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 ...