Roblog

Recent posts

  • Filed under: diversity

    Stop Punishing Women for Being Ambitious

    Women are less likely to negotiate their salaries, earn less than men, and are underrepresented at the highest levels of business. Narratives that explain these problems often focus on what women can do differently – to “lean in”, to negotiate harder, to stop apologising, to be more assertive, and so on.

    Stefanie O’Connell explains how these narratives, problematic in themselves in the way that they blame women for problems they have little control over, can also have unpleasant side effects. Women who adopt these more assertive behaviours, and show their ambition clearly, often face a backlash for doing so:

    “A 2020 study linked this backlash directly to ambition: when women were arbitrarily assigned leadership positions, they were less likely to be found unlikeable. It was only when a woman was actively pursuing a leadership position that she encountered penalties. This suggests that more than power, influence or success, women are penalized for the pursuit of those things. This shows up in tangible outcomes, like the denial of job opportunities, raises and promotions – all of which can make building wealth harder.”

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  • Filed under: technology

    A TikTok Star’s Fave Accessibility Apps

    Lucy Edwards is a hit on TikTok with her videos explaining her life as a blind person, breezily answering questions from viewers that they might feel awkward asking otherwise. Lots of her videos focus on technology (How does she film herself? How does she read a menu in a restaurant? How does she edit her videos?), and Apple have done a special feature on the apps she uses.

    I’ve seen videos of visually impaired people using iPhone accessibility features before and always found them incredible. This is another great example of a side of technology that most people never see, but that is vitally important as more and more of modern life involves being able to use technology. #

  • Filed under: science

    Where Do Butts Come From?

    A surprisingly engaging – and informative – article on the evolution of the… well, you’ll get the picture.

    “One unusually aerated specimen, a type of polyclad flatworm, sports multiple anuses that speckle its backside like feces-spewing freckles. Two others, a pair of sponge parasites called Syllis ramosa and Ramisyllis multicaudata, will twine their body through host tissues like a tapestry of tree roots, with each tip terminating in its own proprietary butthole; they have hundreds, perhaps thousands, in total. (It’s not totally clear why these animals and others spawned an embarrassment of anuses, but in at least some cases, Hejnol thinks it’s a logical outcome of a branched digestive system, which can more easily transport nutrients to a body’s every nook and cranny.)”

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  • Filed under: creativity

    The taste–skill gap in creative work

    Many people who get into creative fields already have a highly tuned sense of taste for their chosen discipline. But this taste, rather than being an asset, often prevents them from progressing – by causing them to reject their own work as sub-standard. How do you get past that?

  • Filed under: organisations

    Cultural context and conflict

    There are high-context cultures and low-context cultures, in human society as well as in businesses. Strong cultures are often high-context: implicit, respectful of hierarchy, desiring of consensus and continuity. That means fewer arguments – but that’s not always a good thing.

  • Filed under: knowledge

    Failure Theory

    A lot of wisdom in a very short post: Andrew Bosworth on the ways that complex systems fail.

    “It has always struck me that the more edifice you build to prevent minor failures the larger the capacity you create for catastrophic ones, just like climbers roped together on a mountaintop… My concern is that many of the efforts we have to defend against failure create catastrophic complexity without meaningfully reducing failure at all.”

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  • Filed under: workshops

    How we are using asynchronous workshops to collaborate remotely at FutureLearn

    For those of us who have been running remote workshops during lockdown using platforms like Zoom and Miro, an interesting article from FutureLearn on taking that a step further by running asynchronous workshops – workshops where people don’t gather together at the same time, but rather participate over a longer period of time, batting ideas back and forth between each other. #

  • Filed under: knowledge

    Simplifying strategy

    Less is really more. When designing systems – from planes to marketing plans – we reach a point where additional complexity can only make things worse. Why is that? We do we find it so difficult to simplify things, and in doing so improve them? And how do we fix that?

  • Filed under: technology

    YouTubers are upscaling the past to 4K. Historians want them to stop

    Like many people, I’ve been captivated by the recent glut of upscaled and enhanced historical films, like the 1911 footage of New York City or the incredible stabilised film taken from Wuppertal’s Schwebebahn in 1902.

    Such footage is incredible, but uncanny; I thought it was simply the glitches and artefacts of the upscaling process, but there’s actually an ethical unease here too, as Thomas Nicholson explores.

    “Digital upscalers and the millions who’ve watched their work on YouTube say they’re making the past relatable for viewers in 2020, but for some historians of art and image-making, modernising century-old archives brings a host of problems. Even adding colour to black and white photographs is hotly contested.”

    Nicholson quotes the film historian Luke McKernan, who says:

    “Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference. It makes the past record all the more distant for rejecting what is honest about it.”

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  • The remarkable life of Alfred Lee Loomis

    Alfred Lee Loomis was a lawyer, a banker, a socialite, possibly one of the most influential physical scientists of the twentieth century, and can reasonably claim to have done more than any other civilian to bring a swift end to World War II. And yet, in the intervening decades, he’s faded into obscurity.

  • Filed under: knowledge

    The thermocline of truth

    What the Royal Mail IT scandal can teach us about the nature of truth inside organisations, and why things often look perfectly fine until right before they fall apart.

  • Filed under: knowledge

    Going with the gut

    The behavioural economics revolution has been on a quest towards rationality, aiming to recognise our messy, inaccurate cognitive biases and replace them with something more solid. But by throwing out intuition and heuristics, we risk losing a great deal.

  • Filed under: food

    Rethinking cider: a story of apple trees

    Adam Wells writes beautifully on the subject of cider, and the romantic journeys that he takes as a cider writer and that the apples take on their way to becoming the final product:

    “If cider does indeed have a soul, it is locked in the apples, in the trees, in the land and in the slow cycle of seasons that brings all three into the confluence of a unique expression. It is in the unrepeatable patterns of weather; the vicissitudes of fate that make every harvest different from the next, however subtly. It is in the gentle incline of an orchard’s bank that drains water that little more quickly, gives every row of trees that little more, little longer, exposure to sunlight. It is in the crusts of sand or clay or limestone that make each orchard geologically individual. It is in the trees that are forty years older than the trees of the same variety next door; in the small-gains increase in intensity of flavour that every passing year has cultivated. It is in the choice to plant one variety over another, not for reasons of yield or efficiency, but simply because the former variety tastes better; imparts greater qualities into its resultant drink. It is in the trimming back of the hazel thicket that casts shadows onto the apples. It is in the health of the soil, and the ways in which the orchardist chooses to maintain that soil’s condition. It is in the careful winter pruning that gives the trees a better chance of a better-tasting crop. It is in the deliberate selection of apples that are pristine and fully ripened and the rejection of those that are dirty or rotten or unripe. It is in the space between the trees, the airflow between the branches and the time between an apple’s falling and its being picked up. It is in the transfiguration of everything above and more into a liquid in our glass that offers all of the answers, if only we knew what the questions were.”

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  • Filed under: technology

    The Healing Power of JavaScript

    Craig Mod writes beautifully on the healing power of programming computers, a sanctuary of knowable certainty in a world aflame:

    “This work of line-by-line problem solving gets me out of bed some days. Do you know this feeling? The not-wanting-to-emerge-from-the-covers feeling? Every single morning of the last year may have been the most collectively experienced covers-craving in human history, where so many things in the world were off by a degree here or a degree there. But under those covers I begin to think – A ha! I know how to solve server problem x, or quirk y. I know how to fix that search code. And I’m able to emerge and become human, or part human, and enter into that line-by-line world, where there is very little judgement, just you and the mechanics of the systems, systems that become increasingly beautiful the more time you spend with them. For me, this stewardship is therapy.”

    It’s a long time since my time has been mostly occupied by programming, but I still feel the same draw Mod does. Tinkering with this site, writing a little script, withdrawing temporarily from the messiness of the wider world and focusing for a moment on a tiny, knowable part of it – and in doing so achieving something, creating something, and generally pushing some kind of mental reset button. #

  • Filed under: creativity

    Centaur chess

    I can’t believe I didn’t find this when I wrote about augmented creativity: Garry Kasparov coined the term “centaur chess” for a game of chess played by two humans, in which the humans ultimately decide which moves to make, but have access to the full power of a computer before doing so. In theory, it’s a form of chess that combines the creativity and empathy of human players with the raw computing power of the chess engine. #

  • Filed under: life

    Your Life in Weeks – Wait But Why

    Related to the last link, a post from 2014 by Tim Urban that urges us to consider our life as a series of weeks, and a surprisingly small number of weeks at that – a teaspoonful of irreplaceable diamonds, ours waste or use as we wish. There have been 360 such weeks in all our lives since he published that article; how have you spent yours? #

  • Filed under: life

    Half-century notes – Phil Gyford

    On the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, the always-insightful Phil Gyford looks back at his life, the decisions he’s made, and what he’s learned.

    “A decade used to seem like a huge chunk of time – after all, so much had changed between the ages of 10 and 20 – but now I realise how quickly each one whizzes by. And, ssshh… the rumour is that they keep getting quicker.

    “So I can see that, from the point of view of someone in their twenties, 50 is officially Old. But 50 is only about half-way through adult life, give or take. There is lots of life left. I’ve only done half of what I’ll do. In theory.

    “So, anyway, how have the past 50 years gone?”

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  • Filed under: culture

    Notes on Naff

    The word “naff”, uniquely British, is hard to explain or define – one of those concepts that you know when you see it. Sean Wyer has a good go, in an effort to explain something fundamental about us Brits:

    “So if hygge can tell us something important about Denmark, and about tensions between actual and imagined Denmarks, what, I wondered, might naffness reveal about Britain and its culture?”

    He doesn’t perfectly nail a definition, but it’s a subject worth chewing over. #

  • Filed under: creativity

    Communal creativity

    Informal, loosely coupled groups of people often produce a prolific burst of good ideas, changing the worlds of science, art, and music. But why is that? What conditions are necessary for this super-creativity to emerge, and when has it happened in the past?

  • Filed under: marketing

    Martin Weigel on the crisis of planning

    Martin Weigel, Head of Planning at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam, writes an inspiring manifesto on the need for those of us who work in marketing to escape our bubbles, reconnect with real people, staff our organisations more representatively, and rediscover our ability to talk to a broad spectrum of society.

    “And so it is that – privileged, unrepresentative, disconnected and with an overinflated sense of its understanding and common values – marketing and advertising professionals have come to rely on the sweeping platitudes of ‘Millennials’ and ‘Gen Z’, happy to believe that people born within certain years are all the same, happy by implication to reject the concept of segmentation and of consumers holding different perceptions and experiences, and happy to believe that some kind of powerful, magical invisible force is at work that determines that people who are born in the same year will all have exactly the same opinions and attitudes.”

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  • Filed under: creativity

    A factory for startups

    All other things being equal, startups are able to innovate more easily than larger, more established businesses. There are lots of ways for existing organisations to involve themselves in startups: startup accelerators, internal startups, and so on. Is the startup studio the most useful model?

  • Filed under: art

    Looking Closely is Everything – Craig Mod

    The wonderful Craig Mod exhorts us to look – to really look:

    “This act of ‘really looking’ is deceptive. It requires an almost ‘unlooking’ to see closely, a kind of defocusing. Because: We tend to see in groups, not details. We scan an image or scene for the gist, but miss a richness of particulars. I suspect this has only gotten worse in recent years as our Daily Processed Information density has increased, causing us to engage less rigorously – we listen to podcasts on 2x speed or watch YouTube videos with a finger on the arrow-keys to fast-forward through any moment of lesser tension. Which means we need all the help we can get to prod ourselves to look more closely.”

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  • Filed under: coronavirus

    VaccinateCA: What We’ve Learned (So Far)

    It’s interesting observing the vaccine rollout in the US, which seems to be continuing at pace despite some of the structural differences that make it harder than the UK’s rollout (like the lack of a single, coherent, nationwide healthcare provider, with primary healthcare information and the ability to contact virtually the entire population).

    One of the things that seems bizarre is the sheer number of organisations responsible for distributing and administering the vaccine, and the lack of a clear picture for individuals. Where should you go for a vaccine? Who has availability? How do you book?

    The VaccinateCA project is fixing that, in perhaps the most lo-fi method possible. A team of volunteers telephones, every day, California’s vaccination centres and asks them how much vaccine they have, who they plan to administer it to, and how to get an appointment. It then collates that information and makes it available to the public.

    This blog post, which shares learnings from the project so far, is a great writeup of what it’s like to deal with a shifting, complex, emergent situation and to try to make sense of it. #

  • Filed under: sustainability

    Guilt and sustainability

    Guilt can be an effective way of inspiring consumers to make sustainable choices, and so the world of sustainability is full of messaging designed to make consumers feel guilty. But should it be? Does it work, and is it right?

  • Filed under: sustainability

    The Energy Charter Treaty: the greatest threat to the planet you’ve never heard of

    Outrageous:

    “On 4 February the German energy giant RWE announced it was suing the government of the Netherlands. The crime? Proposing to phase out coal from the country’s electricity mix. The company, which is Europe’s biggest emitter of carbon, is demanding €1.4bn in ‘compensation’ from the country for loss of potential earnings, because the Dutch government has banned the burning of coal for electricity from 2030.

    …

    “RWE is suing under the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT), a little-known international agreement signed without much public debate in 1994. The treaty binds more than 50 countries, and allows foreign investors in the energy sector to sue governments for decisions that might negatively impact their profits – including climate policies. Governments can be forced to pay huge sums in compensation if they lose an ECT case.”

    Withdrawal from the treaty is tricky but possible; OpenDemocracy urge people to sign the petition started by the Transnational Institute and Corporate Europe Observatory. #

  • Filed under: culture

    LOC Serendipity

    The Library of Congress holds literally millions of items, many of which have been digitised. But how to approach such a huge collection? LOC Serendipity is one amazing answer: surface content at random, and allow people to follow whatever rabbit holes they find interesting.

    Even just the randomly selected titles are great, like some sort of Oblique Strategies prompt:

    Miscellaneous studies in prose
    Politics and pen pictures at home and abroad
    Virginia in the making of Illinois
    Interest tables used by the Mutual life insurance company of New York for the calculation of interest and prices of stocks and bonds for investment
    La dame aux perles
    Elements of logick
    Elisa von der Recke
    The present world situation
    Military character, habit, deportment, courtesy and discipline
    Memorial of Mrs. Agnes Renton
    Vade mecum
    Ballot box and battle field

    I’m particularly fond of the “Infinite 78RPM Records” section, which throws up a never-ending stream of old, public-domain records – mostly ’20s and ’30s jazz but also some scratchy gospel, bluegrass, and folk and ancient stand-up comedy. #