Next read.

It blows my mind that Danny's father tells him about the BFG. That's some Stephen King level crossover.

Next read: Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley

Frankenstein running away from his creation in horror the instant it comes to life touches a real nerve.

I know this is kind of the point, but Frankenstein's moral crisis is as sympathetic as #surveillance company qualms after selling to North Korea.

"I... I just realized that this might be morally dicey..."

#books #currentlyreading

https://t.co/iiBwoGq4Gv

Chapter 5 of Frankenstein reads like a long AITA post.

And yes, he is the A.

"I had an obscure feeling that all was not over and that he would still commit some signal crime, which by its enormity should almost efface the recollection of the past."

Walton(
Frankenstein
Monster(
Felix()
)
)
);

Next read: "Just Enough Research" by Erika Hall

"Research is simply systematic inquiry."

"An ego is a beautiful thing to incinerate."

Oh man, that is *brilliant.*

#remote #testing #design

"Design Justice" by Sasha Costanza-Chock

#currentlyreading #books #design

The book starts with a story of how the author, a #trans*, femme-presenting non-binary person, is typically stopped and searched at the airport because her body "deviates" from the pattern expected by the millimeter scan.

This is an example how "larger systems - including norms, values, and assumptions - are encoded in and reproduced through the design of sociotechnical systems."

Strap in.

Arturo Escobar sees #design as an "ethical praxis for world-making."

How can one develop an ethical, inclusive design process from a continent away and no opportunities for in-person interaction? No observation, no participatory design.

"People experience and resort #oppression on three levels: the level of personal biography; the group or community level of the cultural context created by race, class, and gender; and the systemic level of social institutions. Black #feminist thoughts emphasizes all three levels as sites of domination and as potential sites of #resistance." - Patricia Hill Collins

"More broadly, #visa allocation has always been an algorithm, one designed according to the political priorities of power holders. It's an algorithm that has long privileged whiteness, hetero- and cis-normativity, wealth, and higher socioeconomic status."

#immigration

"Yet [#CRMs] remain niche services, used by ony a relatively tiny group of professionalized campaigners. They typcially cost money to use, often based on the number of ocntacts in the campaign database, and they require a significant investment of time and energy to learn. They will in all likelihood never be widely adopted by the vast majority of people who participate in social movements."

#activism #technology

"Instead, most people, including social movement #activists, organizers, and participants, use the most popular corporate social network sites and hosted services as tools to advance our goals. We work within the addordances of these sites and work around their limitations. We do this even when these tools are a poor fit for the specific task at hand, and even when their use exposes movement participants to a range of real harms."

#WhatsApp in a nutshell.

"Why do the most popular #socialmedia platforms provide such limited affordances for the important work of community organizing and movement building? Why is the time, energy, and brilliance of so many designers, software devlopers, product managers, and others who work on platforms focused on optimizing our digital world to capture and monetize our attention, over other potential goals (e.g. maximizing civic engagement, making environmentally sustainable choices, buiding empathy ... ?)"

"Put another way, why do we continue to design technologies that reporduce existing systems of power #inequality when it is so clear to so many that we urgently need to dismantle those systems?"

"'The Design of Everyday Things' is a canonical #design text. It's full of useful insights and compelling examples. However, it almost entirely ignores race, class, gender, disability, and other axes of #inequ. Norman very briefly states that capialism has shaped the design of objects, but says it in passing and never relates it to the key concepts of the book. Race and racism appear nowehere. He uses the term "women" only once..."

"Norman describes the problems designers face in designing for left-handed people and urges ths reader to 'consider the special problems of the aged and infirm, the handicapped, the blind or near-blind, the deaf or hard of hearing, the very short or very tall, or the foreign.'"

"He thus firmly subscribes to the individual/medical model of disability that locates #disability in 'defective' bodies and as a problem' to be solved, rather than the social/relational model (that recognizes how society actively disables people with physical or psychological differencces, functional limitations, or impairments through unnecessary exclusion, rather than taking action to meet their access needs)..."

"..., let alone the disability justice model, created by Disabled B/I/PoC as they fight to dismante able-bodied supremacy as a key axis of power within the #MatrixOfDomination."

"In other words, the book is a compendium of designed objects that are difficult to use that provides key principes for better design, but it almost entirely ignores questions of how #race, #class, #gender, #disability, and other aspects of the matrix of domination shape and constrain access to affordances. #DesignJustice is an approach that asks us to focus sustained attention on thes questions, benning with "how does the matrix of domination shape afforance perceptibility and availability?"

Next book is "City at World's End" by Edmond Hamilton, a 1950s #scifi book hosted on #Librivox.

Thus far, it's classic 1950s fare. A square-jawed team of white man scientists are flung into the far future along with their town. The local government is weak, the women are frail and must be protected.

For all that the premise is interesting - reminds me of "The Night Land" and "The City and the Stars" - post post post apocalypse cities surviving on doomed worlds.

Also getting a real #obduction feel to.l this earth town picked up and moved to a strange, desolate world.

Next read is "The Buried Giant," by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Post-Aurthurian legend where nobody can form long term memories.

I enjoyed "Catherine the Great" by Robert K. Massie

Next read is Andrew Krivak's "The Bear". A father- daughter post-apocalypse tale.

Next book: Dan Brown's "Practical #Design Discovery"

Depending on where you are with understanding the problem and setting direction, you may need to:

• gather new information
• process what you’ve learned
• explore different approaches
• focus on a particular approach

"Beware the paradox of having too much data and still wanting more. Lots of data may build your confidence in these assertions, but it also leads to spending too much time analyzing the data—analysis paralysis. One of the fatal flaws in our business is that we seem to shortchange analysis, never giving ourselves the time or tools to make sense of what we learn."

#design #UserReaserch

Bubble diagrams are rad.

"One of the hardest design problems I ever worked on was for a company that helps IT groups manage risk. Their product focused on open-source components—inexpensive and widely supported by an enormous community, but often vulnerable to security flaws."

Interesting. I thought that #opensource was generally more secure because of all the eyeballs. With notable exceptions, obviously.

Next Read is "Kiss The Ground" by Josh Tickell.

I started a job in October trying to help farmers (and other people living on the land) practice #RegenerativeAgriculture. We've got to store that #carbon and save the world.

France's #agroecology system

I read Kiss the Ground (and other #ClimateCrisis literature) and I get so angry. As a species we're sinking into climate destruction and still, the world's largest #agriculture countries (looking at you, #US) can't take dramatic action. Only 53% of the country thinks #ClimateChange is major problem; only 49% think humans have something to do with it. This is the struggle of our time and, collectively, we're asleep.
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2020/09/29/concern-over-climate-and-the-environment-predominates-among-these-publics/

I like this author's method of starting each chapter of his nonfiction book in the first-person present tense.

"[David] explains that the per acre yield or corn has skyrocketed since his grandfather's day. His granddad was lucky to get around thirty or forty bushels per acre. In contrast, today in the noisy combine 'we' harvested around 150 bushels per acre - and some of thr farmers he knows are pulling in up to 180."

"When asked about the inputs and the investment needed to squeeze that kind of productivity from the ligand, David they've all gone up too. Farm chemistry can get complicated but the basic roles of application, he says, are simple. The more dry weight of corn (or soy beans) you want, the more pounds of nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium you add. But along more inputs only works up to a point which is called your 'maximum yield' (MY)." #agriculture #farming

"And gauging exactly where that point is so you don't spend unnecessary money on inputs? Well, says David, that's somewhere between a 'scientific guess' and a 'lot of prayin.'"

"He explains that the band numbers for application break down as follows. To grow an acre of corn today you apply around 140 pounds of ammonium nitrate (nitrogen), around sixty of phosphate (phosphorus), and around eighty pounds of potash (potassium). Added to that are about two to three points power acre of herbicides (like glyphosate, the primary chemical Roundup), insecticides, and/or fungicides."

@Argus

booyakasha and big respect outta all the science guys reading so much paper.

Apart from the new Asterix may I recommend a german classic which is very easy/quick to read-through and available in english
https://www.ernst-und-sohn.de/analogous-and-digital

@Argus I bought the whole "A book apart" series in digital format, they are amazing.

@nebunez nice! There's a discount for buying in bulk yeah?

@Argus yep 😃

@Argus "Falsehoods that decision-makers believe about humans."

@Argus Because the "we" who build [or pay for the building of] systems is not the "we" who feel that need for change.

@Argus short answer, because there's no money in it.

I have an ongoing project to create, essentially, a niche anarchist community organizing platform... but I'm likely never going to get paid for it so it's always a third or fifth priority in my time and energy.

@Argus
We were talking about #Fediverse recently again.

Most people are surprised that something like Fedi exists. They love hearing that the #timeline is chronological.

One simply reprlies with "Does it make #money?"

Can't win em all.

We explained that, "It won't chew up and spit out #smallBusinesses like #bigTech appears to do these days."

@Argus Those platforms are advertising businesses. It's not typically the purpose of an advertising business to promote empathy or civic engagement, unless it's for the purpose of getting you to buy something.

@bob exactly. :/

@Argus in some cases, this is true...but, there are a few critical pieces of software that actually have a very small core team of maintainers and not much funding. I seem to recall that OpenSSL suffers from this?

@sean ah yeah, the famous Heartbleed.