OLDaily

Elevating Equity: The Real Story of Diversity and Inclusion
Josh Bersin, 2021/02/18

This is quite a good report based on a reasonably large survey on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace. If you want to 'pay' for your copy with personal information, click on the title link. Otherwise, it can be accessed directly from AWS (52 page PDF). The main takeaway, I would say, is this: "DEI is not a training problem – it’s a strategy and culture problem." Yes, training may play a role, but training in a barren field will produce limited and even negative results. There has to be an organizational commitment, led from the top, that permeates all business functions, and for with managers are held accountable. After you've done all that, you targeted specific training - not just DEI generally, but things like 'listening to employees' and 'inclusive practices in HR'.

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You Are Not a “Math Person”
Tim Stahmer, Assorted Stuff, 2021/02/18

My math skills advanced almost to the top of the graph (I still have 'learning advanced calculus' in my list of unfinished business to attend to) but I can say that there's a lot of truth to this cartoon (especially if you extend 'spreadsheets' to include vectors and matrices). Anyhow, the main point of this article is to stress that being a 'math person' depends a lot more on how you were taught (and, I would add, how much you practiced and internalized math) than genes or inheritance. "Before blaming yourself or the genetic make-up of your family for not excelling at math, take a closer look at the disconnect between the subject as you learned it in school and how it’s used in your life."

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Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) v1.0 Announced
Eran Stiller, InfoQ, 2021/02/18

The relentless pace of developments in aopplication environments continues. This article describes the production release of Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr), first released by Microsoft in 2019 and now with software development kits (SDK) for Java.NET, Python, and Go available with JavaScript/Node.js, C++, Rust, and PHP coming soon. As the article notes, "Dapr hides the complexity of distributed systems by implementing the Sidecar pattern. With this pattern, Dapr loads a sidecar next to every microservice in the application. In turn, this sidecar exposes standard functionality over REST and gRPC protocols." Welp. Something else to learn.

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Remote Learning Isn’t Just for Kids
Kerry Hannon, New York Times, 2021/02/18

I would have thought this obvious, but the article is there to tell us that remote learning can be used by adults in the (home) workplace as well as by school children. But as Daniel Christian notes, the article also says "Adult education, however, is 'the Wild West' of education technology, according to Mr. Yoquinto. There are many outlets experimenting with ways to get a handle on the online adult education marketplace, including community colleges and universities, for-profit learning platforms, workshop providers and nonprofit organizations." It makes me wonder whether all this 'alternative learning' is analogous to 'alternative medicine' - a panacea for a nation without affordable healthcare. Something to think about.

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