My preferred method for eating has a name–maybe misapplied–but is also culturally debasing: eating with only a fork and using the side to cut/smash-through your food before spearing it. A survey calls that a “knork”, though it is in fact an actual product. I’m going to call my method “knorking”.
This week’s World Wide Words is on the Knork.
Astrologers and psychics have known these tricks for years. The magician Ian Rowland, in his classic “The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading,” itemizes them one by one, in what could easily serve as a manual for the beginner profiler. First is the Rainbow Ruse – the “statement which credits the client with both a personality trait and its opposite.” (“I would say that on the whole you can be rather a quiet, self effacing type, but when the circumstances are right, you can be quite the life and soul of the party if the mood strikes you.”) The Jacques Statement, named for the character in “As You Like It” who gives the Seven Ages of Man speech, tailors the prediction to the age of the subject. To someone in his late thirties or early forties, for example, the psychic says, “If you are honest about it, you often get to wondering what happened to all those dreams you had when you were younger.” There is the Barnum Statement, the assertion so general that anyone would agree, and the Fuzzy Fact, the seemingly factual statement couched in a way that “leaves plenty of scope to be developed into something more specific.” (“I can see a connection with Europe, possibly Britain, or it could be the warmer, Mediterranean part?”) And that’s only the start: there is the Greener Grass technique, the Diverted Question, the Russian Doll, Sugar Lumps, not to mention Forking and the Good Chance Guess – all of which, when put together in skillful combination, can convince even the most skeptical observer that he or she is in the presence of real insight.
From Malcolm Gladwell via Bruce Schnier
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I’ve been reading up on Civic Literacy and so far I’m kind’ve disappointed with what I’m seeing and my own involvement in it as well:
Civic Literacy seems to be geared towards government and politics, as opposed to broad participation in communities and society—especially NGOs or other social groups. They seem to be based on what is an arguably outdated concept of American government providing broad social services. Apparently the Reagan and Gingrich revolution haven’t made it into the curriculum yet.
Also, it appears to be based a lot more around how the government works, as opposed to how to participate within government (and resultantly alter its operation) but that is a standard pedagogical issue.
Some links:
I’m taking Mathematical Models in Biology and we had an interesting problem in our last class. We were broken up into groups and asked to create a model around malaria infection. We received some information on mosquito behavior and lifecycles, infection rates and patterns, and effects. That was it.
The primary tenet of mathematical modeling is simplification. We quickly realized that when trying to simplify the process, we needed to know what information we wanted to gain from the model. The standard (and incredibly simple) SIR model, for example, answers the question “how many people will be infected at any one time?”, not necessarily, “how many will recover or die?”.
To put it into mathematical terms, if we’re going to reduce the number of dimensions (by simplifying), we want to make sure that the information we’re left with has useful meaning for the situation.
Which also leads me to thinking about reductionism and holism.
While it is undeniable that people who watch lots of vampire movies have nightmares with vampires, it is also true that people who work at UPS have nightmares about boxes (according to a former anthro teacher of mine who also once worked at UPS). From Wired’s Geekdad Blog
If you grow peaches for a living, you know all about chill units. They measure how much cold a plant experiences during a winter. And chill units are essential to a good crop of peaches. When plants go dormant at the end of summer, many of them have to experience a certain amount of time in cold weather before they can grow on schedule in the spring. If a peach tree doesn’t get enough chill units, it can’t respond promptly to the warmth of spring. It is still in a zombie-like dormancy, and it can only rouse itself after the spring gets even warmer.
From a Wired article on greenups , or when plants begin growing in Spring.
The JHB was known as the “Plywood Skyscraper” after having faulty glass windows that would pop out during it’s construction in the 1970s.
Police were left closing off surrounding streets whenever winds reached 45 mph
Also interesting description of two 300-ton weights that sit on the 58th floor to damp swaying motions.
via wikipedia. Researched due to an article today about MIT suing Frank Gehry over the Stata Center.
According to Fred Turner in From Counterculture to Cyberculture legitimacy exchange is…
…a term that refers to the process by which experts in one area draw on the authority of experts in another area to justify their activities.
and it follows interestingly with
As Bowker explains, “An isolated scientific worker making an outlandish claim could gain rhetorical legitimacy by pointing to support from another field–which in turn referenced the first worker’s field to support its claim. The language of cybernetics provided a site where this exchange could occur.”
The other term I took from the book is “network forum” in which individuals from different fields can meet and exchange legitimacy. Turner’s book gives the Whole Earth Catalog as a print example.
I was really happy with the feedback I received from my last article”Should I get a nonprofit job?” The responses I got, some of which you can read in the comments, helped me focus the message I was trying to convey:
A nonprofit job is not the only way to make a living and make a difference in the world.
In the comments, I think I hit upon the real issue, which is the lack of Civic Literacy I see among people in my age/social group. I don’t mean “young people are lazy/apathetic/ungrateful/whatever”, but that we don’t know how to effectively participate and initiate change in our communities and society—for no lack of interest. We’re having to make things up as we go along, which as I think my parent’s generation would agree, didn’t work out quite the way they thought it would.
So below are three suggestions I have for the intelligent, well-educated (or seeking to be), self-motivated and upwardly mobile individual who can be an ally of the nonprofit sector, but not necessarily employed by it.
Executive Boards are the driving force behind nonprofit organizations. Boards set broad goals and provide important oversight for the functioning of the organization. Many boards have term-limits for serving, which means they need a constant influx of knowledgeable and engaged individuals. Boards often run by the Three-G’s—Give, Get or Get out—but an active board will provide great opportunities for involvement beyond fundraising.
You can turn the typical fundraising experience on it’s head by offering a Request for Proposals, and get a tax write-off as well. Starting a Foundation allows you control social priorities by controlling the purse-strings. Because you’re offering a grant and not an individual gift, you have a better opportunity to target specific programs or objectives with increased accountability and oversight. Did someone say “site visit”?
There was once a time in America when people believed it was the federal government’s responsibility to offer many of the services that the nonprofit sector now provides. Regardless of your political-philosophical position, the government still provides massive amounts of funding to social causes. Contact your local, state or national representative and request support for your particular cause. You might not be able to target a particular organization for earmarks, but a rising tide raises all the boats.