December, 2018 | Chris Aldrich

👓 Not my shoes | Music for Deckchairs

Kate Bowles (Music for Deckchairs)

Disrupt your industries, if that is what you are in business to do, but do not disrupt the bonds that tie employees, however loose or unspoken they may be.
—Isabel Berwick, 'Workplace communities matter–now more than ever'

Kate has a fantastic parable here. I highly recommend everyone reads it. While she talks about her daughters and their shoes and applies it to inequity in higher education, it applies to nearly every facet of our lives. We need to fix these problems, not only to improve equity within our economy, but to improve our humanity and our lives.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

In this future, we’re all being asked to accept that the sticker price of our success is indifference to how things turn out for others. Of course, this isn’t a novelty, and it’s barely a disruption; this is how the demands of profit have needed work to be managed for a long time. ❧

December 03, 2018 at 09:01AM

It’s treating someone else’s wellbeing, someone’s lost job, someone’s public dressing-down, someone’s stolen idea as somehow not your problem, not your shoes. ❧

December 03, 2018 at 09:01AM

This is what higher education is currently saying to its long-term casual staff. While universities are underfunded for teaching and expected to compete globally on the basis of research, then the revenue from teaching will be diverted into research. This isn’t a blip, and there won’t be a correction. This is how universities are solving their funding problems with a solution that involves keeping labour costs (and associated overheads like paid sick leave) as low as possible. It’s a business model for bad times, and the only thing that makes it sustainable is not thinking about where the human consequences are being felt. ❧

This last sentence is so painful…
December 03, 2018 at 08:58AM

Reply to What is Emoji ID? by Doug Belshaw

Replied to What is Emoji ID? by

Doug Belshaw (MoodleNet project)

Some more details about a proposed solution for MoodleNet that could solve some problems around decentralised identity.

Doug, the sound of this is interesting, but it seems to be a lot harder than it might need to be, not to mention the pitfalls of being assigned emojis one wouldn’t want representing them in addition or the centralized nature of the provisioning source.

It also sounds very much like Kevin Marks’ Distributed Verification scheme using the rel=”me” attribute on web pages for which he built a chrome browser extension to actually implement it. Kevin also recently reported that Mastodon now actually supports this verification scheme in one of their most recent updates which should be used by instances that are regularly updating. The benefit is that this scheme already exists, is relatively well supported, there are parsers available for it, and it’s actually working on the open web. It’s also truly distributed in that it doesn’t rely on any central provisioning authorities that require ongoing maintenance or which could provide a monopoly on such a service.

🎧 ‘The Daily’: Why U.S. Bombs Are Falling in Yemen | New York Times

Listened to 'The Daily': Why U.S. Bombs Are Falling in Yemen from New York Times

The killing of Jamal Khashoggi has renewed criticism of Saudi Arabia more broadly, including the kingdom’s role in the war in Yemen. It’s a war that has created what has been called the worst humanitarian crisis in the world — and one that the United States has backed from the beginning.

A nice little overview of some of the history behind what’s going on in several portions of the Middle East.