One of the interesting things I find in studying history is that many people that we consider Giants and Geniuses were not recognized or appreciated by their own generation. It is like some people are so far ahead of everyone else, that it takes a generation or two for people to appreciate what a person was doing or saying. Many of these people died alone and penniless. This week we will be looking at these people who were not fully appreciated by their own generation.
We start with Abraham Lincoln. Many people consider Lincoln one of our greatest presidents, but he enjoyed little popular support when he lived. I found it interesting reading an article about him in a large newspaper at the time of his death. The article said of Lincoln, "Posterity will see in him a greater man than his contemporaries can acknowledge".
There’s a gal at work who will jokingly proclaim “My body is a temple!” before predictably reaching for something that may or may not promote one’s health (brownie scraps are my favourite example for many reasons). I always laugh because I totally say that kind of hippie BS all the time, but like half seriously. Actually, mostly seriously… Maybe all the way serious with a shot of E3 Live and a ginger juice chaser too.
It’s true that at any given time, there are multiple jars of coconut oil open in my house for any and all uses. It’s also true that I use the all natural sandalwood conditioner that donates 47% of its revenue to environmental relief organizations, even though it tangles the hell out of my curly ass hair. My mum randomly picked me up a bottle of coconut aminos while she was out because she knew I would freak (“Whoooooaa It’s like non-allergenic soy sauce!!!!”). Ninety-eight percent of my wardrobe can be described as “flow-y.” I talk about vibes a lot.
All of that is just silly superficial stuff though. I find summertime is when my good habits kind of slip a bit. There are all the obvious reasons and occasions. My entire being is about a million times more in the moment in a general sense. I’ve never been much of a calorie counter, but I’ve never been one to say no to a patio beer and a salty snack once the sun starts setting either. Anyway, a lot of moment-vibing (there it is again) has had me feeling kind of tired if I’m being honest. I seem to be craving coffee with a touch more sincerity in the mornings, which is a mighty tip-off that things are out of balance for me. Not so temple-like.
So when I get to a point like this, I make myself a really deluxe + mostly raw meal as a bit of a “reset” maneuver. Just everything fresh on a plate, lots of chewing and savouring. I’ll feel full and light at the same time, which is always ideal.
Giving tacos the raw treatment isn’t anything new. Almost any raw restaurant will have a version on its menu, and I will ALWAYS order it. So good. Whether they make a dehydrated tortilla to encase the goodness in or it’s just a simple lettuce wrap job, the combination is fierce. There’s some nuts ground into a chunky mixture with spices, some kind of salsa, an avocado component, cashew sour cream, other veg sometimes, lots of lime and flavour. If you have a food processor/blender, it couldn’t be easier to replicate at home either. I decided to make a corn ceviche-ish salsa for mine just to shake things up a bit and add a little sweetness. Don’t regret that move one bit. Also, my measurements are kind of ambiguous in this recipe because hey, it’s summer and you gotta keep it so vibe-y.
raw tacos w/ spicy nut crumble + sweet corn ceviche salsa serves: 4-6 notes: You could probably swing the cashew sour cream in a food processor instead of a blender. Just might be a touch more chunky–still so tasty though.
sweet corn ceviche salsa ingredients: 2 cobs of corn, kernels removed
juice of 1-2 limes
salt and pepper
1/4 cup diced red onion
1/2 pint grape tomatoes, quartered
small handful chopped cilantro
spicy nut + seed crumble ingredients:
1 heaped cup of mixed, raw nuts + seeds (I used walnuts, almonds + sunflower seeds)
sea salt + pepper
ground spices you like (chili powder, cumin, coriander, or taco seasoning if you freaky)
little splash of grapeseed oil
little splash of coconut aminos (or tamari, nama shoyu, soy sauce etc)
cashew sour cream ingredients:
3/4 cup raw cashews, soaked for 3 hours or more
juice of 1/2 a lemon
tiny splash of apple cider vinegar
fat pinch of sea salt
2-3 tbsp of filtered water
to serve:
1 cabbage, leaves removed and cut into respectable taco shells
6-8 swiss chard leaves, de-veined and cut into palm-size pieces
1 ripe avocado, cut into slices
lime wedges
extra chili powder
extra chopped cilantro
Make the corn salsa: in a medium bowl, combine the corn kernels, lime juice, salt + pepper and red onion. Toss to combine. Let this sit for a while, about 15 minutes, stirring here and there. Add the tomatoes and cilantro and stir to combine. Check the mixture for seasoning and set aside.
Make the spicy nut + seed crumble: throw all of the ingredients in a food processor and pulse the mixture until a chunky paste forms. Season it to your liking, scrape into a bowl and set aside.
Make the cashew sour cream: drain the cashews and place them in a blender pitcher. Add all of the other ingredients and blend on high until a smooth paste is achieved. You may have to scrape down the sides a couple times and add some extra water. Once the mixture is smooth and tasting creamy + sour, store it in a bowl or squeeze bottle in the fridge.
To serve: lay the cabbage leaves on a platter. Line them with the swiss chard pieces. Divide the spicy nut + seed mixture among the shells. Then, scoop some corn salsa into each shell as well (there will probably be extra). Garnish each taco with some sliced avocado, cashew sour cream, a little dusting of chili and some extra cilantro. Enjoy!
To say that SDN has a lot of hype to live up to is a huge understatement. Given the hype, some are saying that SDN can’t deliver, but others—notably Nicira—are saying that network virtualization is what will actually deliver on the promises of SDN. Instead, it appears that network virtualization is the first, and presumably not the best, take at the new way of managing networks where we can finally holistically manage networks with policy and goals separated from the actual devices, be they virtual or physical, that implement them.
Out with SDN; In with Network Virtualization?
In the last few months there has been a huge amount of back and forth about SDN and network virtualization. Really, this has been going on since Nicira was acquired about a year ago and probably before that, but the message seems to have solidified recently. The core message is something like this:
SDN is old and tired; network virtualization is the new hotness.
Network virtualization vs. SDN
That message—in different, but not substantially less cheeky terms—was more or less exactly the message that Bruce Davie (formerly Cisco, formerly Nicira, now VMware) gave during his talk on networking virtualization at the Open Networking Summit in April. (The talk slides are available there along with a link the video which requires a free registration.)
The talk rubbed me all the wrong ways. It sounded like, “I don’t know what this internal combustion engine can do for you, but these car things, they give you what you really want.” It’s true and there’s a point worth noting there, but the point is not that internal combustion engines (or SDN) are not that interesting.
A 5-year retrospective on SDN
Fortunately, about a month ago, Scott Shenker of UC Berkeley gave an hour-long retrospective on SDN (and OpenFlow) focusing on what they got right and wrong with the benefit of 5 year of hindsight. The talk managed to nail more or less the same set of points that Bruce’s did, but with more nuance. The whole talk is available on YouTube and it should be required watching if you’re at all interested in SDN.
An SDN architecture with network virtualization folded in.
The highest-order bits from Scott’s talk are:
Prior to SDN, we were missing any reasonable kind of abstraction or modularity in the control planes of our networks. Further, identifying this problem and trying to fix it is the biggest contribution of SDN.
Network virtualization is the killer app for SDN and, in fact, it is likely to be more important than SDN and may outlive SDN.
The places they got the original vision of SDN wrong, were where they either misunderstood or failed to fully carry out the abstraction and modularization of the control plane.
Once you account for the places where Scott thinks they got it wrong, you wind up coming to the conclusion that networks should consist of an “edge” implemented entirely in software where the interesting stuff happens and a “core” which is dead simple and merely routes on labels computed at the edge.
This last point is pretty controversial—and I’m not 100% sure that he argues it to my satisfaction in the talk—but I largely agree with it. In fact, I agree with it so much so that I wrote half of my PhD thesis (you can find the paper and video of the talk there) on the topic. I’ll freely admit that I didn’t have the full understanding and background that Scott does as he argues why this is the case, but I sketched out the details on how you’d build this without calling it SDN and even built a (research quality) prototype.
What is network virtualization, really?
Network virtualization isn’t so much about providing a virtual network as much as it is about providing a backward-compatible policy language for network behavior.
Anyway, that’s getting a bit afield of where we started. The thing that Scott doesn’t quite come out and say is that the way he thinks of network virtualization isn’t so much about providing a virtual network as much as it is about providing a backward-compatible policy language for network behavior.
He says that Nicira started off trying to pitch other ideas of how to specify policy, but that they had trouble. Essentially, the clients they talked to said they knew how to manage a legacy network and get the policy right there and any solution that didn’t let them leverage that knowledge was going to face a steep uphill battle.
The end result was that Nicira chose to implement an abstraction of the simplest legacy network possible: a single switch with lots of ports. This makes a lot of sense. If policy is defined in the context of a single switch, changes in the underlying topology don’t affect the policy (it’s the controller’s responsibility to keep the mappings correct) and there’s only one place to look to see the whole policy: the one switch.
The next big problems: High-level policy and composition of SDN apps
Despite this, there’s at least two big things which this model doesn’t address:
In the long run, we probably want a higher-level policy description than a switch configuration even if a single switch configuration is a whole lot better than n different ones. Scott does mention this fact during the Q&A.
While the concept of network virtualization and a network hypervisor (or a network policy language and a network policy compiler) helps with implementing a single network control problem, it doesn’t help with composing different network control programs. This composition is required if we’re really going to be able to pick and choose the best of breed hardware and software components to build our networks.
A 10,000-foot view of Pyretic’s goals of an SDN control program built of composable parts.
Both of these topics are actively being worked on in both the open source community (mainly via OpenDaylight) and in academic research with the Frenetic project probably being the best known and most mature of them. In particular, their recent Pyretic paper and talk took an impressive stab at how you might do this. Like Frenetic before it, they take a domain-specific language approach and assume that all applications (which are really just policy since the language is declarative), are written in that language.
Personally, I’m very interested in how many of the guarantees that the Frenetic/Pyretic approach provide can be provided by using a restricted set of API calls rather than a restricted language which all applications have to be written in. Put another way, could the careful selection of the northbound APIs provided to applications in OpenDaylight enable us to get many—or even all—of the features that these language-based approaches take. I’m not sure, but it’s certainly going to be exciting to find out.
A new survey categorizes about 1 in 5 Americans as “religious progressives.” Catholics make up the largest proportion of that group in terms of religious affiliation, at 29 percent. (Mainline Protestants are next at 19 percent.) Religious progressive on average are younger (44) than the general population (47) and religious conservatives (53).
These numbers, and many more, are contained in the 2013 Economic Values Survey conducted by Public Religion Research Institute with the Brookings Institute. In the big picture, the survey identifies 19 percent of Americans as religious progressives, 38 percent as religious moderates, 28 percent as religious conservatives and 15 percent as nonreligious.
I just returned from the UK, where reporters and Union Jack-draped monarchists are camped out in front of St. Mary's Hospital awaiting the royal baby, which seems to be coming fashionably late. Poor Kate. Giving birth for the first time is terrifying enough without a cadre of helicopters flying past your window.
Substitute "rags" for "women's interest trend stories," I say. Ever since she came onto the scene a decade ago, Kate, a flesh-and-blood woman, has served as a human mannequin upon which to pin narratives about modern love, marriage, domesticity, and childrearing. By looking at the media's treatment of her, you can get a pretty good look at contemporary gender-related cultural fixations. Only they're not very contemporary at all.
When Kate first appeared as William's college girlfriend, people wondered, with the whispered faux concern of a high school frenemy, whether she was too thin. Also, what was the secret to her shiny hair?
Later, when she and William were dating but not yet engaged, the press speculated frantically about whether and when Wills would put a ring on it, dubbing Kate "Waity Katie" and spawning 1,001 stories about long courtships and ultimatums and whether modern women should expect diamonds or not.
At the same time, her rather short work history and her career ambition were scrutinized. Was she lazy? Traditional? If she didn't work, would she be setting women back? Would she describe herself as a feminist?
When the couple finally became engaged, we could discuss the benefits and drawbacks of waiting until your late 20s to marry. It was also a good opportunity to chirp about the cost of planning a wedding (so expensive!) and unroll the full catalog of pre-wedding diets (SoulCycle! Quicktrim! Caveman!).
When Kate and William had been married for a month, tabloids began humming with faux concern about fertility issues. Was Kate eating Brussels sprouts on her honeymoon because the folic acid helped increase pregnancy changes? Was she--here we go again--too thin to get pregnant? Had the couple been seen outside a fertility clinic? Would she consent to IVF? Should we consent to IVF?
There was the parsing of her domestic habits, which, according to Vanity Fair, ran to "cooking William's favorite supper, roast chicken" and making jam for Christmas presents. She even refused to hire a housekeeper, reportedly planning to do the chores herself (or "share" them with Prince William, as is the modern way), and was taking cooking lessons.
When the royal pregnancy was finally announced, a torrent of "is it OK to ____ while pregnant" stories flooded onto the scene. Play field hockey while pregnant? Drink tea while pregnant? Get a new puppy while pregnant?
Was waiting until your 30s to have babies becoming trendy? But was it also dangerous? Autism! Down Syndrome! Hyperemesis gravidarum, AKA "constant morning sickness," from which Kate suffered, is more common in older mothers, don't you know?
But, most importantly, how long will it take her to get her "pre-baby body" back?
"The royal body exists to be looked at," wrote Mantel. But the same is true about the female body in general.
The scrutiny Kate undergoes on a large scale is the same scrutiny nearly all women experience on a smaller one. Are we too fat or too thin? Is our hair shiny enough? Are we marrying too young, or not young enough? Should we Botox, condition, Clomid, circumcise, vaccinate, exfoliate, co-sleep, Dukan diet, Lean In or Lean Out?
"Ordinary girls and women feel all too keenly the constant scrutiny we're put under and the impossibility of measuring up," writes Susan J. Douglas in Enlightened Sexism, her analysis of gender in contemporary media.
In her book How to Be a Woman, Caitlin Moran summarized the sentiments of British women toward the princess's lot:
Poor cow. Jesus Christ, does she know what she's let herself in for? A lifetime of scrutiny, bitching, pap-shots of her thighs, and speculation on her state of mind. Rather you than me, darling.
But it's not her rather than me. Sure, she may be the one in the tabloids. But the questions the press asks of her are meant for all women.
This image is going around today, as students mobilize through the "Am I Suspicious?" campaign, "seek[ing] not only to raise awareness of the injustices that go on today and have happened in the past, but to prevent such occurrences for future generations."
American Chris Cassidy and Italian Luca Parmitano were forced to call off this morning's planned spacewalk outside the International Space Station when Parmitano suddenly reported that there was water inside of his suit helmet.
"My head is really wet and I have a feeling it's increasing," he radioed about an hour into the spacewalk.
Video of the aborted EVA, starting with the discovery of the water. The call to terminate EVA comes at 12:45. Station airlock opens at 44:48.
The EVA, designated EVA-23, was one of the ones that Ars watched astronauts Cassidy and Parmitano train for late last year. That was during our visit to NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, the giant swimming pool where NASA simulates spacewalks in microgravity. According to NASASpaceFlight's recounting of events, Parmitano was in the process of running data cabling to connect the as-yet-unlaunched Russian Nauka module when the water began to make itself apparent. The quantity of liquid in Parmitano's helmet rapidly increased, with Parmitano noting that it had begun to enter his eyes, nose, and mouth.
Earlier today some folks I know were discussing girls and toys. Of course the conversation eventually turned to the most polarizing toy of them all – Barbie. I was reminded of something I wrote back in 2009. Given how the readership of my blog has changed since then, I thought it might be worth sharking these thoughts again…
This month is Barbie’s 50th birthday. Like many women my age, I had a crate of dolls and assorted paraphernalia as a girl, but I can still remember receiving my first Barbie for my birthday in mid-elementary school. I had stalked this doll weekly on trips to the local Clover store with my mother. I remember how beautiful she looked in the box and wanting to touch her clothes through the clear plastic packaging. I visited Barbie in the toy aisle for months and on my birthday remember how happy I was to see the Barbie package-shaped gift sitting on the breakfast table, waiting for me. Of all the dolls I owned as a girl, this one was my favorite and has stayed with me since.
Figure 1: Dr. Isis’s first Barbie — Peaches N Cream Barbie
Initially my fascination with Barbie was superficial — I was mesmerized by the shimmery bodice of her dress, her pierced ears, and heavy eye makeup. I imagined myself, like her, gliding gracefully in a cloud of peach-colored chiffon. I think my parents felt largely indifferent towards my love of this doll and humored me when she accompanied us everywhere. My Barbie became an active participant in many of the role-playing games I engaged in with friends. My childhood best friend was a little boy who lived next door who happened to have Castle Grayskull and the Death Star. My Barbie, in her poofy peach ballgown and metallic pumps, saved Eternia and Alderaan on more than one occasion. My friend humored me. I think it’s because we always had better snacks at my house.
It didn’t occur to me that there was anything unusual about Barbie battling Skeletor and Darth Vader. She could wield a light saber and the Power Sword li ke a champ. It didn’t occur to me, that is, until the fifth grade when my little girlish figure began to change from being twiggy to distinctly more hourglass. It was at this age that the girls in my class, girls who had known each other for years, began to change the way they treated each other. They started to use words like “slut” and “tramp,” although none of us really understood them. Certain girls, those of us who developed feminine features ahead of the mean, started being labeled as having “done it,” even though most of us had no concept of “it” and were only just learning that some people used their tongues when they kissed.
But girls like me who had graduated from training bras to real-life underwire were clearly different in a way that made us socially unacceptable and apparently overtly sexual. I hated being different and I grew to hate my beloved Barbie for also being different. I wore big, oversized sweatshirts to hide my figure, but my Barbie seemed to mock me, her womanly figure poured into her evening gown. So one night, after an afternoon of taunting, I punished my Barbie for shamelessly flaunting what Mattel had given her with a flawless smile on her face. I put her peach gown down the garbage disposal (an event that broke the garbage disposal and earned me a grounding) and cut Barbie’s hair. I cast my beloved, naked, mutilated Barbie into exile in my toy box and vowed to never play with her again.
Figure 2: Dr. Isis’s naked, buzzcut Peaches N Cream Barbie waves after being caught surfing the web.
I didn’t see Barbie again until high school when I found her at the bottom of the toy box while I was packing things to give to charity. She looked up at me, covered in dust with her buzzcut hair, still smiling from the bottom of the toy box and I felt sorry. I had grown into my female form, but I had judged Barbie harshly for a form she didn’t choose. And she smiled through my judgment and sentencing. I’ve kept her with me since.
[Added 2013 - I went and had a visit with Barbie again this afternoon. Her poor buzzcut hair. Funny how over the years she's helped me to accept what I am and what I am not. Again, she's helped remember not to judge myself to harshly.]
Last week I heard a radio story in which the reporter mockingly spoke of Barbie’s evolution from a 1950′s pinup to “President Barbie,” as though the attempt to make Barbie anything more than a fashion doll were futile because she’s Barbie, and I realized that part of what I like about my Barbie as an adult is that she’s a blank slate — what Barbie is capable of is defined only by the roles we deem acceptable for her. To look at Barbie and decide that she can’t be president only reflects our inability to see beyond her physique.
Barbie’s a tough woman to love because she makes us question what is acceptable femininity.
I would love to be able to write that I thought attitudes toward developing girls and their dolls had changed, but what made me think about my Barbie today was a link to a story about Dora the Explorer. I like Dora the Explorer. I like her curiosity y a ver un personaje que habla español en la televisión. Apparently, 10 years after her creation, Dora is ready to move on to middle school and the artists at Nickelodeon have designed a new, more grown up Dora to make the transition. They’ve released a silhouette:
Figure 3: Middle school Dora. I think her shoes look cute.
Lyn Mikel Brown of Colby College and Sharon Lamb of St Michael’s College, authors of Packaging Girlhood ask, “What next? Dora the Cheerleader? Dora the fashionista with stylish purse and stilettos? Dora the Pop Star with Hoppin’ Dance Club and ‘Juice” Bar?’” On their website they continue:
But we know the truth. If the original Dora grew up, she wouldn’t be a fashion icon or a shopaholic. She’d develop her map reading skills and imagine the places she could go. She’d capitalize on those problem solving skills to design new ways to bring fresh water to communities in need around the world. Maybe she’d become a world class runner or follow her love of animals and become a wildlife preservationist or biologist.
I don’t see why Dora can’t grow up to be all of those things while still choosing a skirt and ballet flats. [Or how it's her fault that she has developed a more womanly shape.] I can still write a differential equation in a pair of Naughty Monkeys. But, 59% of responders to a New York Daily News poll deemed the new Dora too sexual based on her silhouette alone.
This all makes me realize that much of the disdain young women feel towards their developing forms, the self-loathing at being perceived as potentially sexual beings, comes in part from how we treat them. To say that the new Dora or the old Barbie are too sexual because of their narrow waists and widened hips, even when we put them in the role of President, teaches girls that they are defined primarily by their physical form — that the development of secondary sexual characteristics means their primary identity is sexual. These secondary characteristics are, thus, something to be ashamed of.
So, forgive me for being a tool of the patriarchy, but I’ll take Barbie. She might have a disproportionately huge rack, but I still think she has the potential to be anything we want her to be.
One big reason more moms (and dads) don't "lean in" at the office is that they just don't want more work.
As Catherine Rampell at the New York Timeshasbeen reminding us for the past week, that's true for the majority of workers. According to the Families and Work Institute, just 37 percent of working women and 44 percent of working men said they wanted more responsibility at the office in 2008, the last year of data (see below).
Those figures got me wondering, though: When, exactly, do women and men stop trying to climb the corporate ladder? And why? Is it just about having children or is it something else?
To find out, I asked the Institute to break down its 2008 findings by age group, which produced the graph below. It tells a simple story: By our mid-to-late-20s, the desire to take on more responsibility fades fast for both men and women.
In other words, ambition starts sliding right around the time most Americans start having kids. (The median woman has her first child at around age 26). And though women slide a bit further than men, both sexes become less interested in a promotion as they age.* That's right in keeping with what Pew has found about the converging roles of mothers and fathers. At some point in our 30s, most of us lean back.
____________________
*To try and figure out whether this was directly related to motherhood, I took at look at the Institute's numbers comparing mothers under 44 with non-mothers. Unfortunately, the differences they showed weren't statistically significant, thanks to the sample sizes.
On July 7, 1928, Missouri's Chillicothe Baking Company made history by selling the first wrapped package of sliced bread in history.
What took so long?
It starts with the whole wrapping-the-loaf thing. Sliced bread goes stale remarkably quickly, as anybody who's forgotten to tie that little wire thing around a plastic bread bag has learned a million times already. So the trick is inventing a machine that cuts the bread finely while efficiently and securely wrapping the entire loaf.
In 1912, Otto Frederick Rohwedder, a jeweler from Missouri, solved the problem. He invented prototype of a machine that could both slice and wrap a loaf of bread ... only to see his invention destroyed in a fire. Fifteen years and a few tweaks later, he filed this patent, the first ever for a "MACHINE FOR SLICING AN ENTIRE LOAF OF BREAD AT A SINGLE LOCATION."
At first bakers were not impressed, Don Voorhees explained in Why Do Donuts Have Holes?: Fascinating Facts About What We Eat And Drink. The machine failed in aesthetics where it succeeded in convenience, "[producing] loaves that did not sell because they were sloppy looking." Sliced bread needed a makeover before families realized how great it was ...
Enter one Gustav Papendick. The St. Louis baker brought Rohwedder's second machine in 1928 and perfected it. His improved design packaged the sliced loaves in cardboard trays, keeping the bread neat and orderly, and wrapped it in wax paper.
The first commercial bakery to try a bread-slicing machine was the Chillicothe Baking Company in Chillicothe, Missouri. Sales weren't fast and furious, though. Bakeries were skeptical about the public's acceptance of presliced bread. They thought that the drawbacks of having to buy new equipment and having to wrap the bread right away to keep the slices together might not be worth the trouble. After all, what if this pre sliced bread thing was just a passing fad? Would people really buy bread that would get stale faster just so they wouldn't have to slice it themselves?
Apparently the bakers weren't very farsighted. Presliced bread went national when Wonder introduced it to the country in 1930.
You know the rest. Except for a brief ban on presliced bread at the end of the Second World War (to preserve both food and metal for soldiers), the invention stimulated America's love affair with loaves. And as Americans ate more breads, Voorhees noted, they also ate more spreads: butter, jams, jellies, and so on.
So, two business lessons from sliced bread for the road. First, all innovation is tweaking. Rohwedder's prototype couldn't sell until Papendick perfected it, and presliced bread didn't go mainstream until Wonder Bread took it national two years later. Second, never make a financial bet against American laziness. Bakers who thought American families wouldn't want a service that saved them seconds at the kitchen counter clearly didn't understand the time demands of American families.
The other day I was surprised that a group of reporters failed to call out what seemed to be an obvious exaggeration by Republican Congresspeople in a press conference. Did the reporters not realize that a 25% unemployment rate among college graduates in 2013 is implausible, were they not paying attention, or do they just assume they’re being fed lies all the time so they don’t bother?
Last semester I launched an aggressive campaign to teach the undergraduate students in my class the size of the US population. If you don’t know that – and some large portion of them didn’t – how can you interpret statements such as, “On average, 24 people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in the United States.” In this case the source followed up with, “Over the course of a year, that equals more than 12 million women and men.” But, is that a lot? It’s a lot more in the United States than it would be in China. (Unless you go with, “any rape is too many,” in which case why use a number at all?)
Anyway, just the US population isn’t enough. I decided to start a list of current demographic facts you need to know just to get through the day without being grossly misled or misinformed – or, in the case of journalists or teachers or social scientists, not to allow your audience to be grossly misled or misinformed. Not trivia that makes a point or statistics that are shocking, but the non-sensational information you need to know to make sense of those things when other people use them. And it’s really a ballpark requirement; when I tested the undergraduates, I gave them credit if they were within 20% of the US population – that’s anywhere between 250 million and 380 million!
I only got as far as 22 facts, but they should probably be somewhere in any top-100. And the silent reporters the other day made me realize I can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good here. I’m open to suggestions for others (or other lists if they’re out there).
Philip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and writes the blog Family Inequality. You can follow him on Twitter or Facebook.
Email is all-pervasive, and arguably one of the most important tools of modern business. But the fact is most of us are not particularly good at it, wasting time on messages we should ignore and losing track of those that we should be focusing on. Then there's the base human instinct to cc: everyone in our address notebook whenever possible.
What are the best ways to take control and optimize your use of email? Quartz turned to academic research from around the world and other thoughtful sources to compile these insights and suggestions.
If You Want a Reply, Ask Simple Questions A group of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University sought to understand how people attend to incoming email. They found that people are more likely to respond to information requests--whether important or trivial--if they're easy to address. Social messages also get a quick reply because they're "fun." By contrast, very important but complex messages that require a lot of work to answer often don't get a response. (For a recent take on how to get important people to read your emails, you can read Adam Grant's six-point checklist.)
Do Not Disturb Researchers from Loughborough University in the UK studied how being interrupted by emails affects productivity. They found that on average workers allow themselves to be interrupted every five minutes by emails. The researchers concluded that this level of interruption was negatively impacting workplace productivity and drew up the following recommendations:
Check email no more frequently than once every 45 minutes.
Don't cc: lots of people on messages
Turn off incoming email notifications and set up email clients to display the sender, subject line and the first three lines of the email to make messages easier to scan and triage.
Sign the Charter Chris Anderson, curator of the TED conferences, drew up an email charter to stem the flow of flooded inboxes. The 10 rules of the charter are all intended to clamp down on how chained to our emails we've become. The first and fundamental principle of the charter is the onus falls on the sender to ensure the email takes the least possible amount of time to process, even if that means taking more time before sending. Other rules include avoiding replying to messages with single line messages that say things like "Great!" and not using email signatures or logos that appear as attachments.
The idea is to stick a link to the charter at the bottom of your emails so that when you take a couple of days to reply, or appear curt, you not only have something to justify your behavior, but you encourage others to do the same.
Email Is Still the Office Favorite In a study of communication habits of small companies, researchers from the FX Palo Alto Laboratory found email to be the favored method of workplace communication. This was closely followed by face-to-face interactions. One of the reasons for this is the written record nature of email. Workers are keen to send emails to ensure proposals, schedules and ideas are documented for future reference.
Technical People Still Like to Email In a study in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, researchers found that technical workers such as IT professionals prefer email over face-to-face communication because it allows them the time to process information more deeply than face-to-face communications. Email is also an ideal medium for reviewing and revising work. Another reason for technical professionals' preference for it is that it allows them to go back over complex exchanges of information.
Don't Use Email When You Don't Have To Is it possible to reduce, or even phase out, the use of email within offices? Virginia Tech researcher Aditya Johri found that a strong "communication ecology"--i.e. a mix of internal blogs, instant messaging, and social networks--drastically reduces the need for email. Which means messages that do go have to go through email are less likely to get lost in a daily flood of them.
Workplace-Email Training Helps A German study asked whether workplace training on best practices for email could have any impact on productivity. The training focused on three key areas--improving coping techniques for handling large volumes of incoming email, improving personal workflow, and enhancing email literacy in order to bring more clarity to communication. Roman Soucek and Klaus Moser from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg found that employee stress from being overwhelmed by their inboxes was reduced, as was the number of interruptions incurred from emails. Employees also made better use of the range of email functions available to them. The one area that training didn't help with, however, was in deciphering ambiguous emails. In these cases, face-to-face communications was still needed to understand what the sender was trying to say.
No Matter What, Gossiping Is Pervasive Tanushree Mitra and Eric Gilbert from the Georgia Institute of Technology found that gossip is all-pervasive in organizations and that it appears both in personal exchanges as well as formal business communications. By studying the email usage of Enron employees released in court filings, Mitra and Gilbert also found organizational gossip to be a social process that involves gossip sources (its generators) and gossip sinks (its silent readers.) Mitra and Gilbert concluded that if companies can scan employees' email to identify gossip sources, they could get a better idea of workplace mood. It doesn't make things any better, but if you gossip over your work email you can know at least that you're not alone.
The older authority figure wins the
trust of the young target by cultivating a false friendship, having
heart-to-heart conversations, giving gifts, offering protection. And then the
sex ensues, sometimes forced, sometimes seemingly consensual.
It is a classic predatory tactic known as “grooming,”
and no one familiar with it could have been terribly surprised when a new
report from the U.S. Department of Justice declared that young people in the
country’s juvenile detention facilities are being victimized in just this way.
The youngsters in custody are often deeply troubled, lacking parents, looking
for allies. And the people in charge of the facilities wield great power over
the day-to-day lives of their charges.
What was a genuine shock to many
was the finding that in the vast majority of instances, it was female staff
members who were targeting and exploiting the male teens in their custody.
The phenomenon -- a particularly
unexamined corner of the nation’s long-troubled juvenile justice system –
presents an array of challenges for those concerned about better protecting
young people in custody: encouraging male teens to understand such sex is, in
fact, a crime, that it is never really consensual, and that its long term
effects can be seriously harmful; requiring corrections officials to stop
blaming the young boys and meaningfully punish the female staffers; and
establishing standards of conduct meant to end the abuse.
“Many corrections leaders continue
to minimize this abuse, arguing that it’s the kids who are manipulating the
staff, that these boys are asking for it,” said Lovisa Stannow, executive
director of the California-based nonprofit Just Detention International, which
advocates for the elimination of prison rape. “That’s simply not good enough.”
In the last three years, the
numbers haven’t changed much.
The Justice Department released its
second
reportlast
month, and this time researchers surveyed more than 8,700 juveniles housed
in 326 facilities across the country. In all, the facilities house more
than 18,000 juveniles, representing about one quarter of the nation’s total
number of youngsters living in detention centers.
Drawing on their sample, Justice
Department researchers estimate that 1,390 juveniles in the facilities they
examined have experienced sex abuse at the hands of the staff supervising them,
a
rate of nearly 8 percent. Twenty percent who said they were victimized by
staff said it happened on
more than 10 occasions. Nine
out of 10 victims were males abused by female staff.
Nearly
two-thirds of the abused youngsters said that the officials lured them into
sexual relationships by giving them special treatment, treating them like a
favorite, giving gifts and pictures.
Stannow said that the rate of abuse
perpetrated by female guards on male victims is the result of a “dangerous combination”
of cultural and institutional problems, not the least of which is the fact that
women forcing males into sex does not comport with society’s conventional
definition of rape.
“When you have an extreme power
differential and absolute unchecked power, bad things start happening,” Stannow
said. “When you combine this with a culture where sex abuse by females on males
isn’t taken seriously, then you have the perfect set-up for women with all this
power to get away with it.”
Stannow and others say that the
young male victims themselves may not even consider their relationships with
women to constitute sex abuse. They might consider it consensual because they
didn’t actively fight off their abusers.
“The biggest concern for me is what this
means they’re not getting inside detention, which is a positive relationship
with adults and with authority figures. They’ve not learned what those positive
relationships should be like, and, for many, they’ve never had them in their
life,” said Michele Deitch, an attorney and senior lecturer at the University
of Texas’s School of Public Affairs in Austin.
“These boys aren’t getting the
kinds of treatment and programming that are supposed to make them more
productive citizens and healthier youth,” said Deitch, who focuses on improving
safety conditions in prisons and juvenile detention centers. “Many have
experienced trauma their entire lives and now this is just more trauma for them
to deal with.”
Reggie Wilkinson, the former
director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, said that
consensual sex between a corrections officer and an inmate is impossible given
the power imbalance between the two.
But he also said that, in some
cases, both female guards and the boys they molest share some responsibility.
“There’s no such thing as
consensual sex when you are supervising someone, regardless of their age, but
the reality of it is that some of the guys in prison are very persuasive and
some of the women are very persuasive,” Wilkinson said.
“I’m not sure anybody has got a
real handle on why the Bureau of Justice Statistics is finding these kinds of
numbers, but it’s on the radar screen of a lot of people.”
Wilkinson and Stannow agree that it
is important to keep women as detention facility personnel. They often do great
work. But the predators, they say, must be identified, halted and prosecuted.
“I think in many cases female staff
are better suited than males,” Wilkinson said. “A good mix of staff is what we
always want. That so-called motherly impact is a big deal and women who are
stern but fair with the inmates I think can perform that job as well as any
male could.”
Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan bagged herself a deer on a hunting trip to Wyoming with Justice Antonin Scalia last fall. You heard that right: Despite finding themselves on opposite sides of major court decisions, the liberal Obama-appointee and the conservative Reagan-appointee have become hunting buddies since Kagan was confirmed in 2010 as the fourth woman in history to sit on the highest court in the land.
"I shoot birds with him, fairly -- you know, two or three times a year now," Justice Kagan said during a wide-ranging and delightful Aspen Ideas Festival conversation with Jeffrey Rosen, president of the National Constitution Center, on Saturday. "And then he um, at the end of last year we had been bird shooting four or five times. I'll tell you how that came to be. But before I do, before I -- he said to me, 'It's time for big game hunting.' And we actually went out to Wyoming this past fall to shoot deer and antelope. Uh, and we did."
"You're getting some hisses from the audience. I hope you were a better shot than Dick Cheney," Rosen interjected as a smattering of hisses emerged from around the room at the mention of hunting in Wyoming.
Dispatches from the Aspen Ideas Festival. Full coverage.
"I shot myself a deer," Kagan continued. "The way this started, I'll tell the story. You know the NRA has become quite a presence in judicial confirmations, and that means when you go around from office to office, from chamber to chamber, I met with about 80 senators individually and quite a lot of them, both Republicans and Democrats, ask you about your views on the Second Amendment. But because you don't say on anything about your views on anything, when they ask you well, they'll try to figure out what your views on the Second Amendment are likely to be and they'll say, 'Well, have you ever held a gun? Have you ever gone hunting? Do you know anybody who's gone hunting?' And you know me, Jeff, I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and this was not something we really did, you know.
"And so I kept on having these conversations where I would say no and no and no and I was -- and finally somebody said to me, one of these sets of these questions, and so I said, 'You know senator,' I said, 'if you were to invite me hunting, I would really love to go.' And this look of total horror passed over his face. You know, 'Has this woman just invited herself hunting with me?' And I thought, I've gone too far, and then I sort of pulled back and I said, 'I didn't really mean to invite myself, but I'll tell you what, if I am lucky enough to be confirmed, I will ask Justice Scalia to take me hunting.'
"And I went to Justice Scalia when I got onto the court, and I said, 'This is the only promise I made during my entire confirmation proceedings, so you have to help me fulfill it.' And he thought it was hilarious. He thought it was a total crackup. And so, there you go."
A new survey categorizes about 1 in 5 Americans as “religious progressives.” Catholics make up the largest proportion of that group in terms of religious affiliation, at 29 percent. (Mainline Protestants are next at 19 percent.) Religious progressive on average are younger (44) than the general population (47) and religious conservatives (53).
