The story of the slightly smaller Government-Letter sized paper (from Wikipedia):

There is an additional paper size, to which the name “government-letter” was given by the IEEE Printer Working Group: the 8 in × 10½ in (203.2 mm × 266.7 mm) paper that is used in the United States for children’s writing. It was prescribed by Herbert Hoover when he was Secretary of Commerce to be used for U.S. government forms, apparently to enable discounts from the purchase of paper for schools. In later years, as photocopy machines proliferated, citizens wanted to make photocopies of the forms, but the machines did not generally have this size paper in their bins. Ronald Reagan therefore had the U.S. government switch to regular letter size (8½ in × 11 in). The 8 in × 10½ in size is still commonly used in spiral-bound notebooks and the like.

An alternative explanation in the past for the difference between “government size” (as government-letter size was referred to at the time) and letter size paper was that the slightly smaller sheet used less paper, and therefore saved the government money in both paper and filing space. However, when Reagan prescribed the change to letter size, it was commonly stated that U.S. paper manufacturers had standardized their production lines for letter size, and were meeting government orders by trimming ½” each from two sides of letter-size stock; thus the government was allegedly paying more for its smaller paper size before Reagan abolished it. The different paper size also reportedly restricted the government’s ability to take advantage of modular office furniture designs, common in the 1980s, whose cabinets were designed for letter size paper.

Today is Blog Action Day and this year’s topic is Poverty. Since I’ve recently written about poverty directly, today I’ll be more lateral:

Today I am wearing:

1. Cotton American Apparel T-Shirt (with print-design from Woot!)
2. Denim Banana Republic Jeans
3. Saucony Synthetic Running Shoes
4. Old Navy Underwear
5. Hanes Cotton Socks
6. Leather Belt purchased from Brooklyn St. Fair with Levi’s Metal Belt Buckle
7. Penguin Lambswool Sweater

Discussion Set 1: What types of information have I included in this list? What have I omitted? What types of information would you have included (or omitted)? Why?

Discussion Set 2: In my clothing, what could I have done differently, within the broad context of poverty? Why?

Discussion Set 3: How have you approached this exercise: Realistically, Positively, Pessimistically, Cynically, Pragmatically, Comprehensively, Reductionistically, etc? How did the context or presentation of this exercise affect how you did (or did not) perform it? How might someone else approach this exercise and why?

Discussion Set 4: Is this an appropriate exercise for addressing poverty?

Interesting explanation about the traditional layout of the Talmud. From Andrew on the Marks and Meaning mailing list

I’m reminded as you discuss this of the arrangement of texts in a traditional manuscript copy of the Talmud. Most printed copies are a bit different, but originally a Talmud page was divided into nine squares like a tic-tac-toe grid. Sometimes the central box was further subdivided, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The central box served as the location of the primary text to be analyzed in the original Hebrew — usually it was a Torah or Haftorah portion. The boxes to the left and right were explanations of the vowel-pointing for this piece of text; in other words, they were commentaries on what the Hebrew ./meant./ — what actual words were in play here, along with a brief definition of unusual or rare words. The boxes above and below the main text were set up to act as containers for alternate versions of the story, or stories that played off of elements in the center box.

The four corner pieces were commentaries on the main text from Rabbis Hillel, Gamaliel, and the other two — eminent masters riffing jazz- like off of the core beat at the center, or arguing the left-right interpretations, or further explicating the up-down side-stories.

All of the boxes — ALL — would shift size on the page to accommodate all the various elements. If there was a long commentary from one of the rabbis but little else, that box would expand, and the Torah portion would shrink until it was only the verse, or even the word, relevant to that commentary. Conversely, (though it didn’t happen often), if there were a long story in the Torah with little commentary, several verses would get squeezed into one large box, with eight small and almost empty boxes circling it.

The point was, there were nine books crammed into one. Hillel always occupied the same square on the page. The Babylonian Haggadah (stories) was always above the Torah, the Palestinian Haggadah always below. You could read one commentator exclusively, or read the Torah or Haftorah exclusively, or try to read all the commentaries on all of Torah simultaneously.

Ed also posted some more visual links:

An annotated page: http://www.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/TalmudPage.html

Talmud style layout in HTML (with fixed size boxes, so not precisely) http://www.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/TalmudMap/Samples.html

I really like using the Drupal CAPTCHA system with ReCAPTCHA (the one that helps scan in books). Both of them suck in the standard “Drupal makes everything ugly and hard to use by default, but it’s still easier than building something from scratch”.

One of ReCaptcha’s problems is that the words are sometimes hard to read. To deal with that, I used this tip from a Stumbleupon developer in the comments of this post entitled ReCAPTCHA’s quality is going down? : putting a link to reload—Recaptcha.reload()—the CAPTCHA in the explanation. To do that, I pasted this into the Challenge Description setting on the CAPTCHA admin page:

` To prevent spam, please type the two words you see below separated by a space. Can’t read the words? `

I also used CSS to hide the fieldset border box and title from the comments to cut down on the cruft too.

My RSS feeds of late have been delivering to me many interesting posts by Chris Anderson as he explores the different kinds of free. I’ve been specifically interested in his visualizations of the Advertising Model of Free: advertisers pay for advertising, which subsidizes programming, which is then given away for free, with the goal being that consumers will purchaser those original advertiser’s products. There is a great explanation of how broadcast advertising works in the Denver Open Media’s Opening Access video (at about the 1 minute, 30 second mark).

Chris Anderson’s graphic of the same thing is below (C is Consumer, P is Producer, A is Advertiser):

This model of Free is very similar to the standard nonprofit model of giving: Foundations/Donors (D) provide support to Nonprofit Organizations (NP) which then provide free services to Clients/Constituents (C):

That all being said, the nonprofit model doesn’t quite have the same symmetry. In fact, it’s missing a piece that, at least in my experience, very rarely is talked about: what is the relationship of Foundations/Donors to the Clients/Constituents?

I’ve previously explored some of the reasons why nonprofits have arisen in the way they have, including middle-class guilt about the disparities between the affluent and the poor; wealth-transfer mechanisms for the rich; dissatisfaction with the profit motive as an incentive to extract work and induce consumption; greater abundance in society general; and the inability for government agencies to provide services to meet growing needs as a result of the widening gap between rich and poor.

Putting those in context of clients/constituents, the actual people being served, there isn’t that much of a relationship: as a person receiving assistance, one would not care much weather it was coming from the Ford Foundation or the Carnegie Foundation—it is the quality and efficacy of the services that matter, and those are being delivered via the nonprofit.

One way to look at this (and there are many), is to think of the Clients/Constituents as just one part of the larger Society (S):

In this case, what is being transferred between Foundations/Donors and Society in general: reputation, legitimacy, restitution, validation….? That’s an interesting question.

I just received a great set of questions to ask people when conducting Brand Interviews: if you’re trying to lock-down who you are and how to communicate that, it helps to ask people who know you and what they think. These are those questions.

• What do you personally value most about [YOUR ORGANIZATION]? Why is it important to you?

• What do you need/expect from an organization like [YOUR ORGANIZATION]? What other organizations could you/do you expect to meet those needs?

• How would you describe [YOUR ORGANIZATION] to someone who does not know it well? What words/phrases would you use? Why?

• How would you describe the personality of [YOUR ORGANIZATION]? What is it like to interact with the organization?

• In your mind, what does [YOUR ORGANIZATION] do well? What does it do better than any other, similar organization? Where is there room for improvement?

• What are your hopes and goals for the organization? If you were running the organization, what would you change (if anything). What should absolutely not change…what do you consider to be sacred?

• How do you get most of your information about what’s going on [YOUR ORGANIZATION]? How else could we effectively communicate with you?

• Do you visit the [YOUR ORGANIZATION] web site? What are you looking for there? What do you wish were included? How else could the web site be more useful to you?

• Is there anything else you want to tell me? Anything you wish I had asked you?

featured in “PopCo” by Alice Butler (via Angelina):

Ingredients:

2 oz ground almonds

6 oz self-raising flour

2 tsp baking powder

4 oz light muscovado sugar

150 ml corn oil

200-250 ml soy milk

zest of 2 unwaxed lemons

juice of 2 lemons

1 tbsp orange flower water . . . not sure what this is

1 tsp vanilla/ natural vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 190 degrees (given that this is a British book, I’m guessing convert to F – maybe 325ish?), or less if it’s a fan oven.

Grease a cake tin. A deep 6 inch tin is good but any will do.

Sift the flour and baking powder into a bowl and then add the sugar. Mix in the ground almonds and lemon zest. Add the oil and soymilk.

Use slightly less liquid to make the end result more of a cake and less of a pudding. You don’t have to be 100 per cent precise with

the liquids in this cake.

Now add the lemon juice and mix in thoroughly. Add the flower water and the vanilla and mix again. The result

should look like a thick batter.

Pour into the cake tin and bake for about 40 min. The outside should be brown and inside very soft. Turn out, cool and decorate with fresh mint leaves and strawberries.

Today, according to NPR (and many other outlets), “more than 30 pastors across the country are expected to preach a sermon that endorses or opposes a political candidate by name. This would be a flagrant violation of a law that bans tax-exempt organizations from involvement in political campaigns.”

I’ve previously discussed two pillars of nonprofit structure: Incorporation (and Discretionary Conception) and Tax Exemption. So today lets talk about Restrictions on Political Activity for nonprofits.

Section 501(c)3 of the Tax code is relatively clear on prohibiting candidate endorsement: organizations are prohibited, directly and indirectly from participating in, contributing to, or speaking on on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office. on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.

Nonprofit organizations are allowed though:

• Neutral and non-partisan voter education and registration activities. For example, an organization could indicate how candidates voted in the past or a survey of opinions on an issue, so long as all candidates were included no preference was given to the outcomes.

• Lobbying, so long as “no substantial part” of their activities may be that of attempting to influence legislation. Lobbying rules are complicated but the The Nonprofit Lobbying Guide makes it all very clear.

So how did this all come about: some sources place responsibility upon the shoulders of Lyndon Johnson and reactionary, red-baiting, 1950s politics.

In 1952, the Cox Committee was formed to determine “whether foundations have been infiltrated by communists, as well as whether tax-exempt groups are using their money for stated purposes and are not endangering our existing capitalistic structure.” The committee found that foundations weren’t infiltrated, but were vulnerable. Foundations were powerful and could exercise “thought control” and through this could “materially influence public opinion”( OMB Watch).

Echoing today’s nonprofit criticisms (other than the fear of communist leanings) foundations were knocked for their arrogance, insular and irresponsible mismanagement, cronyism, and ignorance of sound practice—existing tax rules did not compel compliance, “as interpreted by the courts, permits far too much license.” Said one former fund advisor, testifying before the Cox Committee:

“Not a single member of the staff [of The Ford Fund for the Advancement of Education], from the president down to the lowest employee, has had any experience, certainly none in recent years, that would give understanding of the problems that are met daily by the teachers and administrators of our schools…. As a former member of the so-called Advisory Committee I testify that at no time did the administration of the fund seek from it any advice on principles of operation, nor did it hospitably receive or act in accordance with such advice as was volunteered.”

(This quote, along with many others, can be found in the right-leaning American Mercury article

Erin McKean makes the point in a TED talk that, unlike paper dictionaries, online dictionary searches do not provide serendipity: finding something you didn’t know you were looking for.

I take this many ways:

True, but…

How many people regularly flip a dictionary?

How exact is search?

How many people just type the word into Google (which, because internet search sucks, is quite serendipitous).

(via Daring Fireball

In my last post exploring poverty, I defined poverty as “the inability to fully participate in or benefit from society”. This definition sought to move beyond a simple definition of poverty as an economic floor, and towards a broader conception of poverty and a goal for society in general.

To begin this post, I’d like to explore the idea of participation as an opposite of poverty. Using participation as a guide, we can thus provide a conceptual benchmark: a society can be measured by the people who are excluded from it.

Describing poverty as exclusion is not unique. Prof. Yves Cabannes writes extensively upon South American anti-poverty movements and their notions of exlusion. Urban organizer Martin Longoria of Brazil has said “You know what is the opposite of exclusion for us? It is not inclusion, but participation. Active participation is what makes you a full citizen.” (“Poor, or excluded? lessons from Latin America and the Caribbean”. UN Chronicle, March-May, 2001)

Within the United States there are many examples of exclusion, but an illustrative one is an exclusion of age: will our older population, expected to grow with the influx of Baby Boomers (and others of the same age), continue to be able participate within society at the same level they currently do?

There is no easy answer to this question (or the multitude of questions like it); and that we frame it within an easy/complex binary system is perhaps the problem. In approaching questions like these, our most common impulse is to look towards existing problems:

• Older people have difficulty voting

• Older people have difficulty earning a living-wage

• Older people have difficulty socializing with younger people

And breaking these down, we usually approach them as essential elements that are missing or unfulfilled:

• They can’t register to vote

• They can’t get to polling stations

• They are not engaged on issues or by candidates

It is easiest to frame issues as the absence of something currently existing, rather than creating something new. We look for simple indicators of success, rather than describing the outcome as a whole. Our collective inability to accept diversity and create participation can be viewed as a failure of imagination.

Experiment: Describe society if people over 65 years old were fully able to participate within the political system. Do so using language that doesn’t actually use “old people” (or senior citizens, or any subject that would stand-in for an idea of them).

It’s difficult. Instead of saying something easy like “Old people can easily get to polling places”, you have to reframe it as “Polling places are close to and accessible to where people live.” And even more difficult, imagine what form that would actually take: more polling places (micro-polling centers?), transportation (who do you imagine driving?), more opportunities to vote so missing one election is less consequential (micro-ballots?).

Imagine solutions not as absence or fulfillment, but as practice.

_Experiment: Describe a society that has entirely eliminated recreational drug use (we’ll say alcohol, tobacco, and everything else too)? Don’t use the word “drugs” (or any other stand-in). How are people spending their time? How do they relax? Or find thrills Or explore their mind and body? _

You may find yourself imagining everyone as being identical—we naturally seek homogeneity as it is a simplifier and makes imagining easier but at a cost. Try to push away from this and think of the diversity of people you know (or even common stereotypes)? Do not imagine them disappearing; instead imagine their activities transformed according to the constraints of the experiment.

Thinking along these lines allows you to explore incremental changes and improvements that may be more achievable, and, when taken together, be more effective than strictly seeking absence or fulfillment. It also helps you avoid framing things as absolutes. Think middle.

I’ve got one more method to help overcome our innate desire for absolutes and homogeneity: use the double-negative.

Experiment: Describe “not not-poor”. Avoid the logical or mathematical desire to cancel out nots like negative signs. If not-poor is rich, than what is the opposite of that, if it is not poor?

The purpose of this exercise is not necessarily to come to a categorical answer (“…the middle-class…”), but instead explore the meaning and connotations of these words and the alternatives that present themselves when you move beyond them.

From feedback to my last piece, I have left the explanation of this method to the end—but I still find it greatly interesting. It comes from the Ismaili philosopher Abu Yaqub Sijistani, who advocated speaking of God in double negatives: by saying He was “not no-thing” or “not not-wise”, it allowed seekers to “become aware of the inadequacy of language when it tried to convey the mystery of God.” So says Karen Armstrong in A History of God (p. 179-80).