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Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters on the company’s new culture memo and ad ambitions - The Verge
It’s funny that you mention it because we have tribes already. We had tribes before this. Let’s break it down. Kernel engineers who work on our content delivery network versus mobile UI engineers, that’s a different tribe. They have different ways of thinking about the world. We’ve always been balancing different groups of people that think about things differently.
That’s why we have these memos because, quite frankly, an evolution of the culture memo was going from the original deck that you talked about, which I would call highly anchored in Silicon Valley — there was a libertarian philosophy or ethos that you could read in there. And partly what we were trying to do over these multiple iterations was tease apart the actual outcomes, the excellence-enabling things that we wanted to identify, versus the behaviors and the articulations, and trying to make those more general.
New analysis of obsidian blades reveals dynamic Neolithic social networks | YaleNews
“Tracing these obsidian artifacts from their sources to their endpoints offers insight into how they moved from hand to hand to hand over time, which helps us better understand population changes in the region during the Neolithic Era,” Frahm said. “It suggested there were larger social networks and more settlements between the source volcanoes and the excavation sites than we previously thought.”
What Japan's Wild Snow Monkeys Can Teach Us About Animal Culture | Science | Smithsonian Magazine
Imo had innovated a new behavior that spread to her peers. Age and sex both influenced its transmission: Younger monkeys and females were more likely to learn potato washing than adult monkeys and males. The next stage began when Imo and her peers matured and reproduced. Now the behavior spread to the next generation with every new baby, males as well as females, learning sweet-potato washing from its mother. Age and sex were no longer factors. “Pre-cultural pressure is working,” Kawai wrote. A new behavior had become fixed within the troop.
For Donald Winnicott, the psyche is not inside us but between us | Psyche Ideas
He wrote of culture – its artifacts and its activities – as extensions of the transitional phenomena of childhood, themselves rooted in the original mix-up with the parent. He thought that the very worlds we inhabit and take for granted are always partly of our own making. For Winnicott, it is only because the worlds we experience are coextensive with ourselves that they feel alive, alluring and psychically experienceable in the first instance, rather than like cold, mathematical structures, as scientific materialism would have us believe. In this way, Winnicott’s psychological paradox of subject and object becomes a philosophical paradox of idealism and materialism.
Perception of musical pitch varies across cultures: How people interpret musical notes depends on the types of music they have listened to -- ScienceDaily
This question has been hard to answer, in part because of the difficulty in finding people who have not been exposed to Western music. Now, a new study led by researchers from MIT and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics has found that unlike residents of the United States, people living in a remote area of the Bolivian rainforest usually do not perceive the similarities between two versions of the same note played at different registers (high or low).
The findings suggest that although there is a natural mathematical relationship between the frequencies of every "C," no matter what octave it's played in, the brain only becomes attuned to those similarities after hearing music based on octaves, says Josh McDermott, an associate professor in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
Rafat on managing as an Indian
In terms of who my inspiration is, there’s a book that just came out called the “Made-In-India Manager,” about people who grew up in India, came here for college, and are now doing very well—the CEO of Google, the CEO of Microsoft. The book is about how the training provided by the complexity of India, and all of the challenges and chaos, and at the same time being very rooted in culture and family, makes you empathize more and helps you excel in a more efficient work culture like the U.S. That’s the theory of the book, at least, and in many ways I agree.
The Communist Cookbook Responsible for Prague’s Slow Culinary Comeback - Gastro Obscura
Cooks that wanted to deviate from these recipes had to get approval from the Ministry of Health, a request that could take years to go through. Most people opted for the easier route, which is how thousands of nearly identical menus came to be established across the country. Paired with limited ingredient diversity, the nation suffered a creative drought: It wasn’t just that all the same dishes were served, but the dishes were prepared exactly the same way, resulting in identical versions of dishes, too. Each bite was calculated as a means of productivity, and dining for pleasure was considered extravagant. “Special” meals were no longer considered, and the scope of Czech cuisine shrunk.
Yet as NYU Prague sociologist Vanda Thorne points out, people were eating outside the home more than ever before. Children ate at school cafeterias, and parents dined at work cantinas. Since prices were controlled and salaries were largely uniform, everyone could afford restaurants. “Meals at home were often prepared from prefabricated components as there was a noticeable lack of fresh produce,” Thorne says. Though homemade meals weren’t as strictly regulated by the state, there was still little opportunity for originality there.
The Communist Cookbook Responsible for Prague’s Slow Culinary Comeback - Gastro Obscura
When communists came to power in 1948, citizens were hopeful they could return to a life containing more prewar luxuries. Though the quality of food improved, life under socialist ideas still proved restrictive. Twenty years later, when liberalization started to gain traction, the party saw a need for even stricter control. In an effort to consolidate power, they purged reformist officials from the government and established a range of restrictions on everyday activities. Eating was no exception.
The state Restaurants and Cafeterias company soon issued a national cookbook entitled Receptury teplých pokrmu, or Recipes for Warm Meals. Dubbed “normovacka,” or “the book of standards,” it dictated what cooks in the country could serve in 845 recipes. Ladislav Pravaan, curator of the Gastronomie Muzeum of Prague, explains that the book even specified sources and serving styles for everything from sauces to side dishes.
Inside the Rise & Fall Of A 1970s Upper West Side Cult: Gothamist
After the raid, the pillagers returned to their seven-story co-op at 2643 Broadway. “We were prepared for them to invade,” says Paul Sprecher, a member of the Sullivan Institute for over a decade. “We had security down at the front door to make sure they would be duly chastised. I don’t remember, I think one guy showed up to complain and he was manhandled.” (According to a 1989 New York Magazine article, the complaining tenant was “beaten by more than a dozen members,” one of whom “broke four knuckles punching the young boy in the face.”)
The paint splatter that started the ordeal is still visible today, on the brick wall just above the Metro Diner on 100th and Broadway. It is perhaps the last physical reminder of a psychotherapy cult—informally known as the “Sullivanians”—that once had 500 members living in three buildings on the Upper West Side.
How Islam Created Europe
Islam did much more than geographically define Europe, however. Denys Hay, a British historian, explained in a brilliant though obscure book published in 1957, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, that European unity began with the concept (exemplified by the Song of Roland) of a Christendom in “inevitable opposition” to Islam—a concept that culminated in the Crusades. The scholar Edward Said took this point further, writing in his book Orientalism in 1978 that Islam had defined Europe culturally, by showing Europe what it was against. Europe’s very identity, in other words, was built in significant measure on a sense of superiority to the Muslim Arab world on its periphery. Imperialism proved the ultimate expression of this evolution: Early modern Europe, starting with Napoleon, conquered the Middle East, then dispatched scholars and diplomats to study Islamic civilization, classifying it as something beautiful, fascinating, and—most crucial—inferior.
Animal culture
In “The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins”, Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, and Luke Rendell of the University of St Andrews, in Scotland, argue that all cultures have five distinctive features: a characteristic technology; teaching and learning; a moral component, with rules that buttress “the way we do things” and punishments for infraction; an acquired, not innate, distinction between insiders and outsiders; and a cumulative character that builds up over time. These attributes together allow individuals in a group to do things that they would not be able to achieve by themselves.
