Governance gaps and international Labour rights

Some shocking details about suppliers for some western products. Governance gaps -failed or tes, to be less euphemistic, allow slave labour to flourish. Underregulated markets do the equivalent of sending children up chimneys if we let them ...
Part of the problem is that some firms simply go round regulation by stepping into a governance gap or allowing a proxy to do so for them. We need an international response to a global set of problems -otherwise globalisation is a race to the bottom. Outsourcing has been a way for manufacturers and marketters to evade responsibilities. So contracts now increasingly embody human rights standards and these are more effective than 'police actions' by global HR agencies.
Building trust, partnership and co-operation can create the basis for a progressive 'strange new world' where TNC's actually offer the basis for human rights; listen to this mini-lecture to find out how ...
Ono of my recently-written liturgies has added agencies and corporations to praying for those who rule the world, this video gives a sense of why.
AuretvanHeerden_2010G.mp4 (video/mp4 Object)

Where do you go when you really want to get something done?

That's the question at the heart of this bit of video. The answer, interestingly and significantly, is rarely "the office" which is supposedly created for productivity. Here, we hear why (in effect, we go into the office to be interrupted! Or to be monitered by a distrustful management who have bought into an ideology of 'dstraction') ... and why the answer should reconfigure the way we work and the way that organisations resource their workforce. My answers are 'a coffee shop' and 'the train' occasionally it's the office. ... it turns out I'm not alone.
Also mentioned is the role of sleep and the analogy it gives to the way we might work. (I'm increasingly thinking that 'sabbath' is a key motif in theology and theological anthropology -and that relates to this).
Twitter and Facebook are not the distractions that they are supposed to be: managers and meetings are. Managers are for interrupting people. Managers call meetings which are toxic -and they procreate! Ten people in a one-hour meeting is 10 hours of company time.
It's a cartoon, but with enough truth to get us to think about 'received practice' and perhaps make offices work for work.
Three suggestions: 'no talk Thursdays'; good use of passive communication; just erase meetings.
On the passive communication; the warning would be that in some cases they can be too open to misinterpretation and need a good infrastructure of trust and respect to cradle them otherwise they become as toxic as the memo can be. On erasing meetings, we've just moved to a regime where faculty meetings are not automatic; some have been erased. We seem to be discovering that agendas can expand to fill the meetings called. One manager I knew used to believe in 'corridor meetings' that is that some of the most effective work gets done in chance meetings and in two minutes between things ... it's worth considering, because I've seen it work sometimes ...
JasonFried_2010X.mp4 (video/mp4 Object)

Christian Apocrypha and the apologetics of canon

It was around before, but since The Da Vinci Code, I've noted that I have to say more about the legitimacy of the NT canon more often to both Christians and to enquirers. And so it's great to find a relatively brief blog post by my old friend Doug Chaplin which helps orient us to helpful approaches to respond. It's here in full:
Christian Apocrypha and the question of Church censorship and here are a few things he writes to give you a sense of the value of the thing:

"I suspect the modern parallel might be rather more what texts and theories are allowed in the science classroom than about freedom of religious belief. If our analogy is the debate around creationism and evolution, then I’m not sure we will easily resort either to language of censorship or the assumption that all truths are of equal value."

And that is probably quite a well-chosen analogy which helps undercut the anachronistic thinking in a way that helps to retrieve the positive value of canon in something like the way that many early Christians might have seen it.

Then there is a second analogy, based this time on the debate in literary studies about whether there is a "canon" of literature that should be taught in order to give students a helpful leg-up into the kind of texts they need to look at in order to educate their palate (to use yet another analogy).

The literary analogy certainly does say something about the power of the guardianship exercised by a cultural elite, but it also suggest there is something about the texts themselves which is also of significance for why these texts get read, edited, performed, reflected about and passed on. They are perceived by a cultural community as being of better (whatever better means in this context) value than others like them – indeed, as being simply better texts.

This latter is something like the way I have found myself answering: that in the course of using texts over a few generations, certain texts emerged, relatively independently in many cases as being those that were most used because, presumably, they spoke and gave voice to what seemed to those early Christian communities to be the most authentic voice of Jesus and the apostolic witness. It's a bit more complicated than that, but we need a headline /on a t-shirt way in first in such circumstances as I'm usually experiencing the issue being raised.

Christ and the Bible

Is this the wisdom that age is meant to bring?

This got my attention because I've found that my empathic emothional responses -of the kind that this study looks at- have been growing 'fuller' in the last handful of years. Now, I'm only in my 50's and that was the decade of life that wasn't actually looked at in this study. But I'd be willing to discover that the process may start to become pronounced in the sixth decade of life. The report of the research is here: Emotional intelligence peaks as we enter our 60s, research suggests
It's clear that it's research that will need further investigation as there are only 144 subjects. But the fact that it seems to corroborate informal observation and coheres with an earlier study gives further plausibility, as does the explanatory hypothesis:

"'Increasingly, it appears that the meaning of late life centers on social relationships and caring for and being cared for by others,' Levenson said. 'Evolution seems to have tuned our nervous systems in ways that are optimal for these kinds of interpersonal and compassionate activities as we age.'"

And the reason I linked this with wisdom can be seen in these phrases from the report:

Older people, it turned out, were the best at reinterpreting negative scenes in positive ways using positive reappraisal, a coping mechanism that draws heavily on life experience and lessons learned. ...
heightened sensitivity to sadness does not indicate a higher risk for depression in the context of Seider's study, but is actually a healthy sign

In other words there is greater emotional resiliance developing in healthy adults as they age. Of course, this would also mean that things like MBTI scores relating to the 'F' function as people age. This may be of a piece with the matter of 'growing into ones shadow' which is meant to be a mid-life and after characteristic.

Couples who delay having sex get benefits later

This seems the kind of stats that ought to ggo into sex education and relationship education. My question is whether it actually will find its way to the curriculum ...

Couples who delay having sex get benefits later, study finds:
"A statistical analysis showed the following benefits enjoyed by couples who waited until marriage compared to those who started having sex in the early part of their relationship:
* Relationship stability was rated 22 percent higher
* Relationship satisfaction was rated 20 percent higher
* Sexual quality of the relationship was rated 15 percent better
* Communication was rated 12 percent better

For couples in between -- those that became sexually involved later in the relationship but prior to marriage -- the benefits were about half as strong."
The researchers, if the report is accurate enough, seem to have spotted some of the most likely issues in their methodology. The issue may be whether the actual questioning was fair-enough ...
However, like many pieces of research, the longevity and plausibility come down to whether there is a good hypothesis as to why. The article seems to put a finger on a likely runner for that: energy/time given to developing the relationship well-roundedly.

Linguistic determinism: the state of the debate

This formal online debate managed by The Economist is probably the best 'all in one place' guide to the debate about linguistic determinism, taking in some of the most significant recent research Economist Debates: Language: Statements. The shame is that, for a debate, the proposition under scrutiny is actually one with some degree of variance which means that the more interesting areas of debate don't contribute to the voting properly. This is because it is difficult to disagree with at least a weak understanding of the proposition and to rustle up some debate the 'counsel' for the prosecution (so to speak) has to define the proposition in a fairly extreme way.

The proposition under debate is "This house believes that the language we speak shapes how we think." and of course it's hard not to agree. The real issue is how trivial or portentious the statement might be. The 'against' arguer admits that, strictly speaking, we have to agree with the statement "Mark Liberman says once again that for him, at the very least, weak versions of "language shapes thought" are true,".

The final summary paragraph 'against' the proposition probably sums it for me: "Boroditsky's experiments are striking and persuasive, but they are a long way from Whorf and Elgin's vision of a qualitative, profound, powerful change in perspective associated simply with a change in language. Profound changes in perspective are certainly available, but the price is higher than a language course" In other words, no matter how hard you tried, it would be impossible to make Orwell's Newspeak actually work to control thought in a population: influence yes, perhaps even make unexamined defaults in uncontentious areas of thought, but as soon as we start to think consciously about something, we start to use thought to shape language and the reflexivity contributes to cultural and linguistic change in that ever-continuing conversation that is culture.

Machine reading tripped up by old-school orthography

Many of us are aware that in English, time was that the letter 's' could be written or printed in a form that looks to the modern eye like an 'f'. Google books' machine reading doesn't get seem to have 'learnt' this. Check out the entries on this search ...

Theodicy of the naturalists

I find myself a bit puzzled by some of the out-and-out naturalist positions. For example the one quoted here: Teilhard and the Question of Life's Suffering: An Excerpt from Rediscovering Teilhard's Fire (SJU Press, 2010; Kathleen Duffy, Editor) :: John Haught :: Global Spiral: "Loyal Rue, a philosopher who exemplifies very well what I mean by an evolutionary naturalist, even seems to suggest that scientists should be careful about letting the rest of us in on the discovery that our religions are adaptive illusions. If we all find out tomorrow what is really going on we might too precipitously dispose of our religious beliefs and sacred theodicies. In that case we would be deprived of one of the human traits that have allowed our genes to survive for so many thousands of years. If we expose our religions as the lies they really are, humanity might go extinc"
You see, my puzzlement is why, on a naturalistic account, we should care? If the genes can't stand too much reality, then they are clearly unfit ...
And anyway, taking this standpoint, why should we value the survival of human beings -or anything really? Surely that sense that it would be 'good' for 'us' to survive is just another survival mechanism which actually has no value except if it helps genes to be passed on. And if it doesn't, so what?
I really can't see where the moral imperative to 'save the humans' comes from in this world view or what its force can possibly be aside from a preference which may (or may not) be shared.

Sign languages make working of metaphor clearer

I'm not sure that this is as big a break-through as it seems to be written up here, though it is certainly interesting to me as a linguist. But the phenomenon described is familiar to most of us who have worked on translations or been tripped up by a literal interpreting of a metaphor only to realise that a certain sense/shade of meaning doesn't map between the most natural choices in source and target languages. Check out the summary article here: Sign languages help us understand the nature of metaphors.
"This study shows that the iconicity of a form may constrain the possible metaphorical extensions that the form might take. Put another way, certain metaphorical expressions in spoken language cannot be 'translated directly' into sign language if their form is iconic."
And if that seems a bit opaque to you then perhaps the 'for instance' will clarify. I think it's interesting. The newer thing is the way that the performance of a ASL or (in this case) ISL sign constrains the connotative meaning and so what is available in terms of extended meanings available to remap in metaphoric usage.
"it is impossible to use the sign FLY (in Israeli Sign Language and American Sign Language) in the expression "time flies" or "the day just flew by." The metaphorical uses of a word such as FLY are impossible because of the form of this sign, in particular, its iconicity. The sign for FLY is produced by moving the arms as if flapping one's wings. But in the expression "time flies," we do not mean that time is flapping its wings. Rather, the metaphor is built on an implication of the action of flying, namely that it is a very fast way of motion. So there is a clash between what the form of the sign encodes (wing flapping) and the aspect of meaning on which the metaphor is built (fast movement)."
However, we should also recall the probable truth of the thesis in 'Metaphors we Live by' and 'Philosophy made Flesh' (Lakoff and Johnson in both cases) that much language is rooted in fundamental metaphors based on bodily experience (and making neurological links co-opting the relevant neuronal gestalts of somatic experience which does seem to be borne out in emerging brain imaging research). We should note it is the role of iconicity that is being picked out here. This is telling us something about (to use the vocabulary of another school in semiotics) motivated signs and their availability for metaphorical usage. What would be interesting to place beside this would be to look at the way that the FLY signs are pressed into metaphorical usage; what are the salient connotative meanings that can be drawn from the signs that can, in turn, be pressed into extended usage. I'm aware that SLs would be fascinating to look at from this kind of linguistic point of view. I hope one day I may have a chance to find out more.

I told you so (Diocese of West Yorkshire

Well the report's out and it seems that my reading of the runes coincides broadly with that of the commission:
"The Report therefore recommends a single diocese for the whole of West Yorkshire"
I wasn't sure how they might handle the rural hinterland and they reckon on the North Yorkshire bits staying with the diocese which has a fair logic to it with area bishops (cf London). In many ways this would be like the Province idea but devolved down a tier (and so avoid complications at this point, not least that the multiplication of provinces would need to be England-wide, really).

So other substantial administrative things...
"There would be a Bishop of Ripon, whose episcopal area would comprise those parts of
North Yorkshire that are within the new diocese. This area could form a single archdeaconry.
The See of Knaresborough would be renamed the See of Ripon and the Archdeaconry of
Richmond would become the Archdeaconry of Richmond and Craven. The present
Archdeaconry of Craven would be dissolved. ...
There would be a Bishop of Leeds, giving dedicated attention to an episcopal area comprising
all the parishes in the City of Leeds that are in the new diocese... s the importance of there being a Bishop of Bradford, who should focus
on the City of Bradford, which would form the Archdeaconry of Bradford. "

Now one of the things that differs from my personal thoughts on this is this:
"Calderdale should not be in the Bradford episcopal area. Instead,
the Archdeaconry of Halifax should be expanded to include the whole of Kirklees and form
an episcopal area"
Ill need to look into their reasoning for that, though I'd admit that Kirklees and Calderdale do share a lot of commonality.
And the following recommendation looks like a leaf out of Gareth Millar's book but with this 'archdiocese' taking the place of a province, even down to the idea of a small episcopal area for the bishop primus (my phrase): "the new diocesan see should therefore be Wakefield. The City of Wakefield is small enough to form an episcopal area for the diocesan bishop of a large diocese. It would form the Archdeaconry of Pontefract."
Oh, and one of the other things I have long said should come to pass is also recommended: that Barnsley deanery should go to Sheffield diocese.
Seems to me an eminently sensible set of recommendations, all in all.

Active role in learning enhances memory

Another case of some research confirming what we already thought we knew, but valuable for that in strengthening the case by those of us wanting to encourage more participatory classrooms.
How taking an active role in learning enhances memory: "'Having active control over a learning situation is very powerful and we're beginning to understand why,' said University of Illinois psychology professor Neal Cohen, who led the study with postdoctoral researcher Joel Voss. 'Whole swaths of the brain not only turn on, but also get functionally connected when you're actively exploring the world.'"

Why married men tend to behave better

I was dimly aware of this: "Researchers have long argued that marriage generally reduces illegal and aggressive behaviors in men. It remained unclear, however, if that association was a function of matrimony itself or whether less 'antisocial' men were simply more likely to get married."

A good example of a proper question being developed out of the results of some research. I'd also want to add my question: whether legal marriage only produces these results or whether other kinds of 'household' partnership do this.

Anyway, with regard to the question as put (rather than mine), it seems that it is not either/or but both/and.

As to my question, there is one bit that seems to be tangential to it, at least. "Burt said her finding may differ from past studies because marital rates have declined significantly in recent years, whereas marriage was more of the norm in the 1950s, meaning selection likely wasn't much of a factor.

It seems that marriage 'proper' is what was studied, so no figures would be available, I would assume, to answer my question. Both the research as reported and as it would have to be to answer my question seem to be crying out for an explanatory hypothesis. What do you reckon would explain the phenomenon?

Anyway, it does seem to me that the 'why' in the title still remains to be substantiated. Without an explanatory hypothesis, it can't be.
Why married men tend to behave better

Demonic Faces in Twin Towers' smoke?

In the words of one of my fave sci-fi series: what the frell? I'd not come across this until a conversation I had today:

"You may have heard of the pictures taken of the World Trade Center while it was burning, in which the smoke formed the face of Satan."and if you go here, Devil's Face in Smoke 9-11, you'll see some of the pictures to support the idea.

Now there are two things that occur to me straight away with this, maybe three, depending on how you count them.

First off, this seems a bit like those stories about images of the BVM in slices of toast, or the face of Jesus in a piece of cut fruit, or even supposed satellite images of verses of the Qur'an in pictures of trees felled by storms. In all of these cases it seems to me that it's mostly about an image that lends itself to interpretations of those kinds by being vague enough to serve as a kind of suggestive ground/base to our projections of meaningfulness.

The second thing is the meaning that can then be assigned to such a 'seeing'. In this case it seems to be conducive to a hospitality towards a particular view of the world in which the goodies and baddies are well-defined in terms of a 'clash of civilisations'. -Maybe I'm being a little too harsh there, but maybe not. Certainly I'm intrigued that other 'readings' are not so possible in the discourse generated here: for example that demonic entities are /were part of those buildings and are forced out by the destruction. This latter reading could lead on to seeing the events potentially having a positive outcome in 'exorcising' the heart of NY of evil entities -though I hasten to point out this is not my interpretation and it should not be construed as in anyway justifying the violence or the deaths involved. Indeed it is an interpretation which could be seen as implicitly critical of global finance or capitalism. The fact that this way of interpreting what is thought to be seen is not anywhere in view, is in itself interesting and should give pause for thought even if (like me) one is rather skeptical of the thing.

And another thing occurs to me: the stock images that are referenced in making these interpretive leaps. They don't come from biblical imagery which, on the whole, is rather restrained about such things. Like the 'faces of Christ' and the 'images of Mary', they are drawn from conventional and largely medieval (or later) iconography. The speculative imagery of artists down the ages have, in a sense, become canonical and serve as interpretive resources for ... well ... stuff like this.

When Baghdad was centre of the scientific world

I sometimes point out in lectures on early Islam and Christianity that the Islamic empire seems to have expanded militarily so quickly that it outstripped the ability of the conquerors to supply elites and civil servants to run the societies they now ruled. Result? Christians -among others- were often holders of high office in early Islam. This of course nuances the claim you may sometimes hear Muslims make as to the civilisational credentials of Islam -sometimes it was Christians under Muslim patronage who were doing the 'heavy lifting': "The most famous of all the Baghdad translators, Hunayn ibn Ishāq, was born in the ancient Christian city of Hira and never converted to Islam. He would spend many years travelling around the world in his search for Greek manuscripts. It is the medical work of the physician Galen that is his most important legacy, for not only did it open up the Islamic world to this great treasure, in many cases it is only via these Arabic translations that much of Galen's work reaches us today."
The article (When Baghdad was centre of the scientific world) mentions the philosophical importance of Al Kindi. Interestingly there was another Al Kindi around who was a Christian and whose contribution was to offer apologetic arguments in relation to Islam.

Anyway, worth looking at the article to get a sense of an Islam that was not (is not) obscurantist but rather a progressive partner in human flourishing.