A Digital Generation Gap

/

An international 2018 study that measured eighth-graders’ “capacities to use information and computer technologies productively” proclaimed that just 2 percent of Gen Z had achieved the highest “digital native” tier of computer literacy. “Our students are in deep trouble,” one educator wrote. But the issue is likely not that modern students are learning fewer digital skills, but rather that they’re learning different ones. 

Nicolás Guarín-Zapata, an applied physicist and lecturer at Colombia’s Universidad EAFIT, for all his knowledge of directory structure, doesn’t understand Instagram nearly as well as his students do, despite having had an account for a year. He’s had students try to explain the app in detail, but “I still can’t figure it out,” he complains. “They use a computer one way, and we use a computer another way,” Guarin-Zapata emphasizes.  

Monica Chin writing for The Verge

Deadlines & Productivity

/

People like to say if it wasn’t for the last minute, nothing would get done. But research shows people’s productivity is not linear. When people sit down to do a task, they’ll put in a lot of effort initially. At some point there’s going to be diminishing returns on extra effort. To optimise productivity, you need to maximise benefits and minimise costs and find that inflection point, which is where you should start to wrap up. 

Elizabeth Tenney, University of Utah’s Eccles School of Business quoted in a BBC article

Deepfakes Flourish

/

Deepfake technology — software that allows people to swap faces, voices and other characteristics to create digital forgeries — has been used in recent years to make a synthetic substitute of Elon Musk that shilled a cryptocurrency scam, to digitally “undress”more than 100,000 women on Telegram and to steal millions of dollars from companies by mimicking their executives’ voices on the phone.

In most of the world, the authorities can’t do much about it. Even as the software grows more sophisticated and accessible, few laws exist to manage its spread.

Read more about Deep Fakes in the New York Times

10 Seconds

/

Image: EmmY AWARDS VIDEO

All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Will you just take, along with me, 10 seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are?  Those who have cared about you and wanted what was best for you in life.

(Ten seconds of silence)

Whomever you’ve been thinking about, how pleased they must be to know the difference you feel they’ve made.

Fred Rogers (of Mister Rogers Neighborhood), Academy Award Acceptance Speech

Switching Strategies

/

Parents need a veritable smorgasbord of strategies to raise their children, everything from tough discipline and strict boundaries to treating kids to ice cream and a day off. Knowing when to use which one is a sign of healthy flexibility. The same goes for leaders at work, who might want to change the way they manage their employees when the company is going through a season of stress.   

Kira M. Newman writing for Greater Good Magazine

Will AI doom or save us?

/

Every new development is condemned as likely leading to the ruination of what has come before. It's a desire to protect our comforts and memories—combined with the fear of losing power and control to the unknown. Anything that forces us to shift our identity is met with resistance. From Socrates (believing the written word is not an ineffective means of communicating knowledge) down through the printing press, radio, TV, computers, etc., the temptation is to condemn new technology for the very fact it is new and unfamiliar. The other temptation is the opposite (deeming it better simply because it is new and shiny). 

Considering that Riepl’s Law seems to be holding (old technology is not replaced, but fades in importance) and each iteration of technology can be used for good or evil, it seems the best attitude toward technology is to see it is as presenting a both/and situation and not an either/or dilemma. 

Will AI doom/save us? Probably. 

Stephen Goforth

The strongest predictor of men’s well-being

/

American men (along with their peers in the UK) derive happiness not from traditional notions of power and strength, but from the typically quieter task of doing meaningful work and contributing to the communities around them. That’s the finding of research out of the UK. Leah Fessler has more in Quartz

The best predictor of toxic work culture

/

To find evidence-based insights on culture change, we began with the large body of existing research on unhealthy corporate culture. Leadership consistently emerged as the best predictor of toxic culture. The importance of leadership will surprise no one, but it does underscore a fundamental reality: Leaders cannot improve corporate culture unless they are willing to hold themselves and their colleagues accountable for toxic behavior.  Toxic social norms can take on a life of their own in a team or an organization and persist through multiple changes in leadership. Without a commitment from the top team, any organization wide culture change — including a cultural detox — is destined to fail. 

Donald Sull and Charles Sull writing for the MIT Sloan Management Review

10 articles about Job Seeking in Public Relations

/

The 3 Things Far-Right & Far-Left Political News Sources have in Common

/

When researchers analyzed almost 6,000 political news stories produced by partisan and nonpartisan media outlets in 2021, three things became clear:

  • Media outlets with extreme biases — regardless of whether it was a conservative or liberal bias — tended to use shorter sentences and less formal language than nonpartisan outlets.

  • Mainstream news organizations, as a whole, wrote at a higher reading level.

  • Far-right and far-left outlets took a more negative tone than nonpartisan outlets. They generally had a lower ratio of positive to negative words.

The researchers describe their findings in a paper forthcoming in Journalism Studies, “At the Extremes: Assessing Readability, Grade Level, Sentiment, and Tone in US Media Outlets.”

Read the full article from Journalist’s Resources here.

Worry that Past Failures will Repeat

/

Worry about the repetition of past problems is not a sign of healthy thinking. True, it indicates a desire to be rid of the possible plenty of repeated pain, but inevitably it represents its own brand of pain. The individual has clearly specified what must - and what must not - be part of his life, but the mind is so obsessed with preventing old problems that satisfaction is not recognized in present situations. The imperative person is a prisoner of the past.

Les Carter, Imperative People: Those Who Must Be in Control

Selfishness and Self-love

/

If it is a virtue to love my neighbor as a human being, it must be a virtue and not a vice-to love myself since I am a human being too. There is no concept of man in which I myself am not included. A doctrine which proclaims such an exclusion proves itself to be intrinsically contradictory. The idea expressed in the Biblical “Love thy neighbor as thyself!” implies that respect for one’s own integrity and uniqueness, love for and understanding of one’s own self, can not be separated from respect for and love and understanding of another individual. The love for my own self is inseparably connected with the love for any other self.

The affirmation of one’s own life, happiness, growth, freedom, is rooted in one’s capacity to love, i.e., in care, respect, responsibility, and knowledge. If an individual is able to love productively, he loves himself too; if he can love only others, he can not love at all.

The selfish person.. can see nothing but himself; he judges everyone and everything from its usefulness to him; he is basically unable to love. Does not this prove that concern for others and concern for oneself are unavoidable alternatives? This would be so if selfishness and self-love were identical. But.. selfishness and self-love, far from being identical, are actually opposites.

Eric Fromm, Man for Himself