Tag: education

Culture for breakfast, since it's so light and airheaded

Yet again some oversight body / de facto regulator gave wind that they already had changed to auditing Culture and the Tone At The Top including Behaviour and Awareness, apart from mere ([ed.]) process and technology.
To get the latter off the table: Good. ‘Technology’ wasn’t understood the least bit anyway; really (sic).
And Process, ah finally they found that about all they had done in the past, was windbaggery of the worst kind. Yes, process has its place, but a so much more minor, subaltern one than the past Tragedy (sic, again) that ‘governance’/GRC/compliance/SOx was …! Yes again, it really was the little chicken pretending to be a full-grown eagle.

So now, they ‘have’ turned to Culture and related blah. About which they have no clue or would had to have fired a majority of own staff and hire complete+ replacement with psychologically skilled (i.e., fully a square angle to -educated) staff. Which they haven’t, or would have found out that the new skill set would have burned down the house that was.

Of which no (smoke) sign is in sight.

So, … words; the Tom Tom Club was right.

And:
dsc_0639
[Blockhead and Culture with a capital C here …; Casa de, Porto of course]

Another Thoreau

Yes another one in a series of The Annotated Alice Thoreau, with:

I am constantly assisted by the books in identifying a particular plant and learning some of its humbler uses, but I rarely read a sentence in a botany which reminds me of flowers or living plants. Very few write indeed as if they had seen the thing which they pretend to describe.

And so it is with, e.g., books and other theory of GRC. Not a living thing to be discovered in them. Just as if the dust of centuries had already descended on ‘process’, ‘structure’, etc. etc. — which it might have, when it is the errand interpretation of what management (sic; not ‘governance’ as that is a nonsense phrase as per this giant) has been around since the dawn of settled farmer civilisation. Note that all that seems, at superficial and likewise erroneous misinterpretation, rebellious might hearken back to the glorious days of the hunter-gatherers as expressed here. But at least, summa, they’re alive as the books/GRC aren’t hence fail.

20160820_141800
[Old guns still work, even as a model they’re still pretty, too; Rijks, Amsterdam]

The Annotated Thoreau, part of many

It is a record of the mellow and ripe moments I would keep. I would not preserve the husk of life, but the kernel.

And so, one would not do well by overly tending to Process in stead of Content, where ‘overly’ will all to easily and quickly be reached. Where Process is just Talk. Sic; just think that one through in earnest. Where an ethical life calls for not Talk but Action, as through a Man’s Actions ‘his’ Character will speak. Only.
So Big Th discusses not only some diary, but also the virtuous life.

Oh well, and:
20160820_161229
[An airplane; apt art museum masterpiece; Stedelijk Amsterdam]

"This is impossible!"

‘tWas not long ago, when all that knew their way in Infosecland (when the land had not expanded and complexified beyond grasp of mere mortals and AI was not yet needed to have taken over) would point at the stupidity of any claim like “That can’t happen here because our security beats every threat till Kingdom come”.
And the claimants would have it, by sheer power play. When dinosaurs roamed, it was in your interest to move over when they’d want to pass.

Now, the dino’s are on the way out (well, the current stock of them; new ones in the wings), and this of course happens.
Where the complete ignorance of the dino’s is displayed by their response, as if something new happened.
Where we haven’t heard enough calls for claw-backs of even standard salaries for, give or take, a decade or two back due to willful and (should-have-)self-knowing incompetence, especially at C-level and up.
But then, justice is served cold, by history making a fool of the true culprits (the authoritarian dino’s) at best, or forgetting them in old Greeks’ second hell as deserved.

Can we be friends now; you being the entry-level kindergarten ‘students’ and the rest of the world you scoffed, as your nannies …? For that:
20160820_151302
[At least they acted as proper Night Watchmen; at the Rijks, Amsterdam]

Popular; now (not) bring it to prep schools

Just for your info: this here overview of programming languages popularity.
Not an endorsement in any way nor the opposite. But … would we want to endorse this list RE kids learning to program in prep/elementary schools, or at middle / high school levels and up ..? Because the list changes so much … before they finish their school, some languages may hardly exist at all (contra: COBOL’s #41 on the list…).

What then ..? At least:
20160820_162507
[Like programming, both Art and Craft; Stedelijk, Amsterdam]

Plusquote: You ..?

Short of just copying the site of all sites when it comes to motivation, this time we have something truly positive ..:

Men have become the tools of their tools.

H.D. Thoreau was right. Already in his day. Didn’t witness the atrocities of … about every decade somewhere (yes, 00, 10s, 20s and 30s, too, around the world, and 50s, 60s/70s, and, on an economic scale, 80s/90s included) of the last century though a millennium ago [is that the right expression? Not like the length ago but the timeframe that has passed…] but still already he was right.

And, since ARPAnet was invented, we’re on a same track for this century, be it still, again, as Always, again, under the flag of utopian optimism about what newest developments in AI bring. But hey, Skynet’s a beautiful thing, right ..? Right ..!?

Since this is a Plusquote post, I’ll still leave you with something positive:
20160820_115438
[Keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping, into the future]

I can see your pulse

Just to drop a note; that Big G’s Glass is still around — but the same may, on a comparative after-launch timescale (sic), possibly not be said about Big A’s Watch.
Come to think of it… Watch isn’t what it’s made for; ‘flix on your wrist would be a hard view. More like Big B-rother watching your intimate (sic) health data…

— As an intermission, this (esp. 0:00-0:11 and 2:45—) deserves many more clicks —

But as said, some competitor is still larger in pulse-racked computing, at least (without having the energy to google for actual data) when it comes to visibility and leadership of the pack.
So, let’s wait and see what v2.0 Big G will come up with next. Maybe there’s a real serious and immediately obviously useful tool lurking just around the corner, just out of sight, not out of pulse. Not like, the iProducts that started as massively dumbed-down versions of stuff already around, with a Braun rip-off design.

Oh well, never take one’s point too far so I’ll stop already. Plus:
20160820_115845
[Warped real life imitation, not usurpation]

Poor bungler has no Scandinavian example to make his point

Gerald jeered in dinner discussion
August 19, 2016 by Karen Mikkelsbergen

Gerald Waterson badly lost a series of discussions with his friends last Thursday. The 36yr (old) county clerk of Decatur, IL, didn’t have a Scandinavian example for any point he wanted to make.

During dinner, Gerald proposed e.g., that social security could not continue in its current form with the lax immigration policies, that a fully sustainable energy supply were feasible, that only college grads should be allowed to teach at high schools, that longer prison terms don’t increase general security and that tomato is a vegetable.

“Those were interesting proposals,” Dean Farmour (35) remembers. “We were honestly interested to have ourselves convinced. His arguments however were lacking every time again. Gerald only had a huge stack of scientific reports at hand and a slew of scientific theories. But he did not have one single example from Scandinavia. Not one!”

Megan Drimble (36) too, was disappointed by the defective argumentation of Geralds vision. “If you’re so sure that longer prison terms don’t work, then you’d better have something more than just fifty years of data from a number of countries. I’d like to have data from just one Finnish province, please!”

Megan herself successfully defended that the hunt for moose would need to be deregulated in Georgia: “Isn’t it crazy that the state legislature doesn’t just allow it? In Sweden, the moose hunt accounts for the prevention of many traffic casualties and of serious damage to forests.”

Gerald now knows what to do. “I always thought that I had studied sufficiently on any subject I thought to know but I was jeered at for that. Next time, I’ll make sure to always have some obscure Scandinavian research at hand. The Danish psychologist Sören Larsen showed, by the way, that to give me a far more convincing posture, too.”

discussie

[Original, in Dutch, on the Speld; translated with permission]

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord