Tag: pervasive

To Speed Up Your Productivity, Slow Down

Imagine this: you step into the elevator and instinctively reach for your smart phone, only to discover that you’ve mistakenly left it at your desk. A sense of panic sets in as you wonder what to do. What will you think about when you can’t have your “thoughts” fed to you?

We live in an age of information, when there is always a new browser window to open, pop-up to click, post to like, and headline to react to. According to Pew Research, 31% of adults are online nearly constantly. This has led to as many as 75% of adults feeling better informed about national news and 65% perceiving themselves more knowledgeable about health and fitness.

More people being more informed sounds like a positive development. With the benefit of receiving more input than ever, we might expect our output to be greater, too. A higher volume of information readily at our disposal should better equip us to make decisions, connect the dots, and share knowledge with one another.

Yet, the power of information comes with an asterisk. We are facing a moment in time when people are feeling more disconnected than ever. Mental health problems are more pervasive among young people who frequently use social media. Not only are Americans generally feeling more isolated, anxious and depressed; they are also becoming less creative. Torrance creativity scores have been steadily declining since the ’90s (University of William and Mary), which many scientists attribute to the increased time we spend staring at our screens, presumably consuming information.

As someone who credits my track record of launching unlikely social ventures like KIND (at least in part) to my penchant for daydreaming and “talking to myself,” I suspect that the gap between information and creativity lies in our distracted movement away from self-reflection. I have no doubt that those moments I spent whistling and singing on the walk to school; the countless times boredom forced me to use my imagination; and the brainstorms I still conduct unofficially in the shower, have helped me uncover what gives me meaning, and have led to some my most creative ideas.  

Self-reflection is the transformative process of converting information into something far more valuable: ideas. It is an exercise through which we make sense of inputs, critically evaluate them, and consider what we might have done wrong so that we can do better next time. It can help us sort fact from fiction. It can help us relate information to our own life experiences to inform our own purpose. By combining information in unexpected ways, we practice creativity. If material simply goes in, but doesn’t get analyzed, it’s not only worthless; it’s an impediment to productive thought.

One of the reasons children are considered more creative than adults is that they know less. They have less information about how the world works, which leaves more space for them to imagine what it could be. This does not mean that we should all go ahead and succumb to ignorance, but it does mean that we should be wary of information overload drowning out self-reflection.

Digesting thoughts requires more energy than does simply consuming information. It follows that self-reflection requires commitment from our part. Especially in the age of information, we are fighting against addictive properties of dopamine-triggering constant reward-systems. It is easy to get distracted. It is easy to be entertained. It is easy, but also damaging, to slowly let our own creativity slip away.

Anyone who has decided to be an entrepreneur is not looking for easy. Entrepreneurs depend on their creativity, and that creativity relies on spending concerted time and space away from your devices to let your mind wander, think critically, and create. The next time you are stepping out of the office, consider leaving your phone behind and see what happens.

By : Daniel Lubetzky

Source: To Speed Up Your Productivity, Slow Down | Inc.com

How Distractions and Delays affect Speed and Productivity

What is the impact of these distractions? Of course, it makes employees lose focus on their work, and also slows down their work speed and productivity. The Udemy survey also revealed that once an employee is distracted, it takes 23 minutes to refocus on a task. So powerful are these distractions that they sometimes side-track the regular project work.

The reality about distractions caused by social media or surfing the Internet is that they become ongoing tasks, one news item prompts the employee to browse through other related articles. It is like a bottomless pit – the employee gets sucked into it and loses track of time. In the beginning, employees are able to snap away from these distractions and refocus on their work, but once they get addicted to these distractions, their work speed and productivity go for a toss.

In addition to distractions, delays in business processes also affect the speed and productivity at work. The most common delays are approval delays. Delay in the approval of invoices or requisitions causes bottlenecks in the business process.

Here are few tips to bring back the focus and speed up your work:

1. Sharpen your focus:

Narrowing down your focus on work-related stuff helps in increasing productivity. Steering clear from distractions and focusing on your work helps get work done faster. This doesn’t mean you cannot take breaks; all you need to do is the time your breaks so that you don’t lose focus from your work.

2. Set deadlines:

Self-imposed deadlines motivate employees to speed up their work. You can set everyday deadlines or weekly targets to complete your work. Still better, you can reward yourself once the targets are achieved. You can treat yourself to a movie or a meal at your favorite restaurant, or as simple as a candy bar when you achieve targets.

3. Set work schedules:

being organized in your work is a great way of increasing your productivity. Sketch a work schedule that times your work, breaks, and meetings. If you set a schedule for a week, then you can review and make changes whenever required.

4. Leverage technology:

Adopting the latest technology like automation can speed up business processes. Redundancies are eliminated and business processes are streamlined by automating the repetitive, mundane steps in a process. Approval delays can be avoided by automated approvals.

By: cflowapps

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Tesla Hit By 6 More Sexual Harassment Claims

Six women currently or formerly working at Tesla’s San Francisco Bay Area electric auto factory and a Southern California service center have filed suits against the company led by Elon Musk claiming they were sexually harassed by fellow employees and that the company failed to take any action.

The suits were filed today in Alameda County Superior Court and follow two earlier lawsuits against Tesla filed in November and this month by women who also say they were harassed by coworkers. Separately, a former engineer at SpaceX, another Musk-led company, published a blogpost earlier today detailing her experiences of sexual harassment at the aerospace firm.

The six women suing Tesla–Michaela Curran, Alize Brown, Jessica Brooks, Alisa Blickman, Samira Sheppard and Eden Mederos–are represented by attorney David A. Lowe, a partner at the firm Rudy Exelrod Zieff & Lowe in San Francisco.

“Tesla has failed to take sexual harassment seriously, from the top of the company down,” Lowe said in a statement. He also referenced a crude joke Musk tweeted in October about starting a university called the “Texas Institute of Technology & Science” and comments he’s made about former employees.

“Elon Musk tweeting a lewd comment about women’s bodies or a taunt toward employees who report misconduct reflects an attitude at the top that enables the pattern of pervasive sexual harassment and retaliation at the heart of these cases.”

Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment and currently doesn’t have a public relations team. Musk also didn’t mention the matter on his Twitter feed (though he did have time to post tweets critical of Massachusetts Senator Elisabeth Warren).

The numerous stories of sexual harassment at Musk’s companies come a day after Time Magazine named him its person of the year. In October, Tesla was ordered to pay $137 million to a Black employee who had sued the automaker for racial discrimination. 

In the six suits filed on Tuesday, the women describe a workplace environment where it’s normal for women to be catcalled, ogled, touched inappropriately and propositioned. In their suits, the women describe the frequent use of crude language and groping by male colleagues–and the failure of supervisors and human resource department staff to take action.

Musk is the world’s wealthiest person, with a fortune Forbes estimates at $251.9 billion. Tesla shares fell 0.8% to $958.51 in Nasdaq trading on Tuesday.

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Alan Ohnsman

Alan Ohnsman

I track technology-driven changes that reshape how we get around from Los Angeles, America’s sunny capital of congestion.

Source: Tesla Hit By 6 More Sexual Harassment Claims

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Open Source Brings Collective Creativity To The Intelligent Edge

The idea of open source is not new. Ideas around the power of collectives to share, iterate, and effectively innovate together in near virtual space arose in the mid-eighteenth century, during the heyday of the age of enlightenment, with groups like the Lunar Society in the UK. The Lunar Society met roughly once a month in Birmingham, at the epicenter of the industrial revolution, as a collective of great minds, including both of Charles Darwin’s grandfathers.

They explored, shared, and broke barriers across disciplines together because they had the space in which to do it, and as a byproduct they gained great energy from discovering the possibilities of the world around them. For anyone who has attended an open source event, this description may sound familiar.

The Lunar Society of the 1790s is in many ways the very essence of open source community. Getting the very best ideas, working together, reacting and sharing together in real time. One major difference, though, is that the Lunar Society was very exclusive by nature, while today’s open source community is not. It is truly open. We live in a vastly more complex and expansive world than Birmingham in the 1790s; the power of the opportunities today is global, and mostly still forming.

With billions of devices running autonomously, computing, sensing, and predicting zettabytes of data, there are endless possibilities for what business ideas and technologies will thrive on the intelligent edge. Only an open source strategy can work in this environment: millions of people, ten of millions of ideas, maybe billions of combinations of code.

Open source for the intelligent edge

An effective intelligent edge will require a robust infrastructure that can handle low latency, high availability, and bandwidth demands. This infrastructure will include three key components: a cloud platform for running applications, analytics to monitor the health of the platform and services, and an orchestration layer to deploy and manage services across a distributed network.

There are five basic ways for companies to obtain this infrastructure: build it themselves from scratch, buy a proprietary solution from a vendor, build it starting with open source, buy a vendor-supported open source solution, or use infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

In a recent survey we administered across 500 respondents in France, Germany, Spain, the UK, and the U.S., a relatively small percentage selected “build your own from scratch,” and a few more selected “vendor proprietary.” The majority selected an option where open source plays a role, whether in IaaS, do-it-yourself (DIY), or vendor-supported options. IaaS was the #1 choice for all three elements (cloud platform, analytics, and orchestration). The rest were split between one of the other flavors of open source (DIY or vendor-supported).

It seems most people aren’t interested in building and/or managing their infrastructure themselves. 34% of business in the U.S. cite “lack of internal skills or knowledge” and “bandwidth constraints on people’s time” as the biggest barriers to adopting intelligent edge technologies, followed closely by “additional investments in associated technologies are unclear” and “lack of internal business support or request.” Open source options give these companies the benefits of the solution without having to shoulder the burden all on their own.

If building and supporting your own infrastructure is core to your business, then building from scratch might make sense — but even then, chances are you may still use open source components. With 180,000 open source projects available with 1,400 unique licenses, it just doesn’t make sense not to use open source to some degree.

Two key reasons why open source is so pervasive

The popularity of open source is not surprising. For one thing, you get to tap into a technological hive mind. There is some debate, and many variables, but estimates put the number of open source developers worldwide somewhere north of 20 million. Open source communities attract a wide variety of people who are interested in participating in a particular piece of technology, with communities and projects running the gamut in terms of size and scope, depending on the focus and maturity of the project.

The common thread is the community of people who are contributing and reviewing code in an effort to make the project better. Generally speaking, the more applicable the code is to a variety of use cases and needs, the more participation you might see in the community. So with open source projects you get to leverage some of the smartest people on the planet, and they don’t have to be on your company payroll.

The second reason for such widespread usage of open source — related to the first — is the fact that you don’t have to do it all yourself. It’s a pretty common scenario for a development organization to use open source code as a component of a larger solution. By leveraging that open source component they can save hundreds if not thousands of work hours by not having to develop or be the sole maintainer of that piece of code. It also allows the organization to focus on their value-add.

Not just a groovy codefest

Open source derives its success from community, and just like in any community, some boundaries and agreed-upon rules to play by are necessary in order to thrive. It’s one thing to download a piece of open source code for use in a personal project. It’s another to use open source code as a critical component of your company’s operations or as a product you provide to your customers. Just because you can get open source code “for free” doesn’t mean you won’t make an investment.

Open source projects need focus, attention, and nurturing. In order to get the full value from the community one must be an active member of that community — or pay someone to be an active member of the community on your behalf. Being active requires an investment of time and resources to give a voice and listen to other voices on a steering committee, discuss priority features to work on next, participate in marketing activities designed to encourage more participants, contribute quality code, review code from others, and more. Leaning in is strongly encouraged.

Open source technology offers a tremendous opportunity for collective creativity and innovation. When like-minded people gather together for a focused intellectual purpose, it’s energizing to the individual and can be hugely beneficial to the organization. Whether the open source code is part of an IaaS, a component of something you build, or part of a vendor-supported solution, it is a tremendous asset you can use to push your company’s value-add forward to better meet your customer’s needs.

Matt Jones

Matt Jones VICE PRESIDENT, GLOBAL ENGINEERING

Matt Jones is responsible for the global R&D team at Wind River. In this role, he leads the delivery of innovative products that are enabling and accelerating the digital transformation of our customers across market segments, ranging from aerospace to industrial, defense to medical, and networking to automotive. With nearly 20 years of experience in the technology industry, he oversees the development of the Wind River portfolio to expand the company’s reach in both new and existing markets.

He was previously at Virgin Hyperloop One, where as Senior Vice President he led the Software Engineering teams; tasked with providing all the software needed to manage, control, and operate an autonomous hyperloop system. This included embedded software and electronics, networking, cloud data and services, as well as customer-facing applications. Prior to Virgin Hyperloop One, he was chief product officer at moovel Group, Daimler’s mobility solutions company. Before moovel, he was director of future technology at Jaguar Land Rover. He also serves as Chairman at GENIVI Alliance, and was a member of the Board of Directors at The Linux Foundation.

He holds a Master of Engineering, Electronic and Electrical with Management, from the University of Birmingham.

Source: Open Source Brings Collective Creativity To The Intelligent Edge

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Critics:

Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. It most commonly refers to the open-source model, in which open-source software or other products are released under an open-source license as part of the open-source-software movement. Use of the term originated with software, but has expanded beyond the software sector to cover other open content and forms of open collaboration.

Generally, open source refers to a computer program in which the source code is available to the general public for use for any (including commercial) purpose, or modification from its original design. Open-source code is meant to be a collaborative effort, where programmers improve upon the source code and share the changes within the community. Code is released under the terms of a software license. Depending on the license terms, others may then download, modify, and publish their version (fork) back to the community.

Open source promotes universal access via an open-source or free license to a product’s design or blueprint, and universal redistribution of that design or blueprint. Before the phrase open source became widely adopted, developers and producers used a variety of other terms. Open source gained hold in part due to the rise of the Internet. The open-source software movement arose to clarify copyright, licensing, domain, and consumer issues. 

Agriculture, economy, manufacturing and production

Discrimination Against Fat People is So Endemic, Most of Us Don’t Even Realize It’s Happening

When we think of prejudice and discrimination, most of us tend to think of overt attacks, harassment, or discriminatory behavior. Blatant examples of prejudice do still occur with depressing frequency, but for most members of stigmatized groups, it is not these experiences that shape their daily lives. Rather, belonging to a socially stigmatized group means traveling through a world that is rife with multiple small, sometimes subtle or apparently inconsequential reminders of your devalued status, known as microaggressions.

As a weight stigma researcher, I focus on the experiences of fat people (many fat rights activists prefer the word “fat” and use it as a descriptive terms and not as an insult) but microaggressions define the lived experience of all groups devalued by society. Microaggressions can come from anywhere at any time. For a fat person, this might be:

  • When they get on a bus and the person sitting next to an empty seat scowls at them or pointedly places their bag on the seat;
  • People watching them while they’re eating in a restaurant or checking out the contents of their trolley in the supermarket;
  • A fat joke on TV or in a film;
  • A slimmer friend asking if she “looks fat in this”;
  • Hearing a group of children making fun of them;
  • Or even wondering whether they will be taken seriously when they go to the doctor with a sprained ankle, or just told to go away and lose some weight.

If you’re not a member of a stigmatised group, you might think that most of these examples sound relatively minor and could be easily ignored. But while any individual incident may be minor, it is the totality of stigma that defines our existence.

The cost of hostile environments

The pervasive hostile environment that marginalised people find themselves in serves as a source of constant physical and psychological stress. The body’s acute stress response involves the production of stress hormones and changes in cardiovascular, immune and neurological systems to deal with the threat.

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This is an adaptive response in the short term – that is, it aids with survival. But chronic exposure to stress is associated with increased rates of diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and even some cancers. This is not limited to fat people. These findings are consistent when looking at people belonging to racial minorities, LGBTQ individuals and many others.

Critically, the harms associated with a hostile environment occur even in the absence of actual stigmatising incidents – stigmatised individuals go through their daily life anticipating, fearing, expecting and preparing for these events. This consumes an enormous amount of mental and emotional energy and is itself a form of chronic stress. Hostile environments also contribute indirectly to long-term health and life outcomes via impacts on educational and economic achievement.

Recognizing stigma

Microaggressions against fat people are so pervasive and normalised in modern society that people, even fat people, may not recognise them as stigmatising at all. The sometimes ambiguous nature of microaggressions means that the target may be unsure of the intent or underlying meaning, wondering if that person was actually stigmatising them or not, making it difficult to respond. What is more, fat stigma is so entrenched that many fat people are complicit in their own stigmatisation, believing that they deserve it, or that the perpetrator was just stating a fact (“fat people are ugly and disgusting”).

On the other hand, if they do challenge the stigma, at best, they may be told to ignore it; at worst, their experiences are invalidated. Victims of microaggressions are told they are just imagining the slight, that they are overly sensitive or even paranoid, or that they simply need to develop a sense of humour. Fat people may even be told to lose weight if they don’t like it. Most people would never tell a member of another stigmatised group that they should change themselves if they don’t want to be discriminated against.

Most of us like to think of ourselves as unprejudiced. We would never harrass a fat person in the street, beat them up, or give them inferior service in a shop.

But children as young as three exhibit anti-fat attitudes. They are not born with these beliefs – they are picking them up from the cues in their environment, for example from the attitudes and behaviours of parents and caregivers, or from ubiquitous anti-fat messaging and stereotyping in kids’ cartoons. If we genuinely want to be part of a kind and decent society, if we want our children to grow up in that world, it is up to us not to let hostility go unchallenged. Oppression comes in many forms, and we all have a role to play in addressing it.

By:

Angela Meadows does not work for, consult,own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Source: https://theconversation.com/

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Critics:

This type of discrimination can take a number of forms, ranging from refusing to hire someone because they are considered to be too short or too tall, to treating overweight and underweight individuals with disdain. There aren’t currently any specific anti-discrimination laws that have been put in place to prohibit sizeism, despite the issue being extremely prevalent. Sizeist stereotypes (such as “overweight people are lazy” or “tall people can play basketball”) are often ingrained in modern society.

In the US, the list of anti-discrimination acts does not specifically include sizeism as an offense.The EOCC website states “Height and weight requirements tend to disproportionately limit the employment opportunities of some protected groups and unless the employer can demonstrate how the need is related to the job, it may be viewed as illegal under federal law. A number of states and localities have laws specifically prohibiting discrimination on the basis of height and weight unless based on actual job requirements.

Therefore, unless job-related, inquiries about height and weight should be avoided.” Therefore, size discrimination in the workplace is only illegal under federal law if it is not a job requirement. Sizeism can be based on height, weight or both, and so is often related to height and weight-based discrimination but is not synonymous with either. Depending on where in the world one is and how one lives his/her life, people may have a tendency to be especially tall, slender, short, or plump, and many societies have internalized attitudes about size.

Another manifestation of body variance is muscle mass and skeletal size, often with associations of degree of compliance to one’s born sex, but do not necessarily affect gender to deviate from sex. As a general rule, sizeist attitudes imply that someone believes that his or her size is superior to that of other people and treat people of other sizes negatively. Examples of sizeist discrimination might include a person being fired from a job for being overweight or exceptionally short though their work was unaffected.

Sizeism often takes the form of a number of stereotypes about people of particular heights and weights. Sizeist attitudes can also take the form of expressions of physical disgust when confronted with people of differing sizes and can even manifest into specific phobias such as cacomorphobia (the fear of fat people), or a fear of tall or short people. Sizeism, being a newly recognized discriminatory stance, is usually observed by those who are its targets.

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