Thanks for raising! I guess I feel it's a necessary disclaimer out of respect to people who do have the first-hand experience. But I can see how it can come off as an excuse for not getting it right, and it certainly shouldn't be.
FWIW, I did talk to a screen reader user for this article (the accessibility consultant I mention – he is the chair of a local blind union), but indeed I don't know anybody personally and he could have easily brushed me off as random cold emailer, so I'm grateful for his comments.
While unrelated to the topic of discrimination, I just wanted to take this chance and say that Ellen Ullman writes beautifully -- I recognised her signature style before seeing the author's name at the bottom.
Discussions about how to save time on eating and cooking -- essentially the ultimate life hacking -- always make me think about early man and his lifestyle that must have consisted mostly of hunting trips that may well have taken up days at a time, and then returning home with the prey and enjoying every bit of the reward. I wonder if they ever contemplated on how they could minimise all this time they spent on keeping themselves alive to make room for .. ehm, what else was there to do anyway?
I've grown up with the same perceptions of gender equality in the Soviet job market. However, I get the feeling that this does not so much have to do with a heightened sense of morality or anything, as it does with the fact that work in the USSR was simply a chore or an obligation that was assigned to you. Often people didn't do a particular job because it suited their personality or they were exceptionally good at it, most jobs were government orders anyway. There was no such thing as career planning. People's careers sort of just happened.
That's not what was suggested in this story, at least. She seemed to have an aptitude in math and interest in computers, so she choose a university where she could study CS.
I went for "please sign up on Path and add me as a friend because unlike on Facebook, there are some things that I share which I really sincerely would like YOU (and not every other random person) to see". I've got my family and closest friends on Path now, about 12 people in total, most of whom add content regularly and I'm happy :)
Having said that, as much as I like Path, I do sometimes feel like I'm doing them a favour promoting it so aggressively, and the favour hasn't quite been returned yet.
That's so cool for your friend :) I hope you've taken some of the credit, encouragement is such a huge part of success.
I'm a girl doing a CS degree and also often think that the amount of help I get from my boyfriend (who has graduated by now) borders on cheating which really makes me feel miserable from time to time, and constantly having someone next to you who you know can complete any task you have with so much less effort doesn't help a lot either.
Other times, however, I acknowledge that as long as he isn't plainly handing the solutions over to me (which he never does) but just kind of acts as my rubber duck, all that can really be said is that it's just a fortunate situation where you constantly have someone to bounce ideas off of. It's also a question of not becoming dependent of that person -- at first I felt that he literally always knew the answer to whatever I was struggling with, but by now I've realised that it's simply about the ability to think out loud and make conclusions as you go along, and I know that I have all the potential to do that on my own as well.
I guess it's kind of what the article is saying as well -- if you're used to someone being better than you and kind of like a mentor, it's difficult to adjust to a situation where you might just have caught up with them in terms of skill and expertise.
This might not be the case for quite a few Estonian startups though -- with 1.3 million people you're desperately lacking a large enough target market for the niche products that some startups are developing, and looking to other countries may actually be a part of a strategy, not simply a case of 'I happen to be an Estonian living in the UK so I'll just go with the flow and do my startup here'. I would call these startups Estonian.
Interestingly, if I would've read the discussion out of context, I definitely would have thought the author meant digital as shadowy and gradienty, and analog as flat.
I've been lucky enough to have visited NK as well and unsurprisingly everything I read lined up perfectly with my own experience. Most likely tourists from all over the world are always shown the stock tour. Our guides were incredibly insistent that we see everything, too -- that means no suggestions for other activities and definitely no wandering off.
One of my most memorable take-aways was also a visit to a school that we were told was one of the best in the country. We were taken to a room where students had formed groups around several desks, all performing different tasks (one desk had microscopes, the other a pc, yet others had more contraptions, probably for demonstrating mechanical processes). As was mentioned in the story, they weren't actually doing anything, they were just sitting there looking at the machinery in front of them and trying to look like they were about to discover something huge. They must've been the best actors in the school, and probably were very proud of themselves to have been chosen to present to such a prominent audience.
Friends of mine used to work in a building that also contained the help desk for external customers. One day when a customer delegation was visiting the help desk, they were all brought in and told to sit at the empty desks and pretend to take calls.
When I went our tour guides were somewhat lenient. They were happy to take us to the Pyongyang Pizzeria when we asked, but insisted that the Opera would "not be fun for us."
Another group we met said their guides would fulfill almost any request, so go figure.
Exactly. I "ranted" about it in response to the article.
Basically I'm not sure the author understood she realized the "stock tour" and that it was all fake and propaganda.
Even the one school people get to visit is fake: the students are actors as you're saying. They take the few genius kids they have and force them to perform the exact same music in front of nearly every delegation that gets there.
Once I realized that every single "official" trip there tells the exact same story, my girlfriend and I decided not to go.
The drones and spy cameras tell a whole different story than the communist party's propaganda of course.
It's really scary what communism did to North Korea...
I think beginning an academic or a research paper with a question or something like "Some people say..." or "Recently" or "Nowadays" is often a very good strategy even though it might be clichéd, because telling the reader exactly what is going to follow in the text is very much expected. When I read with the sole intention of finding a specific piece of knowledge, I want to be able to tell from the introduction (or the abstract) whether I will find that piece of knowledge in the given text.
That being said, I think all other kinds of texts should be as story-like as possible, in the sense that they should be gripping and interesting from the very first sentence -- I want to be a little bit lost and not know where exactly the writer is taking me. In this case, I really like the idea of jumping straight into a scenario (or anecdote), I remember having been suggested by my teachers in middle school to do so. Having opened the text with a scenario, you can also use it in the conclusion to wrap things up and let the reader know how the story ended, given the conclusions reached in the body of the text.
"Some people say..." openings can be problematic, because they can get the reader wondering, who? Who says that? Which pulls them away from the point you're trying to make. Better to start with a specific example of someone saying it: "John Smith thought men couldn't get breast cancer. On April 5, he found out he was wrong."
I really like the idea of jumping straight into a scenario (or anecdote), I remember having been suggested by my teachers in middle school to do so.
Yeah, this is an effective technique that's nearly as old as storytelling itself. It's called in medias res:
The name is Latin for "into the middle of things," which describes the idea: throw the reader into the middle of the story first, revealing earlier events later on where necessary. This lets you open on a dramatic note right away, which grabs the reader's attention, while setting up little enigmas -- who is this person? Why is she doing what she's doing? What does she want? -- for the reader to solve, which keeps them involved.
FWIW, I did talk to a screen reader user for this article (the accessibility consultant I mention – he is the chair of a local blind union), but indeed I don't know anybody personally and he could have easily brushed me off as random cold emailer, so I'm grateful for his comments.