A few of you noticed that I disappeared from Facebook, and asked me if everything is fine with me. Let me start by reassuring that everything is fine with my loved ones and me, both in Norway and Italy. That said, the reason why I deleted my Facebook account is that I cannot stand the disinformation and divisiveness on my feed anymore.
Category: Society
Online friendship—Quality over quantity
The Oxford English Dictionary defines friendship as “the emotions or conduct of friends; the state of being friends.”
I have always taken friendship seriously, and I believe I have to work on friendship as I work on everything else. A couple of years ago, I started to wonder if I applied these criteria to online friendship.
I understand that online relationships are less restrained and encompass an entire spectrum from acquaintance to friendship. Nevertheless, I forced myself to treat friendship in the digital world as in the real world, so I run a sort of experiment throughout the last two years.
Deflating hyper-inflated job titles
As an ex-researcher turned advisor, I still consider several practices of the corporate world as bizarre. One of them caught my attention as soon as I started in my new position this year: hyper-inflated job titles1 and acronyms. Here is a list of my favourites:
- Key Account Manager (KAM)
- Personal Assistant (PA)
- Subject Matter Expert (SME)
- Vice President (VP)
George Carlin would probably have considered this list as “tortured modern language designed to soften reality, make people feel good, and in general dress things up a little.” 🙂 In this post, I aim to show how you could reduce the number of words in these titles and make a better use of the lingua franca we all agreed on.
Footnotes
- For simplicity, I will not distinguish between titles, ranks, and roles. ↩
Double standards in Norwegian environmental culture?
“Norway: Environmental hero or hypocrite?” was the question the Financial Times asked a year ago. As a resident in Norway for the last decade and with a background of research and innovation, I have long been concerned with the same question.
Norway has implemented a number of measures for a green shift. For example, power generation is mainly based on renewable sources, and the number of electric cars per capita is the largest in the world. Nevertheless, the waste volume in Norway increased by 7% while recycling decreased 1% from 2013 to 2014.
Six months in Oslo—Life of a researcher in the capital of Norway
26 November 2012 at 3:00 in the morning. I was sitting on the bed of my bare room in Bergen, overwhelmed with fear and excitement, looking at my life packed into suitcases, backpacks, and boxes, and staring at my one-way ticket for the earliest morning flight to Oslo: “Will I like Oslo?”, “Will I enjoy my new life?”, “Will I miss Bergen?” Now, after six months in Oslo, I can finally answer these questions.