Its been almost non stop rain for the past three days, but today was nothing but sunshine.
I wish I had a camera worthy enough to capture the beautiful sunset I am witnessing at the office.
Yes I am at the office, and wasting a beautiful day. (I am on break so forgive my quick post/rant)
The DECS (Department Of Education, Culture and Sports; a cabinet level department in charge of schools and other institutions in the Philippines that fall under its name) declared that there would be no classes today.
My beef is since I was in elementary school the DECS has always declared classes suspended “”a day late and a day long” (just love how you say the previous phrase).
Its been happening for 15 years and probably longer its really shameful how the DECS does their job too poorly.
In a related note. I can’t seem to stop shaking my head whenever I hear kids, young adults (college level students) wishing there was no class.
Let me qualify:
1. I can understand college kids dreading an exam or an oral recitation the next day.
2. I can understand small children wanting to spend time with their parents.
3. I can understand highschool kids wanting to hang out with friends.
What I can’t understand are the people who think of school as boring and worthless.
You control your lives, if the classes are boring you then cut classes and do something productive with your life.
Me and Chuckie were talking after watching Get Smart and the topic veered towards potential.
And I told him that “Its not about maximizing your potential, its maximizing what makes you happy” (I’ll write about this another time).
I just realize that my sentiments were incomplete. i should have said that “Its not about maximizing your potential, its maximizing what makes you happy, as long as you know that you are not modifying what would make you happy because of fear”.
It took me awhile before I finally got this, I hope you do to (Yeah whoever read my blog)
Counter Hegemonic
hope we can start something like this in the Philippines where there seems to be extreme void in intelligent discourse !
from here:
(Counter)-hegemonic memes
Although the left invented the concept of cultural hegemony, they (we) have been pretty bad at practicing it. In many ways, it is the right’s preconceptions that are still hegemonic – for example, its use of “middle class” to mean rich, or its stigmatizing of single parents, welfare claimants, trades unionists or public sector workers.
Which raises the question. Shouldn’t we try to start an alternative hegemony?
This would not consist in more than just challenging the above preconceptions. Indeed, merely to challenge them is to lend them credence. To say “welfare claimants are not scroungers” is like a man saying “I don’t beat my wife.” It doesn‘t establish his innocence, but draws attention to suspicions.
No. What we need is something bolder, alternative memes. I’ll get you started with three quick ‘uns:
….
I offer this as a mere start. We can never tell which memes will take and which won’t, so it’s best to spread a load of them and see what grows.
The point of these, though, is not to be explicitly “radical“ or “transgressive.” Instead, it‘s to claim that we should take for granted certain things, which only idiots or extremists would challenge; this is how the right regards the above-mentioned claims.
And don’t be hung up by the “truth.” After all, the right wasn’t when it began those successful hegemonic memes.
The point about hegemonic memes is not that they are “true“: no simple statement about people or society is ever wholly true, a fact which usually only the most fatuous pedant points out. Instead, they act as default positions – things that are believed as a matter of course by many people, and whose challengers are regarded as marginal or eccentric.
So, what will be the new hegemonic positions?
Which raises the question. Shouldn’t we try to start an alternative hegemony?
This would not consist in more than just challenging the above preconceptions. Indeed, merely to challenge them is to lend them credence. To say “welfare claimants are not scroungers” is like a man saying “I don’t beat my wife.” It doesn‘t establish his innocence, but draws attention to suspicions.
No. What we need is something bolder, alternative memes. I’ll get you started with three quick ‘uns:
….
I offer this as a mere start. We can never tell which memes will take and which won’t, so it’s best to spread a load of them and see what grows.
The point of these, though, is not to be explicitly “radical“ or “transgressive.” Instead, it‘s to claim that we should take for granted certain things, which only idiots or extremists would challenge; this is how the right regards the above-mentioned claims.
And don’t be hung up by the “truth.” After all, the right wasn’t when it began those successful hegemonic memes.
The point about hegemonic memes is not that they are “true“: no simple statement about people or society is ever wholly true, a fact which usually only the most fatuous pedant points out. Instead, they act as default positions – things that are believed as a matter of course by many people, and whose challengers are regarded as marginal or eccentric.
So, what will be the new hegemonic positions?
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Interactional Expertise
More evidence of how crucial a choice our friends/seat mates/acquittance’s are to the decisions we can make. If this is true and my gut points me to the truth of this, we may be fast entering an age of great decision making. Why because usenet/googlegroups/yahoogroups or other conversational/ web 2.0 social interactivity interconnection technology is allowing us to be in the loop with the world’s foremost experts in the hard and social sciences. We (the early adopters) may be the first wave of people blessed with an Interactional Expertise spanning a large part of human knowledge.
the interview is from here:
How do you distinguish the people who can and can’t contribute to a specialized field?
The key to the whole thing is whether people have had access to the tacit knowledge of an esoteric area—tacit knowledge is know-how that you can’t express in words. The standard example is knowing how to ride a bike. My view as a sociologist is that expertise is located in more or less specialized social groups. If you want to know what counts as secure knowledge in a field like gravitational wave detection, you have to become part of the social group. Being immersed in the discourse of the specialists is the only way to keep up with what is at the cutting edge.
Is this where interactional expertise comes into play?
Interactional expertise is one of the things that broadens the scope of who can contribute. It’s a little bit wider than the old “people in the white coats” of the 1950s, but what it’s not is everybody. (Within science, lots of people have interactional expertise, because science wouldn’t run without it.)
You did experiments to test your theory of expertise. What did you find?
The original version we did was with color-blind people. What we were attempting to demonstrate is something we call the strong interactional hypothesis: If you have deeply immersed yourself in the talk of an esoteric group—but not immersed yourself in any way in the practices of that group—you will be indistinguishable from somebody who has immersed themself [sic] in both the talk and the practice, in a test which just involves talk.
If that’s the case, then you’re going to speak as fluently as someone who has been engaged in the practices. And if you can speak as fluently, then you’re indistinguishable from an expert. It’s what I like to call “walking the talk”. You still can’t do the stuff, but you can make judgments, inferences and so on, which are on a par.
We picked color-blind people because they’ve spent their whole lives immersed in a community talking about color. So we thought color-blind people should be indistinguishable from color-perceivers when asked questions by a color-perceiver who knew what was going on. And we demonstrated that that was in fact the case. Now we’re planning to do another imitation test on the congenitally blind to see if they can perform as well as the color-blind.
Learned Today 2008 06 17 1536H
I’ve been a victim of this awhile ago, I think another side effect of this is that people with certificates automatically discount your knowledge because you lack the said certificate.
I’ve encountered this with managers from job listings for java programmer, web developer, database administrator and the like.
I sometimes had to restrain myself from correcting people who were interviewing me. Its a balancing act between not seeming arrogant whilst trying to correct a false assumptions. I find this often with people not that passionate with programming and the like.
as a disclaimer with everything I write: What Do I Know I Am Probably A Big Fool!
Dunning-Kruger effect
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Dunning-Kruger effect is the phenomenon wherein people who have little knowledge (or skill) tend to think that they know more (or have more skill) than they do, while others who have much more knowledge tend to think that they know less.
Best Read Today!
from chris dillow here:
For me personally, introspection corroborates all this. I can easily imagine that, with even slightly different upbringing or luck, I would be either considerably richer and “successful” than I am now, or in prison. My “character” is of secondary importance, if indeed it exists at all. As Iris DeMent sang:
And I traveled to a prison; I saw my share of shattered dreams.
Were the tables slightly tilted I could be bound, they could be free.
I mention all this because it’s a big reason why I’m an egalitarian. When I see someone successful and respected, I see – as a tendency with exceptions – not an admirable character but merely the beneficiary of lucky circumstances. And when I see life’s other side – again, with exceptions – I see not bad character but bad luck.
And one reason why I am more attracted than most to the possibility of social change is that the long-run pay-off to greater equality and democracy is precisely the effect it might have in improving people’s behaviour.
Feeling Foolish
Why Do I keep feeling this way??
I have a strange feeling that I may be the fool in the equation.
triggered by a quote seen in my feed reader, the quote:
Euripides
“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”
The Secret Of Unit Testing!
from Micheal Feather’s blog here:
Quality is a function of thought and reflection – precise thought and reflection. That’s the magic. Techniques which reinforce that discipline invariably increase quality.
On Creativity in Companies
An excellent post from Scott Berkun. If you are at all involved with a group of people as decision makers a must read.
from here:
some take aways:
…..
They mistakenly believe the problem is the quality of ideas, when in fact the problem is the conservative psychology inherent in democracy.
Pure democracy is not the political system that will create the most change – it’s a system geared for stability, not for innovation.
…..
if you ask for more innovation without changing the authority structure, I’ll call you crazy.
On Refactoring
Inspired by this post
I was recently handed the responsibility to maintain/fix the code of my officemate who has already left for greener pastures. Its my first day with the code so I did a 2-3 hour refactoring session with around 4k LOC.
I finished trudging through 1k LOC , and would probably be finished with the rest of the code if my team lead didn’t tell me to fix a critical bug (on the code I was refactoring).
Note One: I haven’t been told that the code was my responsibility but I have a sixth sense for things like this, so I faced the hurdle head on.
Note Two: Writing Unit tests before refactoring, trust me on this, You know that feeling you have before an operation, well that’s how you feel before and , while and after you are testing your code. No matter what you do you have that fear that maybe you didn’t do it right. So just write the test. Just do this for your sake.
I saw a few readily fixed errors around 10 and about 4 errors that took me awhile to understand and eventually fixed.
Around 2 hours after lunch we had a quick meeting because of the critical bug. The bug was a show stopper and at the meeting the code/functions/pages were formally given to me with a reminder: We need the bugs fixed today.
luckily, some of the the bugs I have already fixed and my refactoring allowed me to easily zero in on the offending code. I was able to fix it in less than 30 minutes.
After two hours, my team lead comes to me and ask warily,
“When are you going to finish fixing the bug?”
“Its Already fixed”
“The bug? you sure?”
“yep”
The face of my team lead of disbelief/suspicion/slight admiration was priceless.
This was all due to refactoring!
Contact Hypothesis
Contact Hypothesis! This although with a stretch ties in nicely with yesterday’s post/rant!
from the TED blog:
The researchers] surveyed 180 Bosnian Muslims about their attitudes towards Bosnian Serbs in the wake of the earlier conflict. They found that Bosnian Muslims who had more Serb friends and who identified more with a sense of being “Bosnian,” rather than “Bosnian Muslim” or “Bosniak,” also tended to show more empathy for Serbs as a group, to be more trusting of Serbs, and to see Serbs as more varied — all of which predicted greater levels of forgiveness and more positive attitudes towards the Serbs.
This pattern is consistent with what’s known as the “contact hypothesis” in social psychology, which states that more high quality contact between groups promotes intergroup reconciliation.