I am also convinced, but cannot prove, that there are no objects, but only relations.  By this I mean that I am convinced that there is a consistent way of thinking about nature that refers only to interactions between systems and not to states of or changes in individual systems. I am convinced that this way of thinking of nature will end up to be the useful and natural one in physics. Carlo Rovelli, physicist, Institut Universitaire de France and Université de la Mediterranée; author of Quantum Gravity. Edge Foundation

Great man theory, etc.

To follow up on last year’s navel gazing, here’s the roundup for 2008:

Places I’ve Slept:

California: Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Los Angeles, Poway;

Northwest: Seattle, CA; Portland and Silver Falls, Oregon;

Midwest: Denver, CO; Madison, WI;

South: New Orleans, LA;

East: Jersey City, NJ; Narragansett, RI;

Best Purchase: Jose Pierpont

Best Gift: Buttons

Best Book: PopCo by Scarlett Thomas

Best Album: Cloud Cult’s The Meaning of 8

Best Object: Butcher block kitchen table that has become my desk

Best Shoe: Dansko clogs

Best Project Brompt.com

I found my union card today and with it was a little Weingarten Rights card—explaining my right to have union representation during an interview by my employer. I didn’t particularly like the text of it, so this is from Wikipedia:

RULE 1: The employee must make a clear request for union representation before or during the interview. The employee cannot be punished for making this request.

RULE 2: After the employee makes the request, the employer must choose from among three options. The Employer must either: grant the request and delay questioning until the union representative arrives and has a chance to consult privately with the employee; deny the request and end the interview immediately; or give the employee a choice of having the interview without representation or ending the interview.

RULE 3: If the employer denies the request for union representation, and continues to ask questions, it commits an unfair labor practice and the employee has a right to refuse to answer. The employer may not discipline the employee for such a refusal.

In 2000, Weingarten Rights were extended to non-union employees (in the form of the right to have a coworker present during investigatory meetings). This was later rescinded in 2004.

Some protected activities still do exist for non-union employees:, including:

1. Free To Discuss Discipline, Wages and Benefits

Non-union employers cannot prohibit employees from discussing work conditions, wages or discipline. In Double Eagle Hotel & Casino, an employer violated the NLRA by promulgating a work rule that prohibited employees from sharing such information with each other or persons outside the company. Such a rule, according to the Board, “plainly infringes on upon Section 7 rights.”

1. Email Complaints About Company Policies

Non-union employers cannot terminate employees for sending mass emails complaining about new company policies. An employee’s “effort to incite other employees to help him preserve a vacation policy which he believed best served his interests, and perhaps the interests of other employees, unquestionably qualified his communication as being in pursuit of mutual aid or protection.” Even if the email does not request other employee participation and is sarcastic in nature, such communications remain protected under the NLRA.

1. Non-Union Employees Are Free to Walk Off The Job To Complain About Supervisors or Other Job Conditions

Another common trap is when non-union employees walk off a job to protest certain job conditions. Most employers naturally (but incorrectly) presume that they may terminate non-union employees for abandoning the job. But that is not always the case. If, for example, employees engage in a work stoppage due to a legitimate job complaint, the NLRA may protect such conduct. In Trompler, Inc., an employer was held liable for back pay and reinstatement for terminating six employees who walked off the job in response to unanswered complaints about their supervisor.Such a work stoppage may qualify as “protected concerted activity” under Section 7 of the NLRA.

Great comment from slashdot on English Units:

A league is about the distance a healthy man can walk on a good road in one hour. A fathom is about the height of a tall man; it is about eighteen hand widths (fingers closed). A US gallon is the volume of eight pounds of water. An imperial gallon (i.e. the UK gallon) is the volume of ten pounds of water.

One interesting thing about weights. The system of dram/ounce/pound is base 16, which makes division by two a practical measuring operation. Take a pound of something readily dividable, divide it into two equal portions (using a balance scale). Then repeat the process four times. The result is one ounce.

This shows the offsetting virtues of traditional units. While they are difficult to calculate with, they are convenient for measuring things – especially when it come to quantifying things for sale.

For example, consider length:
1 inch = approximately the width of a thumb
1 hand = 4 inches = width of a hand with fingers closed
1 ft = 3 hands
1 yard = 3 ft
1 fathom = 2 yards
1 rod = 5.5 yards = length of ox goad
1 chain = 22 yards = 100 links in standard survey chain

1 furlong = 10 chains = distance ox team can plow without rest
1 mile = 880 fathoms

Notice that if you lay out a square field such that an ox team can plow one furrow across then rest, you get a square with sides of exactly one furlong or 660 ft. The area of that field 43,600 square feet, which is nearly exactly one acre (43,560 ft).

For purposes of round measurement (no fractions), such as you would use in commerce, traditional measurement is far more convenient. If I’m buying liquor, the following units exhaust all the practical measures to which I might wish to round a purchase:

1 mouthful
1 jigger (aka 1 fluid ounce) = 2 mouthfuls
1 jack = 2 jiggers
1 gill = 2 jacks = 4 jiggers
1 cup = 2 gills = 8 jiggers = 16 mouthfuls
1 pint = 2 cups
1 quart = 2 pints = 4 cups
1 gallon = 4 quarts = 8 pints = 16 cups
1 cask = 16 gallons
1 barrel = 2 casks
1 hogshead = 2 barrels
1 butt = 2 hogsheads = 4 barrels
1 tun = 2 butts = 4 hogsheads = 8 barrels

In such a system of measurement, you never, ever have to deal with fractions. Breaking down into smaller units is simply a matter of dividing a whole into two equal parts. So if you want to buy things without having to specify fractions, traditional units are the bee’s knees (equal to 1 / 128 of an inch … no just kidding). That’s not so important in a world with calculators – you just calculate a unit price.

Still, if you want to buy eight feet, three inches of rope, you can measure out twenty-four hands and three thumbs and come rather close.

Fact: I now feel uncomfortable when people talk about Web 2.0 as a philosophy.

Last night, I had a free-ranging conversation with my longtime friend and occassional coworker/coproducer Danielle Martin centered around her developing thesis on “ Participatory Media Catalyzed by Ouside Facilitators” at MIT.

In developing her thesis, she had been referring to Web 2.0 as a philosophy—something I have done and had many, many other people have do as well—in a conversation with Henry Jenkins. Who (and this is hearsay, I admit), said, “Don’t. Web 2.0 is a business model.” And he’s right.

Tim O’Reilly, says this: “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.” This is business model.

Instead, Danielle pointed me to the work of Axel Bruns and his conception of Produsers and Produsage: produsers engage not in a traditional form of content production [producer -> distributor -> consumer], but are instead involved in produsage – the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement.

Bruns, in an interview with Henry Jenkins, lays out 4 principles of produsage:

• Open Participation, Communal Evaluation: the community as a whole, if sufficiently large and varied, can contribute more than a closed team of producers, however qualified;
• Fluid Heterarchy, Ad Hoc Meritocracy: produsers participate as is appropriate to their personal skills, interests, and knowledges, and their level of involvement changes as the produsage project proceeds;
• Unfinished Artefacts, Continuing Process: content artefacts in produsage projects are continually under development, and therefore always unfinished - their development follows evolutionary, iterative, palimpsestic paths;
• Common Property, Individual Rewards: contributors permit (non-commercial) community use and adaptation of their intellectual property, and are rewarded by the status capital gained through this process.

These ideas, much more so than Web 2.0, seem to encapsulate what my peers and colleagues are trying to get across when we talk about social media and networked production of knowledge.

In my Boston University Institute for Nonprofit Management and Leadership program, we always get up to the edge of talking about the interplay between resource development and need, but then it always seems to drift away. So this is my contribution: if you swing too far towards either (ignoring the other), you’re toast.

And for the record, available resources and community need are external to your organization. Also, my art is lousy. And if you find this interesting, you should read my previous post on Community Engagement.

Download this as a PDF

I have now had a couple friends ask me to help them prepare job applications, so I pulled together some personal advice on what I feel is the most important part of applying for a job: the cover letter.

As someone who has applied for many jobs, and also reviews about 200-300 job applications every year, I believe that crafting a strong and compelling cover letter—having researched positions you have a fair chance (or a strong argument) of filling, of course—gives the best return on investment; more so than agonizing over your resume itself!

Here’s why:

When I review applications, my primary job is to weed applicants out of the process as quickly as possible. I’m quickly scanning. At this level, the resume matters, but that’s only because I’m checking to see if you are severely under (or over, which will draw scrutiny) qualified, have any gaps (no job experience) and if there is any glaring deficiencies like misspelled words (they jump out at you) or just poor aesthetics (this is supposed to be a synthesis of your professional experience boiled down to just 2 pages; it had better be vertically balanced—not as an aesthetic judgement, but as evidence of your attention to detail and level of perfectionism).

This cursory scan is also seeking out things I recognize: names of schools or businesses, places, specific brand names or techniques, turns of phrase. These will raise my interest, but not necessarily make me weight your resume any better. These mostly are due to chance, so unless you know something that wasn’t mentioned in the ad (maybe you know from a friend who is also an employee that the company loves a specific management technique), don’t worry about this.

You should not worry about being weeded out if you’ve done your homework: at this point, I’m not looking for the best applicant, I’m getting rid of the applicants who clearly are not even in the top 50% (or better, depending on what I’m filling). I’m looking for an applicant that “looks” like the best applicant

So now that I’ve judged appearances, I judge personality and character, and that’s where the cover letter comes in.

The cover letter does more than demonstrate you can competently communicate; it shows you know what you are applying for (I don’t want to receive your scattergun blast); that you have critical thinking skills and can synthesize important details from the posted ad and relate them to your own self; and that you are a human being who is confident in their abilities and wants me to benefit from them (I receive a surprising amount of whining).

The cover letter is your chance to make a compelling argument as to why I should hire you (or at least give you an interview). The fact is, you will probably have worked hardest—throughout your entire potential employment—on getting the job in the first place. So if this is your best, it had better be good.

So that’s my spiel on why you should agonize over your cover letter, not your resume. Your cover letter is your thesis, the resume is just the primary source.

A few weeks ago, I listened to Bill Ayers interviewed NPR’s Fresh Air. As an interview, it wasn’t very good, but Ayers himself said some really interesting things, which I went through and transcribed:

You cannot live a political life—you can’t live a moral life—if you’re not willing to open your eyes and see the world more clearly; see some of the injustice that is going on. Try to make yourself aware of what’s happening in the world.

And when you are aware, you have a responsibility to act. And when you act, you have a responsibility to doubt. And when you doubt you can’t get paralyzed; you have to use that doubt to act again. And that then becomes the cycle. You open your eyes, you act, you doubt; you act, you doubt.

Without doubt, you become dogmatic and shrill and stupid.

But without action, you become cynical and passive and a victim of history—and that should never happen.

While the question was specifically about whether Ayers had doubts about what he did, I think what he says about doubt and action being symbiotic to be very powerful. And its nice to hear about this as his view from age, preceding that longer statement with “I live with doubt today, everyday, all the time. And it is different than being young and certain and jacking yourself up to do certain things…”.

Ayers also talked about American democracy in a way that resonates very strongly with me—and where I draw my patriotism from:

To me, in a wild and diverse democracy like this, each of us should be trying to talk to lots and lots and lots of people outside of our comfort zone and community. And that injunction goes even further for political leaders. They should talk to everyone. They should listen to everyone. And at the end of the day, they should have a mind of their own.

And I don’t want to get into the ethics or morality of what he (or the collective for which he identified with) did. Stick to the didactic.

In the news is Obama’s top-level administration application questions, e.g.

Please furnish copies of all resumes and biographical statements issued by you or any other entity at your discretion or with your consent within the past 10 years.

and while some others seemed to have histrionics about it, I happen to agree with the asking of the questions. At least, based on the assumption that the emphasis is on transparency and a complete as possible picture of the applicant, i.e, these are weeding questions to determine an applicant’s veracity and seriousness in applying, not that any particular item would automatically disqualify someone (at least, I assume this based upon my experience as a hirer and constructor of applications)

This led to some discussion with peers, and I was happy to hear that the first question people ask of interviewees is

How did you prepare for this interview?