April 29, 2013
Reverse discrimination is discrimination against members of a dominant or majority group or in favor of members of a minority or historically disadvantaged group. Groups may be defined in terms of race, gender, ethnicity, or other factors.
This discrimination may seek to redress social inequalities where minority groups have been denied access to the same privileges of the majority group. In such cases it is intended to remove discrimination that minority groups may already face. Reverse discrimination may also be used to highlight the discrimination inherent in affirmative action programs.
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April 21, 2013
A pizza saver is a device used to prevent the top of a food container, such as a pizza box or cake box, from collapsing in at the center and touching the food inside. A pizza saver is made of plastic and has three (sometimes four) legs. They are often white, and the common practice is to place one pizza saver in the center of the pizza before the box lid is closed for delivery.
The pizza saver is not re-used and is thrown away or recycled by the patron, although some people have found secondary uses for them such as egg holders when turned upside down.
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April 18, 2013
Michael Leavitt (b. 1977) is a visual artist based in Seattle, described as “the best caricature sculptor in the city.’ The ‘über-allround-cool-creator’ is most widely known for his ‘Art Army’ series of handmade action figures depicting visual artists, musicians, and entertainers. Through his company, Intuition Kitchen Productions, Leavitt is a ‘jack-of-all-trades’ responsible for a wide variety of conceptual art projects and performance artworks.
From a disinterest in convention, Leavitt proclaims, ‘I’d be afraid not to try other mediums.’ Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, Leavitt was influenced by the wood-craft and engineering of Native American, Scandinavian, and industrial manufacturing in the region. His parents practiced education, graphic design, and environmentalism by trade, formulating Leavitt’s early interests in both art and sociology.
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April 16, 2013
Failure is the state or condition of not meeting a desirable or intended objective, and may be viewed as the opposite of success. Product failure ranges from failure to sell the product to fracture of the product, in the worst cases leading to personal injury, the province of forensic engineering. Former IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson is attributed with saying ‘If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.’ ‘
Wired Magazine’ editor Kevin Kelly likewise explains that a great deal can be learned from things going unexpectedly, and that part of science’s success comes from keeping blunders ‘small, manageable, constant, and trackable.’ He uses the example of engineers and programmers who push systems to their limits, breaking them to learn about them. Kelly also warns against creating a culture (e.g. school system) that punishes failure harshly, because this inhibits a creative process, and risks teaching people not to communicate important failures with others (e.g. Null results).
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April 11, 2013
Fortune-telling is the practice of predicting information about a person’s life. The scope of fortune-telling is in principle identical with the practice of divination (‘to foresee, to be inspired by a god’).
The difference is that divination is the term used for predictions considered part of a religious ritual, invoking deities or spirits, while the term fortune-telling implies a less serious or formal setting, even one of popular culture, where belief in occult workings behind the prediction is less prominent than the concept of suggestion, spiritual or practical advisory or affirmation. Historically, fortune-telling grows out of folkloristic reception of Renaissance magic, specifically associated with Gypsies.
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April 9, 2013
In psychology-related slang, control freak is a derogatory term for a person who attempts to dictate how everything around them is done. The phrase was first used in the late 1960s — an era when great stress was laid on the principle of ‘doing one’s own thing’ and letting others do the same.
Control freaks are often perfectionists defending themselves against their own inner vulnerabilities in the belief that if they are not in total control they risk exposing themselves once more to childhood angst. Such persons manipulate and pressure others to change so as to avoid having to change themselves, and use power over others to escape an inner emptiness. When a control freak’s pattern is broken, ‘the Controller is left with a terrible feeling of powerlessness … But feeling their pain and fear brings them back to themselves.’
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April 9, 2013
Culinary name is the name of an ingredient when used in the kitchen for preparing food, as opposed to their names in agriculture or in scientific nomenclature. Some are used because they sounds more attractive than the real name, or because a cheaper ingredient can be linked with a more expensive one. The culinary name may also refer to a way of cooking or to a region, or using a particular ingredient.
Additionally, name given on a menu may be different from the culinary name. For example, from the 19th until the mid-20th century, many restaurant menus were written in French and not in the local language. Examples include veal (calf), calamari (squid), scampi (Italian-American name for shrimp), and sweetbreads (pancreas or thymus gland). Culinary names are especially common for fish and seafood, where multiple species are marketed under a single familiar name.
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April 8, 2013
A black bloc is a tactic for protests and marches where individuals wear black clothing, scarves, sunglasses, ski masks, motorcycle helmets with padding, or other face-concealing and face-protecting items. The clothing is used to conceal marchers’ identities, allow them to appear as one large unified mass, and promote solidarity.
The tactic was developed in the 1980s in the European autonomist movement’s protests against squatter evictions, nuclear power, and restrictions on abortion among other things. Black blocs gained broader media attention outside Europe during the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, when a black bloc damaged property of GAP, Starbucks, Old Navy, and other multinational retail locations in downtown Seattle.
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April 3, 2013
‘The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations’ is a 2006 book by Ori Brafman (author of the 2010 book ‘Click: The Magic of Instant Connections’) and Rod Beckstrom (President of ICANN); it is an exploration of the implications of the recent rise of decentralized organizations such as Wikipedia, Grokster and YouTube.
The book contrasts them to centralized organizations, such as Encyclopædia Britannica. The spider and starfish analogy refers to the contrasting biological nature of the respective organisms, starfish have a decentralized neural structure permitting regeneration, whereas spiders have in a hierarchical nervous system.
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April 3, 2013
A rag-and-bone man collects unwanted household items and sells them to merchants. Traditionally this was a task performed on foot, with the scavenged materials (which included rags, bones and various metals) kept in a small bag slung over the shoulder.
Some wealthier rag-and-bone men used a cart, sometimes pulled by horse. 19th-century rag-and-bone men typically lived in penury, surviving on the proceeds of what they collected each day. Conditions improved following the Second World War, but the trade declined during the latter half of the 20th century. Lately, however, due in part to the soaring price of scrap metal, rag-and-bone men can once again be seen at work.
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April 2, 2013
The Zabbaleen (Egyptian Arabic: ‘Garbage people’) are teenagers and adults who have served as Cairo’s informal garbage collectors for the past 70 to 80 years. They are also known as ‘Zarraba’ (‘pig-pen operators’).
Spread out among seven different settlements scattered in the Greater Cairo Urban Region, the Zabbaleen population is between 50,000 and 70,000. The largest settlement is Mokattam village, nicknamed ‘Garbage City,’ located at the foot of the Mokattam Mountains, next to Manshiyat Naser, a slum settlement on the outskirts of Cairo. The Zabbaleen community in Mokattam Village has a population of around 20,000 to 30,000, over 90 percent of which are Coptic Christians.
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April 2, 2013
Manshiyat Naser, also known as Garbage City, is a slum settlement at the base of Mokattam Hill on the outskirts of Cairo.
Its economy revolves around the collection and recycling of the city’s garbage. Although the area has streets, shops, and apartments as other areas of the city, it lacks infrastructure and often has no running water, sewage, or electricity.
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