The Gospel of ‘Work as Fulfillment’

The problem with the gospel—Your dream job is out there, so never stop hustling—is that it’s a blueprint for spiritual and physical exhaustion. Long hours don’t make anybody more productive or creative; they make people stressed, tired and bitter. But the overwork myths survive “because they justify the extreme wealth created for a small group of elite techies,” Erin Griffith writes.

If you were designing a Black Mirror labor force that encouraged overwork without higher wages, what might you do? Perhaps you’d persuade educated young people that income comes second; that no job is just a job; and that the only real reward from work is the ineffable glow of purpose. It is a diabolical game that creates a prize so tantalizing yet rare that almost nobody wins, but everybody feels obligated to play forever.

Derek Thompson writing in The Atlantic

In the Grip of Bitterness

During my hitch in the Marine Corps, my wife and I rented a studio apartment in San Francisco from a man crippled by a World War 2 injury. Captured at Wake Island and later confined for years in China, he was left partially paralyzed when an enemy solider struck hi with a rifle butt.

When I visited with this landlord, he'd tell me one story after another of how barbarically he'd been treated. With vile language and intense emotion, he spoke of the tortures he'd endured and of his utter hatred for the Japanese. Here was a man who had been horribly wronged-without question. The constant misery and pain he lived with could not be measured. My heart went out to him.

But there was another factor which made his existence even more lamentable. Our landlord had become a bitter man. Even though he was years removed from the war.. even though he had been safely released from the concentration camp and was now able to carry on physically... even though he and his wife owned a lovely dwelling and had a comfortable income, the crippled an was bound by the grip of bitterness. He was still fighting a battle that should have ended years before. In a very real sense, he was still in prison.

His bitterness manifested itself in intense prejudice, an acrid tongue and an everyone's out-to-get-me attitude. I am convinced that he was far more miserable by 1957 than he had been in 1944. There is no torment like the inner torment of an unforgiving spirit. It refuses to be soothed, it refuses to be healed, it refuses to forget.

Chuck Swindoll, Killing Giants: Pulling Thorns

Look at a day

Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. it's not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it's when you've had everything to do and you've done it. - Margaret Thatcher

Managers and Leaders

The manager is more tightly linked to an organization than is the leader. Indeed, the leader may have no organization at all. Florence Nightingale, after leaving the Crimea, exercised extraordinary leadership in healthcare for decades with no organization under her command. Gandhi was a leader before he had an organization. Some of our most memorable leaders have headed movements so amorphous that management would be an inappropriate word.  

John W. Gardner, On Leadership

Murder all the futures

You must choose a future—and then, one by one, murder all the futures you passed over. –Andrew Boyd

Love is specific

Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of yourself. 

Jonathan Franzen 

Traveling within

Your circumstances … shall not long remain if you but perceive an ideal and strive to reach it. You cannot travel within and stand still without. -James Lane Allen

We can Choose

All of the Auschwitz survivors I met had one thing in common with me and with one another: We had no control over the most consuming facts of our lives, but we had the power to determine how we experienced life after trauma. Survivors could continue to be victims long after the oppression had ended, or they could learn the thrive. In my dissertation research I discovered and articulated my personal conviction and my clinical touchstone: We can choose to be or own jailors, or we can choose to be free.  

Auschwitz survivor Edith Eva Eger in her book The Choice

The pain of losing someone

When someone dies, you want to hang onto the pain of grief because that’s all you have of the person you’ve lost. 

AI & Data Science articles - Sept. 2021

Advanced SQL for Data Professionals

Intelligence agencies pressured to use more commercial satellites

Just how many satellites are orbiting our planet?  

Accord to a new book: The illusion of progress on artificial general intelligence might lead to another AI winter

Nine tools I wish I had mastered before My PhD in Machine Learning  

“Purely inductively inspired techniques like machine learning remain inadequate, no matter how fast computers get, and hybrid systems fall short”

The popular myths of data-driven AI have led the community to not give enough attention to abductive inference says new book

Air Force eyes artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning for cognitive electronic warfare

Data science students don’t know a lot about ethics — and that's a problem

Getting to know—and manage—your biggest AI risks  

Google’s dir of research has advice for beginners in data science

There’s a growing constellation of satellites that can peer deep beneath the Earth's surface

A drastic reduction in launch costs is helping fuel a vision of space

Yearly satellite launches are set to become more congested in the next few years—with development and deployment of anti-satellite weapons likely

Tesla calls it a supercomputing breakthrough: But it’s in-house designed supercomputer hasn't been fully assembled or tested

The Optimization Mindset

When developing an algorithm, computer science courses often define the goal as providing an optimal solution to a computationally-specified problem. And when you look at the world through this mindset, it’s not just computational inefficiencies that annoy. Eventually, it becomes a defining orientation to life as well. As one of our colleagues at Stanford tells students, everything in life is an optimization problem.  

The desire to optimize can favor some values over others. And the choice of which values to favor, and which to sacrifice, are made by the optimizers who then impose those values on the rest of us when their creations reach great scale. 

Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein, System Error

The Little Stuff or the Big stuff?

We all feel overwhelmed by lots of little stuff we feel we have to do, and we have these big things that we’d like to do. But to do them, it feels like you need long stretches of focus when all the other little stuff is out of the way—it feels like it would be selling the project short to try beginning to write your novel in 20 minutes on a subway commute, for example. So instead, you decide to go through your email and deal with other outstanding things—but for the reasons we’ve discussed, the time never comes when you clear all that [out of the way].  

The only way to get around to the important things is: Instead of trying to eradicate all the other stuff, [make progress] on the important stuff first. You just have to let the other chips fall where they will.

Oliver Burkeman quoted in The Atlantic

Prisoners of their own procedures

Means tend to triumph over ends. Form triumphs over spirit. People become prisoners of their own procedures. The means and methods were originally designed to achieve some specific end, but when circumstances change and new means are called for, it turns out that the old ones had become sacrosanct; the means have become ends in themselves— no longer effective perhaps, but enshrined. People forget what they set out to do. It happens all the time. So the mature organization ends up with a web of customs, procedures, written and unwritten rules that is extremely hard to cut through.

John W. Gardner, On Leadership

The beginning

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. -TS Eliot (born Sept. 26, 1888)

One phone Call

We're all one phone call from our knees. -Matt Kearney

The dirt that splatters

Very probably, you’re sick to death of hearing social media disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds. My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love. My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard. 

Jonathan Franzen writing in the New York Times

Leadership & Status

We must not confuse leadership with status. -John W. Gardner

Sometimes procrastination is a good thing

I had a student who collected a bunch of data suggesting that those who procrastinate somewhat are more original and creative than people who never do it—and more creative than those who always do it. Of course, if you wait until the deadline, then you’re just going to have to rush to finish the simplest idea. But there is a sweet spot where procrastination helps with divergent thinking, with incubation, and with nonlinear connections.

Adam Grant Six secrets to true originality

Tuesday Tech Tools: 36 Writing Helps

We all could use a little help with writing and editing text. Here are some wonderful tools (apps and online) that will help in unexpected ways. You'll more writing tools at the tech tools site. If you have other suggestions, feel free to send them my way.

AAJA Guide to Covering Asian America

Associated Press Stylebook*
The most used reference guide to writing news stories, the AP stylebook is available both in print and online for a small fee.  It can improve general writing as well, especially for its alphabetically organized guide to the use of common and proper nouns.

Diversity Style Guide
Resource to help media writers nagivate through a "multicultural world with accuracy, authority and sensitivity."

Cliche Finder
Just what the title suggests. Free.

Copyscape
Check for online plagiarism.

Corpus of Contemporary American English
This BYU site includes transcripts of spoken language from radio and television programs and comprises academic writing from a range of disciplines allowing comparison of styles--spoken language vs.written academic language.

Coschedule Headline Analyzer
Analyze your headlines for SEO and share value. Free. 

Disability Language Style Guide
Created by The National Center for Disability and Journalism.

Dragon Anywhere
Voice to text app for iOS. Have to finish dictation before seeing the text. Free.

Flip Text
Flip text upside-down.  Use it on Facebook or Twitter. Free.

FontPair
Helps you pick font combinations for your resume, website, poster, etc. so your creation stands out from the typical Times New Roman on other material.

Gender Guesser
Cut and paste some of your writing into the the Gender Guesser and it will tell you whether you are male or female based on the writing tendencies of each.

Global Press Style Guide

Google Keyword Planner
Allows users to find and use words that are more likely to be used in searches for the content we are writing. Free.

the Grading Game*
App for practicing your editing skills and win points. Avail at the App Store.

Grammar Girl
Writing Tips from a grammarian.

Hackpad
Edit, organize and share documents. Merged with Dropbox in 2014.

HubSpot's Blog Topic Generator
Just write three nouns related to the topic that you'd like to blog about and this site will offer ideas.  

Lexicon Valley
Slate's grammar podcasts.

Limpert's About Editing and Writing Blog
A blog about how editors and writers do their work by Jack Limert was editor of the The Washingtonian for more than 40 years.

Medium
Created by Twitter co-founders to support good writing. Clean design and easy-to-use interface. For those who want to write but don’t want to maintain a blog or website. Intended to be a place where smart people plant their thoughts.  Share a draft of a post with friends who can make comments as marginal notes (rather than at the end of a post). Free, but Twitter account is required. No custom domains or customization.

NAHJ Cultural Competence Handbook
National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

The NLGJA Stylebook
The Association of LGBTQ Journalists Stylebook on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Terminology.

Online Etymology Dictionary
Gives you the history and derivation of any word. Free.

Power Thesaurus 
Crowdsourced thesaurus. 

Rhymer
Free rhyming dictionary.

SEOmov
SEO writing tips.

Svbtle
Writing platform. Minimalist interface. Encourages reader response. Must apply for membership.

Sync.in
Collaborative writing tool. 

TextExpander
Mac typing shortcut. Takes snippets of text and turns them into longer ones. Ideas for how to use it here. $44.95.

TextGrabber*
Extracts text from a variety of printed sources (PDF, books, etc.) by using the iPhone camera. Can translate text from many languages. $4.99.

Tone Analyzer
Linguistic analysis detects the emotional tone of your writing. Detect the levels of particular emotions it triggers and language style. Free.

Trans Journalist Association

Tribal Nations Media Guide

WatchFramebyFrame
Can also be used to play YouTube and Vimeo videos frame by frame, to see any inconsistencies in content.

Yoast SEO
A WordPress plugin to work SEO into your writing,

Capturing the World

To simplify the world enough that it can be captured with numbers means throwing away a lot of detail. -Hannah Fry