Precariat

When the Bilderberg Group listed precariat as one of their ten items for discussion at their 2016 meeting, many outsiders (and nearly everybody on the planet is an outsider) would have reached for their electronic or physical dictionaries to look up the meaning of this word. I know I did.

Well it turns out that precariat is a portmanteau formed by merging precarious with proletariat. Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia article:

In sociology and economics, the precariat is a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, which is a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare. Unlike the proletariat class of industrial workers in the 20th century who lacked their own means of production and hence sold their labour to live, members of the Precariat are only partially involved in labour and must undertake extensive "unremunerated activities that are essential if they are to retain access to jobs and to decent earnings". Specifically, it is the condition of lack of job security, including intermittent employment or underemployment and the resultant precarious existence. The emergence of this class has been ascribed to the entrenchment of neoliberal capitalism.

 A recent article (June 8th 2016) in QUARTZ included this description:

The "precariat" is a term popularised by British economist Guy Standing, describing a growing class of people who feel insecure in their jobs, communities, and life in general. They are… 

… the perpetual part-timers, the minimum-wagers, the temporary foreign workers, the grey-market domestics paid in cash … the techno-impoverished whose piecemeal work has no office and no end, the seniors who struggle with dwindling benefits, the indigenous people who are kept outside, the single mothers without support, the cash labourers who have no savings, the generation for whom a pension and a retirement is neither available nor desired. 

This marginalised group—“alienated, anomic, anxious, and angry,” according to Standing—is fuelling the rise of populist politicians like Donald Trump in the US and similar rabble rousers in Europe and beyond. (Discussing this group alongside the middle class, which isn’t doing great either, is telling.) The resulting turmoil in politics, markets, and economics is a factor in nearly all of the Bilderberg meeting’s other agenda items.

The word isn't recognised by Blogger's spell checker but it is certain to become better known now that the global elite are discussing it and, by whatever name this category of people may be called, it is growing rapidly in size. Here is Amazon's review of Guy Standing's book:

Described by Noam Chomsky as 'a very important book', Guy Standing's The Precariat has achieved cult status as the first account of this emerging class of people, facing lives of insecurity, moving in and out of jobs that give little meaning to their lives. 

Guy Standing warns that the rapid growth of the precariat is producing instabilities in society. It is a dangerous class because it is internally divided, leading to the villainisation of migrants and other vulnerable groups. And, lacking agency, its members may be susceptible to the siren calls of political extremism. He argues for a new politics, in which redistribution and income security are reconfigured and in which the fears and aspirations of the precariat are made central to a progressive strategy. 

Since first publication of this book in 2011, the precariat has become an ever more significant global phenomenon, highly visible in the Occupy movement and in protest movements around the world. 

In a new preface Guy Standing discusses such developments - are they indicative of the emergence of a new collective spirit, or do they simply reveal the growing size and growing anger of this new class?

Native German Words That English Uses

Today I came across a German word, Gegenschein, that I'd not heard of before. It means "a faint, elliptical patch of light in the night sky that appears opposite the sun, being a reflection of sunlight by meteoric material in space". In German, the word Gegenschein means counterglow (gegen meaning against and Schein means light). It reminded me of other words rather more common German words that have found their way into English unchanged. Here are some that I remember:

• Schadenfreude: delight in another's misfortune (Schaden means harm and Freude means joy)
• Weltanschauung: a comprehensive view or personal philosophy of human life and the universe (Weltan means world and Anschauung means view)
• Zugzwang: a position in which one player can move only with loss or severe disadvantage (Zug means pull or tug, Zwang means force, compulsion)
• Weltschmerz: sadness or melancholy at the evils of the world; world-weariness (literally world pain)
• Zeitgeist: the spirit, attitude, or general outlook of a specific time or period, esp as it is reflected in literature, philosophy, etc. (Zeit means time and Geist means spirit)
• Wanderlust: a great desire to travel and rove about (literally wander desire)
• Ersatz: used as an adjective meaning "made in imitation of some natural or genuine product; artificial" from ersetzen to substitute. It should be noted that the German word has a neutral connotation, e.g. Ersatzrad simply means "spare wheel" (not an inferior one).
• Gestalt: a perceptual pattern or structure possessing qualities as a whole that cannot be described merely as a sum of its parts (from Old High German stellen to shape).
• Leitmotif: in music, a recurring short melodic phrase or theme used, especially in Wagnerian music dramas, to suggest a character, thing, etc.; an often repeated word, phrase, image, or theme in a literary work (from leitmotiv leading motif).

That's probably enough for now, although there are many more.

Pareto Chart

While working my way through a text book on Business Statistics using Excel, I came across reference to a Pareto chart and needed to do a little investigating to find out what it was. Here is the definition from Wikipedia:

A Pareto chart, named after Vilfredo Pareto, is a type of chart that contains both bars and a line graph, where individual values are represented in descending order by bars, and the cumulative total is represented by the line. 

The left vertical axis is the frequency of occurrence, but it can alternatively represent cost or another important unit of measure. The right vertical axis is the cumulative percentage of the total number of occurrences, total cost, or total of the particular unit of measure. Because the reasons are in decreasing order, the cumulative function is a concave function. To take the example below, in order to lower the amount of late arrivals by 78%, it is sufficient to solve the first three issues 

The purpose of the Pareto chart is to highlight the most important among a (typically large) set of factors. In quality control, it often represents the most common sources of defects, the highest occurring type of defect, or the most frequent reasons for customer complaints, and so on. Wilkinson (2006) devised an algorithm for producing statistically based acceptance limits (similar to confidence intervals) for each bar in the Pareto chart.

These charts can be generated by simple spreadsheet programs, such as Apache OpenOffice/LibreOffice Calc and Microsoft Excel, visualisation tools such as Tableau Software, specialised statistical software tools, and online quality charts generators. The Pareto chart is one of the seven basic tools of quality control.

The next issue was to check how to generate a Pareto chart in Excel. I thought that there might be a magic button but you have to do it all yourself. Here's what I ended up with:

I did get some help in doing this and here is a link to a very useful website that outlines step-by-step how to create a Pareto chart. There are some excellent tutorials available on this site.

Remembering PIN Numbers

Here is what's recommended by some banks as an aid to remembering a PIN number. Let's say your PIN is 1537. Make a grid of letters as shown below and decide on a word with the same number of letters as the PIN. For example, choose SHOP and then be careful to assign the number 1 to S, 5 to H, 3 to O and 7 to P. Thereafter, assign random numbers to the remaining letters.

All that is needed to retrieve the PIN then is to refer to the card. Of course, the relevant letters and numbers are not marked in red as they are here and so if the card falls into the wrong hands, it's not of any use.

An alternative is the PINFRUIT method in which letters, specifically consonants, are assigned to the numerals 0 to 9.

In this case, 1537 could be encoded as the words dolly mug with the associated image as shown below:

The image of Dolly Parton on a mug should be sufficient to recall the PIN number once the phrase dolly mug is retrieved. Of course, the PINFRUIT system takes a little getting used to but once mastered, it is easy to apply to any set of numbers that one encounters.

One can take this a step further and assign images to all number pairs between 00 and 99. In this system, the number pairs have preassigned words as shown below:

In this system, 1537 would correspond to towel hammock and so an image of a towel resting on a hammock should be sufficient to retrieve the PIN. 

If one intends to use the PINFRUIT system on a long term basis, then it's probably better to follow the latter system so that words don't have to be made up on the fly. A memory palace can then be populated with the images of words drawn from the 00 to 99 grid and applied to any number of numerals. 

For example, suppose one needs to remember the number 9948621987363. Firstly, divide the number into pairs moving right to left. The result is:

09 94 86 21 98 73 63

It is vital for numbers with an odd number of digits that the pairing process proceeds from right to left so that a leading zero can be applied. Referring to the 00-99 grid, the following words are generated from these number pairs:

soup - eyebrow - fish - hand - buff - comb - jam

A story or synthesised image can be then be generated for this sequence of words. For example, the following synthesised image works from the inside out:

It doesn't matter how odd the image is that is generated. In fact, the odder it is, the easier it will be to remember it.

Microsoft Classroom

I've just read this article about Microsoft Classroom, a new educational offering from Microsoft, slated for release around the middle of 2016. Here is what the article had to say:

Microsoft Launches a New Classroom Platform

The future of the classroom is taking shape through digital workspaces shared by teachers and students, and Microsoft is carving out its own place in an increasingly competitive market.

Today, Microsoft announced a new platform for education — Microsoft Classroom. Having stitched together tools from Office 365 and a series of learning management partnerships, Microsoft has high hopes that Classroom will become the central hub for the class experience.

"Classroom is deeply integrated into the fabric of Office 365," says Tony Prophet, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of education marketing. "It's a tailored experience for managing classrooms and assignment workflows."

Microsoft has faced stiff competition in the U.S. education sector. Google's Chromebook notebooks have gained tremendous ground in the market over the past five years, but Microsoft still dominates worldwide, according to a recent FutureSource Consulting report. Microsoft Classroom is the Windows giant's latest bid for maintaining that dominance in the classroom.

Like Google Classroom, which integrates various tools from the Google Apps for Education suite, Microsoft Classroom works within the cloud-powered Office 365, giving educators and students a home page for their everyday classroom activities. The tool unifies Office apps in an educational context, creating a digital hub for all class activities. From scheduling events throughout the month to delivering quizzes, starting class conversations and grading homework, Classroom automates the everyday paper workload that can slow down a class.

The platform has been piloted in several schools already, and one of the major benefits seen by educators has been time gain-back, according to Microsoft.

"This frees up our teachers so they can spend more time with students and less time administrating a classroom," says Prophet.

It also empowers students, giving them a digital space to collaborate on work. Through Microsoft OneNote Class Notebook, students can leave handwritten messages and sketches or place images and videos onto a shared canvas. Sway, a new app in Office 365, helps students create and share interactive reports, presentations and stories. Through another new release, Microsoft Forms, educators can launch quizzes and surveys, with the results displayed on a spreadsheet. Security features can be enabled to ensure students don’t switch apps to peek at answers online.

To facilitate Classroom's launch, Microsoft also unveiled a series of upgrades and tools. School Data Sync will give districts a running start when launching the new platform. The process streamlines the transfer of existing class and student information from 25 other learning management systems, including Edmodo, Canvas and Moodle, into Microsoft Classroom, easing the transition onto the new platform.

Microsoft will also be offering classroom enhancements to Windows 10 in the forthcoming Anniversary Update, including dramatically improved login time. Prophet says the average first login time for teachers will drop from 120 seconds to less than 30, with subsequent logins for students taking about 6 seconds.

Microsoft Classroom is slated for arrival this summer, just in time to prepare teachers for the new school year.

Also coming this summer — a free preview of Minecraft: Education Edition. Microsoft acquired Mojang, the company that created the popular exploration and building game, in 2014 for $2.5 billion. In January, Microsoft also acquired MinecraftEDU, a version of the game often used in schools. More information on Microsoft’s new version of Minecraft will be available closer to its release.

Of the alternative learning management systems mentioned (Edmodo, Canvas and Moodle), I've used Edmodo and Moodle but not Canvas. Currently, I'm using a free Moodle hosting service called MoodleCloud. The URL is seanreeves.moodlecloud.com and I have an astrology course there that I'm working on at the moment. Google Classroom is also mentioned in the article and here is a YouTube video showing some of this platform's capabilities:

Flyer or Flier

I received this email from Digg and it got me thinking about the differences between flyer and flier. The use of the latter looked wrong to me so I decided to investigate.

It turns out that they're pretty much interchangeable. This site seemed to be as authoritative as any other.

Flier vs. flyer

Outside the U.S., there is no difference between flyer and flier. They are interchangeable, though flyer is about twice as common as flier. American writers tend to use flyer for small handbills and flier for people and things that fly. This distinction does not run deep, though, and the two spellings are very often used interchangeably even in the U.S., so it’s safe to say that neither is correct or incorrect for any sense of the word.

An earlier version of this post said simply that flier is the American spelling for all senses of the word while flyer is preferred everywhere else. This is the conventional wisdom, but it’s not consistently borne out in practice.

There is little consistency in spelling of the word outside the U.S. The Guardian style book, for example, says “flyer, not flier,” while the Daily Telegraph style book says “flier, not flyer,” but in practice these newspapers and other non-U.S. publications use both spellings seemingly with no pattern except that flyer is more common. Obviously there is no agreement on the issue, and the flier–flyer distinction is unsettled for now.

Examples

American publications tend to use use flier for someone who flies and flyer for a small handbill, as in these examples:

American Airlines introduced the first of what we now know as frequent flier programs in May 1981, with 283,000 members.  [USA Today]

According to the flyer—which depicts a raised, clenched fist holding a pencil, a play on the movement’s symbol—Duggan plans to bring in guest speakers. [Wall Street Journal] 

The infrequent flier about to get on the plane at Reno-Tahoe International Airport had sores all over him. [Los Angeles Times] 

“Join us as we revisit a familiar and beloved neighborhood of the Christmas Tour,” a flyer for the event says. [Boston Globe]

Again, though, this is just a tendency and not a rule, and we could find plenty of counterexamples.

Outside the U.S., flyer is more common for all senses of the word—for example:

Something of his alert oversight probably came from his experience as a flyer. [Guardian (U.K.)] 

Once inside a store, look for items that are on the outside cover of the weekly specials flyer. [Globe and Mail (Canada)] 

Elected just 18 months ago, already a high-flyer. [Telegraph] 

They must also stop distributing or displaying any literature, flyers or signage containing any unregistered business name. [Sydney Morning Herald]

ASCIIMathML

The ASCIIMathML is a markup language that claims to be close to standard mathematical notation, easy to read and easy to type. In combination with a javascript program ASCIIMathML.js it will faithfully render mathematical expressions within HTML pages. I came across it when using a new online content management service called versal. Using the mathematical gadget provided by versal, I found the markup language very easy to use and was quickly about to create relatively complex formulae. Here is a link that describes the syntax in full. This is my public URL on versal. The free version allows for the creation of unlimited public courses whereas the PRO version (at US$50 per year) allows for the creation of private courses, the tracking of student progress and other benefits.