students were being made to take them several times a year, including “benchmark” tests to prepare them for the other tests.

This experience of male internet commenters infiltrating what is meant to be female or neutral online space isn’t unique.

The fact that we joke about it documents an acceptance of a culture of abuse online. It helps normalize online harassment campaigns and treat the empowerment of abusers as inevitable, rather than solvable.

People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement.

change stereotypes

we need to broaden perceptions and stereotypes of CS

What is the difference between an energetic Sunday morning at church and the rapturous hours of dawn spent at the club? To him, they both aspire to the same physical and experiential ends.

Not every perceived ill turns out to be bad. Socrates famously decried the invention of writing. He described its ill effects and never wrote anything, but despite his eloquence, he could not command the tide to stop. His student Plato mulled it over, sympathized—and wrote it all down! We will likely adjust to losing most privacy—our tribal ancestors did without it. Adapting to life without community could be more challenging. We may have to endure long enough for nature to select for people who can get by without it.

massmediarefers to those means of transmission

one of the annotations is simply a link to a Google search for a phrase that’s been used.

Mariquitas are a traditional Cuban snack. Resembling what many refer to as “chips,” mariquitas are made with green plantains. They are thinly sliced then fried in hot oil and sprinkled with salt, creating an easy snack that Cubans love to enjoy while sitting or grab on the run.

Digital technology has evolved quickly from personal computers and networks to participatory social, academic, and political Web 2.0 environments with a new vocabulary and new temporal and spatial interactions.

To the new culture cops, everything is appropriation Their protests ignore history, chill artistic expression and hurt diversity

New forms of collaboration made possible by the digital medium sharpen the theoretical question of how explanatory authority is established.

A few years ago I walked into a grocery store

But even from this remove it was possible to glean certain patterns, and one that recurred as regularly as an urban legend was the one about how someone would move into a commune populated by sandal-wearing, peace-sign flashing flower children, and eventually discover that, underneath this facade, the guys who ran it were actually control freaks; and that, as living in a commune, where much lip service was paid to ideals of peace, love and harmony, had deprived them of normal, socially approved outlets for their control-freakdom, it tended to come out in other, invariably more sinister, ways.

So far, Layous and Lyubomirsky’s analysis suggests that Westerners benefit more from positive activities than other populations, including Asians. One study conducted at UC Riverside found that Anglo-Americans benefitted more from happiness-increasing activities; however, researchers did see a small trend that Asians gained more from activities directed toward benefitting others’ happiness, like writing a letter of gratitude, than activities strictly intended to benefit the self.

Companies need to have realistic expectations of the work-life balance of open source maintainers.

effectively contribute and participate in upstream projects

One fascinating study in the 1980s found that American men were less likely to regard gratitude positively than were German men, and they viewed it as less constructive and useful than their German counterparts did. Gratitude presupposes so many judgments about debt and dependency that it is easy to see why supposedly self-reliant Americans would feel queasy about even discussing it.

Thetis Island’s famous ‘Oh-my-God-they’re-on-the-ferry pie’ quick recipe.

black people keep on making it, white people keep on taking it—a fact of nature.

THE INTERFACE CULTURE

Ritual performances may also be viewed as the principal mechanism by which meaning in the built environment is activated (175) or as the key to investing domestic spaces with meaning and transforming their meaning

Much research in social production has focused primarily on theoretical development, or, when it has focused on empirical details, deals with them at an abstract level.

Llamarían Rosas a la avenida SarmientoInformación generalSería el tramo que une Plaza Italia con avenida del Libertador; la Legislatura lo aprobó, pero falta una audiencia pública

No culture in history has been more distracted. If you are wondering why there are no more C.S. Lewis’ in the world, no more stories as good as Tolkien’s, no cathedrals as great as the gothic’s, no music as moving as Pachelbel’s, it may be because the writers of these books, the tellers of these stories, the architects of these buildings and the composers of these symphonies are sitting on their couches watching television. I wonder what’s on tonight.

Connected Learning, has emerged as a powerful way to connect fragmented spheres of a young person’s life—interests, academic and work opportunities, and peer culture.

The countercultural trickster has been pressed into the service of the preppy tech entrepreneur class.

Developers above the junior level, no matter their demographics, have a huge number of choices. It's rarely worth it to be The First. But now they're not! You've removed a significant barrier to hiring at the upper levels, by hiring first at the lower levels.

How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?

into the church

This is important. It means that someone is mixing their public comments related to both their personal views and their work. Effectively, you could say that one is being used to bootstrap an audience for the other. This means that you can't separate these issues by the medium in which they are placed because people are actively mixing their personal and professional speech and benefiting from it in one context while avoiding accountability in the other context.

You see, along with all the wonderful things our Good White Parents taught us, they also taught us that it was important to be nice and polite and non-confrontational when dealing with the white racists we know. We learned to just ignore grandpa. We were reprimanded when we challenged Aunt Evelyn. We were coached before going into parties that people might be racist, but that was just their “point of view”. We were taught again and again that it was more important to keep the peace with family and friends than it was to stand up to racial injustice. This made sense to us because we understood that arguing with family or friends would likely cause us more immediate discomfort in the short term than racial injustice would.

Annual Reviews is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Annual Review of Anthropology. http://www.jstor.org The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity

Hispanic culture

If we believe in equality, if we believe in participatory democracy and participatory culture, if we believe in people and progressive social change, if we believe in sustainability in all its environmental and economic and psychological manifestations, then we need to do better than slap that adjective “open” onto our projects and act as though that’s sufficient or — and this is hard, I know — even sound.

“We should be building platforms to amplify the voices of women in tech, not to cater to the egos of men,” she said. “Men who want to help need to get the hell out of our way, basically. Because we're coming. And we don't need their support.”

Avoiding ads doesn't help much either. Because brand images are part of the cultural landscape we inhabit, when we block ads or fast-forward through them, we're missing out on valuable cultural information, alienating ourselves from the zeitgeist. This puts us in danger of becoming outdated, unfashionable, and otherwise socially hapless. We become like the kid who wears his dad's suit to his first middle-school dance.

Collaborate for God's sake!: EVERY organization dealing with data is dealing with these problems. And governments need to work together on this. This is where open source presents invaluable process lessons for government: working collaboratively, and in the open, can float all boats much higher than they currently are. Whether it's putting your scripts on GitHub, asking and answering questions on the Open Data StackExchange, or helping out others on the Socrata support forums, collaboration is a key lever for this government technology problem.

One person who really didn’t seem to understand was Neil’s wife. Somewhat bemused, and referring to us as his “Internet friends,” Neil’s significant other decided tonight was the night for visiting a long-lost (or possibly ignored) relative, rather than sticking around and faking interest.

Community is a funny beast. Most people—the kind who watch talent shows on television and occasionally dip bread in oil in an expensive restaurant—don’t understand people like Neil. Why on earth would this guy decide to open his home, free of charge, to a collection of strangers who met on the Internet? Why would he want to spend an evening drinking tea and making jokes about something called “Emacs”?

The fourth of the theories is as yet the least influential but seems to be gaining strength. Its key ideas are that human nature causes people to flourish more under some conditions than under others, and that social and political institutions should be organized to facilitate that flourishing. What, more specifically, are the conditions or “functionings” that enable people to flourish?

at its core, DevOps is about culture

I frequently see CEOs who are clearly winging it. They lack a real agenda. They’re working from slides that were obviously put together an hour before or were recycled from the previous round of VC meetings. Workers notice these things, and if they see a leader who’s not fully prepared and who relies on charm, IQ, and improvisation, it affects how they perform, too. It’s a waste of time to articulate ideas about values and culture if you don’t model and reward behavior that aligns with those goals.

ans and counsels them to be of one mind among themselves?

Welcome one-on-ones Career planning

Blameless post-mortems

Create slack time for important improvement projects

They also started to standardize and very deliberately reduce the supported infrastructure and configurations. One decision was to switch everything to PHP and MySQL. This was a philosophical decision, not a technology one: they wanted both Dev and Ops to be able to understand the stack, so that everyone can contribute if they wanted to, as well as enabling everyone to be able to read, rewrite and fix someone else’s code.

and most importantly, a culture that the rest of the world admires.

Visible Ops Handbook

They have events like “Meetsy” (suggested lunch groups to meet people you may not work directly with) and “Eatsy” (where the entire company eats together).

Clear documented standards and processes are a must, but they aren’t set in stone. They can and should change as your business grows.

Don’t guess at what’s wrong with your infrastructure–graph it.

The management ideals that started getting formed included: Accept failures but don’t lower standards. Failures happen, and it’s best if they’re visible, understood, and used a springboards to greatness. Trust but verify. Blameless post-mortems Welcome one-on-ones Career planning Happy company = happy community

They created and implemented the “Developer on Call” program, to address the problem of IT Operations asking, “why should I be the only person waking up at 3am?” To create more developer responsibility and accountability, and to ensure that IT Operations had the necessary resources on hand during deployments, each developer rotated to be on call for one week. With the company’s current size, this translates to one week every three years that a developer would have to be on call 24/7.

They also adopted the mantra, “If it moves, graph it.”

ending the era when management would just say, “Go do this” or “Go do that.” People were happy to come to work, and contribute in ways beyond their job description.

1) Gain support from the top and bottom to change culture, 2) Increase transparency both within the organization and to the public, and 3) Pay back technical debt as soon as possible.

We believe that the very first thing that an organization must do when embarking on this journey is to do the following: Create slack time for important improvement projects Keep batch sizes small and the planning horizon short (e.g., weeks, not months) Keep prioritizing higher “the system of work” over “doing work”

My notes are below, but you can find the full recorded video recorded by Damon Edward here and their Slideshare link here.

Community and culture, Rembetsy asserts in the talk, is the foundation of any company. And how does one go about fostering community and encouraging positive culture? You begin by eliminating barriers, getting rid of silos, and encouraging collaboration across the entire company.

At Velocity London 2012, I saw one of the top five presentations I’ve ever seen in my life. In their talk “Continuously Deploying Culture,” Michael Rembetsy @mrembetsy, LinkedIn) and Patrick McDonnell (@mcdonnps, LinkedIn) described the story of their amazing IT transformation that started in 2008.