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PLOS staff are unionizing. How its leadership responds is a test of its vision for inclusive publishing.
The post Guest Post — The PLOS Union appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
The other day, I returned home from a short trip, and immediately unpacked and washed my clothes, putting everything away. It felt nice.
The next morning, I was feeling a bit unsettled. So I started cleaning. I cleaned in the kitchen, outside in the yard, swept the garage. I felt so good.
I’ve come to realize that cleaning, organizing, decluttering … for me, it’s a form of self-care. It helps me feel settled, makes me feel like I’m taking care of my life.
Yes, cleaning and organizing can be overwhelming, and is often avoided. But it doesn’t have to be. Take a small corner to tidy up, and let yourself just enjoy the cleaning. Get lost in it. Feel the niceness of making things nicer.
Yes, there’s always more to do. But that’s a disempowering way to think about it. Why does it matter that there will always be more to do? That just means there’s more self-care available, always. Just do a small portion right now, and enjoy it. A good analogy is that there will always be more tea to drink … but I only need to focus on this single cup of tea, and enjoy it fully.
As you clean, you might feel things getting cleaner. As you organize, you might feel the progression of settledness of things. As you declutter, you might feel the slight liberation with everything you toss out.
And of course, we can extend this self-care of cleaning and organization into every part of our lives — today I worked on organizing my finances. I’ve been fixing little things around the house. This morning I deleted a bunch of apps on my phone, and turned off a lot of notifications, to simplify my phone experience. I also unsubscribed from a bunch of newsletters and started clearing out my email inbox.
You can think of taking a task from your task list as a form of this self-care. One item at a time, taking care of your life.
It can be overwhelming and dreaded … or it can be nourishing and lovely. It’s a choice, and I choose to feel the care that I bring to every sweep of the broom or rake.
The post Cleaning as Self-Care appeared first on zen habits.
After more than 26 years of dedicated service to The Long Now Foundation, Alexander Rose will be stepping down from his role as Executive Director to focus on The Clock of the Long Now, along with his research into the world’s longest-lived organizations. He will continue to serve on the Foundation’s Board of Directors.
For the past quarter century, Alexander Rose – known to his friends and colleagues simply as Zander – has been the engine behind so much of Long Now’s work. Under his leadership, The Long Now Foundation has gone from a fledgling nonprofit to a living, thriving organization, with a vibrant membership program, and twenty years of thought-provoking Talks. He also created The Interval, our combination cocktail bar, cafe, and gathering space in Fort Mason, San Francisco and is an active steward of The Clock of the Long Now.
Zander’s approach to guiding the Foundation has impacted every single one of us at Long Now. In order to properly commemorate his time here, we talked to the people he worked most closely with among Long Now’s staff, Board of Directors, and associates to paint a whole picture of Zander — as Long Now’s leader, but also as a friend and dedicated member of our community.
When The Long Now Foundation was still in a primordial state in the midst of the 01990s, its co-founders Stewart Brand, Danny Hillis, and Brian Eno ran the show. But as the Foundation grew and began to get to work on its core projects, it quickly became clear that Long Now needed a dedicated employee to manage The Clock and The Library. Stewart immediately sought out Zander, who he had known since Zander was just a kid in the junkyards and dockyards of Sausalito, California. Stewart served as “adult supervision” to paintball games and other adventures on the Sausalito waterfront, and to Stewart, Zander’s qualities as a “natural born leader” were clear from a young age. Kevin Kelly, another founding board member and denizen of the Sausalito waterfront, agreed, noting that even at a young age Zander was a tinkerer and skilled paintball tactician, “immediately trying to improve” the crude early paintball equipment and using it to “crush” Kevin, Stewart, and all other challengers.
When Stewart reached out to Zander more than a decade later, Zander, by then a recent graduate of Carnegie Mellon who was looking for work in the field of industrial design, was at first uncertain. As recounted in Whole Earth, John Markoff’s 02022 biography of Stewart Brand, Stewart also helped Zander get job interviews with a number of companies from the contemporary crop of San Francisco Bay Area technology startups. Yet even as he pursued those interviews, Zander couldn’t help but be captivated by the promise Long Now’s Clock and Library projects offered, even in a nascent form.
In the end, his home would be The Long Now Foundation, becoming the organization’s first full time employee and a general project manager, creative leader, and jack-of-all-trades in the Foundation’s early operations. From his first meeting with Zander, Danny Hillis was impressed by his “very practical sense of building things and getting them to work.”
The two would work closely together for years on the preliminary design and prototyping of The Clock of the Long Now. Zander provided a key understanding of, in Danny’s words, the “poetry and the philosophy of the Clock” from the very start. He was able to balance The Clock’s dual nature, holding it as “a machine to be engineered but, on the other hand, a story to be told.”
One early Clock design moment where Zander’s sensibility shone through was in the design of the Clock’s face. In Danny’s recollection, he brought a rough sketch of the astronomical lines he wanted depicted on the Clock’s face to Zander, who proceeded to turn it into the iconic rete design that still serves as part of Long Now’s brand to this day.
For the last few years of the 01990s, Danny, Zander, and a small team of collaborators worked tirelessly to get the prototype ready for their “very hard deadline”: New Years Eve 01999. Without Zander, Danny told us, they wouldn’t have made it:
“I brought my whole family up there and everyone at Long Now was gathered in the Presidio, where we were sharing a space with the Internet Archive. We had finally got all the pieces put together, but when we got them together, we realized that there was a bug in the direction of rotation of one shaft and that it was going to, when it hit the millennium, go from saying, oh, 01999 to 01998 instead of 02000 — the wrong direction.”
“So, there were hours to go before New Year's Day and we had been working on it and I had been traveling and I just said, ‘oh, well this is just kind of hopeless.’ And I actually fell asleep at that point because I was thinking ‘I don't know what's gonna happen, but I am exhausted.’ So I fell asleep. But then Zander figured it out. He realized that we could do it by just remachining one part and so he drove across to Sausalito. And by the time I woke up, Zander had remachined the part. And so when I actually came to midnight it was all put together and sure enough, at midnight it ticked forward and the dial clicked to the year 02000 and the beautiful chime that Zander had chosen, this beautiful Zen bowl chime rang twice. And so the clock chimed in the year 02000 with two bongs in perfect order.”
Zander’s work at Long Now, even in those early days, was not limited to The Clock. The Foundation’s core project has always involved building a cultural institution to deepen our understanding of long-term thinking in parallel to the Clock, and Zander dove into that cause with full commitment.
Along with a dedicated core of early colleagues, Zander helped develop a diverse set of projects that, in their ways, would help foster long-term thinking in the world. These projects included the Rosetta Project, a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers that aims to preserve the world’s languages using long-term archival devices like microscopically etched disks, and Long Bets, our initiative for long-term predictions and wagers for charity.
Zander didn’t just help get these projects started; he has kept them running for decades as well. Andrew Warner, who has worked as a project manager in Long Now’s programs team for the last decade, says that Zander has “basically done every job at Long Now at some point,” from Clock designer to project manager to maintenance man. Earlier this year, Zander repaired a damaged hot water heater at the Long Now offices the same day he departed on a multi-week research trip on long-lived institutions in India. Throughout all those roles, Zander has maintained his unique sensibility and perspective on leadership. Former Long Now Director of Strategy Nicholas Paul Brysiewicz describes this perspective as a certain “pragmatism” that “does not suffer needless philosophizing.” Long-time Long Now Director of Programs Danielle Engelman cites Zander’s “clear decision-making process after weighing key options & opportunities” as having “kept Long Now's projects and programs moving forward at a pace that belied the small team working on them in the beginning.”
Over the years, Zander has also taken a lead role in one of Long Now's longest-running projects: our speaker series. Since 02020, Zander has acted as the host and co-curator for Long Now's main talk series, bringing together perspectives on long-term thinking from everyone from science fiction authors and artists to scientists, sociologists, and political leaders.
These projects, along with The Clock, helped build a mythos around the Foundation over the years. With this cultivated mythos came interest from the broader culture, with many around the world expressing interest in becoming more involved with Long Now’s work. In response, Zander worked to establish Long Now’s membership program in 02007. According to Danny Hillis, “he really led the idea of the membership program and supported Long Now members. And I think that the original board didn’t really see the potential of that the way that Zander did, but we trusted his intuition on that.”
As Long Now entered its adolescence as an organization, Zander began to research the world’s longest-lasting institutions — groups that had lasted for more than a millennium from businesses to religious orders. This project would later become Long Now's Organizational Continuity Project.
As he studied the records of these organizations, he began to notice a particular, unexpected commonality: across continents and cultural contexts, many of the longest-lived institutions were those that served and produced alcohol, from German breweries to Japanese Sake Houses.
For Zander, the obvious corollary to this finding was to open up a cocktail bar. At first, Long Now’s Board of Directors was skeptical. Running a bar is complicated, and a task far from the core competencies of Long Now at the time. As Andrew Warner put it, “Opening a successful bar is really hard and people didn't really ‘get it’ until it was done.”
But Long Now collectively put their trust in Zander, and he delivered. The Interval, which opened in 02013 after an extensive crowdfunding campaign was “pure Alexander,” per Stewart, with Zander’s fingerprint on everything: its “invention, funding, and peerless delivery.” Danny noted that Zander was especially adept at “getting all the permissions for getting things to happen at Fort Mason,” requiring Zander to use his “political finesse” to navigate the bureaucratic structures of working on federal property.
The Interval, which took the former space of Long Now’s museum and offices and turned it into a world-class cocktail bar, café, and gathering place, was thoroughly shaped by Zander’s influence. As Andrew recounted to us, he even “took the first doorman shift” for the bar’s opening day. Yet perhaps nothing about The Interval’s design speaks to Zander’s unique perspective more than the bar’s Gin Robot. As Nicholas Paul Brysiewicz describes it, “the gin robot at The Interval is the one thing I associate with Zander alone. It’s quintessentially his. It makes billions of gins. It lights up. The lights change color. The only ways it could be more Zandery would involve pyrotechnics.”
Over the past decade, The Interval has become more than just a place to get expertly-crafted cocktails and view the collection of Long Now’s Manual for Civilization. Under Zander’s supervision, the bar has become a place to tell — and to continue — Long Now’s story, a headquarters with a mythos all its own.
Zander’s time at Long Now did not, of course, keep him confined to our offices in Fort Mason in San Francisco. In Long Now’s early days, he traveled extensively with Danny, Stewart, and other board members to explore sites in the American southwest and beyond to find an eventual home for The Clock of The Long Now. As part of that process, Zander became an accomplished rock climber and cave explorer, venturing hundreds of feet into the depths of caves in Texas or mountains in Arizona.
Eventually, Long Now landed on a site at Mount Washington, on the border between Nevada and Utah in the Great Basin, as a likely choice for The Clock. Zander served as a de facto leader for the Long Now team as they explored the many crags and crevices of the mountain. As Danny recounted, “in dangerous situations it's always good to have somebody in charge who's making the decisions and Zander was the one to do that.”
After years of exploration of Mount Washington, Zander and the rest of the team thought they had found nearly all of the useful approaches and pathways within. Yet one particular entrance still eluded them. Inspired by the Siq, a narrow, shaft-like gorge that serves as the grand main entrance to the classical Nabatean city of Petra, Danny and Stewart had imagined a similar pathway as the main approach to The Clock. For years, they searched for it to no avail, until June 21, 02003.
On that day, Zander found a certain opening in what first seemed to Stewart and Danny, his travel companions, to be a “sheer cliff” face on the west side of the mountain. Zander found his way through that passage, a Class 4 crevice, ascending 600 feet alone. “Henceforth,” Stewart told Long Now, “it is known as Zander’s Siq.”
Once the potential sites for The Clock were identified, Zander’s travels did not stop. Instead, he took on a role as a kind of international ambassador for Long Now and for long-term thinking broadly. Those travels have taken him everywhere from the Svalbard seed bank and the far reaches of Siberia to the Hoover Dam, the 1400-year-old Ise Shrine in Japan, and the ancient stepwells of India.
Danny, who accompanied Zander on an early trip to Japan for the rebuilding of the Ise Shrine, which has occurred every 20 years since 00692 CE, recounted that the two of them had been two of the few westerners invited to the rededication ceremony, and the “amazingly moving” feeling of being there with Zander. Afterwards, the Long Now traveling party went to one of the area’s “bottle keep” bars, where patrons can leave part of a liquor bottle reserved for future use for an indefinite period of time. Zander explained to the bartender that Long Now would be returning to the bar in twenty years — in time for the next rebuilding of the shrine. While the bartender was at first skeptical, Zander managed to convince him that they’d actually be back — spreading the word about Long Now along the way. That encounter also ended up inspiring Zander to create The Interval’s own bottle keep system, which can, of course, be used more frequently than once every two decades.
While 02023 marks the end of Zander’s time as Long Now’s Executive Director, his work with us is far from over. He will continue his work on The Clock of the Long Now as its installation continues. He will also continue to work on the Organizational Continuity Project, discovering the lessons behind the world’s long-lived institutions and pulling these lessons into a first of its kind book. He will also continue to be a dedicated member of Long Now’s community, a vital part of the culture that he has fostered over the last quarter century as we go into our next quarter century. Thank you, Zander.
Feminist foreign policies (FFP) are considered the latest contribution of feminism to global governance. Eleven countries around the world have embraced FFP, aiming to “systematically integrate a gender perspective throughout” foreign policy agendas.
In recent years, FFP has spread to Latin America: Mexico introduced an FFP in 2020 and the newly elected Chilean and Colombian governments have expressed their intentions of adopting the framework.
This growing interest in FFP across Latin American raises important questions: What exactly is this feminist foreign policy and what is there to gain by naming foreign policies “feminist”? Should Latin American feminists engage, support, critique, or be suspicious of this global trend? What does FFP look like in a Latin American context?
FFP is emerging as a new subfield in feminist international relations. Building on women’s rights and peace movements around the globe, feminism occupies an important position within academic and political spaces since it provides a powerful source of intervention against different forms of discrimination.
The theoretical foundations of FFP, however, are still not clearly defined. What an FFP looks like depends largely on a government’s interpretation of the concept.
Sweden first proposed a general FFP model built on what they call the three R’s: resources, representation and rights. Their model went on to define “six long-term external objectives” centered on policy making with a gender perspective: freedom from different types of gender-based violence; women’s participation in preventing and resolving conflicts, and post-conflict peace building; political participation; economic rights and empowerment; and sexual and reproductive health and rights. This initial Swedish proposal served as a basis for other countries’ policies.
For many foreign policy observers and feminist activists these objectives were still too vague and ambiguous. First, what does foreign policy entail? This question underlies the discussion among academics and activists about feminism being co-opted for neoliberal economic purposes, or if it maintains its potential as a critical proposition. There are also questions concerning contentious topics for feminists. For instance, how is the gender perspective incorporated into defense and security? Given the long tradition of pacifism in the feminist movement globally and its demand for an active commitment to disarmament, how can countries like Canada simultaneously export arms and pursue an FFP?
International organizations have tried to provide definitional clarity. In its most ambitious expression, UN Women proposes that an FFP should aspire to transform the overall practice of foreign policy—including a country’s diplomacy, defense and security cooperation, aid, trade, climate security, and immigration policies—to the benefit of women and girls.
Feminist civil society, however, tends to take a more critical stance. The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in Germany believes that “fixating on the production of a universally acceptable and concrete definition of a feminist foreign policy fails to consider the different and varied political realities that shape our global landscape.” Thus, it proposes five concepts to inform policy development that better accounts for this variation: intersectionality; empathetic reflexivity; substantive representation and participation; accountability; and, active peace commitment. Regardless of the concrete definition, FFP aims to achieve explicit normative and ethical goals. Yet, as Jennifer Thompson notes, FFP is a state invention in which foreign policy goals are often shaped by state interests rather than feminist activists’ normative principles. While civil society often formulates FFP demands, states implement foreign policies. In other words, it is states that ultimately decide what counts as FFP and what does not. As a result, FFPs may not fulfill their ethical promises—particularly in countries without strong accountability mechanisms. Mexico’s attempt to develop an FFP is a case in point.
In September 2022, Internacional Feminista, a Mexican feminist organization that I co-founded, published the first evaluation of Mexico’s FFP. My colleagues and I concluded that there is no clarity as to what the FFP actually entails and no policy roadmap detailing the FFP’s actions, outcomes, indicators, and intended impact. The Mexican FFP has stalled.
Regarding the question of what constitutes foreign policy, the Mexican FFP has a broad and ambitious scope. The Secretariat of Foreign Affairs seeks to mainstream gender perspectives across all foreign policy areas as one of its core objectives, yet we found this does not happen in practice. Discussion of the FFP is most visible in Mexico’s rhetoric in multilateral fora. However, tangible evidence that Mexico is actually considering a gender perspective is largely absent from other foreign policy issues, such as defense, trade, and diplomacy.
One innovation of Mexico’s FFP was prioritizing gender parity within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its diplomatic corps. Nonetheless, it is not possible to assess whether there is gender parity across the ranks as the Secretariat has no available records of personnel demographic data, disaggregated by gender or rank. The lack of available data disaggregated by gender suggests that this is not as much of a focus area as it’s made out to be.
Another feature of the Mexican initiative was its aim of strengthening the protocols to address and prevent gender-based violence within the foreign ministry. However, there is very little information available regarding how these are implemented and if they have achieved their intended outcomes. The absence of information again suggests that this was not a priority task. In fact, two cases call into question Mexico’s commitment to FFP: one involved failures in consular attention to a Mexican woman victim of gender-based violence in Qatar, and another involved an attempt to appoint a man accused of sexual harassment as Mexico’s ambassador to Panama.
In its FFP plan, the Secretariat also announced funding for intersectionality-related efforts. However, data shows that the budget remained constant from 2018 to 2020. Following the austerity policies of the current administration, no additional resources were granted to support these efforts. Moreover, the budget document labeled these resources as “Expenditures for equality between women and men.” By continuing to interpret “intersectionality” and “gender perspective” as synonymous, the Mexican FFP dilutes the disruptive spirit of intersectionality that accounts for multidimensional identities beyond binary gender categories.
Without clear implementation guidelines and evaluation criteria, Mexican officials have struggled to navigate the contradictions within the government. The most notorious is the lack of support from the president himself who, according to Mexico’s Constitution, is responsible for defining foreign policy objectives. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is openly hostile towards the feminist movement, and a recent leak indicates that the Secretary of Defense spies on feminist activists. Yet, diplomats continue to uphold feminist principles in multilateral forums. The president’s hostility and the mismatch between secretariats obstructs necessary dialogue with feminist civil society and blocks the chances of effective policy accountability.
The Mexican experience highlights the challenges of implementing FFPs in Latin America.
First, it is clear that FFP is not as boundary-pushing as its supporters suggest. It is limited by the lack of accountability mechanisms, broad political support and budget constraints. As a result, FFP is often insufficient to drive change on critical issues. Yet, feminism in the region, as Claudia Korol puts it, “is a rebellious movement in which the plural and diverse bodies and the different struggles seek their place, and demand to be named.” In other words, feminism is in tension with the circles of institutionalized, disciplined and ordered practices, such as government-led foreign policies.
In countries with rampant economic inequality and high rates of gender violence against women, feminist principled policies are sorely needed. Due to institutional resistance, however, policy implementation is far from guaranteed. The design and implementation of foreign policies in the region have historically been a space for male elites and, as the example of Mexico illustrates, the FFP has been insufficient to break this inertia. In the words of feminist scholar Angela Davis, “if standards for feminism are created by those who have already ascended economic hierarchies and are attempting to make the last climb to the top, how is this relevant to women who are at the very bottom?”
After recent elections in Chile and Colombia, leaders are now developing their foreign policies and both countries have declared their interest in adopting an FFP. As consultations develop in Bogotá and Santiago, it is worth remembering that simply labeling a foreign policy as feminist without implementing policies that account for gender perspectives or advance women’s rights creates an illusion of change, while keeping systems of oppression intact and further setting back gender justice.
Genuine efforts to advance gender justice ought to reimagine traditional international relations and diplomacy. As I have argued elsewhere, this can be achieved by more fully considering local dynamics and actors in developing foreign policies. Feminist civil society has been at the forefront of driving successful changes in domestic policies—and we ought to incorporate their strategies and insights into foreign policy development.
I’ve noticed that so many of us are incredibly focused on getting stuff done. Productivity systems and tools, anxiety about being behind on all the things we have to do, a complete focus on all the stuff to do, at the exclusion of all else …
But here’s the thing: if you ever get really really good at executing and getting stuff done … you realize that it’s an empty, meaningless game. I’m a testimony to that — I’m very good at getting things done. And I can absolutely crush my task list for months on end. And at the end of all of that, I still don’t feel much more satisfied.
There’s some satisfaction in getting a bunch of things done, but that’s not what really drives us. What drives us is fear — fear of what will happen if we fall too far behind, if we drop all the balls we have in the air, if we can’t get a sense of self-worth through accomplishment. Our fear is really about what it will mean about ourselves if we don’t get stuff done.
That fear never goes away, no matter how much you get done. It’s like a sex addict who has a ton of sex, and still doesn’t feel fulfilled, and has to go get more. We’re addicts who are never fulfilled.
What would happen if we decided not to play that game? If we could set aside for a moment the fears that drive us, the hope that we’ll ever finish everything, the hope that we’ll somehow get a feeling of being good enough if we are good at getting things done?
What’s beyond all of that?
I don’t know the answer, but here’s what I’m finding:
Those are a few observations I’ve found in the space beyond getting stuff done. What might you find there?
The post Beyond Getting Stuff Done appeared first on zen habits.
By Leo Babauta
I’ve noticed that most people (myself often included) make complicated task and organizational systems. Today I’d like to talk about why and how to simplify that.
Task systems that are overcomplicated require a lot of overhead work — if you have to spend a lot of time organizing and going through your system, you’re spending time on the system that could be spend doing something more meaningful.
Having better productivity systems doesn’t make us more productive. Actually being able to do the hard stuff isn’t down to the system — it’s down to your ability to face uncertainty and resistance. And that’s something you can train in — but it won’t be found in a productivity system.
Having better organizational or note-taking systems doesn’t make us more organized. It is busywork to distract us. Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Why do we spend so much time figuring out our systems and making them so complicated? It’s simply fear. We’re overwhelmed and afraid we can’t handle it all. We think if we get a better system it’ll be the answer we need to start crushing things. We are afraid of dropping one of the many balls we have in the air. It’s simply fear, and everyone has it.
What I’m going to share here is a simple system — it’s not meant to be the perfect system, or the one you have to adopt to start crushing things. It’s meant to be a simple model that can show how simple things can be.
But perhaps more important is the mental view of tasks that underlies this simple system. I’ll talk about that as well. And then I’ll get to the most common obstacles or objections to this kind of simplicity.
Here’s the system: make a single list of your tasks. One List. Put everything you have to do here. Each day, pick some things from that One List to focus on.
That’s the system.
Go through your emails, and for each one that’s been sitting there, add a task to the One List. Star the email and archive it so it’s out of your inbox. Repeat until your inbox is empty. Do the same with messages you haven’t responded to because they contain a task or decision. Emails and message apps aren’t meant to store your tasks.
Maybe you have a bunch of things on your computer desktop. Go through those and put them on the One List.
Go through your Ten Thousand Browser Tabs and take the tasks each one represents, put it on your One List, and bookmark and close the tab.
OK, now you have One List. Things should be a lot simpler (some possible additions are below in the last section). There’s a good chance you’re feeling overwhelmed. That means we need to talk about the underlying mental model of this One List simple system.
The reason why a long list is overwhelming is because underneath the task list is a view: 1) we think this is a list that we need to finish; and 2) we fear that if we can’t finish it or at least stay on top of it, we will be inadequate in some way. We base our self-worth and safety on whether we can finish this list … but it’s too long to finish! In fact, a task list will never be done, even when you die.
This is an unhelpful mental model that produces stress and overwhelm.
Instead, I propose a different view: Tasks are options that we can use as we create the art of our lives.
Imagine you have a big palette of paints, and you get to use them to paint your art on a canvas. You don’t feel like you need to finish all the paints on the palette, right? It’s not a matter of getting them all done so you can avoid feeling inadequate.
Instead, the paints are your supplies for making art. They’re things you can dip your brush into, to create the art of your life.
You can have fun with your art. You can fully express yourself and the deepest truth of yourself. It’s a whole different game.
Just having One List is perhaps too simple for people, so let’s take a look at some possible modifications based on questions you might have …
Q: The list is too long, how do I find focus?
A: Have a shorter Today list. Pick things from the One List and put it on the Today list. Do that at the end of each day for tomorrow, so you can start your day with a plan already done.
Q: How do I choose what to focus on each day?
A: If you’re struggling to decide what to put on your Today list … you might be struggling with uncertainty. This can cause a lot of people to get stuck, because if you don’t know … then what? I would encourage you to stay for a minute in this stuckness, in the “I don’t know,” in the uncertainty. The answers will come to you if you sit in the not knowing for a minute or two. It’s good to create a daily ritual where you create your Today list for the next day … and in that ritual, allow yourself to sit for a moment to get some clarity on what to add to the list. And as you create the list … allow it to be like creating art out of your life!
Q: I never end up finishing my Today list, what can I do?
A: If you are creating art and you don’t finish it … what do you do? You might continue to work on it tomorrow. Or abandon it and start afresh! Or incorporate some of it in your next art piece. But not finishing it isn’t a problem. It’s just a part of the process.
Q: What about meetings, calls, appointments?
A: I like to put those on a calendar instead of a task list. So the calendar can be a part of the simple system. I check my calendar the evening before to see what I have coming up, and again in the morning.
Q: What if I want to have all my financial tasks in one place, all my calls in another, all my errands in another, etc etc?
A: That’s fine! One List is just an example. If you want to have One List for your main work tasks, but another list for your finances and administrative tasks that you do on certain days, go for it. Just keep it fairly simple.
Q: What if I find myself dropping tasks and feeling disorganized?
A: If you were painting a huge canvas, and you kept forgetting to paint certain parts of it … what would you do? Probably you’d set aside some time to paint those parts, if they’re important. Sometimes they’re not important, so you don’t set aside the time. So you can decide how to work with that. The bigger problem is the feeling of being disorganized. This is simply a feeling. It’s a feeling of chaos, of change, of not having everything in perfect order. Can you create art with that feeling?
The post We Overcomplicate Our Task Systems appeared first on zen habits.
Yeshiva University has said it is a religious institution, not an educational institution. But that raises questions about whether it can receive public funds designated for schools.
Staff in ITS worked with the Office of General Counsel to plan, build, and test enhancements to the system supporting the annual conflict disclosure compliance for this academic year. These improvements address suggestions stemming from a recent audit and provide functionality found in commercial conflict of interest systems available in the market. For instance, the most important and useful feature was the ability for the form to adjust questions based on the previous question’s response. The new functionality and operational improvements help streamline the process for the community submitting the form, as well as for the form’s administrators.
Business stakeholders and IT staff across the London, Boston, and Oakland campuses collaborated on an upgrade that simplifies guest access to wireless services at all campus locations. Teams extended the access to allow guests up to 30 days of wireless service at a time. Previously, guests were required to create a new access code every day to connect to the campus network. This upgrade significantly eases the burden on guests, as well as their campus hosts, and allows for more effective collaboration and productivity.
Approximately 265 ITS staff members received incident management training over the course of three days and six live sessions in late February, fulfilling an audit requirement and providing staff with additional knowledge, tools, and resources for properly handling, prioritizing, and communicating IT incidents according to institutional processes. Using multiple baseline key performance metrics for comparison, the training is expected to help improve operational efficiencies, reduce the number and length of service disruptions, and increase overall customer satisfaction.
The Office of the Provost and ITS are partnering to develop and launch a new website and companion digital tools to support the new EXP makerspace and reflect the uniqueness and importance of the physical location set to open for fall 2023. The new website, which will be hosted on the university’s modern web hosting service, will be focused on attracting students to use the space while highlighting promotional elements aimed at industry partners. In addition to the website, the university’s enterprise service management tool, ServiceNow, along with related digital tools, will be leveraged to provide users of the makerspace convenient and self-service access to online training to become certified on makerspace tools and reserve those tools and spaces.
As part of an ongoing effort to modernize university website systems and services, the Bachelors-Completion website was recently successfully migrated from Northeastern’s aging on-premises server environment to the institution’s modern, cloud-based enterprise web hosting service. This move helps increase the reliability and security of a highly-visible, revenue-driving website that sees more than one million visitors a year, while also decreasing site loading time by 60%—ultimately creating a better user experience and higher-SEO value. The Bachelors-Completion website joins the more than 500 websites that have been migrated off the university’s legacy web servers, enabling a 54% reduction in on-premises web servers to-date, and helping the university reduce technical debt, risk, and cost.
In collaboration with business units throughout the university, including Public Safety, IT Services is establishing a more robust Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Program. A formalized BCDR Program helps ensure business operational resumption after an outage or disruption, mitigates risk of data loss, and protects the university against reputational damages. This essential program will support the university’s expanded campus footprint and global reach to ensure continuity of critical products, services, and applications when major natural or human-caused disruptive events occur.
Leveraging the Outsystems enterprise platform, IT teams developed and delivered an updated voting form for the Student Government Association’s annual vote. The project team collaborated with SGA representatives to capture business requests and updates, demo the changes, and release the final product so that it is available for fair voting for student government representatives. New functionality added this year include added logic for no confidence voting, so that if only one candidate is standing for election, a no confidence message is displayed at the start of the candidate slates. Logic was also added to disable other voting options when a candidate is written in.
IT teams supported the ongoing expansion of the global campus in Seattle with a complete data communications buildout at 225 Terry Ave., 2nd floor. This work provides state of the art wireless connectivity with increased Wi-Fi speed, four new Global Learning Spaces classrooms, and seven additional breakout spaces. As a result, the infrastructure now supports up to 20 additional students per class and hundreds more personal devices on the wireless network.
An initiative is underway to automate the request process and provisioning of high-performance computing (HPC) resources for classroom use, which benefits around 1,000 students each year who need to use HPC resources as a part of their coursework. The provisioning of user access, groups, and storage are all being automated. At the same time, the request form is being updated, with the help of a Canvas integration recently developed by ITS, to further improve and simplify the experience for professors, instructors, and teaching faculty requesting resources. Additionally, HPC usage is being standardized and compute environments are being tailored for courses.
According to demographic data collected in recognition of March as Women’s History Month, women employees in ITS account for over 32% of the division’s full-time workforce. This percentage is up from 25% in 2018 and is above the IT industry average of 26%, as reported by Gartner, the respected business and technology research firm. This trend in ITS aligns with Northeastern’s commitment to building a diverse and inclusive university community, and is part of ITS’ ongoing efforts to amplify voices and initiatives that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion as best practice.
In a joint effort between IT Services and Human Resources, the Employee Hub was formally introduced to Northeastern employees on Monday, March 27 as the new digital home base for faculty and staff. An expansion of the Student Hub that launched in 2020, the Employee Hub provides quicker, easier access to many of the productivity tools and other resources that employees need to navigate day-to-day university and work life most effectively. Daily site visits to the Employee Hub, which replaces and builds upon the myNortheastern employee portal that will retire as of June 1, 2023, were up three times in the days immediately following the announcement.
The completion of all pre-requisite upgrades in Banner marked a significant milestone in the project to migrate Student Financial Services off of the current financial aid system, Powerfaids. This milestone puts the university one step closer to the expected transition to Banner Financial Aid starting with the incoming class of students this fall 2023. This work will result in a more stable and integrated platform for this critical university function, which awards approximately $1B in financial aid each year.
By Leo Babauta
I’ve noticed that most of us let ourselves be driven by our resistance to something difficult, scary, unknown.
We take on a hard task — creating something, for example — and then we feel some kind of resistance. Or maybe it feels like overwhelm. It’s simply uncertainty, and fear of the unknown.
This is quite normal, to feel uncertainty, fear, resistance, overwhelm. Then we let it drive our actions, letting the fear be in the drivers seat. That’s pretty normal too, and very understandable.
What would it be like if we didn’t need ot let this resistance drive us?
What if we could let ourselves stay in the uncertainty, feel the resistance … and then transform it into creativity and action?
Let’s take a look at the two parts of that.
So the first thing is you have to set aside some space for whatever you’re resisting. Warning: this step can be a doozy. We somehow always find ourselves too busy to make time for the thing we’re resisting. We’re so busy! We don’t have time for that scary thing! Funny how that works.
So if you notice that you never have time for it … make the time. Set aside some time. Maybe 15 minutes in the morning, maybe 30. Cut out some Netflix, Youtube, or social media time, and make time for this. Put it on the calendar, and commit yourself fully.
OK, let’s say you do that … now you find yourself in that block of time, and all of a sudden, everything else seems so much more urgent! Your emails are suddenly irresistible. Your kitchen magically needs some cleaning.
Stay here, don’t abandon the task. Your resistance wants to drive you away, but you’re going to try something different. An act of leadership rather than letting life happen to you.
Sit still for a minute. Let yourself feel the resistance. Not the thoughts about how you can’t do this, or how you should do it later … but the sensation of resistance in your body. The sensation of overwhelm and fear and uncertainty. It’s simply a sensation, an experience.
Be with it. If it feels like more than you can handle, stay a few moments longer. It’s a training, to be able to stay mindfully present with the feeling of resistance.
With practice, you learn that it’s not a big deal. You can be with it, with non-judgment, gentleness, even love.
Once you’ve done that, there’s another incredible way to work with this energy in your body. It feels like something you don’t want … but actually, it’s just energy.
This is the energy of life. Of being human. Of fear and meaning. Of learning and creating. Of discovering something new. Of connecting and falling in love.
This energy is not something to expel from your life, but rather to use in your creation. What can you create in this place of resistance, in the unknown? Can you let yourself stay curious, and explore? What might emerge, if you stay open here?
From this place, your deepest creation will be uncovered. You begin to realize that you are not the inventor of your creations but the discoverer of them. You begin to get excited about what might be unearthed in the unknown.
This is magic. What are you waiting for?
The post Creating When You Feel Resistance appeared first on zen habits.
The Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage (“The World Heritage Convention”) entered into force in 1975. The world heritage regime, in effect, produces the shared heritage of humanity. States use their right, as set by the Convention, to nominate sites within their borders; the files accompanying the nomination make the case for the site’s “outstanding universal value.” The relevant Advisory Body—for cultural heritage sites, the International Council of Museums and Sites (ICOMOS)— evaluates the site and its file. The intergovernmental World Heritage Committee, composed of twenty-one rotating members, discusses the site, the file, and the ICOMOS recommendation during its annual meeting; it makes the final decision on additions to the World Heritage List.
The Convention requires the World Heritage Committee to meet annually to take the regime’s implementing decisions. The Russian Federation was supposed to host last year’s meeting during June. But Russia’s war on Ukraine led to strong pressures for a change in location; in the end, the session was indefinitely postponed.
In October 2022, Ukrainian President Zelensky officially nominated the Historic Centre of Odesa for inscription on the World Heritage List. He did so under the emergency procedure for sites facing immediate danger. Thus, if the nomination succeeded Odesa would also be placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger, which designates sites “for which major operations are necessary and for which assistance has been requested under the Convention.”
To fulfill its obligations under the Convention, the Committee held an extraordinary session at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters in December 2022. During this meeting, the Committee decided to convene a second extraordinary session in January 2023.
The agenda for the January 2023 meeting had three substantive items; the third item read “any other matter.” Italy, Belgium, Japan, Greece and Bulgaria advanced Odesa’s nomination by placing the “evaluation of nominations to be processed on an emergency basis” under that third item.
The Russian Federation responded with a series of procedural moves aimed at preventing the nomination from moving forward. The debate grew heated enough for the Saudi Arabian chair of the meeting to make multiple calls for order and civility.
The Russian objection focused on the rushed nature of the nomination.
The vote to adopt the meeting agenda was unprecedented in the regime’s history. It had to be repeated at each step of Odesa’s consideration for world heritage designation. During each vote, thirteen or fourteen Committee Members abstained. These abstentions by Asian and African Delegations reflect their broader refusal to take part in some of the Western-liberal actions on the Ukrainian conflict. The Russian Federation was the only Committee Member that voted in favor of its own proposals. Proposals by the countries sponsoring Odesa’s nomination got between five to seven votes. Since the required majority is calculated by members present and voting, supporters of Odesa’s inscription carried the day.
Odesa’s nomination took place via an emergency process. The Palestinian Authority regularly uses this process in an effort to get sites in its territory added to the List (two of its world heritage sites are currently on the Danger List). Israel always objects, arguing that those sites face no real danger. The Russian objection was different; it focused on the rushed nature of the nomination. Its Delegation expressed regret at not having been afforded the time to “generously share[] the documents from our archives including the decree by the Empress and the regional plans and the maps.”
In response, the Committee Members, the Secretariat and ICOMOS argued that regular timelines and procedures are not applicable to emergency nominations. Multiple speakers emphasized that what mattered were the site’s “outstanding universal value” and the emergency it faced—referred to as “reasons we all know” or “Russia’s war of aggression.”
On 25 January 2023, UNESCO’s intergovernmental World Heritage Committee added the Historic Centre of Odesa (Ukraine) to the World Heritage List. Inclusion on the World Heritage List means that Odesa has “outstanding universal value.” It is, therefore, part of the shared heritage of humanity.
But why did Ukraine nominate Odesa in the first place?
Russia’s invasion aimed to capture Odesa, and it seems likely that Moscow intended to ultimately annex the city. By successfully nominating Odesa, Kyiv reinforced international acknowledgement of its sovereignty over the city.
Article 3 of the World Heritage Convention states that sites can (only) be nominated by states on whose territory they are located. Therefore, Ukraine’s nomination of Odesa is an act of claiming sovereignty over the territory on which the city is located.
Further, sites are placed on the World Heritage List under the name of the nominating country and with specific boundaries. Thus, with its addition to the List, Odesa has been internationally registered as a Ukrainian (world heritage) site.
Ukraine’s nomination of Odesa is an act of claiming sovereignty over the city
To be clear, the Convention is not only a sovereignty-boosting mechanism. When placing sites on the List, states forfeit certain sovereign prerogatives and take on internationally sourced conservation and presentation requirements. However, in cases of contested sovereignty, the regime presents states with the opportunity to internationally register debated boundaries under their name.
The “Old City of Jerusalem and its Walls” nomination by Jordan in 1978 gave rise to the regime’s first debates on this matter. Ultimately, the site was inscribed in an extraordinary session. While Israel acceded to the Convention in 1999 and Palestine was admitted to UNESCO in 2011, the Old City of Jerusalem remains the only world heritage site not listed under a country.
Other contested boundary sites have since been nominated. The best-known case is Cambodia’s 2008 nomination of the Preah Vihear, amidst objections by Thailand. The inscription led to clashes along the disputed Thai-Cambodian border where the temple sits.
The Palestinian delegation’s remarks after the inscription of Hebron’s Old Town (2017) similarly attests to the dynamics of claiming and extending sovereignty via world heritage: “Palestine, as a sovereign state, even though it is occupied, has exercised its right to inscribe on the World Heritage List a city that is on its territory. It should be a trivial statement that people are masters of their own territory.”
In these cases, the Secretariat or the Advisory Body invokes Article 11 of the Convention. This article states that inscriptions do not prejudice contested sovereignty claims. And yet, as the examples show, states use the regime to internationally register contested territories under their name, and reinforce their sovereignty.
The terms of the nomination itself reinforced Kyiv’s efforts to associate Ukraine with Europe and the liberal international order.
Designating sites as world heritage involves describing their “universal value.” The nomination files, evaluations, and Committee discussions become exercises in narrative representation.
The nomination file describes historic Odesa as universally valuable as “a fragment of Late Renaissance Western European civilization,” a vibrant trade port, and a melting pot of different ethnic groups. Similarly, in his speech after the site’s addition to the List, the Ukrainian representative described Odesa as a multinational heritage “created by Greeks, French, Italians, Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars and other nationalities.”
As critical scholars have long noted, heritage is never simply about the past. Heritage is made from the present and shaped by its concerns. Heritage-making traces cultural histories of contemporary political communities. It aims to project these communities to a future that follows from their past.
Bulgaria and Greece emphasized close ties to multicultural Odesa
The nomination represents Odesa, and Ukraine more broadly, as part of past and present European culture. Further, it attaches the site and the country to valued elements of the liberal international order, namely, free trade and multicultural tolerance. Values of a virtuous cycle of trade and prosperity made possible by and fostering peaceful multiculturalism have been part of liberal-internationalism and integral to world heritage regime’s vision of humanity.
These threads repeat in the ICOMOS evaluation. The Advisory Body described Odesa as a city located on the Ukrainian shores of the Black Sea, which prospered in the 19th century as a result of liberal trade policies and the presence of diverse communities. Odesa was deemed universally valuable as a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, cosmopolitan, historical city.
During the discussion of the site, the sponsoring countries referred to ICOMOS’s positive evaluation but focused on the closure of the debate to prevent further objections by the Russian Federation. After the inscription, however, Bulgaria and Greece took the floor to emphasize their countries’ close ties to multicultural and tolerant Odesa.
These interventions recognize and affirm the insertion of Odesa and Ukraine into structures of international, liberal values.
Such insertion is strengthened by the continued reference to the site as Ukrainian. For example, speaking on behalf of the Friends of Ukraine, the United Kingdom emphasized Odesa’s importance for “Ukraine’s rich history” as well as “global world heritage.” As a result, Odesa remains at once Ukrainian and becomes internationally recognized as part of a European and liberal-international world.
Moreover, these representations move Odesa and Ukraine away from Russia’s narrative frames.
Evidencing those frames, the Russian Federation’s Delegate remarked that “it would not be an exaggeration to say that for every Russian, the beautiful city of Odesa holds a special place in history and culture.” The Delegation elaborated on the Russian attachment to Odesa as “the so-called southern Palmyra, a hero city of the great patriotic war.” These remarks represent Odesa as belonging to Soviet history instead of the European Renaissance. The Delegation’s remarks, quoted earlier, on the Russian Federation’s willingness to open its archives and share the Empress’s decree further narrates Odesa as part of Russian imperial history.
A second member of the Delegation objected to the nomination’s “omission of the role of Russian culture and language in the development of Odesa.” He quoted from a 19th century traveler who “for objective reasons does not mention Ukrainians, due to the fact that there was no distinct Ukrainian nation group in these centuries.” Therefore, the Delegate contended, it is incorrect to describe Odesa as a Ukrainian city in the 18th-19th centuries.
If heritage is never simply about the past, then these remarks are not only about prior centuries. If heritage-making narrates histories of contemporary political communities with an eye to the future, then these se representations locate Ukraine’s present and future as intertwined with Russia.
After the designation of Odesa as world heritage, UNESCO’s Director-General Audrey Azoulay wrote that it is “thus placed under the reinforced protection of the international community. While the war continues, this inscription embodies our collective determination to ensure that this city… is preserved from further destruction.”
As the United Kingdom recalled in its speech, the Convention posits that the loss of world heritage sites amounts to the “harmful impoverishment of all nations of the world.” Crucially, Article 6 of the Convention commits states “not to take any deliberate measures that might directly or indirectly damage the cultural and natural heritage on the territory of another State Party.”
One can recall here the recent and well-publicized destructions of Timbuktu and Palmyra world heritage sites. Here, the world heritage designation inserted the two sites into moral and legal frameworks of international protection. International news media used world-heritage narratives to draw attention to the value of the sites and the loss at stake. The International Criminal Court charged an Ansar Dine member with war crimes for Timbuktu’s destruction.
In fact, the Russian Federation has made use of this moral universe in the past. To mark its contribution to the military campaign that took Palmyra back from ISIS, Russia organized a classical music concert in the ancient amphitheater. The concert positioned Russia as standing on the side of civilization against barbarity. In contrast to the opprobrium that the Russian Federation has received for its actions in the Syrian war, the liberation of Palmyra gave rise to conversations between UNESCO and Vladimir Putin on how to best protect and preserve the site.
And now, the world heritage designation of Odesa places the Russian Federation on the other side of this moral-legal universe.
[i] The recordings of the extraordinary meeting are available for public access. All quotations from the meeting are transcriptions by the author and they are linked to the relevant recording.
Enlarge / WHO's COVID-19 technical lead, Maria Van Kerkhove, looks on during a press conference at the World Health Organization's headquarters in Geneva, on December 14, 2022. (credit: Getty | FABRICE COFFRINI)
While the World Health Organization says it's continuing to urge China to share data and cooperate with investigations into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the United Nations' health agency is calling out another country for lack of transparency—the United States.
WHO officials on Friday said that the US has not shared reports or data from federal agencies that have assessed how the COVID-19 pandemic began. That includes the latest report by the Department of Energy, which determined with "low confidence" that the pandemic likely began due to a laboratory accident.
"As of right now, we don't have access to those reports or the data that is underlying how those reports were generated," Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO's technical lead on COVID-19, said in a press briefing Friday. "Again, we reiterate, that any agency that has information on this, it remains vital that that information is shared so that scientific debate, that this discussion, can move forward. Without that, we are not able to move forward in our understanding."
Part three of a three-part series aims to discuss the topic of advancing accessibility within scholarly communication with the focus of digital accessibility.
The post Guest Post — Advancing Accessibility in Scholarly Publishing: Recommendations for Digital Accessibility Best Practices appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Part two of a three-part series aims to discuss the topic of advancing accessibility within scholarly communication with the focus of digital accessibility.
The post Guest Post — Advancing Accessibility in Scholarly Publishing: Building Support appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Part one of a three-part series aims to discuss the topic of advancing accessibility within scholarly communication with the focus of digital accessibility.
The post Guest Post — Advancing Accessibility in Scholarly Publishing: Fostering Empathy appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
The university’s Discovery Cluster high-performance research storage systems, located at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC), have been expanded in capacity, and updated to increase system performance. These updates enable the more than 6,000 research faculty and students throughout the global university network who use MGHPCC to work with larger data sets while reducing the amount of time they need to run simulations. MGHPCC is an intercollegiate high-performance computing facility located in Holyoke, Massachusetts, supported as a joint venture of Boston University, Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, and the University of Massachusetts system.
As part of ongoing work to support further integration of the Oakland campus with the global campus system, Northeastern IT teams in Oakland and Boston collaborated to migrate the legacy Mills housing data from a third-party vendor to Northeastern’s system. This transition provides Northeastern’s enterprise systems and housing teams with full control of this service, further enabling the university to move quickly as it coordinates enrollment growth.
The Mills email transition was completed when the final step of moving the @mills.edu mail domain to @northeastern.edu was done on January 31. Since the merger was finalized last summer, data from no fewer than 833 @mills.edu individual and shared Gmail accounts were migrated to Northeastern M365 accounts, while continuing to route all mail sent to those addresses to their new @northeastern.edu mailboxes. As a result, legacy Mills College employees and students are now fully integrated with Northeastern’s unified communication and collaboration platforms, allowing for more seamless messaging, meeting, and file-sharing with members of the university community around the global campus network.
ITS is moving forward with a Microsoft partner to help the university provide security responses across all global campuses on a 24/7/365 basis. Cyberattacks continue to increase around the world, making it more important than ever for Northeastern to ensure that its services, data, and people are protected around the clock. As Northeastern continues to expand globally, utilizing an outsourced security operations center will help the institution scale its security program. As a result, the university can continue to repel attackers and help keep the community safe from cyber threats.
The latest update to the Student Hub moves up the date by which admitted student data is brought into in the Hub. As a result, admitted students will now have earlier and expanded access to useful information and resources, beginning as soon as this data becomes available in related systems of record. Previously, admitted students did not receive the full Student Hub experience until the week before they started classes. Admitted students’ basic data, like their college and major, will now be displayed on the Me profile and searchable on the Discover page to foster connections, and the students will also be able to view their course registrations, billing statements, and more, directly through the Hub and well in advance of the start of classes. While improving the experience for admitted students, it is also expected this update will reduce the amount of support calls made to the university ahead of each new academic semester.
As follow-up to a 2019 assessment, the university has engaged Gartner, a leading global technology research and consulting firm, to refresh and expand the institution’s digital application assessment and roadmap. The effort will help Northeastern better manage risk while enabling improved prioritization and investment across the global university. Technical staff and business partners and leadership throughout the university will be included in the assessment process through surveys, interviews, and workshops.
Academic Technologies has been working with the Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning with Research to discuss and explore the recent technological advancements in generative AI, such as ChatGPT, and their impacts on education. Focus has been not just on the potential threats of this technology, but also the opportunities for providing a robot-proof education. Teams from Academic Technologies, CATLR, and other areas around the university co-wrote a whitepaper and presented in an educator exchange, “The Landscape of AI and ChatGPT: What is it and how can we work with it?” on Feb. 13. AT and CATLR will continue to support broad discussions about this new technology and create resources that help faculty to re-think assignment design to support more authentic learning and preparation for their future careers.
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