Linknote — — 123 words

Society

Can everyone be excellent? — Alfie Kohn

A very good piece about why fears around grade inflation and the like are spurious. Even if everyone meets high standards, people continue to call for the standards to be made higher still. Moreover, people exhibit a damaging compulsion to rank.

But boy, do we love to rank. Worse, we create artificial scarcity such as awards — distinctions manufactured out of thin air specifically so that some cannot get them. Every contest involves the invention of a desired status where none existed before and none needs to exist. This creates an adversarial mentality that makes productive collaboration less likely, encourages gaming the system, and leads all concerned to focus not on meaningful improvement but on trying to outdo (and perhaps undermine) everyone else.

Linknote — — 179 words

Social science — Society

The one thing about your spouse’s personality that really affects your career — Andrew O’Connell — Harvard Business Review

Two pairs of sandals

It has been found that having a conscientious spouse helps lead to an increase in income, number of promotions and job satisfaction. Why?

> First, conscientious spouses handle a lot of household tasks, freeing employees to concentrate on work (“When you can depend on someone, it takes pressure off of you,” Solomon told me).

Or, put another way, if someone else is doing all the dirty work at home, it gives you the privilege to focus on your career.

I wonder if there’s research to say what the effect is if both people in a relationship share household duties equally. Hopefully if both partners are conscientious, both feel the benefits in their careers.

Support each other. Teamwork! 🐌🐢

> You can support your spouse in supporting you. If you depend on his or her reliability, diligence, and goal orientation, don’t take those traits for granted. Maybe you’ve been standing heroically at the bow for so long that you’ve forgotten how much effort it takes to row. So sit down and row for a while.

Linknote — — 138 words

Society — Technology

The privilege of free time in Open Source — Dries Buytaert

Caption: "Free time to contribute is a privilege."

Dries Buytaert makes a very good point here. Time is the scarcest resource we have. This is making open source a closed shop.

Today, I’ve come to understand that inequality makes it difficult for underrepresented groups to have the “free time” it takes to contribute to Open Source.

He suggests some ways open source communities could take action on this.

Overall, being kinder, more patient and more supportive to others could go a long way in welcoming more people to Open Source.

The culture of coding seems nasty generally. I’m not sure if it’s specifically a problem with open source as opposed to developers generally.

But I always found it odd how unwelcoming, patronising and generally unhelpful people in open source communities (such as WordPress support forums) can sometimes be. Sometimes it doesn’t seem very open at all.

Linknote — — 72 words

Human-centred approaches — Society — Technology

People won’t stop staring at their phones, so a Dutch town put traffic lights on the ground — Neha Thirani Bagri — Quartz

Experimental Dutch traffic crossing

An interesting experiment to place pedestrian crossing signals on the ground, “where everyone is already looking”. The Netherlands seems to be the place for experimental road safety design (see also: the squareabout).

This has got to be an improvement on the modern fad of placing pedestrian crossing signals at chest height to the side, where they simply get blocked by other people, rather than across the road where everyone can see it.

Note — — 225 words

Business — Personal — Society

Work:

It’s 10 years since Woolworths closed down. I worked there at the time. To this day, the whole experience is among the most surreal of my life.

At the time, I wrote a lengthy series of blog posts detailing my own story of the goings-on around the failure of one of Britain’s most iconic businesses.

Being on the shop floor while a British institution collapsed around me taught me a bit about business. But it taught me *a lot* about people. Enjoy this look back.

(These used to be linked to each other using a WordPress plugin, but these were lost during a migration — so here they all are.)

1. [Woolworths: The curiously British US-based company](https://doctorvee.co.uk/2009/01/06/woolworths-the-curiously-british-us-based-company/)
2. [Woolworths as it was known and loved, and neglected](https://doctorvee.co.uk/2009/01/07/woolworths-as-it-was-known-and-loved-and-neglected/)
3. [Woolworths: Childhood memories and adult gripes](https://doctorvee.co.uk/2009/01/08/woolworths-childhood-memories-and-adult-gripes/)
4. [It wasn’t just the credit crunch](https://doctorvee.co.uk/2009/01/10/it-wasnt-just-the-credit-crunch/)
5. [The blunder of Woolworths](https://doctorvee.co.uk/2009/01/11/the-blunder-of-woolworths/)
6. [Identity crisis](https://doctorvee.co.uk/2009/01/12/identity-crisis/)
7. [The beginning of the end](https://doctorvee.co.uk/2009/01/13/the-beginning-of-the-end/)
8. [The nasty side of human nature](https://doctorvee.co.uk/2009/01/14/the-nasty-side-of-human-nature/)
9. [Woolworths: Final thoughts and wrapping up](https://doctorvee.co.uk/2009/01/17/woolworths-final-thoughts-and-wrapping-up/)

For more on Woolworths 10 years on from its collapse, [check out Graham Soult’s excellent report](https://www.cannyinsights.com/2018/12/31/nine-out-of-ten-ex-woolworths-sites-remain-in-active-retail-use-a-decade-after-closure/).