Posts about “Culture”
There were many naysayers when this “magical device” first came out. It’s nothing but a glorified iPod Touch they cried. No front-facing camera. No multitasking (until the Fall that is, when iPhone OS 4 comes out). No USB ports, and so on.
Well I’m not one of those nitpicking technocrats. I think that the iPad is like a shiny piece of the future, straight out of Star Trek. It’s amazing. But here’s the thing: I don’t even own a laptop.
If you’re more concerned with your company culture than the size of your pay cheque, your might be interested in this Vancouver start-up. Jiibe is a user-generated service that matches your value system to a compatible company based on a questionnaire you fill out.
I can see this site being really useful to young Millennials who care a great deal about the softer aspects of job satisfaction and are in a process of self-discovery.
Here are some recent article shorts. As usual, you can click on the thumbnails to read them. The one on the left is a feel-good piece on laughter yoga. The right piece touches on the depressing psychological and cultural effects of global warming. There’s also a teeny one in there on the dodgy air we have to breathe in airplanes (even Purell won’t save you this time).
Seeing these two articles juxtaposed like this evokes a stark contrast between Western frivolity and Aboriginal reality.
The May edition of alive magazine is out, and I have two articles published in it this month. A few months ago I interviewed stress guru Eli Bay about his relaxation techniques. Take a deep breath, relax for a few minutes and read his insights.
I also wrote a short piece on the rise of the mosquito population in our new era of rising temperatures. Mosquitoes love warm, moist climates, and they’re getting a lot of that these days.
Canadian Business magazine has just released their annual report on Canada’s best places to live. Our cold and sober capital, Ottawa, graced the number one spot based on factors like household income, unemployment rate, and new cars (New cars? Really? What does splashing out on some smoking wheels have to do with livability?). Vancouver shuffled in at number 10. And what impoverished, crappy-car-driving town came in last at number 154?
The cultural differences in the perception of colour are well known to anthropologists. Red, for example is bold and signifies anger in the West, but is considered lucky in the East, especially in China. But do web designers take the cultural colour faux pas into consideration? They should. Especially if designing for international clients. After all, colour is a tricky beast and just because you happen to be in love with mauve, it doesn’t mean your client will.
Over at Wired’s video gallery you can watch some amusing tech vintage commercials. While I find the ones for the old Mac, the Vic-20, and the Commodore chuckle worthy, my vote for the funniest - and the most creative - goes to the 1980s ad for the Atari 5200’s Pole Position. Back in those days, the marketing strategy was basically to show as little of the game’s graphics as possible while hyping up the game in various ridiculous ways.
Can governments read people’s minds with radio waves? Many people believe so. In fact, in order to combat this unseen menace, a paranoid subculture has arisen around the wearing of tin foil hats. This seemingly bizarre practice has garnered such credibility that an MIT student conducted empirical research in order to debunk it. Curiously, his findings indicated that tin foil in fact amplifies certain radio frequencies. Ironically, or perhaps tellingly, the frequencies amplified are the very same governmental and corporate frequencies that paranoids are trying to avoid.
When editing technical documents, how aware should you be of regional differences in pronunciation? Here is an interesting article on the subject by Brian Forte. Forte raises the following issue regarding the usage of an indefinite article with initialisms:
How do you pronounce an initialism like HTML?
I was taught English in public Australian schools of the 1970s. So I was taught aitch rather than haitch. Which means I pronounce ‘HTML’ with an initial vowel sound and I write ‘an HTML page.