Office vs School: excellent!!!!!

According to Lucy Kellaway, FT:
.....School exams are really tough!...
There is no job interview, no scary presentation, no terrifying after dinner speech, no bruising negative feedback that can do such lasting psychic damage. Nor is there any work project (unless one is a corporate lawyer or investment banker) that requires such mercilessly hard work.
The real problem with the exam system is that it teaches lessons about work itself that you need to unlearn pretty smartly if you want to get ahead in business.

First, it teaches you that there is a fairly straightforward relationship between effort and result. In exams, if you work very, very hard in the evenings you are going to do an awful lot better than if you spend your evenings in the pub. In most office life, this is not true. The relationship between effort and reward is much more complicated.

Second, in an exam there is nowhere to hide. If you fail you may try to pin the blame on your teachers or the examiner, but in your heart you know there is no one else to blame but yourself. You either weren’t bright enough, or you didn’t work hard enough.

One of the beauties of office work is that there is no shortage of candidates to blame for one’s failures. Management, the market, the culture, one’s colleagues, the competitors, an IT failure; the options are endless. You can screw something up royally and get away with it indefinitely. Indeed, so long as you are quite senior you can bring the entire banking system down and still get a big bonus.

The third bad lesson from exams is that failure matters. If you flunk finals you don’t get the chance to do it again. Real life is much more forgiving. That presentation went badly? There will be another one along soon enough, which might go a bit better.

Preparing for the exams, you work as hard as humanly possible while trying to unsettle fellow students by claiming to have done nothing at all.

With real work it is the other way round. The secret is to do as little as you can get away with, but make it seem that you are slogging your guts out.

In offices, people go home early and leave their jackets on their chairs and instruct their computers to send out work e-mails at 1am. There is no such thing as being seen to work too hard.

Finally, exams demand clarity of thought and expression and penalise waffle and bullshit. Whereas in business, alas, waffle and bullshit have become the gold standard.

.....

Union of Subsidized Farmers?

Where I Live
Originally uploaded by Artwerk

WOW! :)

Mass Media

Mass media can function both as a modern form of one-way communication AND as a public forum. It depends on their social organization and civic practices, and not on their technical nature... Goban-Klas, 2005, 111.

Networking Revolutions

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sites/cyber.law.harvard.edu/files/Goldstein_Ukraine_2007.pdf

The Role of Digital Networked Technologies in the Ukrainian Orange Revolution
Published December 01, 2007
Authored by Josh Goldstein, Internet and Democracy
This working paper is part of a series examining how the Internet influences democracy. This report is a narrative case study that examines the role of the Internet and mobile phones during Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution. The first section describes the online citizen journalists who reported many stories left untouched by self censored mainstream journalists. The second section investigates the use of digital networked technologies by pro-democracy organizers. This case study concludes with the statement that the Internet and mobile phones made a wide range of activities easier, however the Orange Revolution was largely made possible by savvy activists and journalists willing to take risks to improve their country.
Last updated March 25, 2009
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SMS Language :)

Wellman about networks, community, women and ... quality of contemporary social life

NETWORK COMMUNITY

In the current situation, married women not only participate in community, they dominate the practice of it in their households. Women have historically been the “kinkeepers” of western society: mothers and sisters keeping relatives connected for themselves, their husbands and their children. They continue to be the preeminent suppliers of emotional support in community networks as well as the major suppliers of domestic services to households (Wellman 1992c; Wright 1989). With the privatization and domestication of community, community-keeping has become an extension of kinkeeping, with both linked to domestic management. No longer do husbands and wives have many separate friendships. As men now usually stay at home during their leisure time, the informal ties of their wives form the basis for relations between married couples. Women define the nature of friendship and help maintain many of their husbands' friendships. Women bear more than the “double-load” of domestic work and paid work; their “triple load” now includes community “net work”.

Thus the privatization and domestication of relationships have transformed the nature of community. The domesticated community ties interact in small groups in private homes rather than in larger groups in public spaces. This makes it more difficult for people to form new community ties with friends of their friends, and it focuses the concerns of relationships on dealing with household problems (Wellman 1992b). Women's ties, which dominate community networks, provide important support for dealing with domestic work. Community members help with daily hassles and crises; neighbors mind each other's children; sisters and friends provide emotional support for child, husband and elder care. Because women are the community-keepers and are pressed for time caring for homes and doing paid work, men have become even more cut off from male friendship groups (Wellman 1992c). North American men rarely use their community ties to accomplish collective projects of work, politics or leisure. Their relationships have largely become sociable ties, either as part of the relationship between two married couples or as disconnected relations with a few male “buddies”.

This domestication helps explain the contemporary intellectual shift to seeing community and friendship as something that women do better than men. Just as husbands and wives are more involved with each other at home, the focus of couples and male friends is on private, domestic relations. Men's community ties have come to be defined as women's have been: relations of emotional support, companionship, and domestic aid. Thus the nature and success of community are now being defined in domestic, women's terms. Concurrently, the growing dominance of the service sector in the economy means that the manipulation of people and ideas has acquired more cultural importance than the industrial and resource-extraction sectors' manipulation of material goods. With developed economies having more managers and professionals than blue-collar workers (Statistics Canada and Canada 1993), the workplace has shifted to the very emphasis on social relationships that women have traditionally practiced at home.

At the same time, the material comfort of most North Americans means that they no longer need to rely on maintaining good relations with community members to get the necessities for material survival. The goods and services that community members exchange are usually matters of convenience, rarely of necessity, and hardly ever of life and death. Community ties have become ends in themselves, to be enjoyed in their own right and used for emotional adjustment in a society that puts a premium on feeling good about oneself and others. This resonates with contemporary feminist celebration of women for being more qualified in the socioemotional skills that are the basis of contemporary communities — and the downgrading of the allegedly masculine qualities of instrumentalism and materialism. Community is no longer about men fixing cars together; it is about couples chatting about domestic problems.

Contemporary discussions of community often reverse the traditional sexist discourse that has seen women as inadequate men. Now it is men who are seen as unable to sustain meaningful community relationships, especially when such relationships are defined only in terms of socioemotional support. This socioemotional definition has almost totally replaced the traditional definition of community as also including instrumental aid. Patriarchical arguments for male superiority in getting things done are being replaced by celebrations of female superiority in knitting together social networks. As “feminist author” Maggie Scarf (Scarf 1987) said on the Oprah Winfrey television show, “Men just don't have friends the way women have friends. Men just don't like to make themselves vulnerable to other men.”Clitoris-envy, the alleged longing for empathy among men, has become the new-age replacement for penis-envy among the not-so Iron Johns (Bly 1990).

The Network Community: An Introduction to Networks in the Global Village Pp. 1-47 in Networks in the Global Village, edited by Barry Wellman. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999. Dostępny: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/globalvillage/in.htm

Just Hilarious! Sci Chain Letter :D

How to Make Tenure Fast: A Chain Letter for Scientists

By DAVID DEMERS

rom the sci-tech studies list, an Internet discussion group devoted to science and society.

Dear Fellow Scientist:

This letter has been around the world at least seven times. It has been to many major conferences. Now it has come to you. It will bring you good fortune. This is true even if you don't believe it. But you must follow these instructions:

-- Include in your next journal article the citations below;

-- Remove the first citation from the list and add a citation to your journal article at the bottom;

-- Make 10 copies and send them to colleagues.

Within one year, you will be cited up to 10,000 times! This will amaze your fellow faculty, assure your promotion and improve your sex life. In addition, you will bring joy to many colleagues. Do not break the reference loop, but send this letter on today.

Dr. H. received this letter and within a year after passing it on she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Prof. M. threw this letter away and was denied tenure. In Japan, Dr. I. received this letter and put it aside. His article for Trans. on nephrology was rejected. He found the letter and passed it on, and his article was published that year in the New England Journal of Medicine. In the Midwest, Prof. K. failed to pass on the letter, and in a budget cutback his entire department was eliminated. This could happen to you if you break the chain of citations.

1. Miller, J. (1992). Post-modern neo-cubism and the wave theory of light. Journal of Cognitive Artifacts, 8, 113-117.

2. Johnson, S. (1991). Micturition in the canid family: the irresistible pull of the hydrant. Physics Quarterly, 33, 203-220.

3. Anderson, R. (1990). Your place or mine?: an empirical comparison of two models of human mating behavior. Psychology Yesterday 12, 63-77.

4. David, E. (1994). Modern Approaches to Chaotic Heuristic Optimization: Means of Analyzing Non-Linear Intelligent Networks with Emergent Symbolic Structure. (doctoral dissertation, University of California at Santa Royale El Camino del Rey Mar Vista by-the-sea).

(David DeMers, a computer scientist, former tax lawyer and now a portfolio manager for Prediction Co., a firm in Santa Fe, N.M., that finds and trades on price anomalies among securities, wrote this letter in 1992 when he was finishing his Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego, and looking for a job. He says it has drawn a greater response than all his other scholarly work, including his "Big Kahuna" method of evaluating baseball players for rotisserie leagues.)

http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/021699sci-chain-letter.html

Back to Warsaw

I love this city regardless awful weather and sort of CEE traffic jams. Warsaw has a lot to explore and to enjoy. I love it.

At-last-welcome me to the world of personalized informational self-presentation and self-reflection

It's nice here :)!
5/7/8
KN