via https://twitter.com/#!/katenieder/status/194544990968487937 "The students then filled out a survey designed to discover how cold or warm they felt. It may sound strange, Leander says, but people often begin to feel cold when their social lives turn uncomfortable or otherwise unfulfilling—they literally get the chills. Individuals that describe themselves as lonely, for instance, take more frequent hot showers than their peers. And, sure enough, the students in the study reported that they felt colder when the experimenter's social cues seemed somehow off—that is, when she was either acting friendly but not mimicking or seemed professional and did mimic—as the group will report in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science." "social norms are really critical to follow in order to establish a good bond with people."

"I think it’s fairly simple. You know the classic “First they came for the X, then they came for the Y, and I did nothing, and then they came for me?” schtick? This is one of those stories. In fact, it’s the end of one of those stories. They already came for the doctors and the psychiatrists. They already came for the lawyers. They already came for the accountants and auditors. They already came for all the professions. Professors are the last to be broken on the wheel, the last to be put at their station in the new assembly lines of the 21st Century Service Economy."

"In his seminal book “Code”, Larry Lessig argued that social systems are regulated by four forces: 1) the market; 2) the law; 3) social norms; and 4) architecture or code. In thinking about social media systems, plenty of folks think about monetization. Likewise, as issues like privacy pop up, we regularly see legal regulation become a factor. And, of course, folks are always thinking about what the code enables or not. But it’s depressing to me how few people think about the power of social norms.""Whenever a network system unfolds, there are inevitably competing norms that arise from people who are disconnected to one another. (I can’t tell you how much I loved watching Friendster when the gay men, Burners, and bloggers were oblivious to one another.) Yet, the faster things move, the faster those collisions occur, and the more confusing it is for the norms to settle.""People don’t like to be configured. They don’t like to be forcibly told how they should use a service. They don’t want to be told to behave like the designers intended them to be. Heavy-handed policies don’t make for good behavior; they make for pissed off users.""Of course there’s a legitimate reason to want to encourage civil behavior online. And of course trolls wreak serious havoc on a social media system. But a “real names” policy doesn’t stop an unrepentant troll; it’s just another hurdle that the troll will love mounting. In my work with teens, I see textual abuse (“bullying”) every day among people who know exactly who each other is on Facebook."

"At Nokia, informal mentoring begins as soon as someone steps into a new job. Typically, within a few days, the employee's manager will sit down and list all the people in the organization, no matter in what location, it would be useful for the employee to meet. This is a deeply ingrained cultural norm, which probably originated when Nokia was a smaller and simpler organization. The manager sits with the newcomer, just as her manager sat with her when she joined, and reviews what topics the newcomer should discuss with each person on the list and why establishing a relationship with him or her is important. It is then standard for the newcomer to actively set up meetings with the people on the list, even when it means traveling to other locations. The gift of time — in the form of hours spent on coaching and building networks — is seen as crucial to the collaborative culture at Nokia."

"Whether because they're Canadian or because they're engineers, or both, they are unusual among aid organizations because they focus on understanding what didn't work. For the last three years, they've published Failure Reports detailing their specific failures. The reports make an interesting read, not just for aid organizations, but for anyone trying to manage engineering teams."

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This study investigated a range of factors potentially associated with adolescent problematic drinking in a sample of 11–16-year olds in Northern Ireland.

In similar vein to our previous article from NE England, this campaign in Colorado, USA, used the same social norms approach with school students in grades 6-12 across the state. They used data from the Healthy Kids Colorado Survey asking children about their current attitudes, perceptions and behaviours regarding various topics, such as alcohol/substance abuse, then devised an effective prevention campaign.

In similar vein to our previous article from NE England, this campaign in Colorado, USA, used the same social norms approach with school students in grades 6-12 across the state. They used data from the Healthy Kids Colorado Survey asking children about their current attitudes, perceptions and behaviours regarding various topics, such as alcohol/substance abuse, then devised an effective prevention campaign.

"The rhetoric of social mobility helps to legitimize  class hierarchies, by maintaining the pretence that  management is a technical skills. In fact, bosses' power derives from other sources.And what's worst of all is that such hierarchies might not be needed anyway. In many firms, "management" is either a redundant function - because good companies run themselves - or it's worse than useless."

Subjects communicated prior to playing trust games; the richness of the communication media and the topics of conversation were manipulated. Communication richness failed to produce significant differences in first-mover investments. However, the topics of conversation made a significant difference: the amounts sent were considerably higher in the unrestricted communication conditions than in the restricted communication and no-communication conditions. Most importantly, we find that first-movers’ expectations of second-movers’ reciprocation are influenced by communication and strongly predict their levels of investment.

"…In this work, we give a short overview of traditional community roles. We adapt those models and apply them to virtual online communities. We suggest a community membership life cycle model describing roles a user can take during his membership in a community. Our model is systematic and generic; it can be adapted to concrete communities in the web. The knowledge of a community's life cycle allows influencing the group structure: Stage transitions can be supported or harmed, e.g. to strengthen the binding of a user to a site and keep communities alive."

'While “self-styled” seems mostly a put-down, it is a notably weak one. The user of this phrase notes that someone claims something, but lacks an official credential, or strong consensus, supporting this claim. But we the reader can also note that this speaker offers no stronger criticism, and is not willing to directly contradict the offending claim. After all, instead of calling someone a “self-styled visionary,” you might say “he calls himself a visionary, but he’s not; he hasn’t has a vision in years.”'

"This memo considers three radical ideas applying to the Web, not necessarily as serious proposals (although given support they could be turned into such) but as thought experiments or fantasies meant to sharpen the discussion of the "meaning" of URIs and other current issues of web architecture. The first fantasy is the idea that a URI's meaning is in how it is used, not what it "identifies". The second is the prospect of second sourcing for URI behavior. The third is the idea of encyclopedia-style documentation for URIs."

"In the rhizomatic model of learning, curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process. This community acts as the curriculum, spontaneously shaping, constructing, and reconstructing itself and the subject of its learning in the same way that the rhizome responds to changing environmental conditions…"

"Our findings suggest that in ravens, bystanders may console victims with whom they share a valuable relationship, thus alleviating the victims' post-conflict distress. Conversely victims may affiliate with bystanders after a conflict in order to reduce the likelihood of renewed aggression. These results stress the importance of relationship quality in determining the occurrence and function of post-conflict interactions, and show that ravens may be sensitive to the emotions of others."

'It turns out that people’s stated preferences have a weak relationship to who they actually like. Stated preferences, one study found, “seemed to vanish when it came time to choose a partner in physical space.”'

"At the end of the day, the most pressing problems of modern life require an accurate description of the real world so that the inevitable tradeoffs can be managed for the common good. Fundamentalism interferes with this enterprise and needs to be recognized for what it is. Fortunately, we can go beyond epithets and prove that a given belief system counts as fundamentalist by calling attention to the absence of tradeoffs. Market fundamentalism can be as plain as the nose on your face when you know what to look for."