Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor -
~ Truman Capote
Chronicle of Higher Education, Stop Ignoring Microaggressions Against Your Staff:
Three ways that professors and administrators, intentionally or not, put staff ‘in their place.’
“You don’t behave enough like staff,” I was told derisively by the tenured professor who was then my supervisor. Despite my Ph.D., my years of experience at various levels of higher education, and my long list of successes as a faculty developer, this supervisor insisted on pointing out my place within the academic hierarchy. I sat there, in silence, swallowing my anger and shame. ...
Nowadays there’s a name for such slights — they’re called microaggressions. I’ve been dealing with them for my entire academic career — first as a graduate student and an instructor and then when I shifted from a faculty role to an academic-staff member. ...
But so far, little attention has been paid to the daily microaggressions directed at those of us who fall into the highly diverse yet nebulous category of staff members — that is, anyone who is not in the “prestige” ranks of faculty member or administrator. Outside of David M. Perry’s 2020 essay on “Title Policing and Other Ways Professors Bully the Academic Staff,” I’ve seen little commentary on the treatment of staff members. And there is an appetite for that discussion. When I asked on Twitter what one of my next topics should be in this series of essayson campus staff, the most common answer was microaggressions. ...
My aim in what follows is to describe three of the most common types of microaggressions directed at staff members, based on my own and other staff members’ experiences.
Revealed: the Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harass
Julia Carrie Wong – A Guardian investigation exposes the breadth of state-backed manipulation of the platform. “Facebook has repeatedly allowed world leaders and politicians to use its platform to deceive the public or harass opponents despite being alerted to evidence of the wrongdoing. The Guardian has seen extensive internal documentation showing how Facebook handled more than 30 cases across 25 countries of politically manipulative behavior that was proactively detected by company staff. The investigation shows how Facebook has allowed major abuses of its platform in poor, small and non-western countries in order to prioritize addressing abuses that attract media attention or affect the US and other wealthy countries. The company acted quickly to address political manipulation affecting countries such as the US, Taiwan, South Korea and Poland, while moving slowly or not at all on cases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mongolia, Mexico, and much of Latin America. “There is a lot of harm being done on Facebook that is not being responded to because it is not considered enough of a PR risk to Facebook,” said Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Facebook who worked within the company’s “integrity” organization to combat inauthentic behavior. “The cost isn’t borne by Facebook. It’s borne by the broader world as a whole.” Facebook pledged to combat state-backed political manipulation of its platform after the historic fiasco of the 2016 US election, when Russian agents used inauthentic Facebook accounts to deceive and divide American voters. But the company has repeatedly failed to take timely action when presented with evidence of rampant manipulation and abuse of its tools by political leaders around the world…”
How to record separate audio for each person in a Zoom call
Tech Republic – “Recording a Zoom meeting can be helpful for lots of reasons, and creating separate audio files for each participant can make post-meeting editing much easier than trying to parse one big file. Let’s say you’re in a Zoom meeting. Someone says something profound or important about the topic at hand, but the moment passes without any record of what was said. Hopefully someone wrote it down, but if not, there could be an important piece of institutional knowledge lost the moment it was uttered. Luckily, Zoom has the option to record meetings, both in audio and video format. There are a lot of reasons why someone would want to do so—creating a permanent record, easing the work of whoever is taking meeting minutes, giving participants or other employees the chance to watch it at another time or any number of additional cases…”
Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community
Office of the Director of National Intelligence: “This annual report, April 2021 of worldwide threats to the national security of the United States responds to Section 617 of the FY21 Intelligence Authorization Act (P.L. 116-260). This report reflects the collective insights of the Intelligence Community (IC), which is committed every day to providing the nuanced, independent, and unvarnished intelligence that policymakers, warfighters, and domestic law enforcement personnel need to protect American lives and America’s interests anywhere in the world.This assessment focuses on the most direct, serious threats to the United States during the next year. The order of the topics presented in this assessment does not necessarily indicate their relative importance or the magnitude of the threats in the view of the IC. All require a robust intelligence response, including those where a near-term focus may help head off greater threats in the future, such as climate change and environmental degradation. As required by the law, this report will be provided to the congressional intelligence committees as well as the committees on the Armed Services of the House of Representatives and the Senate.Information available as of 9 April 2021 was used in the preparation of this assessment…”