bloggers-from-the-united-states

"As you get older, all those dumb clichés, they’re all true. You only have a certain amount of time left, and you should only spend it doing the things that you want to do."

"It's not painless – there's a lot of struggle with all the identity stuff you go through. But we were saying you can count on one hand people whose parents achieved at a very high level and whose children also achieved. So it definitely binds us and I think that's why we enjoy working together. Our heads aren't swelled about it."

"I’m really glad to be a part of that because I think that I represent so many — I hate to say it — marginalized identities: I am African American. I am a woman. I am a queer person. I am disabled. I’ve got a lot of these things going on that inform my daily life"

"There’s a privilege to being able to go to school and see someone standing at the front that looks like you. It’s not until you get the teacher who looks like you, who’s teaching a class on African American studies. That changed my life. I said, ‘What is this? I did not know any of this!’ It was the first time that I felt like I was learning something about where I came from that was not revolving around being subservient to someone else or less than someone else"

"I, as an older person need to be like, ‘All right, I’ll work with you on this.’ I’ve tried to pass this torch, you know, and be supportive, but we can’t just point fingers at them and be like, ‘Oh, they’re lazy. They don’t want to do anything"

"Well, white people already had that. So, what do they gain out of this? Black people are free to shop. But what do the white people get [that they didn't already have]"

"I noticed that students are more receptive to videos than they are to assigned readings and things like that. And so I’m trying to negotiate, ‘How do we make that happen?’ How do I let them know that this is still an ongoing thing: That 100 years ago, we were still talking about issues of racial discrimination, sexist discrimination. That this is not a new thing? … So, trying to bridge those gaps is a little bit difficult. And I think that there is a lot of apathy"

"The people who tend to call themselves allies are usually the people with privilege, who will not have a mutual benefit from whatever they're trying to help with"

"Happiness and joy don’t sell as well as suffering and crawling our ways up seemingly insurmountable hills. No, people are incredibly entertained by Black women’s suffering to the point of wishing ill upon us to see what the output will be"

"We are all the same people. Understand that the boat just went to different places. We originated in the same spots. We are all the same"

"The mutual benefit would be, 'Wow, now both black and white people won't be suspected of shoplifting"

"I have been really focused on this idea that I’m coming from a line of people who started this work, and I have to continue"

"The last thing I'm interested in is someone who is slapping a label on themselve as a way to be recognized as a good person"

"So any opportunity I have to be a part of a forum (to) engage people to celebrate and to amplify diverse voices and to hold on — in the face of all these attacks on (diversity, equity and inclusion), things like that — to the very simple idea that diversity makes us better, that’s always a good thing"

"No one wants to hear that we might be in a psychological state that weakens us or renders us unable to serve them; we must be strong at all times and no one wants to hear otherwise"

"I read “The Education of The Negro Prior To 1861” and I understood what Carter G. Woodson was talking about. The pain that I felt that it took me becoming an adult to first learn these things was traumatizing to me. And all I could think to myself was, ‘What about everyone else? They’re not studying themselves. What will they become?’ And that’s where we get stuck in a lot of things"

"We are challenging that system and so we have to conspire. We have to plot and plan the ways in which we can tear those systems down"

"This really makes sense because what we're doing is conspiring to shut down entire systems of oppression"

"What our ancestors and elders have been trying to do is make things better for each generation. But we equate better with proximity to whiteness and we have to stop doing that… Sometimes the consequence is a separation from cultural traditions and affinity… But cultural memory is strong. Even when you are displaced or removed or separated from each other, that memory is there"

"But when Black women sing, we seem to be given permission to perform pain for others to consume. People demand that Black women singers emote suffering and go so far as to call it their “best” music"

"For the teens that I interviewed, privacy isn’t necessarily something that they have; rather it is something they are actively and continuously trying to achieve in spite of structural or social barriers that make it difficult to do so. Achieving privacy requires more than simply having the levers to control information, access, or visibility. Instead, achieving privacy requires the ability to control the social situation by navigating complex contextual cues, technical affordances, and social dynamics. Achieving privacy is an ongoing process because social situations are never static."

"Privacy is not a static construct. It is not an inherent property of any particular information or setting. It is a process by which people seek to have control over a social situation by managing impressions, information flows, and context."

"When people become famous, they are often objectified, discussed, and ridiculed with little consideration for who they are as people. Fans and critics feel as though they have the right to comment on everything celebrities do with little regard to the costs that those in the crosshairs of attention will bear. The cost that celebrities pay for the supposed benefits of being rich and famous is ongoing scrutiny and a lack of privacy. Most people do not understand or appreciate the pressure that results from fame, even though public meltdowns—such as the night that Britney Spears shaved her head in front of numerous photographers—are highly publicized. The public’s obsession with obtaining information about the famous puts serious pressure on those people’s lives, as the paparazzi’s role in Princess Diana’s death so brutally reminds us.20 Few people have sympathy for the kinds of stress that gossip places on public figures who have high status and wealth. At a distance, famous people seem invulnerable"

"In 1995, psychiatrist Ivan Goldberg coined the term internet addiction disorder. He wrote a satirical essay about “people abandoning their family obligations to sit gazing into their computer monitor as they surfed the Internet.” Intending to parody society’s obsession with pathologizing everyday behaviors, he inadvertently advanced the idea. Goldberg responded critically when academics began discussing internet addiction as a legitimate disorder: “I don’t think Internet addiction disorder exists any more than tennis addictive disorder, bingo addictive disorder, and TV addictive disorder exist. People can overdo anything. To call it a disorder is an error."

"Teen "addiction" to social media is a new extension of typical human engagement. Their use of social media as their primary site of sociality is most often a byproduct of cultural dynamics that have nothing to do with technology, including parental restrictions and highly scheduled lives. Teens turn to, and are obsessed with whichever environment allows them to connect to friends. most teens aren't addicted to social media; if anything, they're addicted to each other."

"The things that make us safest from others make us least from ourselves."

"Listening to teens talk about social media addiction reveals an interest not in features of their computers, smartphones, or even particular social media sites but in each other."

"Just because teens can and do manipulate social media to attract attention and increase visibility does not mean that they are equally experienced at doing so or that they automatically have the skills to navigate what unfolds. It simply means that teens are generally more comfortable with—and tend to be less skeptical of—social media than adults. They don’t try to analyze how things are different because of technology; they simply try to relate to a public world in which technology is a given."

"In a world where information is easily available, strong personal networks and access to helpful people often matter more than access to the information itself."

"A central challenge in addressing the sexual victimization of children is that the public is not comfortable facing the harrowing reality that strangers are unlikely perpetrators. Most acts of sexual violence against children occur in their own homes by people that those children trust.27"

"A great deal of the fear and anxiety that surrounds young people’s use of social media stems from misunderstanding or dashed hopes.14 More often than not, what emerges out of people’s confusion takes the form of utopian and dystopian rhetoric."

"It’s easy to think of privacy and publicity as opposing concepts, and a lot of technology is built on the assumption that you have to choose to be private or public. Yet in practice, both privacy and publicity are blurred. Rather than eschewing privacy when they encounter public spaces, many teens are looking for new ways to achieve privacy within networked publics. As such, when teens develop innovative strategies to achieve privacy, they often reclaim power by doing so. Privacy doesn’t just depend on agency; being able to achieve privacy is an expression of agency"

"More often than not, what people put up online using social media is widely accessible because most systems are designed such that sharing with broader or more public audiences is the default. Many popular systems require users to take active steps to limit the visibility of any particular piece of shared content. This is quite different from physical spaces, where people must make a concerted effort to make content visible to sizable audiences.8 In networked publics, interactions are often public by default, private through effort"

"the introduction of social media does alter the landscape. It enables youth to create a cool space without physically transporting themselves anywhere. And because of a variety of social and cultural factors, social media has become an important public space where teens can gather and socialize broadly with peers in an informal way. Teens are looking for a place of their own to make sense of the world beyond their bedrooms"

"When adults jump to fear and isolationism as their solution to managing risk, they often undermine their credibility and erode teens’ trust in the information that adults offer."

"Building tech companies is about identifying problems, engineering solutions, and executing strategies that lead to different, scalable outcomes. What do I mean by scalable? Meaning the solution must be repeatable for the greatest number of customers without having to change small details."

"For me, the journey was Film, then Tech and Venture Capital, then back to Film."

"I went to school at Savannah College of Art and Design in 1999 to study film production. Then when I got out of college one of my first jobs was working on Tyler Perry’s first movie “Diary of Mad Black Woman.” I ended up working at his company for a few years. Then in 2008 I left the film industry to pursue tech, founding successful companies like Audigent"

"With FilmHedge I looked at Film and TV finance and asked myself a question: “If thousands of movies and TV shows are funded every year, why is the process of raising and closing money always so different for each of them?” That’s horribly inefficient. FilmHedge streamlines the process to make it more efficient."

"There are similarities though. Audigent at its core is a programmatic advertising company. They use innovative tech to improve the way online ads reach people, resulting in improved performance and engagement. Originally, Audigent was doing this in partnership with the three major record labels (Warner, Sony and Universal), which created a new revenue source for the music business. Revenue derived 100% from data as opposed to music, streaming, or touring."

"Wherever there is a struggle for social justice, Cheryl is there."

"Throughout history philosophers and mystics have sought a compact key to universal wisdom, a finite formula or text which, when known and understood, would provide the answer to every question. The Bible, the Koran, the mythical secret books of Hermes Trismegistus, and the medieval Jewish Cabala have been so regarded. Sources of universal wisdom are traditionally protected from casual use by being hard to find, hard to understand when found, and dangerous to use, tending to answer more and deeper questions than the user wishes to ask. Like God the esoteric book is simple yet undescribable, omniscient, and transforms all who know It. The use of classical texts to foretell mundane events is considered superstitious nowadays, yet, in another sense, science is in quest of its own Cabala, a concise set of natural laws which would explain all phenomena. In mathematics, where no set of axioms can hope to prove all true statements, the goal might be a concise axiomatization of all “interesting” true statements."

"Ω is in many senses a Cabalistic number. It can be known of, but not known, through human reason. To know it in detail, one would have to accept its un-computable digit sequence on faith, like words of a sacred text. It embodies an enormous amount of wisdom in a very small space, inasmuch as its first few thousand digits, which could be written on a small piece of paper, contain the answers to more mathematical questions than could be written down in the entire universe, including all interesting finitely-refutable conjectures. Its wisdom is useless precisely because it is universal: the only known way of extracting from Ω the solution to one halting problem, say the Fermat conjecture, is by embarking on a vast computation that would at the same time yield solutions to all other equally simply-stated halting problems, a computation far too large to be carried out in practice. Ironically, although Ω cannot be computed, it might accidentally be generated by a random process, e.g. a series of coin tosses, or an avalanche that left its digits spelled out in the pattern of boulders on a mountainside. The initial few digits of Ω are thus probably already recorded somewhere in the universe. Unfortunately, no mortal discoverer of this treasure could verify its authenticity or make practical use of it."

"Recently I attended a workshop on the study of complexity at which two MIT computer scientists, Tom Toffoli and Norman Margolus, demonstrated the operation of an and gate on a computer monitor. Also watching the show was Charles Bennett of IBM, an expert on the mathematical foundations of computation and complexity. I remarked to Bennett that what we were watching was an electronic computer simulating a cellular automaton simulating a computer. Bennett replied that these successive embeddings of computational logic reminded him of Russian dolls."

"Durant: It can get a little frustrating after you take an L but overall, you get another opportunity to right the ship tomorrow, and practice film, so I'm grateful any time I get to step on the court, you know, and trying to finish this off right. But yeah, after games, it gets a little frustrating and in the moment when we are having a bad stretch, yeah, it get a little frustrating. Reporter: Do you enjoy the game as much? Durant: Ay, come on now, shit. There is beauty in the struggle, you know. There is beauty in it. There is beauty in all the stuff, especially when you come out the other side of things and you realize that pressure and hard times made you better. So I think we can all pull from these experiences to get better and use them for the next game, but the worst thing we could do is feel sorry for ourselves, you know. Still gotta put our best foot forward and try to play the best ball the next day. If you don't play great ball that day, try to do it the day after that, until the season over...""

"The universe is a work in progress."

"Whatever gravity was, it must work, because he (Galileo) had the math to prove it."

"It is indeed like that, how often we are held by prejudice, so that we either do not admit what is before our eyes or bow as much as possible to a preconceived opinion because of the perverse wont of human nature. Nor do I except myself from that weakness."

"Once, when his wife suggested that he attend church on Sunday for the sake of the children, Hale answered, “My creed is truth, wherever it may lead, and I believe that no creed is finer than this (the 100-inch telescope).”"

"Trump's behavior may have been on the high end of the shitty male behavior spectrum, but it still falls within the parameters of what a lot of people are socialized to accept, especially when the bully is rich and powerful like Trump. He, like many men who behave the way he does, gets away with it because far too many people believe that being a bad-tempered thug is just what being a man is about."