digestable morsels of complexity
For their science fair project, my son Zander and his friend Colin surveyed their 4th grade classes, and compared them against 150 adults to see whether kids or adults are better at picking the AI-generated face in each pair. For each pair below, one is real, the other AI-generated. The corresponding pie chart shows the [ ]
A seminal bit of research was released in 2023 on the State of Belonging in America that showed just how much civic and philanthropic prosocial behavior stops when people feel like they don t belong in their community. They measured a person s sense of belonging in their own family, among friends, at the workplace, as a [ ]
I recently discovered Pew Research s extensive analysis from 2021, where they surveyed over 10,000 folks and probed their political and world views. Clustering people based on the synthesis of all these issues reveals nine (9) orientations that represent loose coalitions of people on the left and the right in the United States, plus a small [ ]
Anais Nin once said: “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as WE are.” When this power of personal perspective is used to transform the world we call it “vision”. But it can also color the lens through which we see the world. In that case, we call this misperception “bias”. Observer bias [ ]
Let s not forget that Putin chose to wait until just after the Olympics to invade, because Russia winning medals in figure skating was a national priority. Week 1: Feb 25 Feb 28, 2022 March 7th, 2022: It s clear that Russia is losing, so they launch a new propaganda blitz with the Z thing, which might [ ]
This year I ll focus on important people who died. Political Figures Religious Historical figures Sports Icons Music, Writers, the Arts Memes and memorable images of 2021 Fast forward 63 years and people still act this way around covid-19. A minority put in the work to save the species when the majority look for convenience [ ]
How can the big data generated by churches be used to understand their diversity? I have been interested in applying Data Science tricks to understanding the varieties of worship in the US for several years. Similar to my Genetic Tree of Aid post, I created a hierarchical map of the topics that are found on [ ]
March 2020 In another part of the world, Malala and Greta Thunberg hang out together. March 9th: 3000 dead. People start to freak out about what they might not be able to buy soon. With nobody driving, a barrel of oil costs LESS than the empty barrel. Motif investment (now folio) funds at this time [ ]
Andy Slavitt ran Obamacare under president Obama. He understands the complexity of the US healthcare system. In early 2020 Andy began talking to governors and experts everywhere to prepare a coordinated response to the virus. Each night he would post a summary of these conversations on twitter. This, for me, was the best source of [ ]
This comes from Jeremy Konyndyk of @CGDEV, the Center for Global Development via Twitter (March 11, 2020 the day WHO declared the pandemic) Jeremy FLATTEN THE CURVE Konyndyk @JeremyKonyndyk Here is the speech that the country *needed* to hear from the President tonight: My fellow Americans, the next few months are going to be [ ]
I have a Neuoscience PhD, and I m a Full Stack Developer, Data Scientist, Manager at work. I m atypical of people doing my work worldwide, as StackOverFlow s 2019 survey shows. Just shy of 90,000 people from over 150 countries contributed to this sample. While education is a great thing to have, many professionals are earning $100k [ ]
A friend posted this to Facebook recently: Friends: What are things you do to take care of yourself at 40+ or 50+ that you wish your earlier 30-something self had known? There were so many useful answers, I wanted to compile them here. This reflects life wisdom from dozens of people: Pain is a messenger. [ ]
Every year I collect interesting images from Social Media and post them here. See 2017 in memes and images post here. #metoo continues to drive a global dialogue, both in the workplace and in churches. Blockchain and cryptocurrencies continue to be a thing. Some Royal people get married and this guy gives a stellar sermon. [ ]
Borrowing from xkcd s amazing breakdown of the US political spectrum since George Washington, here is my take on what happened in the 2018 midterms: Overall, Democrats gained enough seats to take control of the House, but the remaining House Republicans include more Far Right politicians than ever before, in the history of the country. Outgoing [ ]
The following are part of the larger Living Prophets podcast, the voice of liberal religion in the modern era. I reached a milestone (Oct 2018) in publishing 50 episodes over 14 months. These 12 episodes focus on what makes activism effective, and how we can make a real difference in our own communities by being [ ]
By Nick Hamlin, guest blogger In response to my top 10 list, Nick offered his own top 10 list. I met Marc’s blog before I met Marc himself. I’d heard about his storytelling project during my new employee orientation at GlobalGiving and immediately started reading this blog. It wasn’t until he came back to DC [ ]
I ve been writing this blog for ten years! Here is the ChewyChunks top ten list over the last decade. The year in memes Each year I do a year-end lookback at major events and in memes. I am on my 7th consecutive year: (2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012) See also my 2016 Gratitudes list. Millions of [ ]
If you are an advocacy organization, wouldn t it be nice if you could tell who among your network of contacts is taking up your message and effectively spreading it as your champions? Earlier this year, I did a consulting project for Open Contracting Partnerships (full story here) to help them measure the growth of their [ ]
Natural language processing has been available for a while, and the free stuff is starting to get good. In developing the FeedbackCommons, we re on our third generation of classifier. A classifier is a trained machine learning algorithm that predicts whether a given chunk of text is saying something positive, neutral, or negative. This is really [ ]
There are a lot of buzzwordy ways to say it participatory development, feedback loops, community led, and now Peace Corps has published a useful field book for their version of this, called PACA. Participatory analysis for community action Participatory Analysis for Community Action (PACA) is Peace Corps unique approach to appreciative, participatory, gender-sensitive, inclusive, [ ]
Empowerment shouldn t be a buzzword anymore. It s 2018 s version of saying beneficiary to mean all the people who an organization aims to serve, even if the people didn t benefit. Any time someone in power offers to empower somebody else, they are not ceding power. They re loaning it out. They retain the power to take it [ ]
I ve done a lot of narrative data analysis over the years, and one of the lessons is that many of the words that past experts used to ignore, even calling them junk words, and actually the most important ones. Think about the 60 most common English words. If you re trying to extract a theme, topic, [ ]
In 1963 civil rights activists were asked to sign this commitment card before they could take part in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference s protests in Birmingham Alabama: I hereby pledge myself—my person and body—to the nonviolent movement. Therefore I will keep the following ten commandments: 1. Meditate daily on the teachings and life of Jesus. [ ]
Macro-trends: We re still finding other Earth-like planets. And the rapid growth of powerful AI combined with NASA data makes finding Earth-sized ones more likely. In 2017 podcasts became more common. People spend more time listening to them than reading blogs. I started a podcast too. My podcast: Living Prophets succinct sermons from liberal religion [ ]
Today s special election for Alabama senate is a prelude to the election maps of 1960 and 1968, where third party candidates split one or the other party s support. In 1960, Kennedy (a liberal Democrat from the Northeast) could only have won because of two things: His running mate was a popular Texan, and there was [ ]
I spend a lot of time dealing with data. Data is an ingredient in an organization s larger decision making process:Institutions say they want knowledge management (KM) systems. What this is is a way to store all the information they create in one place and make it searchable. But the knowledge solutions I ve seen only address [ ]
Lets be honest: Many people would rather consume content from a podcast in 2017 than read your blog. I personally spend no time reading blogs anymore on personal interests, but I still spend hours each week walking the dog or biking to work whilst consuming podcast content. So how do you take your wordpress.com-hosted blog [ ]
Pretty graphs are a cunning attempt at pushing data, when the opposite is the case, you need to create pull. Good managers need to pull data to make smart decisions in context. Visualizations are not contextualized representations. Read more: 3 reasons why I hate pretty graphs
[Reprinted here. A synopsis:] This was my heritage. I, a descendant of confederate soldiers, even owned a replica gray cap of a confederate infantryman that I would wear as a youth playing in the woods with toy guns, pretending to defend my home against invaders from the North. But in the book of 2 Samuel Ch [ ]
If given a choice between a fast horse or the North Star, the wise person chooses the star. Better a long journey in the right direction than a fast one to parts unknown. True to this has been my week in Durham. Late Monday night a group of protesters, angered and galvanized by events in [ ]
Yesterday I led a discussion at Feedback Labs. As part of their DataStorm series a brainstorming and peer review session for data people in the philanthropy world I presented highlights from a recent white paper that we wrote for a big aid agency about how we can all work more as a team. [ ]
In the era of hyperpolitics, the best ways to actually cut through everyone s strongly-held beliefs is through interactive illustrations of phenomena that affect society. Here are some good examples of games that help citizens better understand our world. Topics: gerrymandering, budget balancing, racial profiling and gentrification Gerrymandering From a great blog on visualization…
Here are some signs Scientists are bringing to the March for Science in Washington on April 22, 2017. This is about playing the solutions cards. What I ll be wearing.
As of this morning, North Carolina House Republicans and the newly elected Democratic governor managed to eek out a compromise to the vastly unpopular bathroom bill (HB2) enacted one year ago. This bill, which was passed to stop local municipalities (specifically Charlotte s city council) from creating anti-discrimination laws for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, [ ]
What gives you hope? my minister Rob Hardies often gets asked. But since the election, he s been getting it all the time (according to the Washington Post). I m confused, people tell him. I feel vulnerable, afraid for my future, my kids future. Everything is at stake.” Yet I’m afraid that the question is misleading, Rob [ ]
Throughout the year I collect images that define the zeitgeist. Here are images, memories, and memes from 2016, a year that many people I know would rather forget. But it happened, and we must remember Earlier in 2016, this cartoon made the rounds. It looked like the South was moving away from hate and [ ]
Gratitude #7: Life is precious. Life is short. For over a year my son Zander spent every day with his buddy. Then little Sam went off to day care, and Zander didn t see him anymore. A few weeks after that, my wife was filming Zander, asking him questions. He s always a smiling, joyful little guy. But when [ ]
You might think that the peer review process in Science academia exists to weed out sketchy results. That’s just a side effect. It’s real purpose is to define the frontiers of each field and force contradictory ideas into head-to-head battles that force winners and loser to emerge. If a field of inquiry allows incompatible ideas [ ]
In the 2016 election most of the country was evenly divided. But these better maps show how even it was. Compare 2016 with 2012 and earlier years. Not all congressional districts have the same population size. It can range from 450,000 to 950,000 people per district. Adjusting the map to equalize area by population gives [ ]
I began a month-long meditation of daily gratitude. Gratitude Reverend Rob shared his story of dialoguing with the other yesterday at our UU church. For a year they hosted another church inside our church. Ours was a liberal religious community with an openly gay pastor. Theirs was a conservative evangelical congregation that preached against homosexuality. [ ]
Recently a colleague said, Charlotte is the most segregated city in America. Why? I asked. Well, in part, because that s where the supreme court cases about busing students to integrate school districts came from. That s true. That was also 1971. In 2016, Charlotte was also the city that passed laws to fight discrimination against gay [ ]
First, encouraging essays just before result came in We will all still be Americans Tomorrow I will still love you all. Tomorrow, we will all still be Americans. (Except for my friends who aren t, of course! 🙂 ) Tomorrow, someone will win and someone will lose. Tomorrow, some of us may be tempted to be [ ]
In the run up to the 2016 election, both parties and the independent majority in the middle have said the future of our democracy is at stake. Although this IS an important election, and voting is REALLY IMPORTANT, it s helpful to recognize that Life on Earth is better now than at any point in history. [ ]
Just as DNA is the genetic code of life, non-profit organizations encode their existence in the text of their mission statements, fundraisers, project proposals, and reports. I pulled this information from 2,988 projects on GlobalGiving in order to create a genetic tree of how all projects and causes relate to each other, using a method [ ]
Ever wanted to see a complete and honest view of the aid world for an entire country? Using data from the GlobalGiving Storytelling Project in East Africa (about 65,000 stories from people, collected in 2010 and 2011), my buddy Nick (co-creator of aidsight.org) was able to build me this genetic tree of 2,558 named organizations in [ ]
My buddy Nick and his team just finished their masters in data science. For their final project, they had to do something amazing with an open data set. The choose to fix the thousands of public finance reports curated by the the Intenational Aid Transparency Initiative, or IATI. IATI is the first (and only) standard for [ ]
As I polish up my upcoming book, Story-centered learning for organizations working for change , I am posting nuggets of wisdom that never made it online. Here is our outline for a two-hour scribe training session (assuming they will be using the two-story approach and interviewing broadly within a community over many months). What follows are some of [ ]
Pew Research Center, a non-partisan group, conducted the study in 230 countries in 2012. In their no-spin summary of results, they write: Worldwide, more than eight-in-ten people identify with a religious group. A comprehensive demographic study of more than 230 countries and territories conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion Public Life [ ]
I m writing a book about six years of running GlobalGiving s Storytelling project and the story-centered learning method it spawned. This is a transcript from an amazing 2014 NTEN lecture from the people who changed minds of a nation. Learn what it took during the years leading up to that day when Facebook was taken over [ ]
By the end of this decade there will be a new kind of actor in board rooms and executive team meetings. The role of the quant is changing from the guy who runs reports and gives you a write up before the meeting to the guy/gal that sits in the meeting, fact checking assertions from [ ]