Tag Archives: corporateculture

Reading: Gruber: Dickhead of the Week: Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri

From Gruber: Dickhead of the Week: Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri

John Gruber has become my favorite tech critic – speaking truth to less-than-legitimate power.

This is Facebook’s political/PR strategy on this issue: (1) to ask everyone to ignore the plain truth that Apple’s changes to IDFA tracking are for exactly the reason Apple states: to give users control over their own privacy; and (2) to claim that Apple’s actions aren’t hurting Facebook but instead are hurting “small businesses”. Small businesses are taking advantage of privacy invasive user-tracking ad placement, but if their ads are less effective without privacy invasive user-tracking, then so be it, they’re less effective. The idea that we don’t dare do anything good for privacy that might reduce the efficacy of user-tracking ads because “pity the poor small businesses” is sophistry.

Reading: Trump coronavirus press conference: Despite dire warnings, the president wants everyone to “relax” – Vox

From Trump coronavirus press conference: Despite dire warnings, the president wants everyone to “relax” – Vox

Let’s get this right, because anyone could be infected or infect others, there is no wide-spread test and no vax yet:

[o]n CNN’s State of the Union Sunday, Fauci explained why — even though the coronavirus is believed to be more severe in older people and those with underlying health conditions — young and relatively healthy people should still take steps to limit their exposure.

“The virus is not a mathematical formula,” Fauci said. “There are going to be people who are young who are going to wind up getting seriously ill. So, protect yourself.”

He added that young people can also carry the virus without being seriously affected, infecting those for whom the virus could mean serious health risks. But Trump failed to convey that message, instead making the risk among younger Americans seem slight.

“I think very important — the young people, people of good health, and [these] groups of people are just not strongly affected,” Trump said. “Elderly people that are not well or not well in certain respects are really a very dangerous group. We have to watch them, we have to protect them very much.”

These sorts of statements from the president have become par for the course in this pandemic, but that doesn’t make them any less dangerous. It is true that there are administration officials out there like Fauci who are providing sound, balanced information — but it is also true that they do not speak with the weight and authority of the office of the president of the United States.

So when Trump tells younger Americans they are “not strongly affected” without providing any context, or when he says “it’s a very contagious virus, it’s incredible, but it’s something we have tremendous control of,” which is not true, he is doing more than giving bad advice or indulging in a little self-aggrandizement: He is putting lives at risk.

Reading: Why Do Corporations Speak the Way They Do?

From Why Do Corporations Speak the Way They Do?

Laugh-a-minute account of those corporate gals and guys and their crazy antics with nouns and verbs. MASH does WeWork.  Continues in the stylistic tradition of Richard Lantham’s Revising Prose (1979).  In the final chapter, Lantham argues what he was hinting at all along: Corporate wonks are poet wannabes.

Reading: The Disneyfication of a University

Source

Dane Kennedy in Academe Blog

it is corporate culture, a creature that has become all the rage in the business world—and now, it seems, is burrowing its way into universities. Its professed aim is to instill a sense of shared purpose among employees, but its real objective is far more coercive and insidious.

Our president is rumored to have forked over three to four million dollars to the Disney Institute to improve our culture (he refuses to reveal the cost). A select group of faculty and staff, those identified as opinion leaders, are being offered all-expenses paid trips to the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando “to gain first-hand insight into Disney’s approach to culture.” For everyone else, the university is conducting culture training workshops that run up to two hours. All staff and managers are required to attend. Faculty are strongly “encouraged” to participate, and some contract faculty, who have little job security, evidently have been compelled to do so.

Sounds far too familiar. Admin looking for another way to control the university space. Sell ‘em cartoons.

Not sure who’s the bigger looser here: the admin who bought the goop from disney, the fac and staff at the university, or the students and parents who foot the bill for bilge water.

The result is predictable – as Kennedy observes: it’s Mickey Mouse. The admin plays Goofy.

What I’m reading 24 Oct 2016 through 27 Oct 2016

What I’m reading 8 Jul 2016 through 19 Jul 2016

What I’m reading 19 Mar 2016 through 22 Mar 2016

  • The Purpose of Online Discussion – Hybrid Pedagogy – Whether this article addresses the matter of //purpose// is open, but there is this matter of mediation rephrased: "While the introjection of machines is an interesting opportunity for further educational research, as an instructor, plan for student participation with this in mind: they are interacting with a machine and not people. An online discussion is more like a computer’s lecture than an IRL discussion, no matter how interactive."

    Mediation is opportunity. So suggests McLuhan. – (cmc de )

  • How Will Keeping A Notebook Help You Hack Your Life – WebSeitz/wiki – Bill Seitz on using a wiki as a notebook. It's more than a hack. It's a way of life. – (en3177 notebooks notetaking DH )
  • ‘I Love My Label’: Resisting the Pre-Packaged Sound in Ed-Tech – Tapping into a volume of historical data, the predictive algorithm guides course selection in a way that improves academic success and drives on-time degree completion.” But just like the predictive modeling in music, this process should prompt us to ask a lot of questions about what feeds that algorithm and what are the results: What sorts of classes get recommended? Are students offered something that sounds familiar, comfortable? What signals to the algorithm what a student might find familiar? What happens in the face of an algorithmic education to intellectual curiosity? To risk-taking, to exploration, experimentation, play? To the major that many of us pursue for a while, “Undecided.” Does the educational system as-is, with or without an algorithm, value these things? And what happens when classes are devised in order to perform well according to this algorithm? – (corporateculture d2l )

What I’m reading 15 Jan 2016 through 17 Jan 2016