BurningbirdYule points to three short movies utilizing stop motion created by a family run production company, Painful Productions in Vancouver Island. These short-shorts are more than worth a view, as is Yule’s writeup of the company.
(Note, you can download a Mac-based player for Windows Media files.)
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
…depressed by all the news of buying and selling this week, can I?
The tech.memorandum.com web site, which is supposed to track technology related items of interest reads more like the Wallstreet Journal. There were some vague mumblings about tags coming out of Web 2.0, but most of the story from this pricey event is about which company bought what service, including Verisign buying Weblogs.com and AOL buying the Weblogsinc web site.
Verisign and AOL. Knowing both of these company’s backgrounds, I’m sure these two organizations will add much to the environment. Family values and hard-ass corporate greed, all rolled up into one taffy-like ball.
About the only true tech story was Newsgator buying NetNewsWire, but that’s probably because I’ve been working with the Newsgator API this week.
Thankfully, money can’t buy everything: Happy Birthday Wood s lot–may you continue your apostrophe-less presence for many years to come.
Monday the temperature was in the 90’s. Today, it won’t break 60. Autumn.
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Kathy Sierra writes on how to speak at Tech conferences. Some of her advice is good, but I disagree, and strongly, on a couple of assertions she makes. Specifically Kathy believes that if women aren’t represented well in this industry, it’s our own damn fault.
One of her tips for getting invited to speak is attend a lot of conferences:
This is by far the best strategy for getting a talk accepted. The more you know what works and what doesn’t, the better you’ll be at both proposing and especially delivering the talk. However, many of us can’t afford the conferences which is precisely why we want to land a speaker slot–Free Pass! Still, I have a hard time listening to complaints about the lack of diversity from people who aren’t motivated enough to find a way to attend a professional conference. There are always clever ways to get into a conference if one wants it badly enough… (as a master at finagling entry to conferences, and being a conference junkie myself, I’ll do a whole separate post on that some day).
I suppose this will work for those women who happen to live where conferences are held, but for the rest of the country, showing up on the door and begging admittance doesn’t hack it. More, this implies having connection into the insider group in order to get in the door. If you don’t have connection to the insider group, it’s harder to get in.
To get an idea of what the insider groups consist of, pick a topic related directly or indirectly to technology and see how often women webloggers who write on it get referenced as compared to the men.
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
I have a hard time listening to complaints about the lack of diversity from people who aren’t motivated enough to find…–pick one: a job, an education, free passes to a conference, an opportunity for advancement, a ride out of a flooded city. This goes back to that old excuse of the priviledged: those who don’t have opportunity choose not to have opportunity.
Kathy also writes:
It’s tempting to think your proposal wasn’t accepted because…
B) I’m [insert your favorite: female/non-white/too old/too young/unknown/not Web 2.0-ish]
There’s been a LOT of complaining about the lack of women at the conferences, and lot of finger pointing at the conference organizers for having an all-male committe that clearly favored the male proposals. WRONG! From O’Reilly, for instance, these are the stats for the last ETech:
“We received 223 proposals, 15 of them from women, for 6% of the total. Of the women who submitted proposals, 46% were selected; for men, the acceptance rate was 32%.”In other words, women were MORE likely to have etheir proposals accepted than men. The lack of diversity in conferences — at least the O’Reilly conferences — is because they do NOT get enough proposals from non-white,non-male speakers.
I like Kathy, I really do. I think she’s a hell of a good writer, and I admire her skills: both as a technologist and a marketer. But if she says we’re wrong, I answer back, as emphatically: WRONG.
Let’s look more closely at O’Reilly, shall we?
The invitation list for Foo Camp consists of what? Ten percent women? Less? How about the recent Web 2.0? Doesn’t matter if this was a joint conference or not: the O’Reilly name was on the door. As for the ETech conference, the statistic mentions how many of the proposals submitted by women were accepted. I’m curious: how many of the people invited to speak outside of the proposal system were women? How many women as compared to men were specifically invited by O’Reilly folk to submit proposals?
I took graduate level classes in statistics in college: tell me the point you want to make and I can tell you how you can package your numbers to make it. So let’s walk away from these numbers for a minute…
How many conferences has O’Reilly put on that have had a woman in charge of speakers? How many conferences has the organization even had women on the selection committee? I’m not talking about the women involved in administrating the conference–I’m talking about those directly involved in choosing speakers.
Let’s go even further: how many times do you see women referenced in the O’Reilly weblogs? Even when the topic of conversation is social software, which does have a significant number of women? Good lord, look at the O’Reilly sites and the writers and people: we can only hope that some of the critters represented in the colophons are female.
Too few women submitting proposals to O’Reilly conferences. It would seem the same could be said in regards to books and articles, too. There was a Wired article on Tim O’Reilly recently, hinted that he’s a bit of a country hippy. If so, then he’ll understand the phrase, “You have to prime the pump first”.
I could go on, but the point is mute, and the problem isn’t specific to O’Reilly and I don’t want this to turn into a “Let’s kick the shit out of Tim O’Reilly, shall we?” session. The issue comes down to this: do you believe that the reason women don’t have the opportunities at technical conferences is because we’re not trying? If so, why stop there: the same could be asked of women in technology, and even women in society.
I haven’t had much to say the last couple of days. When I read this I was concerned that anything I would say at this point would probably result in a visit from the Secret Service.
I did want to point out a couple of things. The first a letter containing questions and a request for a hearing penned by the Government Reform Minority Office. Add to this letter the new items we’re hearing, such as FEMA sending evacuees to the wrong state, and Brown induging in polite chit-chat when a catastrophe looms.
Norm Jenson has three good videos worth a first, second, and third look. The first is an interview with Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard. If you haven’t seen this yet, be prepared — it is not something that will leave you unmoved. You may want to watch it when you get home.
The second is an editorial by Keith Olbermann, and all I can say is that I am so glad there is someone like Olbermann who can do such a brilliant job of artculating our anger.
The third is of Jon Stewart. What Stewart provides is a way of laughing ourselves out of the immobility of the grief and the anger so that we can act. Right now, we’re acting in support of the victims of Katrina. Later, we’ll be acting against those who shirked their duty, completely gutted what was once the most efficient organization in the US government, and who dismissed an entire group of people just because the people are poor, and black, and southern.
Even now, Bush brings up WMD first, when he talks about making sure we’re prepared. WMD, then natural disasters. WMD first, because God causes natural disasters, so it’s up to God to repair the damages. Let the religious organizations deal with it. The religious organizations and the states and the counties and the cities. That way, the federal government can spend more money in Iraq.
Here’s a tidbit for you: the damage in New Orleans has cost thousands of lives, including several hundred waiting to be rescued from a ferry warehouse, and the 30 old people drowned when they were left unprotected in their beds. It will most likely cost 150billion dollars to fix, could result in devestating cultural and community shifts within one of our most important cultural and transportation cities, will pollute the surrounding area for years to come–and could have been prevented if 3 billion dollars had been set aside to fix the levees to withstand a category 5 hurricane.
Not only did we not spend this money, we removed all funding to provide any upkeep of the levee this last year — a year that scientists have said would be the worst hurricane season in history.
But more on that at a later time. Right now, I’m too unbalanced to be very articulate. Instead, I’ll point you to a writing by Dave Rogers called Change. It is by far the best work he has ever done, and one of the best writings I’ve read this year. I want to quote the whole, but will try to settle for a smaller piece:
There is something that keeps a group of people together that is more than just a paycheck. We “honor” individuals within our group as a way of renewing and strengthening that thing that keeps us together. It’s about faith, which is a word that is much abused of late. It’s about keeping faith with one another, and the really important things we believe, even if we don’t think about them much. To honor someone is to keep faith with them. Honor, the noun, is the quality of having kept faith with one’s fellows.
…
What happened in the failures of government in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was not something intrinsic to the nature of bureaucracies or the public sector. What happened was a failure of leadership, a failure to renew and strengthen the shared faith that makes each of us a part of something larger, and hopefully, better than we are as individuals. What happened was a failure of leadership to keep faith with us.That failure in leadership was not an accident. It was the result of too many years of too much neglect of the value of public service. For too many years, for too many people, public service has become just a means of advancing oneself in the private sector. People with something to gain, people with a profit motive, selfish, cynical people, have blurred the ideas of authority, responsibility, and accountability. All toward the end of abusing their authority to promote themselves while neglecting or ignoring their responsibilities, oblivious to the shared faith that has become the tattered and fraying social fabric that binds us together.
That failure in leadership was not an accident. It was the product of a political system that has embraced the ways and the methods of the marketplace to manipulate people, to command their attention or distract it. To craft clever, meaningless messages intended to obscure more than to illuminate. To appeal to fear rather than courage. To value appearance over substance. A marketplace in which honesty and integrity are often perceived as impediments to a healthy bottom line.
…
I’ve seen a lot of folks wondering what “we” can do to address this situation, and, predictably, people are focusing on technological solutions, when what we have is not a fundamentally technological problem. It’s something far less physical. It’s a crisis of faith, it’s a kind of identity crisis about who we are as a people and what we say we believe. Because there’s a disconnect, an enormous chasm, between what we say we believe and how we manifest that belief in the leadership we choose and the other choices we make. So if you want to try to begin to “solve” this problem, I’d say your time would be better spent there than in advocating a particular technology. I will note that many of those who do will be doing so while angling for some competitive advantage in the marketplace.
There is so much more — this excerpt doesn’t do the writing justice, so, please, read the whole essay.
About the issue of focusing on a technology solution to what ‘ails’ us. This was, in part, the inspiration for the post that I created, edited, added to, and eventually deleted–leaving only a cryptic ‘never. mind’. It was inspired in part by of discussions of meetings to organize ‘disaster 2.0′ — upon reading of which left me equally enraged and despondent. I am glad, now, that I pulled my writing because Dave says what I should have said.
We can’t afford to get caught up in the anger, sadness, and the despair; the amount of work and the utter indifference of the government. If we do, we’ll never change things, and we need to bring about change. It’s not a political party change because switching the Republicans out for Democrats won’t make a difference if the Democrats bring the same marketing mindset that Dave references. (Though I strongly believe the Republicans have had their chance these last few years, and have made a right mess of it. It’s now their turn to play minority, until such time as they remember who it is they’re supposed to serve.)
It’s a change within our hearts and heads. We have to, as Dave said, learn anew about how to keep faith with each other. Marketing is talking; keeping faith is listening.
Having said that, I also listened, with thanks and relief, to Dave’s post today about the feathered dinosaur. As to my opinion of the conclusions reached, Dave, all I have to say is this:
Scary, eh?
I also noticed that Tropical Storm Ophelia is blasting the area where you live, Dave, and may strengthen into a category 1 hurricane. Luckily, there’s help.
Now, that’s scary.
Stay dry and stay well, my friend. To all of you in harms way: stay dry, and stay well.