratio: "It's as important to renew energy as it is to spend energy if [you] want to be a consistently great [athletics] performer.
" We forget too easily that the brain is an organ that requires periods of replenishment as much as muscles do. If you work your muscles too hard, they ache, so we learn very early on not to overdo it. Joho the Blog. The hosts of the BardCast podcast consider Cymbeline to probably be Shakespeare’s worst play. Not enough happens in the first two acts, the plot is kuh-razy, it’s a mishmash of styles and cultures, and it over-explains itself time and time again. That podcast is far from alone in thinking that it’s the Bard’s worst, although, as BardCast says, even the Bard’s worst is better than just about anything. Nevertheless, when was the last time you saw a performance of Cymbeline?
Yeah, me neither. We saw it yesterday afternoon, in its final performance at Shakespeare & Co in Lenox, Mass. It was directed by the founder of the company, Tina Packer, and showed her usual commitment to modernizing Shakespeare by finding every emotional tone and every laugh in the original script. These two embellishments are emblematic of the problem with the play. To be clear, most of the interpretations seem to bring Shakespeare’s intentions to life, even if unexpected ways.
Apophenia. Seth's Blog.