Saturday, February 4, 2017
How Not to Run a Complex Organization
An excerpt from the New York Times -
Case Study in Chaos: How Management Experts Grade a Trump White House
By JAMES B. STEWART
The unanimous verdict: Thus far, the Trump administration is a textbook case of how not to run a complex organization like the executive branch.
“This is so basic, it’s covered in the introduction to the M.B.A. program that all our students take,” said Lindred Greer, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. By all outward indications, Mr. Trump “desperately needs to take the course,” she said.
Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford and the author of “Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t,” said Mr. Trump’s executive actions as president “are so far from any responsible management approach” that they all but defy analysis.
“Of course, this isn’t new,” he told me. “His campaign also violated every prudent management principle. Everyone including our friends on Wall Street somehow believed that once he was president he’d change. I don’t understand that logic.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/business/donald-trump-management-style.html
Case Study in Chaos: How Management Experts Grade a Trump White House
By JAMES B. STEWART
The unanimous verdict: Thus far, the Trump administration is a textbook case of how not to run a complex organization like the executive branch.
“This is so basic, it’s covered in the introduction to the M.B.A. program that all our students take,” said Lindred Greer, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. By all outward indications, Mr. Trump “desperately needs to take the course,” she said.
Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford and the author of “Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t,” said Mr. Trump’s executive actions as president “are so far from any responsible management approach” that they all but defy analysis.
“Of course, this isn’t new,” he told me. “His campaign also violated every prudent management principle. Everyone including our friends on Wall Street somehow believed that once he was president he’d change. I don’t understand that logic.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/business/donald-trump-management-style.html
Friday, February 3, 2017
We've Been Here Before
From Salon -
“We’ve been here before”: Black Panther Jamal Joseph discusses present day political climate and offers words of wisdom
By D. WATKINS
http://www.salon.com/?post_type=post&p=14696142
“We’ve been here before”: Black Panther Jamal Joseph discusses present day political climate and offers words of wisdom
By D. WATKINS
http://www.salon.com/?post_type=post&p=14696142
Quote
From the LA Times -
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Thursday, February 2, 2017
A Powerful Message
From the Huffington Post -
The Moving Story Behind This Viral Photo Of A Doctor’s Powerful Sign
A union reacts after a doctor in Brooklyn is stranded in Sudan due to Trump’s travel ban.
By Elyse Wanshel
When a fellow doctor was detained in Sudan, his colleagues at a Brooklyn hospital got on it. Stat. Their outraged reaction became a viral photo.
On Jan. 31, a picture of a doctor holding a sign that reads, “I am taking care of your mom … but I can’t go see mine,” was posted to Twitter by Khaled Beydoun.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/doctor-holding-sign-mom-trump-muslim-travel-ban_us_58937a91e4b07595d05a4b3b?
The Moving Story Behind This Viral Photo Of A Doctor’s Powerful Sign
A union reacts after a doctor in Brooklyn is stranded in Sudan due to Trump’s travel ban.
By Elyse Wanshel
 |
| Dr. Mazin Khalid went to medical school with Dr. Kamal Fadlalla and is his friend. He’s holding a sign written by another doctor. |
When a fellow doctor was detained in Sudan, his colleagues at a Brooklyn hospital got on it. Stat. Their outraged reaction became a viral photo.
On Jan. 31, a picture of a doctor holding a sign that reads, “I am taking care of your mom … but I can’t go see mine,” was posted to Twitter by Khaled Beydoun.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/doctor-holding-sign-mom-trump-muslim-travel-ban_us_58937a91e4b07595d05a4b3b?
Celebrating Our Gifts
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-jaimie-milner-gifted-20160131-story.html
All Aboard
From Thrillist -
THE MOST STUNNINGLY BEAUTIFUL TRAIN RIDES IN AMERICA
By MATT MELTZER
https://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation/best-scenic-train-rides-us
THE MOST STUNNINGLY BEAUTIFUL TRAIN RIDES IN AMERICA
By MATT MELTZER
https://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation/best-scenic-train-rides-us
It's Personal
An excerpt from the NYTimes -
A Washington Correspondent’s Own Refugee Experience
By HELENE COOPER
WASHINGTON — When I was 13 years old, my family fled our home for the United States.
We were refugees, even though we came here on visitor visas that we simply outstayed. The country of my birth, Liberia, had just seen a military coup, where enlisted soldiers took over the government, disemboweled the president and launched an orgy of retribution against the old guard. My father was shot. My cousin was executed on the beach by firing squad. My mom was gang-raped by soldiers in the basement of our house after she volunteered to submit to them on the condition that they leave my sisters and me, ages 8 to 16, alone.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/insider/a-washington-correspondents-own-refugee-experience.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share&_r=0
A Washington Correspondent’s Own Refugee Experience
By HELENE COOPER
WASHINGTON — When I was 13 years old, my family fled our home for the United States.
We were refugees, even though we came here on visitor visas that we simply outstayed. The country of my birth, Liberia, had just seen a military coup, where enlisted soldiers took over the government, disemboweled the president and launched an orgy of retribution against the old guard. My father was shot. My cousin was executed on the beach by firing squad. My mom was gang-raped by soldiers in the basement of our house after she volunteered to submit to them on the condition that they leave my sisters and me, ages 8 to 16, alone.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/insider/a-washington-correspondents-own-refugee-experience.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share&_r=0
Playing Dress Up
From the Huffington Post -
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| Ambrielle-Baker Rogers, Morgan Coleman and Miah Bell-Olson dressed as Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson and Mary Jackson, the trio of black women featured in the movie “Hidden Figures” who helped NASA send astronaut John Glenn into orbit. Courtesy of Amanda Evans
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/girls-dress-up-as-hidden-figures-characters-totally-nail-it_us_5892016ce4b02772c4ea6d7d?
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He Was the Man
From Vanity Fair -
Sidney Poitier, 1967, and One of the Most Remarkable Runs in Hollywood History
Five decades ago, at the height of the civil-rights movement, America’s most beloved movie actor was a black man whose three films that year—To Sir, with Love; In the Heat of the Night; and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—made him king of the Hollywood box office. How the actor’s coolly uncompromising navigation of that status helped send a pointed message to white America.
by LAURA JACOBS
It was the “long hot summer of 1967,” so called because racial unrest had reached full boil. Riots—“the language of the unheard,” in the words of Martin Luther King Jr.—were exploding in city after city, from Atlanta to Boston, Birmingham to Milwaukee, roaring in Newark and Detroit. Malcolm X had been shot dead two years earlier, and Stokely Carmichael’s Black Power, in all its incendiary eloquence, was sweeping up the young, both black and white. It was slash-and-burn civil-rights activism, and it terrified parents, enraged racists, and unsettled the White House. America the melting pot was a crucible in crisis.
But at the movies, even in the South, the crucible was cool. In 1967 the country’s biggest film star, its most loved actor, was black. He had the self-containment of a cat, the swoop of a hawk, the calm of a saint. His poise was a form of precision, and his precision, intelligence that ran deep. He was Hollywood’s first African-American matinee idol (though technically Bahamian-American) and the last of an Old Hollywood breed—the gentleman hero in the bespoke suit. His name was Sidney Poitier.
http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/02/sidney-poitier-remarkable-run-in-hollywood-history
Sidney Poitier, 1967, and One of the Most Remarkable Runs in Hollywood History
Five decades ago, at the height of the civil-rights movement, America’s most beloved movie actor was a black man whose three films that year—To Sir, with Love; In the Heat of the Night; and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—made him king of the Hollywood box office. How the actor’s coolly uncompromising navigation of that status helped send a pointed message to white America.
by LAURA JACOBS
It was the “long hot summer of 1967,” so called because racial unrest had reached full boil. Riots—“the language of the unheard,” in the words of Martin Luther King Jr.—were exploding in city after city, from Atlanta to Boston, Birmingham to Milwaukee, roaring in Newark and Detroit. Malcolm X had been shot dead two years earlier, and Stokely Carmichael’s Black Power, in all its incendiary eloquence, was sweeping up the young, both black and white. It was slash-and-burn civil-rights activism, and it terrified parents, enraged racists, and unsettled the White House. America the melting pot was a crucible in crisis.
But at the movies, even in the South, the crucible was cool. In 1967 the country’s biggest film star, its most loved actor, was black. He had the self-containment of a cat, the swoop of a hawk, the calm of a saint. His poise was a form of precision, and his precision, intelligence that ran deep. He was Hollywood’s first African-American matinee idol (though technically Bahamian-American) and the last of an Old Hollywood breed—the gentleman hero in the bespoke suit. His name was Sidney Poitier.
http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/02/sidney-poitier-remarkable-run-in-hollywood-history
Wednesday, February 1, 2017
This Dude is From Davis
An excerpt from Wired -
The Chemical Engineer Who’ll School You on Coffee
By CAIT OPPERMANN
AS A CHEMICAL engineer who studies the motion of fluids, Bill Ristenpart deals with a lot of spattered blood and aerosolized pathogenic mouse phlegm. But when it comes to teaching wary freshman the basics of mass transfer and thermodynamics, the UC Davis professor relies on a less messy (and more potable) liquid: coffee. Beans go through so many complex chemical changes that they can easily form the basis of a whole curriculum.
Ristenpart’s three year-old course, the Design of Coffee, has become the most popular chemical engineering class in the country, enrolling a quarter of Davis’ freshmen. After spending the semester deconstructing coffeemakers and determining pH levels by taste, the 500-odd students compete to engineer the tastiest brew using the least amount of energy. Which isn’t easy, Ristenpart says, because “we know very little about coffee.” Though Americans down some 400 million cups a day, US researchers don’t typically study it; there’s little incentive for agencies like the USDA to fund research on a crop grown thousands of miles away in the tropics. Nearly everything about java, from the microbial intricacies of fermentation to the molecular basis of flavor, remains a mystery.
https://www.wired.com/2017/02/study-coffee-at-uc-davis/?mbid=nl_2117_p2&CNDID=
The Chemical Engineer Who’ll School You on Coffee
By CAIT OPPERMANN
AS A CHEMICAL engineer who studies the motion of fluids, Bill Ristenpart deals with a lot of spattered blood and aerosolized pathogenic mouse phlegm. But when it comes to teaching wary freshman the basics of mass transfer and thermodynamics, the UC Davis professor relies on a less messy (and more potable) liquid: coffee. Beans go through so many complex chemical changes that they can easily form the basis of a whole curriculum.
Ristenpart’s three year-old course, the Design of Coffee, has become the most popular chemical engineering class in the country, enrolling a quarter of Davis’ freshmen. After spending the semester deconstructing coffeemakers and determining pH levels by taste, the 500-odd students compete to engineer the tastiest brew using the least amount of energy. Which isn’t easy, Ristenpart says, because “we know very little about coffee.” Though Americans down some 400 million cups a day, US researchers don’t typically study it; there’s little incentive for agencies like the USDA to fund research on a crop grown thousands of miles away in the tropics. Nearly everything about java, from the microbial intricacies of fermentation to the molecular basis of flavor, remains a mystery.
https://www.wired.com/2017/02/study-coffee-at-uc-davis/?mbid=nl_2117_p2&CNDID=
Gentrification Warning Signs
From Salon -
5 warning signs that your neighborhood is gentrifying
Know what to look for before your rent goes up
By D. WATKINS
http://www.salon.com/?post_type=post&p=14693925
5 warning signs that your neighborhood is gentrifying
Know what to look for before your rent goes up
By D. WATKINS
http://www.salon.com/?post_type=post&p=14693925
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