CBC unplugged
The management of CBC, the Canadian Public Broadcasting radio, broke the labor negotiations that had been going on for 15 months and locked out 5,500 CBC workers on August 15. The dispute is around the hiring of contractors and part-time workers. CBC, which has received no funding increase in five years, decided to solve its financial problems by proposing to increase the number of contract employees to 25 percent. This means that half the CBC employees, which have been without a contract since March 2004, will be left without permanent status. The talks were interrupted when CBC refused to to negotiate this proposal with the Canadian Media Guild, and at 12:01 AM of August 15, the lock-out was announced.
While the workerless radio is broadcasting music and borrowed programs, the locked out Canadian Media Guild workers started CBC unplugged, an alternative broadcast through podcasting. Robert Paterson, who wrote many posts on the CBC predicts that
When the lockout is over CBC staffers will have embraced the new technology and will transform CBC into more of a community organization.
Or, in the interconnected web world, the CBC unplugged experience may change podcasting.
- Read Derek Miller’s comments here and here
- Flickr pictures of the CBC lock-out.
All about our mothers
Everybody is blogging on their mothers lately. Jory started with a post on her mom, Joy, that made me sob.
people have somehow caught on to this woman’s ability to not judge– even in matters concerning me–to listen, and, if you’re meeting her in-person, to feed you.
[After that post, Joy decided to start her own blog]
Then Gillian talked about her mom’s 64th birthday and posted the cutest daughter-mother picture.
My friends from childhood will still ask me how she’s doing, and say how much they liked her. Despite what they were wearing, what colour their hair was, and how much metal was in their faces, she treated them with respect, which is a rare thing for a teenager to receive from a friend’s parent.
Ronni Bennet talks about witnessing the death of her mother.
Even Shelly, who doesn’t seem the sentimental type, wrote about her mom inheriting Shelley’s old Nikon Coolpix 995:
I told her I would write detailed instructions on how to use all the lenses and filters. “Be sure to also write down what kind of film I should use,” she said.
What about my mother?
My mother in February 1959, one year before marrying my father and one year and 10 months before I was born.
My mother has been beaten by life.
My mother lost her father when she was 5 and the World was in War.
My mother was raised by a crazy mother who could not forgive her for the death of her husband.
My mother married my father to escape her family.
My mother was depressed and unhappy when I was born.
My mother didn’t feel good enough to raise a child.
My mother didn’t trust herself and anybody around her.
My mother never learned how to love and be supportive. Nobody did it with her.
My mother had a spark that never had a chance to burn.
I love her but I cannot live close to her.
I miss the person she could have been.
I miss the relationship we could have had.
Mamma, mi manchi.
What scares you?
Recently I have been reading about all these memes traveling around blogosphere: tell me the last 3 books you read, the three most listened songs on your iTune, etc. I’ve never received an invitation to share my last readings or favorite music, which I am grateful for. I am not quite ready to share them with the world.
But thinking about another recent and fierce debate started by Jay Rosen’s comment on the “expression of terror” and “raw fears” he heard at the Blogher conference, I thought about something less personal to share.
So, here is my first meme. What scares you? What are your rational or irrational fears that keep you up awake at night?
Here are mine:
- Driving on highways
- Losing my health insurance
- Be deported by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
- Flying
- Losing the people I love
So, what are your fears? Scott, Eddie, Funkygrl, Andrew, Joy, Nancy, Erik, anybody?
The politics of happiness
When I say “the pursuit of happiness” in my blog tagline, I really mean it. I really care about the interconnection between women, technology, and happiness.
I realize now that it’s impossible to talk about happiness without talking about politics. Because there is such a thing as the politics of happiness.
Sometimes this becomes really clear. Take, for example, the decision to bar gay marriage. In a rational, legal sense, that decision denies gay couples a right (or the many rights that come with marriage). But in a personal sense, that decision prevents their pursuit of happiness (and if you don’t believe me, stare for a few seconds to one of the pictures of just married gay couples in San Francisco in February 2004).
[It turns out that the words "certain unalienable Rights" and among these "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" that our Founding Fathers idealistically included in the Declaration of Independence, never made it into the American Constitution. They only agreed on the much blander Ninth Amendment "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."]
Sometimes the effect of politics on our personal life is subtle. Sometime it crushes us. Liz Lawley on Misbehaving.net talks about the chain of women’s blogs that connected her to Badger’s story.
So I found out about Badger by reading Lilia’s blog–and Lilia found her through Profgrrl, and Profgrrl found her through Academic Coach. A string of women blogging about women, connecting to other women, using blogging to change each other’s lives.
[Which clarifies the connection between the politics of happiness, women, and technology.]
Badger is a graduate student and her husband is an artist. Last year, Badger’s husband was diagnosed with liver cancer. Suddenly, the political decisions that shaped health care management in this country became brutally personal. Politics were letting Badger’s husband die.
Cost to date for surgery, CT-scans, hospital stays, doctors’ visits, and labwork: $79,000. Insurance benefit left for year: $21,000. Days left until new benefit year: 145. Response from Social Security Administration when I went down to their office with our 2004 tax returns to prove our lack of income: Priceless.
“There’s nothing I can do for you. Come back in two years.”
Prognosis of someone with stage four liver cancer: 3 months
[Read more about Badger and her husband; help Badger]
So, here it is. I tried to avoid blogging publicly about politics. But it turns out that it’s not possible to have an opinion on happiness (everybody looks for it, everybody deserves it) without talking about politics.
Even Jared Spool is blogging
Jared Spool and a couple of other folks at UI Engineering (Christine Perfetti and Joshua Porter) have started Brain Sparks, a new blog on web design, usability, and other interface issues.
It’s interesting how long it’s taking to the traditional, old school usability world to embrace blogs and RSS. Jakob Nielsen doesn’t seem to have any intention to upgrade his “blog” Alertbox to offer RSS (but BoingBoing lists few bootleg RSS feeds for Alertbox as well as a fab five design makeover of the useit.com site). BTW, for an opinionated guy like him, his silence on RSS and blogs it’s also quite interesting. Even Alan Cooper does not offer a feed for his newsletter. I suspect that control and site traffic are the main reasons.
It must be because of Jared’s excessively innovative tendencies that the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) describes him as a bad boy (no, the UPA Voice does not a RSS feed. I checked).
The paradox of choice
I’ve just finished reading The paradox of choice
The Paradox of Choice and Blink are at the same time very different and very similar books. Blink is more entertaining: to make his point, Malcolm Gladwell tells really good stories. Barry Schwartz lists numbers, studies, and results. Blink is about rapid decision making. The Paradox of choice is about deliberate (and often excruciating) decision making. But the two books cite many of the same studies and, most importantly, they both have a strong and urgent moral message to communicate.
Blink’s message is that the ill effects of snap judgement (bias, stereotyping, and “momentary autism”) can and should be reduced through awareness and training. The Paradox of choice wants to prove that we could be so much happier if we just stopped being so picky and avoided comparing ourselves only to people who are doing better than we are. Happiness, says Schwartz, comes from finding the time to be grateful for what we have and content with our “good enough” lives.
By the way, does anybody have recommendations for recent good books on decision making?
[Oh, I almost forgot: What would Nancy White say about all this?]
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