Flying Shortbread

Lead from behind

2012-01-28T10:13:00.003+02:00

http://dovbaron.podomatic.com/

AMY SHOWALTER
• yaktivist vs activist
• ego vs getting something done
• action shock vs action achievement
• street cred
• play by the rules
• they could have taken the easy way, but didn't
• underdog
• unconventional in how you do it, but still moral
• eyes up in a top dog world
• pious and self aggradising
• passionista - good in two circumstances - one: show passion of the top dog's interests and two: make top dog feel like a hero - calm face to face discussion first and don't start to look like a radical - make sure your passion is networkable - not just you
• making a presentation: start with what's in it for them
• time and personal contact with people you are persuading it
• how you put your personal brand across, your reputation
• changing minds through proximity
• building your pack
• takes the pack to make it happen
• team - cohesive team leader, convert communicator, connected pack members
need advocates who are connected
• engage humor, think friendly and funny
• universal law - be nice, be meek, be kind

DANIEL PINK
• show vulnerability
• make rules as a team
• let them do it their way

GURUS
Jonathan Jay - Sack Your Boss
Daniel Lavanga - The Law of Sevens
Mark McKergow
Peter Thompson
Richard Koch
David Thomas
Nicky Pattinson
Paul McGee - Shut Up, Move On
Pete Godfrey
Mike Dooley - Notes From The Universe
Stuart Goldsmith

TED Sheena Iyengar: How to make choosing easier

2012-01-25T10:15:00.002+02:00

cut - less units to choose from
concretise - make it real
categories - more categories, fewer choices
condition - let me practice complexity

The philosophy of ambiguity, the idiosyncrasies of English

2012-01-19T08:02:00.002+02:00

The main reason that Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.
I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, 'where's the self- help section?' she said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.
What if there were no hypothetical questions?
If a deaf person signs swear words, does his mother wash his hands with soap?
If someone with multiple personalities threatens to kill himself, is it considered a hostage situation?
Is there another word for synonym?
Where do forest rangers go to 'get away from it all?'
What do you do when you see an endangered animal eating an endangered plant?
If a parsley farmer is sued, can they garnish his wages?
Why do they lock gas station bathrooms are they afraid someone will clean them?
If a turtle doesn't have a shell, is he homeless or naked?
Can vegetarians eat animal crackers?
If the police arrest a mime, do they tell him he has the right to remain silent?
Why do they put Braille on the drive-through bank machines?
How do they get deer to cross the road only at those yellow road signs?
What was the best thing before sliced bread?
One nice thing about egotists: they don't talk about other people.
Do infants enjoy infancy as much as adults enjoy adultery?
How is it possible to have a civil war?
If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?
Whose cruel idea was it for the word 'lisp' to have 's' in it?
Why are haemorrhoids called 'haemorrhoids' instead of 'assteroids'?
Why is it called tourist season if we can't shoot at them?
Why is there an expiration date on sour cream?
If you spin an oriental person in a circle three times, do they become disoriented?
Can an atheist get insurance against acts of god?

The Big Picture: Why Can't a Woman ... Be a Man?

2012-01-06T10:35:00.001+02:00

With all of its bustling and agenda setting, the new Democratic majority ought to think about passing an Affirmative Action Resolution for Women in Movies. Madame Speaker, women are more than half the population of this great country, yet onscreen they're an endangered species--the ivory-billed woodpeckers of cinema.

Visit your multiplex, and try, just try, to find a movie where women are as plentiful and powerful as men. 300, the Spartan workout video, has one important female role, of King Leonidas' wife (Lena Headey); that leaves 299 for the guys. In Shooter, the hero-on-the-run gets brief assistance from a young widow (Kate Mara) before returning to his mission of evaporating a million bad guys. Girlish Jon Heder, one of the two skaters in the Will Ferrell hit Blades of Glory, does have a love interest (Jenna Fischer), but Ferrell doesn't--unless it's Heder. Indeed, the one big new movie fully populated with strong women is the "double feature" Grindhouse, from those epicures of raw meat, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez.

Only the AARP set may recall that movie women used to be on an equal footing with men. Female characters were at the center of some of the top-grossing films in history, from Gone With the Wind to The Sound of Music and Titanic (sort of). Now they mostly ornament the margins. If they're lucky.
One reason for the vanishing movie female is that the genres in which women used to be equal or dominant--the romantic melodrama and comedy--fell out of favor when the core audience changed from families to teen boys. The guy-kids prefer starker fare: action movies (one man against the system), science fantasy (techies save the solar system) and horror films (where young women are the naked and the dead, usually in that order). What didn't change was Hollywood's view of the sexes: that men are defined by their exploits, women by their emotions. In a movie era that found sentimentality risible, thus unprofitable, the ladies were excluded.

Even in comedy, where women were mandatory for smart repartee and the fade-out kiss, guys have elbowed them out of the equation. Forget Tracy and Hepburn. Today the standard pairing is some combination of Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Ferrell and one or more Wilsons. Wedding Crashers, Talladega Nights and Blades of Glory are basically male love stories: boy bonds with boy, boy breaks up with boy, boy and boy make up. The female interest is strictly nominal.

Old Hollywood had men-only genres too, especially the western. Cowboy films allowed for a token lady part, to give the hero someone to fight over; but she would never do the fighting, instead cowering, paralyzed with dread, during the final showdown. It wasn't until the exploitation movies of the '60s and '70s--the ones paid lavish tribute in Grindhouse--that the gals in guy-genre films finally had something to do: take charge, kick ass and kill people. The films weren't exactly feminist, since the actresses usually had to take off their blouses before they could flex their muscles. But they gave women a snarly, ballsy attitude, and the chance to be as quick on the draw as John Wayne.
In Planet Terror, Rodriguez's half of Grindhouse, a go-go dancer (Rose McGowan) loses a leg when zombies chew it off--wait, it gets weirder--and instead of a prosthetic limb has her stump fitted with a machine gun, which she uses to mow down acres of the undead. Death Proof, Tarantino's contribution, presents two trios of high-adrenaline chicks menaced by a psycho stunt driver. The women in both entries love guns and cars and don't mind using them for righteous vengeance and reckless thrills.

For these directors, female empowerment means armament; they liberate their movie women by turning them into men. They will show their actresses killing villains but never making love. (When two lovers start a sex scene in Planet Terror, the screen flames out and a sign, MISSING REEL, appears.) So the young males in the audience get not a window into the complex and mysterious nature of women but a mirror of their own urges: to talk tough and blow stuff up.

Speaker Pelosi, is this the legacy you want to leave your grandchildren?

By: Richard Corliss

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1607257,00.html

Racial slurs or racial markers

2012-01-06T10:30:00.001+02:00

Racism and Comedians: I agree with Silverman, there's never a reason to use a slur; and saying a word like 'woman', kinda cuts you off from men, e.g. The women took issue with the men's lascivious ass-slapping. What if it's a question, e.g. Hey, you're a woman, do you wanna make a case against those men for lascivious ass-slapping? Can racial and gender references be interchanged... I dare not give an example. *terrified* :) Great article.

"The license to borrow terms other people have taken back can worry even edgy comics. A few months ago, I interviewed (Sarah) Silverman, who argued that her material was not racist but about racism (and I agree). But she added something that surprised me, coming from her: "I'm not saying 'I can say nigger because I'm liberal.' There is a certain aspect of that that I'm starting to get grossed out by. 'Oh, we're not racist. We can say it.'"

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1609807-1,00.html

Township seminar at UP

2011-11-14T08:30:00.000+02:00

Click here to listen to the podcast

Half of the speaking team.

Mark Gevisser;

Sakhela Buhlungu;

Angus Gibson;

Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom;

Anton Harber;

Tsepo wa Marnatu;

Chris van Wyk.

Gevisser:

Place to talk across boundaries. In and outside of university. Across that boundary.

All male panel. Ironically women are vulnerable (corrective rape) in township. Apologizes that women will remain vulnerable.

Will each speak for 10 mins on their work and how it changes how we think of township. Then the resident scholar will comment on what they said and ask questions that bring it together.

Harber:

Jokes about the diff between Wits and UP.

Doesn't describe Diepsloot as a township. Reasons why he'd wanted to write about Diepsloot. 1994 arose. Product of transitional period. Townships are enforced segregation. Calls it a settlement. Core area is called the reception area (received for allocation). People are stuck there. Diepsloot is JHBs reception area.

Legal and technical sense. Diepsloot had a delay because PTA and JHB argued about who should provide the services. So Diepsloot is an aspirant township. Only one section is informal so it's not an informal settlement. It's structure and organized. The state has to assert it's authority.

'Service delivery' is so passive. They are not active participants. 'consultation 'participative development'. Local business people got the tenders - 'corruption'? RDP one size fits all. Complex reality, pride of origin and a desire to leave - residents are ambivalent.

Mamatu:

What did 'township' never mean? The positive and romantic, ubuntu. The township is a place people go back to for funerals and for the vibe. It's a ship that never went to town. The place remains the same.

Not Soweto. It's changing. So forget Soweto. It's good to be born in the township, but don't die there. It's not fit for humans. People there lack agency, no advancement, victims, valueless, no future. Art shows those things. Contrasted to suburbia. Why would you want to show that there are good things about a township. It's unconscionable.

You'd dress up to come to town. You have to raise yourself to go to the city - a better place. The city keeps marginalizing you. You work hard to be a part of it, but the city doesn't want you.

'As long as' is a Bantu expression, make do for the time being, at leastness. At least you have a school. The least of being. Toilet is outside. Public, exposed. Spectacle.

We have at leastness leaders. Some leaders had less. The leader has a higher bar he has to attain. He's not good enough for the big world. We see the leader from this bifocal way.

Townships are an insult to people's humanity. Why are they still there. The formula is flawed.

Grootboom:

Tries to look for redeeming aspects of township. Wanted to show gritty, but came up redeeming. Beautiful confusion. The beautiful mess.

He hated the township. Grew up in Soweto. Lived near the hostels. Faction fights between parties. Spent little time in schools because of disruptions. Necklacing. Stayaways. Felt there was no hope. School was a way to get out. As a writer he was more objective and nostalgia takes over. Grandparents missed townships. Long after apartheid they are still there. Still growing. Homelands are hated. Townships should be hated.

There are people living there, it's not that they are destitute. There are all sorts of classes. The community functions.

The desire is to represent where you come from. Make the people rounded, make the audience shocked that those people are the same as people from the city.

Gibson:

From Durban. Overlooked the sea. Culture was over the sea. The local view repelled. Radio depressed. The timbre of white radio. First political memory - mother say Verwoerd has been stabbed to death. Didn't know who Verwoerd was. Family disconnected from South Africa. Goals didn't involve local. Didn't see or register images of townships.

Blacks wore American stuff with their own style. This interested him. The minedump he once climbed showed him Soweto for the first time. The scale of that image that something that big could be hidden for so long was shocking. Afraid to go there.

Those were the streets that hooked and kept him here. Absence of image of township and black life. Designed as spaces that one doesn't linger in. Migrant labour that goes home. White people needed permits to go into township. Footage of townships was shot over police shoulders. Wanted to make verité films and needed a collaborator an insider. A poet and intellectual and his pal, the thug rub shoulders together.

Found archival images that we are familiar with but that couldn't be seen in the 70s. Few images of blacks and they were victims. He made documentaries in a vacuum. People could only speak about their own experience. Absence of the naturalist image. Yizo Yizo wanted the people to be what they really were.

Van Wyk:

White people have a preconceptions of what happens in the township. Horrified at being introduced by a whitey as choosing between gangster and writer. Not true. People knew the gangsters on the township, but not the names of the writers.

His township book - it's skinner. Should he use their real names. Not realising that it would sell 20 000 copies. Worried about it but the editor didn't think it was necessary. He had to move.

The people love that he wrote about their story. That they are interconnected.

Now lives in a sterile white suburb. You don't have to end up in the township. But has visited the township. People think that his accent will change.

Buhlungu:

Will respond to the presentations. Sociology professor focuses on activism. Labour. Politics.

Township is familiar. People have something to say. It symbolizes many things. Resistance, suffering, battles, wars, apartheid, shameful. They have produced leaders and rapists. Two contrasting views - jewels or hellholes. There's a website. South African townships are true jewels of the country. Heritage. Art. Sports. Culture revival.

Skosana carried a cross and did a hunger strike because the hellhole of crime still exists. It's a burden to be black today.

Issues: the good and the bad live side by side, difficult to untangle. Are the townships fir whites, colored and blacks the same? Place where people can practice their culture. Standards are relaxed, the bar is lowered. If a crook offers you goods you buy them. Celebrate and tolerate mediocrity. Materialism is good that's how you measure people. How you got them doesn't matter. I only steal from white people. State has promoted and encouraged entitlement. Service delivery is the worst thing in post 1994. The grant. What's next. Individuals never have to take over.

What he feels we should talk about. Can you talk about townships without talking about rural areas and white suburbs. Mobility means move away. Townships are diverse. There's apartheid in the townships. What are the differences between the kinds. Hierarchy. Has that been demolished. The protests don't happen in the townships. Townships move. White suburbs become townships because the whites move out when the townships arrive. Apartheid was about space and ascribing that space with power or powerlessness. That hasn't ended. It's going to stay with us. The politicians abandoned the townships first. The majority is represented by people who don't live with them.

Questions

Alumni culture, money should be reinvested into home. Mamatu: We must start over. Get rid if the townships. Raze it accountability of the rich, are they looting the poor. Gibson: working on a science fiction, envisioning an idealistic view of what can happen. Buhlungu: black diamonds (people who make it in the white suburbs) won't be attacked. Politicians are attacked, it will accelerate.

Townships are racialised by the speakers, but everyone lives in a version of the townships. What about what the role of the township is today. The past of the township is different from the present. Soweto is a farce, it always matters where you come from. Structural elements make it hard to succeed. Oprahvisation of the township. We don't show them as they are. We mutter about potholes, the labs in the township schools are derelict.

Diepsloot's trouble were political, not that they were attacking their neighboring white suburb, Dainfern.

Poem: Pretty by Katie Makkai

2011-11-04T09:08:00.001+02:00

See the poem performed on YouTube

When I was just a little girl, I asked my mother
“What will I be? Will I be pretty?”
Will I be pretty? Will I be pretty?
What comes next?
Oh right,
will I be rich which is almost pretty
depending on where you shop.
And the pretty question infects from conception
passing blood and breath into cells.
The word hangs from our mothers’ hearts
in a shrill of fluorescent floodlight of worry.

“Will I be wanted? Worthy? Pretty?”
But puberty left me this funhouse mirror dryad:
teeth set at science fiction angles,
crooked nose,
face donkey-long
and pox-marked where the hormones went finger-painting
my poor mother.

“How could this happen? You’ll have porcelain skin as soon as we can see a dermatologist.”
“You sucked your thumb. That’s why your teeth look like that!”
“You were hit in the face with a Frisbee when you were six, otherwise your nose would have been just fine!”

Don’t worry; we will get it all fixed she would say,
grasping my face, twisting it this way and that
as if it were a cabbage she might buy.

But, this is not about her.
Not her fault she, too, was raised to believe
the greatest asset she could bestow upon her awkward little girl was a marketable facade.

By sixteen I was pickled by ointments, medications, peroxides.
Teeth corralled into steel prongs, laying in a hospital bed.
Face packed with gauze, cushioning the brand new nose the surgeon had carved.
Belly gorged on two pints of my own blood I had swallowed under anesthesia,
and every convulsive twist, of my gut, like my body screaming at me from the inside out
“What did you let them do to you?”
All the while, this never ending chorus droning on and on
like the IV needle dripping liquid beauty into my blood.

“Will I be pretty?” Will I be pretty like my mother,
unwrapping the gift wrap to reveal the bouquet of daughter her $10,000 bought her?
Pretty? Pretty.

And now I have not seen my own face in ten years.
I have not seen my own face in ten years,
but this is not about me!
This is about the self-mutilating circus we have painted ourselves clowns in.
About women who will prowl thirty stores in six malls to find the right cocktail dress,
but who haven’t a clue where to find fulfillment or how to wear joy,
wandering through life shackled to a shopping bag, beneath those two pretty syllables.

About men wallowing on barstools, drearily practicing attraction
And everyone who will drift home tonight
crestfallen because not enough strangers found you suitably faceable.

This, this is about my own some-day daughter.
When you approach me, already stung-stained with insecurity,
begging, “Mom, will I be pretty? Will I be pretty?”
I will wipe that question from your mouth like cheap lipstick and answer no.
The word pretty is unworthy of everything you will be, and no child of mine will be contained in five letters. You will be pretty intelligent, pretty creative, pretty amazing, but you will never be merely “pretty”.

Masculinity and feminity

2011-10-27T09:30:00.004+02:00

what it mean to be a 'real' man/woman and the responsibilities that come with these roles

• in my culture, we define manhood as a stage where a man is grown up when he reaches 21 years and initiated or go to mountain, and he can get married but still under guidance & care of parents
• womanhood is a stage where a girl reaches 15 years and started to see her period and graduated in an initiation school and she will be called "Khoba" which means a virgin girl ready for the world

Real Man is someone who is the King, the head, the president and the leader in his family. As the head is expected to have the following:
• He must have the plan for the family (Clear Vision) for his wife and children. He must know how to provide for the family and have policies that he use to lead the family.
• He must have the eyes to see the needs of his family.

Real Woman is a helpmate who must provide support for her husband to be able to fulfill the role of being a leader int he family. She must believe in the leadership of the husband and be influenced by it. As the deputy president, she is expected to have the following:
• She must submissive to her husband
• she must respect the husband, she must understand that respect is not a token of being a slave but a commanded quality which works for the good of the mankind.
• She must always appreciate her husband
• She must meet the sexual needs of her husband
• She must act like a heart in the body
• She must act like a neck that support the head
• She must act like the arms in the body

Source: Facebook (sic-ced), originally from a powerpoint presentation

Religions

2011-10-06T15:55:00.003+02:00

Religion is always worth it. I have nothing against any religion. I love religions.

I don't believe in hell. But I also don't believe in so many other things, this is just one of the things. I know that whether I believe in it or not doesn't make it existent or not. I know that I have to understand what it means for those that believe in it. Just like I have to understand all the things that people believe in, or at least allow for it. I don't challenge it, I think.

The fact that I don't believe will always be taken as a judgment, just like differing opinions always imply judgment of some kind. The only way people can communicate, is by suspending their taking of a difference of opinion personally, and by finding a workaround.

fetsiboomsticks

On white silence.

2011-10-01T07:58:00.001+02:00

Samantha Vice also advocates for white people at least a partial silence and a political humility which would prevent white people from engaging in the politics of the day. White people have power. When they speak, they speak with the authority and arrogance that inevitably flows from their whiteness. Hence, says Vice, it is morally risky to speak publicly in our society if one is a white person. I have three responses to that: First, do we not have the duty to take this risk? Is it not a bit precious — showing perhaps inadvertently too much concern for ones own ethical purity and ones status as a not so bad person — by not wanting to take risks and not wanting to make mistakes? Is this not a move to avoid exposing oneself to ridicule, hatred, criticism, accusations of racism and arrogance, of sexism and homophobia, which might well be levelled against some of us by others who, surely, we must be careful not wish to construct as utterly powerless victims of whiteness and of what white people do and say? Surely, despite the structural inequalities and the effects of past and ongoing racism and racial discrimination in our country, it would be highly problematic to hold that white people should be silent because this will be somehow respectful of black people and the powerlessness they experience in the face of white privilege? I do not experience black South Africans as powerless or being in need of my silence and I worry that believing that would be fundamentally patronising and disempowering towards black South Africans. If I make a mistake, if I talk and my words are seeped in whiteness or the arrogance that is associated with white structural privilege, I know that I will be told so in no uncertain terms by others — and rightly so. And is this not a better way to work on the self? By engaging with the world, with fellow South Africans, by doing so in a manner that is fully aware of ones privilege, by taking the risks, by getting it wrong and reflecting on why one got it wrong and trying again and by demonstrating in word and deed that one is not the font of all wisdom? Is this not how we even begin to embark on a journey of becoming full and equal citizens in this country? Will the silence, then, not be a whitely silence? Silence can appear like a cop out, like and avoidance of the burden of having to take decisions and taking risks, and for taking responsibility for one’s whiteness and for inevitably getting it wrong and taking responsibility for the effects of structural privilege and for doing something about it? Source: Pierre de Vos. http://constitutionallyspeaking.co.za/revisiting-whiteness/. (This is the part that got me thinking, the other bits not so much.)

To-Do Lists

2011-08-17T12:40:00.003+02:00

The normal list-making that I do goes like this.

TASKS IN INBOX
• think of something
• get out iPhone and send myself an email
• first word of subject - Task.
e.g. Task. Get tickets at Computicket for Pandora

OPTIONAL
I filter my emails that 'Task' gets a favorite star and a Tag (label) called Task. I can then easily see what the tasks are. I can also search for Task and it will show me all my emails that begin with the word Task, and I sort that list by date. As soon as I have done the Task, I simply take off the favorite star and Archive and it archives to the folder Task. Then I can even look and see what I have already done. That feels good!

CRITICAL AMOUNTS OF TASKS
This way I can see how many Tasks I have on hand. I can see that there are 29 Tasks in my inbox - 30 is my limit. When I hit 30, I take two hours each day and kill them. Thwack!

LONG-TERM TASKS TREATED SEPARATELY
Then there are the long-term tasks, e.g. LT Task. Website idea for jobless people. "LT" stands for long-term.

PRIORITISING AND DECIDING WHAT'S IMPORTANT
When they are all lying there staring at me, and they reach 29 tasks, somehow knowing that I have to make time for a thing on that list, makes me evaluate its necessity. I found that seeing what remains on my list in pressured situations tells me a lot about myself. Fascinating!

TODOIST
This was a site I used to do:
http://todoist.com/

But I prefer that I can see my to-do list in my email box, where I check my emails. It serves as a reminder.

TED: Tom Chatfield: ways games reward the brain

2011-05-31T21:00:00.000+02:00

experience bars measuring progress - instead of small reward increments
give lots of task - keep the tasks small and measurable, break things down into many tasks
reward effort - don't punish failure
feedback - must link consequences to action, feel a lesson, model lessons
uncertainty - neurological goldmine, the reward that they weren't sure they were going to get, there was an unlikelihood, the real turnon is doing stuff with other people, collaboration

TED: Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions

2011-05-23T10:00:00.000+02:00

If you get the answer wrong in science it hurts lots of people, and possibly kills them. You pay a fine, you go to jail. How come we think all cultures are right, even when they result in demeaning things all the way up to torture and murder. Harris mentioned the burqa.

TED: Carne Ross: An independent diplomat

2011-05-22T13:58:00.003+02:00

State governments are no longer the places where things happen, they are lumbering. We must make it happen. Make meetings between warring members.

TED: Nalini Nadkarni: Life science in prison

2011-05-22T12:41:00.001+02:00

She gave trees canvases and let them paint. Found that trees have signatures like a Monet or a Renoir. She did calculations and found that the way they painted had cycles.
How can this be applied to a seemingly static institution like a prison.
They gave lectures about science in prisons
The prisoners chose the lectures over TV
That is movement
They had a project about frogs and wetlands
The prisoners chose to the project over TV
Solitary confinement prisoners were given images of nature in their exercise yards
If prisoners can change, we can too

TED: Elif Shafak: The politics of fiction

2011-05-22T12:37:00.001+02:00

fetsiboomsticks: Cultural ghettos are places where we congregate with people just like us. Where we otherise others by affirming ourselves and by actively ennumerating what differences the differences of others.
frustration is very stimulating. Learning a language, being frustrated that you can't express in fine detail keeps you trying.
a reader wants to see the manifestation of the identity of the author in the story
fetsiboomsticks: you are not a creator, an actor takes roles that he 'agrees' with, that he is prepared to endorse, that's what we think.
multicultural writers are expected to write their culture, English writers are allowed to be more imaginative
she was prosecuted for words she had written and she objects because it is fiction writers are entitled to their opinions, but it is not politics its fiction, separate things
fiction is a connector, politics is a divider
Muslims read books by Palistinians and vice versa, they connect. Politicians stop you from listening
She likes not knowing what she will write about next or what characters will do in the next ten pages
Perhaps we should not teach students to write what they know, instead write what we can feel outside of their cultural ghetto

TED: Jessa Gamble: Our natural sleep cycle

2011-05-18T16:59:00.001+02:00

People who experience true wakefulness in an experiment:

went to bed at 20h00
woke at 24h00
had quiet peacefulness until 02h00
slept until 05h30

TED: Sheryl Sandberg: Why we have too few women leaders

2011-05-18T16:29:00.000+02:00

Women systematically underestimate their own ability
Women don't negotiate for themselves in the workforce
7% of women negotiate their first salary, 57% of men do
Women attribute their success to external factors, men attribute it to themselves
No one gets to the promotion without believing they deserve it
Success and likability are negatively correlated for women and positively correlated for men
Solutions: Get women to sit at the table (make sure that you notice that men are reaching, but women are also there), Make your partner your partner (men do less housework/childwork), Don't leave before you leave (open yourself to men working in the home, women stop putting their hands up in their careers because they want to have children)

TED: Eli Pariser: Beware online "filter bubbles"

2011-05-16T08:47:00.000+02:00

Information junk food, vegetables and desert.
We don't have a balanced information diet.
Beware the filters.
You are living in a filter bubble - google and facebook tailoring what gets into your bubble.
You don't know what DOESN'T get in.
Algorithms are curating the world for us, online.
The editors were human gatekeepers, now the gatekeepers are algorithmic - created by coder-gatekeepers.
We need control over the filters.
Filters must be made more responsibly because we need to know things outside of our opinion set so that we can operate responsibly.

TED: Morgan Spurlock: The greatest TED Talk ever sold

2011-05-15T15:51:00.000+02:00

I am an up attribute:
playful
fresh
novel
contemorary
adventurous
edgy
daring
nimble
agile
profane
domineering
magical
mystical
inspiring

Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world

2011-04-14T12:42:00.000+02:00

Ushahidi was created by two blog readers who had time (72 hours) to create a platform on which a person can congregate information - aggregates it and make it public, people loved it, so they turned it into an open source platform.
The ability of the world population to collaborate on free projects
A trillion hours a year exist for free projects
When a new technology steps in people always ALSO use it for throwaway stuff (e.g. LOLcats)
It's tempting to want the abundance without the LOLcats, but it doesn't work that way
Freedom to experiment means freedom to experiment with anything.
Even with the printing press we got porn before journals
'Design for generosity' our intrinsic motivations are more powerful than our bosses telling us to do something
Deterrence theory - add a punishment, people will do less of that thing
Study - when you add a punishment, people do MORE of that thing - if you pay the fine you pay it and you feel nothing, it's more powerful preventer of bad behaviour to feel bad or to feel good about exercising social constraints, AND after the fine is removed the behaviour still doesn't change.
Communal value - where LOLcats works, we share, we commune, civic value satisfies the whole community, all the people on the planet
"Free cultures get what they celebrate" (Dean Kamen) - reward the people that give civic value and you can change society

TED: Jason Clay: How big brands can help save biodiversity

2011-04-14T10:23:00.000+02:00

Amazon. What can I do to save the rainforest? Get someone to make a product that is sourced from the rainforest that can show that the rainforest is worth more as resource than pasture. It failed. The people who made money from the rainforest were not the same people who were cutting the forest.
The average European cat has a larger carbon footprint than the average African.
The average American consumes 43 times more than the average African.
Should consumers have a choice between sustainable or not sustainable products, or should all the products on the shelf be sustainable.
Are consumers equipped to make the choice between products? Do they have time to make an informed choice? There are so many ifs ands and buts. It's a minefield.
Sustainability needs companies to work together, countries need to work together. And the where what and who have to be managed.
There are 1.5 billion producers. 500 commodities determine the trade of all of these companies. If you look at the companies working with these commodities and the same company names kept coming up. What percentage do they touch. 100 companies control 25% of the trade of the 15 most significant commodities, e.g. Cargill. 100 companies you can work with. They leverage 50% of production.
After 40 years the organic movement has produced 0.7 of 1 percent of global food.
We can't wait that long. Consumers can't do it.
They bring in stakeholders and design standards. It's difficult.
Salmon. 60% came to the table, some were suing each other. But they got standards for salmon aquaculture vetted by all the organisations.
What brings them to the table. Big business' risk is NOT having commodities. Availability. For producers the buyer determines HOW they produce.
They're getting the big companies to the table. They're pulling out all the stops.
Cargill have research that says they can double palm oil production in the next 20 years without cutting down a single tree, do it on already-degraded land in only Borneo. If Cargill makes a decision 50 percent of the palm oil businesses move. If Cargill only supplies sustainable palm oil, then all the palm oil China receives is sustainable.
Mars 20% or trees produce the cocoa. So they are identifying traits in those 20% of trees that make them the right tree. Mars is driven by their need for commodities.
Coca Cola wants to enter the European market. They enter into an agreement with growers in Turkey to produce fruit for the juices they want to ship into Europe. AND they buy carbon in the trees to offset the shipment costs. They are bringing the externalities, the cost to nature, back into the price of the juice. This way we don't just keep taking from nature, we put money back into fixing it through the big companies.

TED: Sheryl WuDunn: Our century's greatest injustice

2011-04-13T13:40:00.000+02:00

There are fewer women in the world because more girls are discriminated to death than all the people killed in all the battlefields in the 20th century.
When you educate a boy, he has slightly fewer children.
When you educate a girl, she has significantly fewer children.
When you don't use women as part of the solution you not using all the solution resources you can.
Move women out of a viscious cycle into a virtuous cycle (and she will work harder for women than men do - fetsiboomsticks).

TED: Sheryl WuDunn: Our century's greatest injustice

2011-04-12T16:09:00.003+02:00

There are fewer women in the world because more girls are discriminated to death than all the people killed in all the battlefields in the 20th century.
When you educate a boy, he has slightly fewer children.
When you educate a girl, she has significantly fewer children.
When you don't use women as part of the solution you not using all the solution resources you can.
80 000 slaves were transported to the new world, 800 000 women are trafficked across borders.

Freshly Ground, "I'd like" lyrics

2011-03-28T19:30:00.003+02:00

I'd like to call you sometime
I'd like you to need me one time

What would you do if you knew the truth?
Oh what would you do if I told you the story of my life?
Would you find me overly familiar towards you?
Would you call me crude, fling me aside to the birds?

What do I do with all these feelings warming me up inside?
What do I do with all these precious hours dreaming of you and I?
Would you recognize it's a need I've been fighting for so long?
Would you recognize it's a hunger only you can fill?

I'd like to call you sometime
Oh I would like to call you

I'd like to call you sometime
I'd like you to need me one time