On the latest episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast, Marco, Casey and John were discussing podcasts. They were comparing them to blogging, the way more people wanted to have their own podcast, and how the tools for making your own podcast compare to those for making your own blog. A little over an hour in, Marco mentioned a useful Easter egg in Tumblr for podcasters.

I don’t usually link to my blog from Tumblr, but this is an exception. I think this is sufficiently useful to people on Tumblr (and if not here, then where?) that it probably merits linking here as well. An easy way to get an RSS feed for a podcast on Tumblr, if the audio files are hosted elsewhere.

Do not use derogatory terms, such as insane, crazy/crazed, nuts or deranged, unless they are part of a quotation that is essential to the story. 
  
Do not assume that mental illness is a factor in a violent crime, and verify statements to that effect. A past history of mental illness is not necessarily a reliable indicator. Studies have shown that the vast majority of people with mental illness are not violent, and experts say most people who are violent do not suffer from mental illness. 
  
Avoid unsubstantiated statements by witnesses or first responders attributing violence to mental illness. A first responder often is quoted as saying, without direct knowledge, that a crime was committed by a person with a “history of mental illness.” Such comments should always be attributed to someone who has knowledge of the person’s history and can authoritatively speak to its relevance to the incident. 
  
Avoid descriptions that connote pity, such as afflicted with, suffers from or victim of. Rather, he has obsessive-compulsive disorder. 
  
Double-check specific symptoms and diagnoses. Avoid interpreting behavior common to many people as symptoms of mental illness. Sadness, anger, exuberance and the occasional desire to be alone are normal emotions experienced by people who have mental illness as well as those who don’t. 
  
Wherever possible, rely on people with mental illness to talk about their own diagnoses. 
  
Avoid using mental health terms to describe non-health issues. Don’t say that an awards show, for example, was schizophrenic. 
  
Use the term mental or psychiatric hospital, not asylum. 

stfuconservatives:

robot-heart-politics:

One year, I managed the summer intership programs for my department. The previous summer, IBM research had wound up with an intership class consisting of 99% men. (That’s not an estimate: that’s a real number. That year, IBM research hired 198 summer interns, of whom 2 were women.) For a company like IBM, numbers like that are scary. Ignoring all of the social issues of excluding potentially great candidates, numbers like that can open the company up to gender discrimination lawsuits!

So my year, they decided to encourage the hiring of more diverse candidates. The way that they did that was by allocating each department a budget for summer interns. They could only hire up to their budgeted number of interns. Only women and minority candidates didn’t count against the budget.

When the summer program hiring opened, my department was allocated a budget of six students. All six slots were gone within the first day. Every single one of them went to a white, american, male student.

The second day, the guy across the hall from me came with a resume for a student he wanted to hire. This was a guy who I really liked, and really respected greatly. He was not, by any reasonable measure, a bad guy - he was a really good person. Anyway, he had this resume, for yet another guy. I told him the budget was gone, but if he could find a good candidate who was either a woman or minority, that we could hire them. He exploded, ranting about how we were being sexist, discriminating against men. He just wanted to hire the best candidate for the job! We were demanding that he couldn’t hire the best candidate, he had to hire someone less qualified, in order to satisfy some politically correct bureaucrat! There was nothing I could do, so eventually he stormed out.

Three days later, he came back to my office with another resume. He was practically bouncing off the walls he was so happy. “I found another student to hire. She’s even better than the guy I originally came to you with! She’s absolutely perfect for the job!”. We hired her.

I asked him why he didn’t find her before. He had no answer - he didn’t know why he didn’t find her resume of his first search.

This was a pattern that I observed multiple times that year. Looking through a stack of resumes, without deliberately excluding women, somehow, all of the candidates with female names wound up back in the slushpile. I don’t think that anyone was deliberately saying “Hmm, Jane, that’s a woman’s name, I don’t want to hire a woman”. But I do think that in the process of looking through a file containing 5000 resumes, trying to select which ones to look at, on an unconscious level, they were more likely to look carefully at a candidate with a male name, because we all learn, from a young age, that men are smarter than women, men are more serious than women, men are better workers than women, men are more likely to be technically skilled than women. Those attitudes may not be part of our conscious thought, but they are part of the cultural background that gets drummed into us by school, by books, by movies, by television, by commercials.

Actually, studies have shown that this actually does happen in hiring.  Male and female managers see a woman’s name at the top of the resume and, even when all other things are equal, will shuffle the woman to the back of the pile or rate her differently than her identical male colleague because…well…she’s a she.

It happens for race, too.

Not surprising at all.

^ Fascinating and terrifying. Ladies, have any of you tried applying for jobs using only your initials on your resume? Should we be doing that?

Although I’ve never experienced this directly (having never been on that side of a hiring table), I could believe that it’s true, and that subconscious forces are at work in the hiring process.

My old maths teacher used to tell me a similar story about hiring: apparently people with surnames in the second half of the alphabet were less likely to get a job, just because their CV tended to appear later in the process, and the slots were already filled.

punkmonksteven:

You never realize how important a letter on your keyboard is until it stops working properly.

This might be of interest to people here.

markzuckerbitch:

i kind of want to carry around a little ax in my pocket like a tiny little pocket ax so i can cut/chop pocket sized things 

thatstraightedgechickfromjersey:

nonifarted:

I would put this on my wall. 

My jaw literally just dropped. THIS IS THE BEST FUCKING THING I HAVE EVER SEEN.

I like this a lot, and I’m more than a little ashamed that this issue didn’t occur to me at all when I was reading the books.

hazellazer:

Curious how often this happens.

Not a man in my case, but there has been at least one person who tried to convince me that I didn’t mean “no”.

littlemixbutts:

Just a friendly reminder that if there’s anything you ever want me to tag, please let me know.

Your comfort is very important to me. If i happen to be a part of your blogging experience and if I post anything that does happening to trigger you, I am more than happy to tag stuff to make you feel safe.

So just ask really; don’t be afraid. You can even do it on anon if you want.

Ditto. I very rarely post here (this will be post number 7), but I will do this if anybody asks. Same for Twitter with hashtags/for keyword filtering.

thebackstagebadger:

This was the first Badger ever posted. Bringing it back because it’s still my favorite. =D

This has been somewhat harder for technical directors in my college theatre society because it’s called BATS (which I think stands for the BATS Amateur Theatre Society, or somesuch).

They’ve been around for several decades, and they still don’t have one. Disappointing.