Tag: Coworkers

• China’s All-Seeing Surveillance State Is Reading Its Citizens’ Faces
  

  China is rushing to deploy new technologies to monitor its people in ways that would spook many in the U.S. and the West. Unfettered by privacy concerns or public debate, Beijing’s authoritarian leaders are installing iris scanners at security checkpoints in troubled regions and using sophisticated software to monitor ramblings on social media. By 2020, the government hopes to implement a national “social credit” system that would assign every citizen a rating based on how they behave at work, in public venues and in their financial dealings.

  https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-all-seeing-surveillance-state-feared-in-the-west-is-a-reality-in-china-1498493020

• Ira Glass on structuring stories, asking hard questions
  

  I’ve said this many times in many places, but the structure of stories on our show in this kind of narrative journalism is there’s plot and then there are ideas. And those are the two elements that you’re constantly monitoring to know whether or not you’ve got them. And in part I feel like when people hear that they don’t even know exactly what is meant by that. All plot is is a series of actions where one thing leads to the next—sort of like this thing led to this next thing, led to this next thing, led to this next thing, led to this next thing, and then some of the things in this list can be, “And then he said this to me, and as a result, I said this back to him, and then he said this back to me, and then I got angry and I stormed out and I wrote a bill saying…” What you want is one thing leads to the next leads to the next leads the next and the reason why we do that is because once you have any sequence of actions in order of like, this happened and then this happened and this happened that creates narrative suspense because you wonder what happened next.

  https://www.cjr.org/special_report/qa-ira-glass-turnaround-npr-jesse-thorn-tal.php

• Act Like the Leader You Want to Be
  
• There’s Now a Name for the Micro Generation Born Between 1977-1983
  

  So here it is, according to Dan Woodman, an associate professor of sociology at The University of Melbourne: Xennials.

  The idea is there’s this micro or in-between generation between the Gen X group – who we think of as the depressed flannelette-shirt-wearing, grunge-listening children that came after the Baby Boomers and the Millennials – who get described as optimistic, tech savvy and maybe a little bit too sure of themselves and too confident.

  http://didyouknowfacts.com/theres-now-a-name-for-the-micro-generation-born-between-1977-1983/
  While I agree that the generation I grew up with does not fit with GenX or Millennials, I hate that name.

• If You’re a Top Performer, Get on Your Coworkers’ Good Side
  

  The study, led by Elizabeth Campbell of the University of Minnesota, and published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, looked at several hundred stylists working in a wide variety of salons—chosen because they represent a socially dynamic environment where colleagues have to work individually and interdependently in order to succeed. They found that peers were far more likely to speak ill of top performers and try to damage their reputation. Furthermore, the more collaborative the environment, the more peers tried to drag down top performers.

  http://lifehacker.com/if-youre-a-top-performer-get-on-your-coworkers-good-si-1796716739

Photo: Trinity Kubassek