Malcolm Gladwell wrote last fall how strong ties like friendships are how high risk opposition works. Weak ties like Facebook cannot sustain them. So it is interesting how stories about the Egyptian revolution mention Facebook and Twitter as tooks. Naturally, Gladwell responded by writing, “Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented.” Also, he…
Technology is evolving us, says Amber Case, as we become a screen-staring, button-clicking new version of homo sapiens. We now rely on “external brains” (cell phones and computers) to communicate, remember, even live out secondary lives. But will these machines ultimately connect or conquer us? Case offers surprising insight into our cyborg selves.
A while ago, there was some kind of difficulty understanding why we (the DBAs) and another group were unable to read the same words yet not draw the same conclusion. The words in bold are what I wrote on my white board explaining why there was a difficulty. Communication Vocabulary Standards: Words have agreed upon…
A friend of mine who I used to work with once remarked (2007-ish) the University System of Georgia does not really work like a system so much as a loose confederation fighting over money. Given I have no access to budgets, I would not know. GeorgiaVIEW works remarkably well given there are only a few…
A few of you may know my accent is completely abnormal for the region where I was raised. In some ways it sounds midwestern or even Canadian. Apparently children also identify affiliation by accents like they do gender and skin color. So I had TWO strikes against me? My parents seem the likely culprits for my…
Its odd. My writing is very, very formal. (Too formal for some.) So formal, people think that I am insulting them. Ironically, I thought learning to write formally would minimize the offensiveness of the message. So the form that seems to work best is for me to write formally and go back through the message…
I am not a genius. Apparently I read my email like an Einstein or a Darwin. Of course, if you converted the 14,500 letters down to characters, then I am probably well on my way to writing as much as them. Only the informational value in my correspondence is probably much, much less than world…
Note to self: Do not ask people to reply to more than one question per email.