NPR has a story on an algorithm created by researchers David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina that can allegedly detect when business leaders are being dishonest about their company’s practices or earnings. Unfortunately, they don’t publish the complete wordlists used in their algorithm (pdf) , just these 2 categories:

Extreme positive emotions

** amaz*, A-one, astonish*, awe-inspiring, awesome, awful, bang-up, best, bless*, brillian*, by all odds, careful*, challeng*, cherish*, confidence, confident, confidently, convinc*, crack, cracking, dandy, deadly, definite, definitely, delectabl*, delicious*, deligh*, deucedly, devilishly, dynam*, eager*, emphatically, enormous, excel*, excit*, exult, fab, fabulous*, fantastic*, first-rate, flawless*, genuinely, glori*, gorgeous*, grand, grande*, gratef*, great, groovy, hero*, huge, illustrious, immense, in spades, in truth, incredibl*, insanely, inviolable, keen*, luck, lucked, lucki*, lucks, lucky, luscious, madly, magnific*, marvellous, marvelous, neat*, nifty, outstanding, peachy, perfect*, phenomenal, potent, privileg*, rattling, redoubtable, rejoice, scrumptious*, secur*, sincer*, slap-up, smashing, solid, splend*, strong*, substantial, succeed*, success*, super, superb, superior*, suprem*, swell, terrific*, thankf*, tiptop, topnotch, treasur*, tremendous, triumph*, truly, truth*, unassailable, unbelievable, unquestionably, vast, wonderf*, wondrous, wow*, yay, yays, very good

Extreme Negative Emotions

abominable, abortive, absurd, advers*, ambitious, annihilating, annihilative, atrocious, awful, badly, baffling, barbarous, bias, breach, brokenhearted, brutal*, calamitous, careless*, catchy, challenging, cockeyed, coerce, crafty, craz*, cruel*, crushed, cunning, curious, danger*, daunting, daze*, defect*, degrad*, demanding, demeaning, depress*, derisory, despair*, desperat*, despicable, destroy*, devastat*, devil*, difficult*, dire, direful, disastrous, disgraceful, dodgy, dread*, exasperating, exorbitant, extortionate, fail*, farcical, farfetched, fatal*, fateful, fault*, fearful*, fearsome, fierce, finished, fright*, frustrat*, funny, grave*, griev*, guileful, hard, harebrained, harm, harmed, harmful*, harming, harms, heartbreak*, heartbroke*, heartless*, heartrending, heartsick, hideous, hopeless*, horr*, humbling, humiliat*, hurt*, idiot, idiotic, ignominious, ignor*, implausible, impossible, improbable, inauspicious, inconceivable, inferior* , infuriating, inglorious, insane, insecur*, intimidat*, jerk, jerked, jerks, kayoed, knavish, knocked out, knotty, KOd out, KO’d out, laughable, life-threatening, luckless*, ludicrous*, maddening, madder, maddest, maniac*, menace, mess, messy, miser*, misfortunate, mortifying, muddle, nast*, nonsensical, outrag*, overwhelm*, painf*, panic*, paranoi*, pathetic*, peculiar*, pessimis*, pickle, piti*, precarious, preconception, prejudic*, preposterous, pressur*, problem*, reek*, resent*, ridicul*, roughshod, ruin*, savage*, scandalous, scourge, serious, seriously, severe*, shake*, shaki*, shaky, shame*, shock*, silly, skeptic*, slimy, slippery, squeeze, steep, strange, stunned, stupefied, stupid*, suffer, suffered, sufferer*, suffering, suffers, sunk, terribl*, terrified, terrifies, terrify, terrifying, terror*, threat*, thwarting, ticked, tough*, tragic* , transgress, trauma*, tremendous, trick*, trigger-happy, ugl*, unbelievable, unconscionable, unconvincing, unimaginable, unimportant, unlucky, unmanageable, unspeakable, unsuccessful*, untoward, unworthy, usurious, vehement, vexing, vicious*, victim*, vile, violat*, violent*, vulnerab*, washed-up, wicked*, withering, wonky, worst, worthless* , wretched, very bad

Build, learn, organize, subvert

A design by Ryan Jenkins of Troy, NY. My colleague Carolyn Braunius had this screen-printed on a shirt at the Prometheus Barnraising.

From the introduction to Paul Lockhart’s A Mathematician’s Lament (PDF;  it’s also published as a book which is how I discovered it):

A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds himself in a society where music education has been made mandatory. “We are helping our students become more competitive in an increasingly sound-filled world.” Educators, school systems, and the state are put in charge of this vital project. Studies are commissioned, committees are formed, and decisions are made— all without the advice or participation of a single working musician or composer.

Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious black dots and lines must constitute the “language of music.” It is imperative that students become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence; indeed, it would be ludicrous to expect a child to sing a song or play an instrument without having a thorough grounding in music notation and theory. Playing and listening to music, let alone composing an original piece, are considered very advanced topics and are generally put off until college, and more often graduate school.

As for the primary and secondary schools, their mission is to train students to use this language— to jiggle symbols around according to a fixed set of rules: “Music class is where we take out our staff paper, our teacher puts some notes on the board, and we copy them or transpose them into a different key. We have to make sure to get the clefs and key signatures right, and our teacher is very picky about making sure we fill in our quarter-notes completely. One time we had a chromatic scale problem and I did it right, but the teacher gave me no credit because I had the stems pointing the wrong way.”

In their wisdom, educators soon realize that even very young children can be given this kind of musical instruction. In fact it is considered quite shameful if one’s third-grader hasn’t completely memorized his circle of fifths. “I’ll have to get my son a music tutor. He simply won’t apply himself to his music homework. He says it’s boring. He just sits there staring out the window, humming tunes to himself and making up silly songs.”

In the higher grades the pressure is really on. After all, the students must be prepared for the standardized tests and college admissions exams. Students must take courses in Scales and Modes, Meter, Harmony, and Counterpoint. “It’s a lot for them to learn, but later in college when they finally get to hear all this stuff, they’ll really appreciate all the work they did in high school.” Of course, not many students actually go on to concentrate in music, so only a few will ever get to hear the sounds that the black dots represent. Nevertheless, it is important that every member of society be able to recognize a modulation or a fugal passage, regardless of the fact that they will never hear one. “To tell you the truth, most students just aren’t very good at music. They are bored in class, their skills are terrible, and their homework is barely legible. Most of them couldn’t care less about how important music is in today’s world; they just want to take the minimum number of music courses and be done with it. I guess there are just music people and non-music people. I had this one kid, though, man was she sensational! Her sheets were impeccable— every note in the right place, perfect calligraphy, sharps, flats, just beautiful. She’s going to make one hell of a musician someday.”

Waking up in a cold sweat, the musician realizes, gratefully, that it was all just a crazy dream. “Of course!” he reassures himself, “No society would ever reduce such a beautiful and meaningful art form to something so mindless and trivial; no culture could be so cruel to its children as to deprive them of such a natural, satisfying means of human expression. How absurd!”

When I tell people I have a degree in math, the response is usually “I was really bad at math.” The truth is that most people never did any actual math; even I did fairly little.

If your popover fails, it still makes a delicious hockey puck. I also love popovers because they are relatively quick to throw together (about an hour to mix and bake), use 4 basic ingredients (milk, butter, flour, eggs), and are mostly healthy: they won’t induce the same carb coma as pancakes and have fairly little butter baked in (so you can spread a lot on top).

I have made both a ton of popovers and a ton of hockey pucks, so this is my fairly fool-proof method for making the former, not the latter.

Ingredients

1 cup whole wheat pastry flour (or 3/4 C white whole wheat flour + 1/4 C All Purpose White Flour; I have not managed to get consistent results with 100% white whole wheat)

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 eggs (room temperature)

1 cup milk (room temperature)

1 tablespoon melted butter, + more for greasing

Steps

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

If you forget to set out the eggs and milk, do this: put the milk and eggs in a pyrex measuring bowl in the oven while the oven preheats; be sure to check it after ~5 minutes (you just want to bring it to room temperature or a little warmer; if it gets too hot, when you mix in the flour the starch will get activated and it’ll be gross).

Put a muffin tin in the oven while preheating (you want it hot). Some people also brown a little bit of butter in the bottom of each well (this recipe makes 8 popovers if you’re using a normal-sized muffin tin). I don’t usually do this—I just rub a stick of butter around after the tin is preheated (about 5 min)

Whisk the eggs, milk and melted butter. All the recipes I’ve read warn of overmixing: get a little air in, but no need to beat for more than 30 seconds or so.

Add the flour and salt and whisk about 15 seconds longer. You should see a bunch of little air bubbles.

Take the preheated muffin cups out of the oven; if you browned the butter in the oven, give it a swirl to grease up the sides; otherwise grease it up with a stick of butter. Fill each well in the tin about 1/2 to 3/4 of the way full (I’m able to get 8 of them out of this recipe).

Bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes (don’t open the oven!), then turn down to 350 degrees (still don’t open the oven!) and bake 25 minutes more. Open the oven (finally!), poke a quick hole in the top of each with a knife, and let them bake about 5 minutes more.

Take them out of the oven and eat.

Key takeaways:

• You need room-temperature ingredients

• Pre-heat the muffin tin

• Have a hot oven

• Don’t open the oven until the very end. This sucks because if the popovers fail, they fail in the first 10 minutes of baking; but you won’t find out till 30 minutes later (if you open the door mid-bake, they might fall, which isn’t as bad, but not quite as impressive).

My advice to the Public Conversations Project (who are awesome, BTW) in response to them posing a question about social media and “Can real dialogue be practiced online, modeled in a way that will shift online conversations from torrents to curiosity, from blame to understanding?”

Don’t confuse “online” with “Twitter”

I think the strength of the Public Conversations Project is not that it starts conversations, but that it creates an environment in which those conversations can flourish, take on meaning, and lead towards transformative action. There are tons of different platforms, designs and approaches beyond Twitter and Facebook. Form follows function and Twitter, Facebook and most of the other popular social media platforms are not designed to create the kind of conversations you want. I would encourage you to still use them for outreach, fundraising and brief dialogue, but to also look beyond them to other online services or platforms that can create an environment that encourages true conversation. Though you may meet strangers on a busy and crowded street, you then invite them inside to a more controlled and comfortable space. I think the Public Conversations Project could play an important role in describing what that controlled and comfortable (yet still accessible) space would look like online—but to do so you would need to look beyond the current social media hotness.

I get a chuckle every time I come across this Creative Commons’ed  web 2.0 graphic I created over 4 years ago as the result of a conference non-sequitur. The above is from a LinkedIn group with 1,800+ members.

From Patricia Fara’s_ Science: A Four Thousand Year History_. She takes a historical and comparative approach to explore the diversity of scientific experience (similar to Karen Armstrong’s A History of God).

If you assume that todays science, along with its technological applications, represents the summit of human achievement, then Islamic philosophers do indeed appear to have ground to a halt after four hundred years [8th to the 12th century CE]. But for Muslims who believe that the quest for spiritual perfection is more important than dominating the material world through reason, then it is the science of Europe that took the wrong track….

Modern science places a great premium on originality. In contrast, [Abū Ali al-Husain] Ibn Sīnā’s [Latinized: Avicenna] writing was valued by his contemporaries not for its novely but for its throughness and systematic organization. Like Newton, Islamic scholars studied the world because they wanted to approach God—and also like Newton, whole swathes of their lives have been cut out of the history books to make them appear as proto-scientists. Ibn Sīnā preached the Islamic goal of striving for stability. For him, understanding nature was not an end in itself, since the physical, divine and spiritual worlds are inextricably twined together. The word islam means both submission and peace, or being at one with God. Ibn Sīnā’s aim was not to pick apart the structure of the universe, but to be led towards the unity of God.

A sensible reply to Slashdot blustering over OPLC’s Nicholas Negroponte’s superficially-nutty statement “Paper books are really dead — they’re gone. And they’re not being killed by tablets, they’re creating tablets”:

…living in a 3rd world country where access to book is diffucult and “piracy” normal (including on books) I think he might be “righter” than we think.

Currently there are “roughtly” 1 billion people living in countries where the majority reads at least “some” and 5 billion who live in counties where only a minority reads. (nb: of course india, china, etc have great literature, and la hogera in santa cruz is trying very hard to get good interesting local writers to the local market, but the realitly is that the wast majority of people in emerging countries do not read for “fun”, they read if they are ordered to by their employers…., because:

If you are poor and a “cheap low quality pirated book” cost 4 to 5 hours of work you will not offer 100 hours of work every year to your child, so the child will not connect “reading with fun” (exept the statistical “lucky” one outlier)).

Moreover there is little avaiability of recent outside book (a hard cover foreign book can cost about 50% of a basic montly salary). So execpt the pirated copies of some blockbusters made popular by pirated copies of foreign movies, you do not read recent foreign books (softcover classics are about the end of it).

But “everybody” has access to computers (mostly of course in cyber cafés) and most students use pirated PDF’s of school books, not just because they cannot affort the 30..40$+ * 10..20 they would need, but because:

• Amazon do not deliver in many 3rd world countries
• and other providers can take up to 2 month to get the book to you (assuming you have an internationally valid credit card)
• and the local bookshop are not very efficient (or just would not bother because they know you will hassle them when they ask 3..4 time the “amazon” price because they have to pay: the book, the transport the customs (40%)..

So ebooks are the best way to get books to these 5B people

At the Transmission Project we’re steadily working towards fleshing out our critique of best practice and the proposal of an alternative: _ honest practice_.

If “best practices” are the standards of excellence within organizations considered high performing, how can it be expected that those standards could be immediately implemented in startup programs? What of differences in organizational culture and constituencies, not to mention technical and information systems? Is innovation supported if funding follows conventional wisdom? How do we know that wisdom is valid when our industry is trained to share only the lessons of success and not of failure?

The difference between honest practice and best practice reminds me of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The Poet”: poets translate underlying patterns and deep truths into the vernacular;  mystics create shallow snapshots that soon lose their greater meaning.

Readers of poetry see the factory-village, and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these. for these works of art are not yet consecrated in their reading; but the poet sees them fall within the great Order not less than the bee-hive, or the spider’s geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars she loves like her own. Besides, in a centred mind, it signifies nothing how many mechanical inventions you exhibit. Though you add millions, and never so surprising, the fact of mechanics has not gained a grain’s weight. The spiritual fact remains unalterable, by many or by few particulars; as no mountain is of any appreciable height to break the curve of the sphere. …

But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze. The poet did not stop at the color, or the form, but read their meaning; neither may he rest in this meaning, but he makes the same objects exponents of his new thought. Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false. For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead. Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one. The morning-redness happens to be the favorite meteor to the eyes of Jacob Behmen, and comes to stand to him for truth and faith; and he believes should stand for the same realities to every reader. But the first reader prefers as naturally the symbol of a mother and child, or a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweller polishing a gem. Either of these, or of a myriad more, are equally good to the person to whom they are significant. Only they must be held lightly, and be very willingly translated into the equivalent terms which others use. And the mystic must be steadily told, —All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric, —universal signs, instead of these village symbols, —and we shall both be gainers.

Last weekend I visited Hudson, NY for the Prometheus Radio Project’s first full-power radio barnraising. I spent Saturday morning volunteering in the kitchen: despite all of the consensus-process workshops offered at the barnraising, the kitchen ran as an autocracy. Lunch remained delicious.