I enjoy commencement speeches. When I come across particularly good ones, I write about them in this blog, save highlights in my clippings folder, or watch the videos online. The latest one, “Solitude & Leadership,” came to my attention thanks to the website Library of Scroll. It was a speech given to the plebe class of West Point in 2009 by William Deresiewicz and was later published on the American Scholar website.
From Wikipedia: “Homesteading is a lifestyle of self-sufficiency.” Most people’s experience with the Internet these days is far from the concept of self-sufficiency. Google News is a one-stop website for everything from global to local news so why bother with the BBC, New York Times, or a local paper? Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and TikTok are where people share the stories, photos, emotions, and videos of their lives (and unfortunately sometimes get their news as well). Netflix has largely replaced theaters and network television for many. Amazon provides access to millions of sellers around the world and includes helpful reviews (mostly) from actual buyers of products. More and more going online today means accessing an information service curated by some of the largest companies on the planet. Even those who want to publish their own website are immediately greeted on Google by a wide variety of “website builders” like GoDaddy or Squarespace where “for only $9.99 a month” you can have “everything you need to grow online.” And if you don’t like Squarespace, there are dozens of alternatives like Wix, Weebly, WordPress.com, Duda, Portfoliobox, etc.
Over the last several decades, mainstream thinking has become more and more influenced by a deluge of online information and opinions. It started with a trickle in the 1980s when CNN became the first 24 hour all news network. In the 1990s, personal computer ownership increased to 35% and services like American Online (AOL) became popular communication tools. Next, AOL and their Instant Messenger (AIM) inspired the first mass messaging services and “chat rooms.” In the 2000s, these services matured into the massive global communication tools we use today like Twitter and Facebook. At each step, more and more of the general population gained access to a platform that could reach the entire world. We now have instantaneous access to information from every field and every part of the planet. However despite all this information, even when a person tries to focus only on information from confirmed “experts,” there still seem to be major disagreements on basic scientific “facts.”
What really are “facts?” It’s a question that current events have brought into sharp focus. Going beyond the usual daily barrage of conspiracy theories and obvious untruths is the deeper level of fake news including the people who use the term “fake news” to cast doubt on potentially truthful and helpful information. Even another step deeper is news where one verifiable expert says “X” is true and other, also verifiable, expert says “Y” is true and it seems like X and Y are in direct conflict with each other.
Have I got a story to tell you, but first let’s play a round of “fill in the blank.”
The last post, “The Taming of the Emails,” ended with a preview of a few techniques that might be helpful in taming an unruly email inbox. In a strange coincidence, the techie website ArsTechnica published the post, “Zeroed Out: Five Steps Toward Restoring Inbox Sanity” two days later.
Lately the tech news has been filled with security articles on issues with ominous names such as Meltdown and Spectre. Yes, these are serious problems that need to be addressed by updating to the latest versions of Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android, but if you want a real chill, think about what will happen when your email inbox reaches its size limit!
My manager at my first engineering job after college was a woman. In my second engineering job, my coworker was a female engineer. Years later I worked for a company where one of the two owners was a woman and she provided my first real training as a sales engineer. The other owner of the company, a man, handed me a stack of technical manuals and just said “read these.” However the woman trained me by example, setting a high bar for ethicality, professionalism, and technical expertise. Based on these experiences (and at the risk of “mansplaining”), here are a few of my thoughts on the situation.
What a month! It started with the vocal backlash of the tech community against the new MacBook Pro which prompted my post, “The Rise of the Incompetent Experts,” continued with the elections, and culminated with our fascinating trip to Cuba which I photographed with the new iPhone 7+. Along the way, the post, “Acoustics – Apple’s Future is ‘Ear’” explored the interesting acoustics related idea that Apple may be paving the way for an audio user interface accessed through the soon to be released Apple AirPods.
Recently, the backlash against Apple has become relentless. Even the more mature, balanced sources for news from experts have begun to take potshots.