Our very first topic of discussion is away, and it is one that sprang to mind when I read today’s press. The conservative party in the UK is proposing that there should be greater controls placed on web content. Is this a good thing? or do you think it is the first step to policing and censoring the exchange of information?

A day late getting this posted….

I am a big fan of the concept of self-censorship. And by that, I don’t mean stifling creative thought. I mean that we each have an obligation to try and get along with other people, and that means in part that we have to make an attempt to avoid offence. Just because it’s virtually impossible to avoid offending anyone isn’t a good enough reason to just give up and offend everyone.

I am not in favor of legal restrictions on web content; beyond the practical, I feel that if we needed them, we’d be not much better than children, unable to control ourselves. And there is the practical – unless you go the route that China has chosen and attempt to provide all of the internet content for your citizens internally somehow, it’s very difficult to control what web content can cross your borders.

In the less-distant future, perhaps we will actually be a global culture, governed by a single legal body. Even then, the appropriate route is in creating consequences. There are consequences if you open your mouth and insert foot at your boy/girlfriend’s family dinner and offend his/her family, and there should be consequences for putting certain types of content online or putting it online without appropriate safeguards to keep in out of the wrong hands.

What should those be? Depends on the culture we have developed by the time we’re able to enforce those. Right now, it’s usually monetary, and that doesn’t seem to be working. I’m not thrilled with punative options, although perhaps it would work better if “prison” were on Mars or something. Who knows. I think there’s gotta be a better solution. We’re too advanced not to be able to come up with something.

Social Network Sites

Since their introduction, social network sites (SNSs) such as MySpace, Facebook, Cyworld, and Bebo have attracted millions of users, many of whom have integrated these sites into their daily practices. As of this writing, there are hundreds of SNSs, with various technological affordances, supporting a wide range of interests and practices. While their key technological features are fairly consistent, the cultures that emerge around SNSs are varied. Most sites support the maintenance of pre-existing social networks, but others help strangers connect based on shared interests, political views, or activities. Some sites cater to diverse audiences, while others attract people based on common language or shared racial, sexual, religious, or nationality-based identities. Sites also vary in the extent to which they incorporate new information and communication tools, such as mobile connectivity, blogging, and photo/video-sharing. (via)

Big news at the moment still, and subject to a great deal of discussion – both pro and anti. Whats your opinion?

I started writing on this prompt, and found myself rambling on about experiences with each of the social sites. And that didn’t really seem to answer the question.

My opinion is pretty much the same as my opinion of a hammer, or a keyboard. Yeah, ok, it exists. It’s a tool. I think the pink and flowered hammers they came up with so us little wimmin could feel comfortable wielding a tool of nail destruction are silly. I think some of the high-end gaming keyboards are sort of a waste of time for anyone who doesn’t game for a living – sheesh, what’s wrong with just stretching your hands once in a while, huh? But those are just opinions, that’s all.

I’ve got accounts on MySpace (rarely used), Facebook (Research, plus I get a kick out of some of the games), Twitter (work-related stuff), and Flickr (photography – see my Flickr applet to the right). They all have their purposes. They’re all a little silly. They all take some effort to distinguish the signal from the noise.

I can understand why people are reticent to join social sites – they don’t take the place of sending an email to someone, much less sitting down with them for lunch or coffee. They take up time that most people really can’t spare. And they’re designed for people who don’t really have to think about separating personal from professional selves – high school or college kids. While people in their 30s and up are adopting them rapidly, they’re still designed in such a way that on one profile, you can have parents, aunts, cousins, friends, partners, and work colleagues all reading your updates. And the old way of thinking is that you don’t offer your work colleagues access to your weekend party pictures.

The new way of thinking, I think, is that it’s incumbent on those work colleagues to look for and draw out the information about you that they might care about from these sites. And, in a wider picture, the new way of thinking is that it’s not the responsibility of the content creator to provide only that information which will be useful, but the job of the content consumer to be able to filter the data for that which pertains to him or her.

This represents a new way of thinking about information, but I think it’s still too soon to predict its ascendency or failure.

And wow, you can tell I was raised by a former english teacher in this post.

“What’s the worst ‘best’ book you’ve ever read — the one everyone says is so great, but you can’t figure out why?”

Neuromancer, by William Gibson.

Supposed to be a great book. Supposed to be a classic Spec-Fic, the beginnings of cyberpunk.

And I couldn’t make it past the first 3 chapters. Couldn’t find my way to caring about Case enough to want to know what happened to him. You see, I read stories about people, not about wires and electronic chips and chemicals. People. And Case – well, he just wasn’t a very interesting or likable person. I’d still love to read some good cyberpunk, but it’s gotta be about the people.

Book #2, which almost made my top worst “best” book?
The Wise Woman, by Philippa Gregory.
Gregory’s books have hit best-seller lists, been turned into movies, gotten lots of acclaim… so I thought I’d try one of them.

In the first 2 chapters, the main character of TWW manages to betray the only people who’ve ever cared about her more times than she changed her underwear, all for a warm bed and walls that aren’t drafty. Sorry, Ms. Gregory, I just can’t continue reading about a character with the morals of a gerbil. I gave that one away, hopefully to someone who enjoyed it more than I did.

What’s your worst “best” book?

Am I a going to far when I state that I see a world in the not to distant future where genetic testing for certain diseases will be mandatory and it will be a crime to conceive if you test positive for certain genetic disorders. Such a movement would most likely start in more overpopulated areas of the world with less freedoms but I do see it coming. China already has its’ “one child policy“. Is the next genetic step a “One Child No Defects” policy?

Yes. Absolutely, that is much too far. I don’t think it is rational to expect that any nation will, in the near future, implement a “One Child No Defects” policy. Many couples do make the decision not to have a child that they know will carry certain defects which can be tested for in utero, but in no way does this imply that it will become law in any place on earth.

I find the assumption that the most overpopulated countries in the world would have the resources to provide genetic testing and engineering to all fertile couples to be unfounded. The things which we take for granted – ultrasounds, knowing the sex of a fetus well before birth, the ability to test for certain genetic diseases – cannot be assumed to be available even to all members of our own society, much less women in other countries. And, frankly, discussing a fear like those shows a middle-class bias.

I’m hardly an expert on Ability Rights – being an adult with neither learning nor physical disabilities. I do have poor eyesight, but it is correctable with lenses. That said, I do know that there are many people in US culture who would choose not to have a child because of defects which will affect the child’s growth, and probably just as many people who *do* choose to have the child, regardless.

Your home is a Time-Lord’s Hideout Your kitchen consists of dilithium-powered food replicators, manned by obedient robot slaves, who are sure to never, ever rebel. I mean, it’s preposterous to even consider it. There’s a pantry with emergency backup caffeinated beverages. You also have some breakfast cereals in there, but you haven’t had breakfast since last Spring. Your master bedroom has an on-call masseuse and sports therapist. Your study has every science fiction title ever written. One of your garages contains a life-sized X-Wing fighter, and KITT. (KITT was a gift from a well-meaning uncle.) Your home also includes a robot repair bay, where your mechanized servants are routinely fitted with new restraining bolts. (It’s just a precaution.) Your guests enjoy your animatronic replica of the cantina at Mos Eisley. Outside is your radio telescope, listening constantly for alien transmissions. Especially invaders. They’ll come eventually, even if nobody believes you. (Nobody does.) And, you have a pet — a taun-taun named “Padme”. Below is a snippet of the blueprints:

Find YOUR Dream House!

]]> http://personal.poppyphotodesign.com/2007/10/02/i-think-im-the-last-one-to-pick-up-this-meme/feed/ 1 Poppy http://personal.poppyphotodesign.com/2007/02/02/cortisol-week-in-the-news/ http://personal.poppyphotodesign.com/2007/02/02/cortisol-week-in-the-news/#comments Fri, 02 Feb 2007 12:00:43 +0000 Poppy http://poppylochridge.wordpress.com/?p=274 Continue reading »

I encountered a couple of articles this week on the hormone cortisol. Completely unrelated – one was a link from an article about stress on Lime.com, the other was a news link out of my GMail window.

And yet, they interrelate.

6 Lessons for Handling Stress — Friday, Jan. 19, 2007 — Page 3 — TIME

Researchers figured something similar had to be happening in burnout victims. But rather than finding a prominent cortisol peak, investigators discovered a shallow bump in the morning followed by a low, flattened level throughout the day. Intriguingly, such blunted cortisol responses are also common among Holocaust survivors, rape victims and soldiers suffering from PTSD.

For women, nothing’s like the smell of men’s sweat | Oddly Enough | Reuters.com

Cortisol is secreted by the body to help maintain proper arousal and sense of well-being, respond to stress and other functions.

Cortisol levels in the women who smelled androstadienone shot up within roughly 15 minutes and stayed elevated for up to an hour. Consistent with previous research, the women also reported improved mood, higher sexual arousal, and had increased blood pressure, heart rate and breathing.

So the first, most obvious conclusion is that if elevated cortisol levels correlate with higher arousal and chronic stress/burnout correlates with extremely low levels of cortisol, then people suffering from chronic stress logically would be less likely to be aroused. Likewise with response to new stressors – flattened levels of cortisol would make it more difficult to respond to new or additional stressors.

And since the first article also indicates that the low, flattened cortisol levels tend to be long-term – even after the burnout situation is over, they can persist for years, it’s entirely possible that after dealing with chronic stress, these behavioral side effects could persist for years as well.

Yikes. What are we doing to ourselves?

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But it really bothered me, you know? I mean, I was trying to clarify what had and hadn’t been done for the customer as well as encourage someone with less experience than I to attempt to resolve an issue that I knew I could have done in 15 minutes or less. I asked if he had reviewed the notes and whether there was anything he thought had been missed. His reply was that he had talked to his supervisor already. Which doesn’t really answer the question. Supervisor got on the phone, and I still think I failed at trying to express that for an agent to at least try to come up with a solution is experience, builds skils.

Even after they agreed to hang up and go try some steps, it still bothered me. What turned what I thought was a simple yes or no question into an argument? How did we get from “have you?” to “Okaaaaay, fine. Just…. whatever.”? So I asked for feedback.

And then I wrote the supervisor a memo apologizing for my part in the misunderstanding. So I’m happy about that part at least. I hope he passes it along to the agent in question.

You almost need an anthropology degree to do this job anymore.

And I’m pissed off by the constant refusal to see anything as systemic and blame everything on individuals.

If the job I’ve been doing for two years was so easy to do that no-one else flinched about putting in so much time and effort without cracking and burning out, why exactly did half of the team doing it leave for other positions as soon as they could? Both of those other two, even, were about to take positions outside the company before the Corporate Beast decided they were important enough to offer them internal positions.

At the risk of sounding like Drew Barrymore’s Cinderella, For if you suffer your people to be over-worked, and their manners to be worn down by distrust and vigilance, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.

Three more people are getting laid off at the end of this week from my site, although from a different department and therefore a different budget. It’s a damn shame – they’re all quite good at what they do, and there’s more experience in those three people alone than they have cumulatively in our other two support offices. In addition to being money-focused to a fault, the Corporate Beast is also in a distrustful phase, where the base assumption is that anyone not sitting where their manager can see them is clearly goofing off, not working, and charging the company for time spent sitting at the computer thinking. Because of course, thinking isn’t measurable work.

In other cynical news, we got a memo from The Bossman a little while ago that had eyes a-rolling. In this memo, he debriefs us on a recent trip to our India support center, and actually calls us impatient and intolerant of the agents there.

It’s as if he’s forgotten momentarily what they keep reminding us of: this is a call center, and impatience is the Way Things Are in a call center. Call centers are measured by the number of calls taken; we are trained and pushed to control our calls to prevent delay. Why, yes, we are impatient with internal ‘customers’ who call and spend 2 full minutes explaining the life story of the person they are speaking with, and then after we make recommendations, spend more time explaining why their customer isn’t going to like that answer and is there please another option.

Just think about that for a second. Let it sink in. Why in the name of all of the gods would I give someone an unpleasant answer to a question if there were a better answer available? If there was a history of people withholding information like that, the distrust would be understandable. But we have no such history here; whether these particular agents have supported other products where such a history exists, I couldn’t even guess.

*I had just worked my butt off in Biology for 3 weeks to pull my grade from a C to a B.

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