Oh, don’t worry, this isn’t going to be that technical. Women have always been information managers. What comes into the home and family sphere, what goes out; the interaction of the personal spheres of interaction between larger systems such as commerce, education, religion, and families has been the purview of women. Men have traditionally been more involved with concepts and systems concerned with organizing elements outside of the home such as political and military concerns of the larger community and interactions between communities. At least in the western world this has been the generalized trend until the Industrial Revolution.
Since that time everything has gotten all mixed up. Some places, like America, got the general trajectory correct by working toward equality and democracy while still valuing individual effort and the separation of church and state. The trend in Europe and European influenced countries since the Protestant Reformation has been to move toward a less rigidly hierarchical system through the dismantling of the bundle of religion, governance, and the military into a triumvirate of male authority formalized by the Emperor Constantine and his Nicean Council.
From my perspective, one that is ultimately anthropological, the whirls and eddies of organizational forms in the flow of human cultural history are the norm. Our society is a recent invention that stretches back only a few thousand years. While our culture is much older, the cooperative interaction of governments and social institutions coordinating and regulating the behavior of the citizenry on a global scale is a rather recent invention.
Change, major change, is an option for our society. We know we have to make change if our families are to be able to continue to live well over the next few centuries.
Power does not really exist at least in any way that can be defined as a constant in all human systems. Influence does exist. There are people we listen to, respect, learn from, and from whom we willingly take direction. Coercion can work over the short-term, but over the long haul people act according to their beliefs.
So if women want to change the world, what do we have to do? Simple, we have to act according to our beliefs in the areas in which we have influence. We must speak out about the things about which we care. Just our speaking out, our putting our thoughts out there changes things, others who read or hear you then know they can speak and the cascade can be mind-blowing. Without sharing we cannot find commonality and build a better world from those areas of agreement.
And there is the legacy effect. Documenting women’s actions, thoughts, and dreams in a way that is being preserved for the first time in history will have tremendous influence over future generations.
We must all be the indices or signposts for all those in our spheres of influence. Women’s networks of knowledge have always existed and provided the foundations of informed action and culture in communities, but with our ability to communicate around the globe instantaneously we have broadened the reach of our information and the influence it has as well erecting new signposts for others to discover and use.
Do you appreciate how much influence you have?
Be Kind When People Say, "I'm So Sick of Politics" Part 3
This is the third in a series of posts that examines some of the reasons people are fed up with politics. The first post talked about why I, and others, continue on with political writing even though we are also tired of extreme partisanship and hate-speech. The second post focused on how many people confuse the political parties with the two types of political actions that can be taken. Conservatism and progressivism exist independently from political parties and we should look at working together toward specific goals in society rather than jumping on bandwagons. Women can change the world. But there is another reason for kindness when you hear that someone has turned off from political messages.
It is difficult to accept that what you thought was true, and from from which you acted, might not have been real. It is extremely difficult to undergo the internal changes that have to be made when beliefs change. Many people in this situation choose not acknowledge that something they once thought to be true really was not true.
In politics there is so much manipulation and propaganda that many people just throw up their hands and try to ignore that part of our society. Every four years it becomes much harder to ignore. Eleven years ago when the four planes were taken over and turned into missiles to attack New York City and Washington, D.C. people who awoke from non-political lives were tossed into a political maelstrom. With no real base to support this new and massive amount of information the usually non-political folks chose to believe what they were told, by not so independent media. It was impossible to find any critical analysis news coverage in vast geographic portions of the U.S. I spent a lot of time in the heartland back then and was never able to watch MSNBC even in large mid-west cities. Most people who lived there had no way to even stumble across a viewpoint that was different from that of Dick Cheney.
Now there is some independence of thought and diversity creeping back into the common discourse and that means that confusion is a likely by-product of encountering information that contradicts former beliefs and actions. Anger and confusion walk hand in hand. There are some significant number of individuals who are turning off from politics because what they are being told to believe, and may have honestly believed is different from what they are coming to see for themselves.
No one enjoys being wrong, hearing I told you so, or realizing that a person or party you worked for does not consider your well-being, or the well-being of those you love, to be important. Even the most staunch Republicans are now admitting that devisive elements are fracturing the once resolute unity of the Republican Party. Those cracks divide the supporters, the non-wazoo regular people, along lines that may make little sense. I personally think that some kindness is probably needed by people who thought they were the essense and heart of movement but now find out they are little more than foot soldiers for heartless corporate interests.
I don't think I would want to find out I had been duped in that manner. And if I had been I would want some time and understanding. While I happen to think that the coming election is the most importnt one I have seen in my lifetime, I also believe that an awakening of sorts is happening and finding different pathways to mutual goals will also be incredibly important for dealing with societal challenges we are likely to face after the election.
Act with kindness and look for commonality.
Food Bloggers Infiltrate Science Writing
I always pride myself on noting when iconic culture change happens, and there was a significant merging of food blogging and science writing this week. A recipe for a pesto-like cilantro-based sauce/paste was published in an article, NATURE | NEWS: Soapy taste of coriander linked to genetic variants on Nature.com.
Nature is the online identity of the interdisciplinary science journal by the same name, one of the very top science journals in the world, that has been around since November 1869. Nature doesn't do recipes. Recipes for science experiments, yes, (called methodology sections) but not for food. But it did. There are many ways to discuss the reason behind that a small but significant portion of the population thinks cilantro or coriander tastes like soap and will not eat it. Julia Child was one of these people and the article brings both her reaction to cilantro and a recipe that uses a preparation technique, crushing the cilantro, that helps reduce the soapy taste of cilantro.
By the way the recipe ingredients are:
1/2 cup [c. 75g] toasted almonds
3 cups coriander leaves and tender stems (about 2 bunches)
1 or 2 garlic cloves
1/2 cup [120ml] extra virgin olive oil
2/3 [c. 70g] cup grated aged sheep’s milk cheese like Nisa, Serpa or pecorino-Toscano
Serve right away with pasta, grilled meats, vegetables or soups, or freeze.
This recipe inclusion doesn't mean that science is dumbing itself down. But just as with journalistic reporting, scientific reporting, for the masses, is in flux as people search for information via mobile and digital platforms that deliver infomation up without the visual and tactile cues that once distinguished scientific journals from lifestyle magazines.
This doesn't mean that the online version of Nature will deliver begin delivering recipes and decorating tips. But it doesn't mean that it isn't considering something along those lines either. When people search for information, there is usually a question that motivates that search. Many bloggers know this and form their individual posts around an answer to a question.
Search is less skilled than it once was. Perhaps you remember the days when you were in school and you actually had to go into a library and use print copies of a general index such as The Readers Guide to Periodical Literature to find basic information, or perhaps you remember searching on computer stations that had CDs or online access to basic informational databases such as InfoTrac. On a different table, station,or CD kiosk in that same library were indexes that were far more specialized. Those sorts of distinctions still exist, but your searches are apt to be done outside of a library without the guidance of someone with training on how to find information. Most likely you do a Google search. There is a chance that you could land on the site of Nature, The New York Times, or a Food Blog partially dependant on how your search has been personalized by Google.
So what does this all mean? It means that purveyors of informtion of all types are competing with advertisers and publishers outside of their traditional competitors to have your eyeballs land on their pages and use their presentation of the information for which you search. Different formulas and methods for presenting that information will be tried by publishers.
If you are looking for food science information to answer the question, “Why does my kid think my homemade salsa tastes like soap?” you may want a more technical article that talks about aldeheides in food. The pool of individual writers and publishers, aka bloggers, has changed the information that is available to people with questions. The old school publishers, even in science, have noticed this and are changing how they frame their information. Never doubt the power of women, and men, writers.
9/11 Myths and Misinformation
This morning somehow, I think I was sleeping on the remote and punching buttons while I slept, I awoke to Fox News programming on which a guest, Retired General Michael Hayden, NSA Director leading up to and during 9/11/2001 was spewing vitriol about President Obama (please don’t say just Obama.) The Presidency and the current occupant of the highest office in the land is worthy of being shown respect no matter what your politics. Hayden is one of the people who were heads of Government Agencies that were charged with protecting the United States from the very kind of terrorist attack that they allowed to happen. Not only was he in a position of authority then, he was later with other higher level appointments and with nomination for head of the Central Intelligence Agency.
- He was Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) from 1999 to 2005.
- From April 21, 2005 to May 26, 2006 he was the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence
- And from May 30, 2006 – 12 February 2009,he was Director of the CIA
- On July 1, 2008, retired from the Air Force
Other Faux (pronounced Fox) Facts about September 11 that make my blood boil:
- Condoleeza Rice’s statement that “I don’t think that anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile …” is disingenuous at best. Some reasonable people knew in 1995 that something like this was being planned, as well as the warnings the Bush Administration had in August 2001. She should have made the President listen to her when she discussed the PDB in August 2012.
- “George Bush kept us safe.” Duh, the 9/11 attacks happened almost a year into his presidency. If Faux News can say that Obama is responsible for economic events that happened before his election, let alone his taking of office, then surely former President George W. Bush must take responsibility for an attack which had been warned of in one of his Daily Presidential Briefings almost a month before the attacks.
Richard Clark is one of the only people who admitted responsibility for screwing up and has talked about the guilt he feels for allowing 9/11 to happen. Read or watch his testimony before the 9/11 Commission to get the full impact of his apology to the American People. If you get a chance to watch the Secrets of 9/11 which I saw watched on Destination America Channel, formerly Planet Green, one of a group of Discovery Channels, I highly recommend it. It is not a 911 conspiracy product. It is fact filled reporting. Watch it if you can.
In the mean time, here is a video of Richard Clark talking about the build up of a 4th Branch of Government that was made 8 years ago that most people still don’t really comprehend. Just because there was a terrorist attack on the U.S. in September of 2001, something that had happened before, there is no justification for turning our country into a police state.
Here is another good summary article you should read: NSA Analyst: “We Could Have Prevented 9/11” if you want a more recent summary, May 2012, of what we know about that horrible chapter in American History.
This is a tough anniversary for the many people personally impacted by what happened 11 years ago today. So if you are not mourning personal losses suffered that day, why not pay respect to these thousands of souls lost to the physical world in the attacks by reading up on facts, not opinion pieces, about what happened.
Blessings to all the innocents who have, do, and will suffer from the ceaseless pursuit of war by we humans. If you are a praying person, please say a special prayer for peace today.
Favorite Storage, for Ideas?
I like boxes. I like to have everything categorized. A perfect storage area for me would be a room lined with shelves with breathable, acid free boxes that were so well labeled that no matter what I want to display or contemplate something from my life, library or personal museum, I can simply go to that storage area, put back the last items I studied, appreciated, and enjoyed, and retrieve the particular item or items upon which I next want to focus.
I like to put things in personal terms, because that is how I can best understand them. Oh, I love to think about how things work, how we decide what is important on a large scale, but as a regular ol' woman I like to fall back on the familiar where I can relax and not think about outside forces or the unfamiliar.
But I don't want to surround myself with everything all at one time. Neither does Hubby, aka Fang, whose favorite saying from the world of domesticity is, “most people over-furnish.” I agree with him, but that single agreement is where the agreement stops.
Fang has torn out several closets during the 20 plus years we have lived in this house. They have not been replaced. He does this while telling me that I have too much stuff. You can imagine the rather heated discussions that ensue.
I have a spare room now that Zilla lives across the country. I now have the space to organize everything. Nice. But I have moved on from the building or nesting stage of my life and it is much more difficult to dedicate time and energy to organization. Sigh. No,I haven't resolved the basic challenge of this seemingly simple, but actually complex set of organizational actions so that I can build and populate the easy access storage of things I will want to surround myself with during the rest of my life here on Earth.
There are two things here that I need to mention. First, I have many of my mother's things that are sentimental but not assigned a high monetary or cultural value by society. Second, I live in Southern Arizona where, traditionally, homes tend to have no attics, basements or garages.
I see this quandary as similar to the one in which contemporary society finds itself.
Men have written the histories and filled the museums and barrows with tribute to that power for hundreds if not thousands of years. It was not that women did not have a material culture. We did. Our energies often were directed into flesh rather than stone or metal.
Even stone and metal erodes or wears away over time. Our voices still give voice to ideas through the generations though the stories and teachings we share. Our societal structure is the framework on which we store our tales, lessons, and truths. I suspect that women have always wanted more trunks from which they might retrieve embroidery samplers through which their foremothers labors made real what was important in their worlds, the quilts that kept them warm as children and might someday warm their grandchildren, and from which holiday ornaments could emerge to provide the backdrop for family holiday rituals.
For my husband the signed/numbered Maus print and the Japanese bronze is enough for now and the future, but for me I need to rotate the items on the “knick knack” shelves to sometimes show the series of old mottled glass jars that each hold the assemblage of buttons accumulated by my great-grandmother, grandmother and mother and other times hold the whimsical Oaxacan creatures that are pure, bright, fantasy. Sometimes I wish the world would equally value shelves upon which local family stories can be highlighted and the monumental art that is created for those who have skimmed profit and accumulated wealth over several generations.
Women May Be the Winners of the Google SEO Wars
For those of use who watch the web search industry develop, the recent transformations within it have created excitement to say the least. Everything has changed. Or at least that is the current buzz. Major changes have been made to how Google does search over the last year. That is true. Search is always evolving, so do not panic and simply inform yourself about what is happening to the information process that bloggers count on to fairly index and refer to their blogs.
I remember being heavily penalized by a subject area reviewer volunteering for DMOZ for having a page on one of my earliest websites that had a list of books of particular interest to Late Boomers that linked to Amazon.com. The editor trashed the whole site because of the page. I was livid. I saw many other sites that were far more commercial than mine do well. Links were where it was at way back in the early adolescence of the internet. If you didn’t link properly, properly according to whom I never did figure out, your site could nose dive. Even though it was a directory and not a search engine with which I had trouble, that is when I started paying some attention to what came to be known as Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.
Google rose to prominence and finally dominated the market a couple of years into the new millennium. Checking your page rank on Google became as common place for individuals with web pages as checking the number of hits your website received. Almost immediately search engine “professionals” emerged from the primordial info slime and the 21st Century’s first group of snake oil sales persons integrated themselves in amongst the few real SEO professionals. Lots of people who pass themselves off as experts are con artists, but most SEO sellers are just well-intentioned people who do not know as much as they think they know. Real SEO requires staying on top of what are essentially trade secrets – the proprietary algorithms that are used to fuel web search.
What are called ink farms and content farms were some of the major problems for the search engine companies. Link farming attempted to create higher rank or search page result listings by trading or selling links that would increase a site’s supposed credibility or authority as at one time incoming links were treated as valid reflections of the authority and influence of the site. Linking just to increase links inflated the number of links while decreasing the worth of a link.
Search engines, such as Google, began to do battle with link farms mid-decade into the ’00s. Link farming slowly withered as search engines began to cut the weight links had in search, and content was declared king. Then sites had to have content or articles or blog posts to rank highly in search results. Content rather than links then began to be farmed, or more accurately ranched, as major content farms used two main strategies to produce content for sites that would fake out the search engines.
One type of farm hired individuals to write lots of stuff for very little money, so the quality was not that great, but the quantity of the content was enough to feed lots of sites, many actually used regurgitated content. The content farms then sold to sites so that the sites would have lots of fiber for the search engines to digest.
Another type of farm hired people to write posts and articles that seeded keywords at just the right frequency in pieces that did not even have to make much sense. This was done because keywords are used in meta tags and should be reflected in the content that the meta-tags describe. This was the juncture at which content became confused with key words.
Now we seems to be entering a new focus phase for search engines. I like to think that while content is still king but the but the power behind the thrown has been recognized and is queen in all of her contextual glory. It is good to be the queen, in the Mary Englebreit sense of the word., because all those cherries and patterns, color, attitude and relationships are what matter in the process of getting the searcher connected to the information he or she wants. Social authority is the new buzzword for search. To rank well in the brave new world of search you need have quality content and that translates, according to the word on the street, to often updated, non-keyword seeded content that is accessed by important people.
The “important people” aspect of the new search is reflects the increasing awareness of the heavy hitting nature of social media. The recommendations of people you trust, as measured by your info stream with them more than whether you actually know them or not, is the “new” and secret ingredient of Google search.
Some folks, such as the women who started the BlogHer network, Lisa, Elise, and Jory, were paying attention long before Google began to pay attention and these savvy women had launched conferences and networks based on a feminized understanding of information in the digital age. Sites that foreshadowed the coming changes, which some people are only now “getting,” and all the concomitant changes to search that have resulted reflect what I like to think of as the feminization of the internet. (I am writing more about this topic this week in what may or may not become a series of articles.)
To restate this succinctly, what has happened recently with Google stems from search engine companies trying to outmaneuver scam artists whose sole purpose in life is to get you to look at stuff in which you have absolutely no interest. Deceptive ads, promises of free prizes, and manipulation of search engine results are three of the most common ways such “marketers” do this. This practice gives real marketers who work to deliver a good product a bad name, but be that as it may, everyone does want your attention on the web. So while some of us may be expressing concern as we mull over the whole Google privacy hoo-haa, at the very same time, some things Google is doing are very much in our interest as women, household managers, content creators, and savvy private and public consumers of information. Google appears to be using relationships and networks (of both creators and consumers) in the algorithms that determine what the authority is of individual chunks of information on the web. And women are the mavens of communication and relationship networks.
Women understand context and know how to balance competing priorities. Women understand that comments are actually conversations. Women also know when someone is trying to hose them. Women create the daily stories that build most our culture. The semantic web is attempting to recreate the way we humans understand things. Women are experts at this.