Author: Ezra S F


  • Sociology has a concept of us holding multiple social roles. At home, I am both a husband and a father. With relatives, I am a son, nephew, or cousin. At work, I am a supervisee, mentor, subject matter expert, or organization historian. Things get a bit more undefined out in the wider world, but I…

  • Semantic Drain and the Meaninglessness of Modern Work makes an interesting point that a problem with knowledge management work is that much of is filler work without a fulfilling purpose. I was far more stressed as the university webmaster than as a database administrator. The webmaster job was highly subjective with people getting upset about…

  • Listening to the Radiolab Bit Flip episode. If you haven’t listened, then you really should first.

  • Stores like for us as consumers to give them a customer ID to track what it is that we are buying. Many have phone number or a card or an email address. They use this information to track our purchases and personalize their nudges for us to buy products.  There is one way they might…

  • Social media plays with our minds in allowing us to stay connected to old friendships. We feel like we are maintaining the relationship. But, it lacks something. Social media tends to bring out our worst. We portray ourselves at our best. We compare our worst to others’ best. Assumptions, gossip, and negativity abound. It really…

  • Because representation matters, I am looking forward to this spin-off of Black-ish. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcnQjti7hlc

  • In shopping for Mother’s Day the algorithms now think I am female. Obviously, they took the items I looked at for this quest and incorporated them into my profile’s records and are basing new recommendations on them. They are fresher. And they have left over inventory they want to move. So, I get it. This…

  • A sound is a terrible way to get my attention. I mostly live in some kind of background noise. So, there is a strong possibility that I will miss a notification through listening to music or podcasts. Worse, even if I do hear it, I have no clue what weird thing is trying to get…

  • This guy won the Internet for a while. “I love learning the words that their generation comes up with — both the unique ones as well as the ones where they take an existing word and give it a completely different meaning.” One of my favorite web sites is Urban Dictionary because people apply new…