island⁹⁴

Having gone through an institutional hiring process—both as the hirer and the hiree—I am well aware of the intricacies of non-discriminatory practices. Essentially: you can’t base your decision on anything outside of the approved job description and qualifications. Regardless, I got a hoot out of the following qualification on a job my friend sent me:

Employee must be able to relate to other people beyond giving and receiving instructions: works well with co-workers or peers without exhibiting behavioral extremes; perform work activities requiring negotiating, instructing, supervising, persuading or speaking with others; and respond appropriately to criticism from a supervisor.

Looks like the FCC has “demonstrate[d], once again, that at present it is difficult, if not impossible to apply public interest pressure to TV stations via the Commission’s license renewal process.”

A Chicago/Milwaukee appeal was made to the FCC over a lack of local and regional political coverage from area broadcasters: less than 1% went to non-federal election coverage in the month prior to the election.

Also interesting how they cut up the types of coverage:

As for the style of the stories, or “frame,” as the CMPA study put it, most went to “horse race” stories (guesstimating a candidates’ electoral chances at the moment) and “strategic” stories (”how the candidate was using an event to reach particular groups of voters”). Strategy and horse race items dominated coverage. Issues-oriented features counted for less than a fifth of air time.

After a bunch of googling around, I haven’t found an authoritative answer to my question: how are you supposed to set up and use your refrigerator’s food crisper—fruits and vegatables need different levels of humidity (which ones need what I wasn’t sure), and the little baffles are supposed to change that (which setting does what I wasn’t sure).

So it seems that Cooks Illustrated PDF seemed to give a half-way decent explanation of the proper settings and use:

• Opening the baffles for air to pass through lowers the humidity, which is fine for basically anything that needs to be kept cold (like some fruit: apples and grapes)
• Closing the baffles to stop air from circulating allows the humidity to rise for leafy vegetables.

But according to Cooks Illustrated, it’s all much more complicated than that—some produce like it warmer than the crisper may provide, like green beans, subtropical fruits, melons and herbs. So good luck if you have roommates.

During an AmeriCorps icebreaker, I matched my desire to learn vegan baking with someone who knew how. Who say’s icebreakers are worthless (well, I sometimes do). I got the following two tips:

Egg Substitute: Use an amount of water equal to an egg (maybe ~1/4 cup) and mix in tablespoon of ground flax-seed

Best Oil: Coconut Oil is the best oil to use for moistness and tastiness. Of course, it’s really bad for you, but who cares.

If salmonella outbreaks weren’t actually killing people the following statement might be a humorous farce of a murder investigation:

Investigators are seeing more signs that the salmonella outbreak blamed on tomatoes might have been caused by tainted jalapeno peppers…. Echoing federal officials, who said this week that tomatoes remain the prime suspect, the health officials said that tomatoes cannot be ruled out as the cause of the outbreak. Investigators have been collecting samples of another possible suspect, cilantro, though the herb is less likely to be the source, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing.

Other possible scenarios: salsa tryst, the tomato has an evil twin, the butler did it.

Ever since Dr. Strangelove I’ve found the fluoride controversy interesting and scary (for many reasons). I can’t verify any of this, but from a Digg article entitled Fluoride’s glory may be cresting, here was a comment that seemed to have enough info to worthwhilely put it here:

Fluoride replaces the hydroxyl ion in the naturally occurring calcium hydroxyapatite causing a stronger nuclear bond. In that respect it strengthens the tooth. The problems associated with flouride come from poor understanding of the inherent dangers of ingestion.

When it comes to toothpaste, I alternate a flouride containing paste with a paste containing sodium-calcium phosphosilicate which adheres to the surface of the tooth enamel creating new calcium hydroxyapatite. It does this by a simple mechanism. The sodium raises the ph of the saliva which causes the calcium and phosphorous to plate out of solution onto the tooth and re nourishing any damaged areas.

I’ve found the Lumifi Search / Research Platform useful at times, but it sometimes seems like a sledgehammer. They have a widget for just search that’s pretty useful. If I’m looking for specific things with a lot of noise (like “nonprofit culture”), it tends to give some interesting results.

They also have it as an OSX Dashboard Widget.

An article on nonprofit challenges from the British org Yorkshire Culture:

In business, we are told that the customer is king; in the non-profit sector it is more like Jack, Queen and King — multiple stakeholders ranging from funders, to brokers to end users. The problem is that the end user or recipient often has very little say in what is being ‘purchased’ on their behalf. To most non-profit organisations the crucial relationship is that shared with the funder or broker, not the end user. If cultural non-profit organisations are to fully exploit their enterprise potential, relationships need to be rebalanced.

And the challenges:

1. Satisfying the needs of the funders
2. Pricing and cost
3. Unwilling funders
4. Restricted income
5. Handling surplus
6. Investment problem
7. Overheads in service delivery

The IRS is using the last two digits of your Social Security Number to determine when you’ll receive your Economic Stimulus (e.g. free money i.e. your children’s money).

Paper checks will also go out based on Social Security number. For Social Security numbers ending in 00 through 09, the paper checks will be mailed starting May 9 and will continue through May 16. A similar process will be repeated in the following weeks.

Please allow additional delivery time, perhaps 3 to 5 days, since the paper checks are being sent through the mail.
PAPER CHECK

Last two SSN digits:
Payments will be mailed no later than (and received a few days after):
00 through 09 May 16
10 through 18 May 23
19 through 25 May 30
26 through 38 June 6
39 through 51 June 13
52 through 63 June 20
64 through 75 June 27
76 through 87 July 4
88 through 99 July 11

It’s another election year which means that politics are flying.

From a story on NASA forcibly downplaying global warming:

The report did not directly accuse them of lying, but used more nuanced terms such as “mendacity” and “dissembling.” The space agency complained those terms were unjust.

And I enjoy how the New York Times describes a John McCain statement:

Like Mr. Bush, Mr. McCain has steadfastly refused to set dates for withdrawals of troops and envisions a long-term American presence in the country. But last month, in the general election battleground state of Ohio, Mr. McCain did a semantic dance and said he expected that most American troops would be home from Iraq by 2013.

Notes from Rebecca below on managing nonprofit technology projects

http://aspirationtech.org/events/mntp-sf
http://mntp.aspirationtech.org/index.php/Event_Agenda

…maybe I’ll clean this up someday.

—-
!!!Basic Stages of a Project
1. Initiate
* define project
* talk about start and end points, budget, participants/roles, timeline
2. Plan
* defining scope, requirements, use cases
3. Implement

4. Monitor

5. Close
*how do you know when you’re done with the project you’re working on?

*upkeep/maintenance phase?

*in “waterfall” style projects, there is just one of each step
*in “agile” style projects, the plan -> implement -> monitor cycle repeats
*know which style project it is at the beginning!

—-
!!!Content inventories
For redesign processes, figure out what content and navigation is currently present and how it’s organized. Include things like creation dates and web statistics; talk about the value of old content to users. This can affect how much of the content is migrated, and can give organizations insight into how they intend to communicate vs. how they’re actually communicating. For example, one PM working on the ACLU site inventoried 15,000 pages; the ACLU decided to migrate 8,000 of those, and rethought their style of technical & legal language to a more personal approach.

—-
!!!Scope Creep
*postpone things to phase 2
*define project endpoints in the “initiate” phase
*specifications that include what ‘’won’t'’ be included
*review scope and recently developed features regularly
*revisit goals to regain focus as scope creep starts to take over
*saying no: make sure that people are aware of the depth of their requests, especially if they’re out of scope. inform people about research or dev time required just to estimate cost for a feature.

—-
!!!Recognizing Impending Doom
*chunking projects: dividing projects into smaller chunks will make overages more obvious.
*development time = developer + QA + PM + client + risk + padding.
*define checkin points in the web plan
*be upfront/honest/immediate when you’re feeling uncomfortable
*be proactive about input–consider what input people will have before you ask them for it
*one attendee mentioned that they “had been trying to stay with this FOSS community which was politically important, but they were making incredibly bad engineering decisions” and they eventually had to break with the FOSS group.
*beware of working with volunteers who aren’t web professionals
*notice the point where transparency starts to drop

—-
!!!Client Panic
*lack of communication: presenting a product that the client hasn’t seen before and they aren’t happy
*role changes on either the client or dev side can trigger less dialouge
*when you’re behind, don’t just work harder: restructure dev roles, reopen lines of communication with client
*sign of panic: abusive emails. one dev mentioned having a “2 strike rule” for abusive communication; he immediately calls higher-ups re: lack of tolerance for abusive/blame email/interaction
*learn how to identify ‘’good'’ things about a client relationship

‘'’recovery stragegy”’: regaining trust is remotely is difficult. Highly structured communication can help; for example, frequent meeting at consistent times with a repeated agenda.

#highly structured communication
#revisit goals
#talk to other members of the client org
#re-structure the project
#fire the client

—-
!!!Turning a Project into a Product
*forces you into more standardization
*documentation becomes exponentially more important
*languages & international users: translators can be your most active outside contributors

—-
!!!Other
*build test cases alongside app development
*involve real-life people–external stakeholders–in the process
*make sure there is someone within the nonprofit who can maintain the solution
*can you narrow your website’s focus? working with the client to focus the project; can be used to reduce the feature set and budget, AND/OR to clarify the client’s communication strategy.
*get clients to take notes at meetings and send them to you so that you know what they’re taking away/expecting
*discussions about “which tools?” can obscure discussions of needs
*blog or message board for a project: for both issues and for cheerleading
*”the smallest organizations need the most hand-holding”
—-
EOF

Aha! I knew there had to be a word for misusing review quotes. From this week’s World Wide Words:

Such extracts from reviews are called “pull quotes” in the jargon;massaging them into more favourable versions is “quote doctoring”. Another word, with apologies to Stephen Potter, is “quotemanship”(or “quotesmanship”). “Contextomy” is yet another term, one used principally by academics in reference to literary misquoting. The ending “-tomy” means cutting up and has here been neatly reversed into “context”. It was created by the historian Milton Mayer in 1966 in reference to a much more significant issue, the misquoting
of the Torah for propaganda purposes by Julius Streicher, editor ofthe Nazi paper Der Stürmer in Weimar-era Germany.

I’ve been meaning to type of some of my notes from the NTEN 2008 Conference, but the benefit of waiting is that someone will do it better. Like Britt Bravo: Notes from The Seven Things Everyone Wants: What Freud and Buddha Understood (and We’re Forgetting) about Online Outreach .

In short (lots more notes and examples in the link):

Need 1: To be SEEN and HEARD

Does your home page make people feel heard? Not many people give money because they read a well word-smithed mission statement. Effective sites and campaigns provide space for people to express themselves. Nonprofits need to truly listen to their supporters and acknowledge what they are saying.

Need 2: To be CONNECTED to someone or something

Engage people by connecting to what they (not you!) care about.

Need 3: To be part of something GREATER THAN THEMSELVES

Need 4: To have HOPE for the future

Doom and gloom, and finger-wagging messages don’t work.

Need 5: The security of TRUST

People are starved for a sense of trust in “the messenger.”

Need 6: To be of SERVICE

The #1 reason people stop giving to a nonprofit is that they feel like they are being treated like an ATM machine. They want to help, but they want to be of service, and to have different ways of serving. That need is not being fulfilled if all they hear is the unimaginative drumbeat of dollars.

Need 7: To want HAPPINESS for self and others

The core of Buddhism is that everyone wants happiness and to be free from suffering. The more you want happiness for others, the better it is for you, and them.

The cafe down the corner from my house makes the best brownies and I’ve been wanting this recipe ever since they opened. My friends have been quietly debating whether it was corn syrup or condensed milk that makes them so good. I made an oft-hand remark about it today and the counter-girl went back and wrote out the recipe for me. Turns out the answer is butter and eggs, lots of ‘em.

In regard to the amounts below: they were given to me in grams, and I did some loose conversions since I don’t have a scale.

3-1/3 C (760g) Butter
1-2/3 Lb (910g) Chocolate
12 Eggs
2 Tsp Vanilla
2-1/2 C (560g) Sugar
3-1/3 C (420g) Flour
2 Tsp Salt

18″ X 24″ Pan (makes 24 Brownies)

I didn’t get the instructions for actually baking them, but I assume that you melt and cool the chocolate, then cream everything, adding the flour at the end.

Probably bake at 350 (though maybe a cooler 325). They should have a torte-like consistency when done—cakily aerated but moist and fudgy if compressed.

From an Ars Technica article entitled YouTube University gets failing grade from prof, students. The original analysis is here

Juhasz breaks the issues down into a set of what she refers to as “binaries”—tensions between opposites that have to be balanced for proper teaching.

Those binaries were:

1. Public/Private
2. Aural/Visual
3. Body/Digital
4. Amateur/Expert
5. Entertainment/Education
6. Control/Chaos

Dandy’s recipe:

8 medium tomatoes, stewed
1 jalapeno
4 green onion, chopped
1/4 bunch of cilantro, chopped
2 garlic cloves

In large sauce pan, stew tomatoes and jalepeno.
Remove stem from jalapeno.
Put into blender or food processor.
Add garlic.

Pour into pan.
Add 4 green onions and cilantro.
Simmer for 15 minutes.
Salt and pepper to taste.

My alteration:
Take all of the above ingredients, and just throw them in a blender (I use a can of whole stewed tomatoes rather than the fresh tomatoes—probably better fresh). Done.

Brief article on getting a nonprofit job from the NY Times

Q. What are the biggest misconceptions about switching from the corporate world to the nonprofit world?

A. Many people are surprised to find the hours longer and stress greater than in the corporate world. Brian Olson, who left the private sector for a nonprofit in 2006, found the decision-making process to be unfocused.

“No matter how good a volunteer board is, it’s not the same as a corporate board, because everyone has a different agenda,” said Mr. Olson, who returned to the private sector a year later to be vice president for public affairs at Video Professor Inc., a company in Lakewood, Colo., that sells self-tutorial programs. “There was a purity to corporate life I missed,” he said.

There is value, he said, to “a company just getting the job done based on the needs of the marketplace.”

Makes me think of my friend’s snarky t-shirt idea: “Get a Nonprofit Career: Make a difference in someone’s life. Your own.” or simply “Nonprofit jobs let you feel good about yourself”.

Interesting article entitled Trust Isn’t Transitive (or, “Someone fired a gun in an airplane cockpit, and it was probably the pilot”) about a recent accidental/negligent discharge in a 747 by a pilot’s gun:

Let’s look at this quote from the article in question, attributed to Mike Boyd: “if somebody who has the ability to fly a 747 across the Pacific wants a gun, you give it to them.” This is a horribly flawed assumption, because it assumes that trust is transitive, when clearly it isn’t.

The reason trust isn’t transitive is because trust is most often based on data regarding the past which allows us to make assumptions about specific competence, quality of performance, and behaviors in the future.

We can assume that a trained pilot, when facing piloty thingies, will act like a trained pilot. WE CANNOT ASSUME THAT A TRAINED PILOT WILL ACT LIKE A TRAINED LION-TAMER WHEN FACING A WILD LION.

Skills from one domain cannot simply be moved from that domain to another

And the great example:

…many pilots will tell you that jet pilots are much more like to die on a motorcycle than they are on a plane, because they act stupid on motorcycles.

“Limiting the CIA’s interrogation methods to those in the Army Field Manual would be dangerous because the manual is publicly available and easily accessible on the Internet…”

President W. Bush on his veto of a CIA waterboarding ban. Of course, the Operating Manual for Guantanamo Bay Prison is on the internet too. But then again, apparently Guantanamo isn’t effective either.

Ran across a Slashdot comment that neatly summarizes my evolution of computer preference:

I used to hate Apple for the same reasons that you prefer non-Apple products: I like to feel like I have control and figure out how things work, etc. However I got a Macbook Pro for school to go with my PC I’ve had for ages. The fact is, I don’t use my PC anymore because as much as like messing with things, I’d rather they work 99% of the time and I’m willing to sacrifice the nerdiness and wasted time getting things to work in order to successfully use my comp when I need to. Of course, I was running XP but I cannot deal with it any more. I was trying to use it again yesterday, I don’t know how I used Windows for my whole life until now. Nothing works! Everything crashes, games just choke to the point of hard shutdowns being a requirement despite having enough processing power, RAM, video card power etc (I invested a lot into my system). I just can’t deal with it anymore because I feel like kicking the thing everytime I turn it on. Ideally, I’d move over to Linux and although I’ve tried a few times, it’s always delegated to a secondary OS because it still can’t support everything 100% without tons of excess effort. However Linux at least combines stability with the nerdiness factor, after using Windows for years thinking getting things to work proved my 1337ness, I realized it was just that Windows couldn’t handle shit and I was proving my 1337ness but for no real reason.. getting things to run that a normal user may have trouble with is good, but it’s also pointless. I know this probably reads like a troll but it’s the absolute truth from my perspective and I’m only saying it in response to the parent who has similar views to my old self.

Also to add, I do think Macs, and especially their applications are less likely to crap out than Windows apps—or at least Mac apps are built with much more care and forethought. And when Mac apps do fail, it’s more likely to be a critical flaw than a Windows application where spending 30 minutes mucking about in .dll files or the registry might fix. And at this point in my life, I prefer a soft sigh and moving on rather than than mucking about with what in the end is only a 25% success rate and never involves something mission critical.