socialization

The website for The Guardian has a very interesting new entry in its “Walking the City” series: “The art of noticing: five ways to experience a city differently.” The article advises us to:

  1. Look for ghosts and ruins.
  2. Get there the hard way.
  3. Eat somewhere dubious.
  4. Read the plaque.
  5. Follow the quiet.

Awesome! I’ll have to follow all five steps the next time I’m in a new city…

Today is Earth Day. CityLab has re-posted an interesting article from 2015, “How the First Earth Day Changed How We View Cities.” Check it out!

Pacific Standard magazine has a new series on understanding Generation Z. The intro to the series notes,

We hear a lot about how Gen Z represents a new kind of generation: digital natives drastically different even from Millennials, who already had the Boomers scratching their heads. Are they really any different? How have they been shaped by—and responded to—new technology, recent history, and a shifting economy?

This project—a collaboration between Pacific Standard and Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS)—draws on Stanford’s “Understanding iGen,” for which researchers did deep interviews with college students in the United States and the United Kingdom, while also drawing on behavioral data, consumer trends, and a series of surveys. Through publishing the results of these efforts, we hope to approximate a portrait of this generation, and an idea of where they’re leading us.

Each week, we’ll publish a new series of stories looking at a particular area of focus in our efforts, considered from different perspectives. Sign up for our daily newsletter to follow along and let us know your thoughts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Should be interesting…even though my generation — Generation X — was skipped in the intro; it seems that Gen X is the omitted generation.

In early January Lake Superior State University provides a list of words and phrases to banish in the new year. Wayne State University also releases a list about word usage, but its “word warriors” project encourages the increased use of words that better convey meaning and promote good communication. 2019 lists of words/phrases to banish and words to use more frequently have been released. The most intriguing on the increased usage list is “anechdoche,” a conversation in which everyone is talking, but no one is listening. Sadly, that is too common these days.

According to a recent CityLab article, “[n]ot everyone spends Christmas Day eating home-cooked meals beside a tree draped with tinsel and ornaments. For many Jewish families in the United States, there’s another Christmas tradition: maybe a trip to the movie theater, and definitely dinner at a Chinese restaurant.” The article uses Yelp and Google Trends data to examine how many people — Jewish and others too — eat Chinese food on Christmas Day. Next year in 2019 the authors will have to update the article to also include data on Christmas Eve; while driving around searching for an open spot for dinner on Christmas Eve 2018 my favorite Chinese restaurant had a line that stretched halfway down the block (!).

Why do grits remind U.S. Southerners of home, while maple syrup does that for Canadians, and chocolate activates positive feelings for the Swiss? “Behind our seemingly nationalistic food preferences are the psychological processes that inform group identity, which, research shows, can change depending on our environment,” explains a Pacific Standard article on social identity theory. The brief article closes with “identities that govern seemingly innate experiences, such as the taste of food—or even racial bias—can be harnessed to create positive social change.” It doesn’t provide any specifics, however. Hopefully future article will do so.

The Pacific Standard has an interesting article about the use of humor to increase critical thinking. The article notes, however, “while funny things can be reassuring and uplifting, making us feel better, humor isn’t automatically guaranteed to change a viewer’s mind. In fact, humor can do the opposite, reinforcing what we already think.” Indeed.

The Pacific Standard website has published a fascinating story about using data to help migrants find work. In the article the authors of a Science magazine article are interviewed; they discuss their study of applying an artificial intelligence algorithm to analyze historical data to predict where to best settle refugees upon their arrival in a new country. The authors note,

Refugee policies, like immigration policies generally, are dominated by ideology rather than sound evidence. We haven’t seen a lot of innovations in this space. Cash assistance, language instruction, training programs: These turn out to be very expensive and difficult to scale. The nice thing is, from a policy perspective, [using artificial intelligence algorithms] doesn’t really cost you anything more. It’s just a smarter way of doing the allocation. Rather than doing it in a haphazard, quasi-random fashion, as we’re doing it right now, we might as well do it in a more data-driven way, where we send people to the places they’re more likely to succeed.

Indeed!

The annual Beloit College Mindset List has been released. Providing “a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students about to enter college,” this year’s list for the class of 2021 is for students mostly born in 1999…the year I finished graduate school and became an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota! Items include “Zappos has always meant shoes on the Internet,” and “the BBC has always had a network in the U.S. where they speak American” [BBC America! I’m going to miss Orphan Black.]. My oldest niece starts at Whittier College next month; I’ll have to send her this list.

A Vanderbilt University professor notes, “Beloit College just published its annual Mind-Set List to remind professors of the ever-growing gap between their own cultural experiences and those of their incoming students. As a service to these new students, I am now providing the faculty version of the mind-set list. Here is your guide to the college years of a typical 50-something professor.” His “The Mind-Set List, Faculty Edition” is pretty funny!

The August 11, 2017 Google Doodle is about the 44th anniversary of the birth of hip hop. The doodle is interactive: one is invited to experiment with scratching and mixing records on two turn tables [just two turntables, though, not two turntables and a microphone]. I must admit that I spent a little too much time playing with it today! I also reminisced about my earliest experience with hip hop: with other 7th grade kids I improvised my own lines to raps by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five…I think that one of my lines was “Like Melle Mel I’m here to say, all the pretty girls come my way!” I didn’t pay much attention to hop hop again, however, until rooming with a high school buddy in my first year of college. At one time Charles Isbell maintained an online hip hop reviews page, but now he’s too busy with administration, as he’s the Executive Associate Dean and Professor in the College of Computing at our undergraduate alma mater, Georgia Tech. I wonder how many other deans out there were hip hop heads back in the day…