Randomly Posting Stuff Cause You Feel Like It

[VintageFemme]

What has kept you together for almost 50 years?


R: Well Gai is tenacious and she doesn’t let go. She’s loyal and likes crazy women. It’s the real deal, that’s all.

G:I knew when I met Rhonda and I’ve always known. What really makes it work is waking up in the morning and saying “Who is this person?” Yes I know so much about her, but in ways I discover that I don’t know anything about her. It’s fantastic! @gaigherardi and @rhondadhawkins

[Orema]

Golden Gate Park hosted San Francisco's largest outdoor display of AIDS Memorial Quilt last weekend. The public was able to view more than 3,000 hand-stitched panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt while it was on display June 11-12 at Golden Gate Park. (Photo courtesy of National AIDS Memorial)

https://localnewsmatters.org/2022/06...-this-weekend/

[FireSignFemme]

[homoe]

Originally Posted by FireSignFemme

...........

[Bèsame*]

[Orema]

Your boss might be reading your work messages. Here’s how to prevent that.

Your boss may have access to your chats, messages and emails at the workplace. But there are ways to protect yourself.

By Danielle Abril



You may have recently noticed that many of your casual work conversations, which previously occurred face-to-face, have moved to digital apps in your evolving working environment. But beware: Your messages to your colleagues may not be as private as you think.

As more companies allow their employees to work remotely, either part- or full-time, distributed workforces are turning to digital services like Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Chat to get their work done, collaborate and bond with their colleagues. Sometimes, that might mean that casual conversations about weekend shenanigans, workplace gripes or personal relationships are happening online, creating a digital record of all communications. So workers would be wise to keep in mind which platforms and devices may or may not provide privacy and adjust their behavior accordingly, privacy experts say.

Before we delve into the topic, I’d like to remind you that the Help Desk is here to help you with your biggest questions and qualms. We also want to know what’s happening at your workplace. Are there workplace technologies you are concerned about? Are certain policies changing the way you work? How is the future of work playing out at your employer? Tell us about it, and we will do our best to dig into your biggest issues.

Now, back to your workplace privacy. We spoke to several privacy experts to understand how workers should think about their digital workplace communications and the services they use. Here’s what they had to say.

Q: Can my employer see my private messages at work?

A: Privacy experts agree that there are two things workers should think about when they send a message to a colleague. First, is the service you’re using provided by your employer? Second, are you having the conversation on a device provided by your employer?

If the answer to either of these questions is yes, be aware there’s a chance your employer could see or retrieve your messages. Additionally, even if you’re using your own device and your own personal account on a digital service, your messages still may be at risk if you have workplace software installed.
“The reality of what’s happening is a lot is changing very quickly,” said Alan Butler, executive director and president of the research organization Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Devices, software and different things are being used … and the onus is on the individual [to understand it all].”

The general rule of thumb is to assume that if your workplace is providing you a tool or device, they can and will see what you do on it, Butler said. In some cases, that might mean using administrative privileges to read direct messages or private channels on the company’s Slack workspace. It could mean retrieving emails, messages on Microsoft Teams or texts on your company-provided mobile devices. Or, it could mean screenshots of a person’s messages on other services like Facebook, Twitter or Apple’s iMessage that come from the company’s monitoring software.

The matter can get particularly consequential if workers are using messaging apps to unite against unfair working conditions or policies, said Cynthia Khoo, senior associate at Georgetown University Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology.

“There’s a standard level of monitoring that’s been on the rise,” she said. “But there’s an additional level of monitoring that’s out to squash labor organizing and activism.”

Even if employers can’t retrieve messages on your device, they may be able to get metadata that will help them map out which employees may have been part of the same conversation, said Daniel Kahn Gillmor, senior staff technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. They also may ask you to provide your private messages off your private device related to a workplace conversation in an internal investigation, said Edgar Ndjatou, executive director of the nonprofit organization Workplace Fairness. “You can decide whether you want to honor [the request], but you may potentially be fired for not honoring it,” he said. “It is fair game.”

So what can workers do?

First, if you want to have a private conversation with a colleague, it’s best to do that on your own device using your services, experts note. Also, look for services that provide end-to-end encryption versus just encrypted messages, Khoo said. End-to-end encryption means that your message will be encrypted the moment before it leaves your device until it arrives at the receiving device. Anything less than that means it could be decrypted somewhere in transmission.

She also suggests looking for services that offer ephemeral messaging so that messages disappear within a certain amount of time. Several experts agree that one of the gold standard services for private messages is Signal. WhatsApp is also a popular alternative, though Khoo points out users should be aware that it’s owned by Facebook-parent Meta, which is widely known for massive data collection.

Gillmor says to think about your digital conversations as in-person conversations, during which the location of where those discussions happen matters.

“You wouldn’t go have a conversation outside of your boss’s door,” he said. “You would find a more discreet way to do that — maybe when you’re out for drinks or near heavy machinery on a factory floor.”

It may be best to establish what service workers collectively will use in-person before moving online, experts say. That way there’s no record of the consensus.

But even with the best software, “nothing is foolproof,” said Butler of EPIC. While Signal allows users to disable screenshots of their conversations, the message receiver could always use a second mobile phone to take a photo of a message on the phone where the message was received, he added. And your privacy also depends on the person with whom you’re talking as they could ultimately hand over any private messages despite the service or device, Gillmor said.

That said, sometimes workers need to hold truth to power and that may need to happen on company channels. “It’d be a shame if everyone only toed the line,” he said.

And some conversations are protected by law. So if someone is talking to colleagues about poor workplace conditions and pushing them to collectively respond or act, employers would be breaking labor laws if they retaliated against that, Ndjatou said.

Ndjatou says in general the best advice for workplace messages, regardless of their level of privacy, is to know your audience and use common sense. Anything you say can always be used against you and if a conversation is particularly sensitive, it might be best to fall back on the old-fashioned way of communicating.

“If it’s possible, just meet in person and not digitally at all,” said Khoo.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/techn...mails-privacy/

[VintageFemme]

I saw this tweet and just loved it . . .

you ever wonder if butterflies get little humans in their stomachs when they fall in love

[VintageFemme]

Today is #NationalLipstickDay
Pucker Up

[PlatinumPearl]

[Orema]

Already missing her.

[Orema]

NYT Opinion | I'm Going Blind. This Is What I See.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X04HKyW-3hc

From The NY Times YouTube page: In the Opinion video above, the filmmaker James Robinson introduces us to Yvonne Shortt, who is legally blind. But unlike the stereotype of the blind living in a lightless world, Ms. Shortt, like most other legally blind people, lives a nuanced existence between those who see well and those who can’t see a thing.

Ms. Shortt has retinitis pigmentosa, a disease that causes progressive loss of sight. She can see some things some of the time, depending on various factors, including the amount of ambient light, her distance from the object and the object’s location in her field of vision.

In this short film, Mr. Robinson simulates what it’s like to be Ms. Shortt, navigating her world with progressively declining eyesight but also recognizing what she has gained even as she has lost something so precious.

This is the first in a three-part series of videos by Mr. Robinson, who made “Whale Eyes,” a short Opinion film published last year that was nominated for an Emmy Award, about his own disabling eye condition. “Adapt-Ability,” an Opinion Video series, explores how it feels to live with a disability, and the ways in which society can adjust to be more inclusive of people with disabilities.

[Orema]

NYT Opinion | I Stutter. But I Need You to Listen.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0E_wMIwfSI

From NYTimes YouTube page:

John Hendrickson stutters. He has stuttered nearly his entire life.

And in the Opinion video above, Mr. Hendrickson, working with the filmmaker James Robinson, explores the obstacles and emotional burden of his condition and explains the coping strategies and workarounds he has devised to make it through the day in a world that demands that we speak up and speak clearly.

The film suggests that the problem may lie not with people who stutter but with a society that is largely unprepared or disinclined to accommodate them.

This is the second in a three-part Opinion Video series by Mr. Robinson that profiles people with disabilities. The first, about a woman with retinitis pigmentosa, was published last week. The third, featuring a man who has prosopagnosia — or face blindness — will be published next week. Mr. Robinson also made “Whale Eyes,” an Emmy Award-nominated film we published last year that explores his experiences living with an array of disabling eye conditions.

[Bèsame*]

"Sometimes these busy lives that we've created for ourselves can wear us out"

Most certainly. The part that struck me the most, "that we've created for ourselves".
I chose all of it. I asked for it. I wanted to move, I wanted to care for my Mom, I want to enjoy eating good food and to eat up life!
I can feel burdened by it or I can recognize that all this stuff fulfills me, even though sometimes it exhausts me. Be grateful for a full life and the to-do lists that come with it. I'm adding a relationship to my full life as well.

[Orema]

Your Doppelgänger Is Out There and You Probably Share DNA With Them

By Kate GolembiewskiPhotographs by François Brunelle
Aug. 23, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/23/s...twins-dna.html

That person who looks just like you is not your twin, but if scientists compared your genomes, they might find a lot in common.


Charlie Chasen and Michael Malone, Atlanta, 2014.

Charlie Chasen and Michael Malone met in Atlanta in 1997, when Mr. Malone served as a guest singer in Mr. Chasen’s band. They quickly became friends, but they didn’t notice what other people around them did: The two men could pass for twins.

Mr. Malone and Mr. Chasen are doppelgängers. They look strikingly similar, but they are not related. Their immediate ancestors aren’t even from the same parts of the world; Mr. Chasen’s forebears hailed from Lithuania and Scotland, while Mr. Malone’s parents are from the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas.

The two friends, along with hundreds of other unrelated look-alikes, participated in a photography project by François Brunelle, a Canadian artist. The picture series, “I’m not a look-alike!,” was inspired by Mr. Brunelle’s discovery of his own look-alike, the English actor Rowan Atkinson.

The project has been a hit on social media and other parts of the internet, but it’s also drawn the attention of scientists who study genetic relationships. Dr. Manel Esteller, a researcher at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain, had previously studied the physical differences between identical twins, and he wanted to examine the reverse: people who look alike but aren’t related. “What’s the explanation for these people?” he wondered.

In a study published Tuesday in the journal Cell Reports, Dr. Esteller and his team recruited 32 pairs of look-alikes from Mr. Brunelle’s photographs to take DNA tests and complete questionnaires about their lifestyles. The researchers used facial recognition software to quantify the similarities between the participants’ faces. Sixteen of those 32 pairs achieved similar overall scores to identical twins analyzed by the same software. The researchers then compared the DNA of these 16 pairs of doppelgängers to see if their DNA was as similar as their faces.


Elisa Berst and Corinne Barois, Paris, 2010.


Ana Maria Sánchez and Katherine Romero, Bogotá, Colombia, 2014.


Pedro López Soto and Albert Pueyo Kaotico, Barcelona, 2015.


Stella Cappiello and Nunzia Girardi, Bari, Italy, 2015.

Dr. Esteller found that the 16 pairs who were “true” look-alikes shared significantly more of their genes than the other 16 pairs that the software deemed less similar. “These people really look alike because they share important parts of the genome, or the DNA sequence,” he said. That people who look more alike have more genes in common “would seem like common sense, but never had been shown,” he added.

However, DNA alone doesn’t tell the whole story of our makeup. Our lived experiences, and those of our ancestors, influence which of our genes are switched on or off — what scientists call our epigenomes. And our microbiome, our microscopic co-pilot made up of bacteria, fungi and viruses, is further influenced by our environment. Dr. Esteller found that while the doppelgängers’ genomes were similar, their epigenomes and microbiomes were different. “Genetics put them together, and epigenetics and microbiome pulls them apart,” he said.

This discrepancy tells us that the pairs’ similar appearances have more to do with their DNA than with the environments they grew up in. That surprised Dr. Esteller, who had expected to see a bigger environmental influence.

Because the doppelgängers’ appearances are more attributable to shared genes than shared life experiences, that means that, to some extent, their similarities are just the luck of the draw, spurred on by population growth. There are, after all, only so many ways to build a face.

“Now there are so many people in the world that the system is repeating itself,” Dr. Esteller said. It’s not unreasonable to assume that you, too, might have a look-alike out there.


Anna-Maria Tenta and Helena Joas, Munich, 2013.


Garrett Levenbrook and Roniel Tessler, New York, 2013.


Karen Chu and Ashlee Wong, Culver City, Calif., 2013.


Jeanne Bédard and Jessica Gagnon, Montréal, 2015.

Dr. Esteller is hopeful that the study’s findings will help doctors diagnose illness in the future — if people have similar enough genes to look alike, they might share predilections for diseases too.

“There seems to be something pretty strong in terms of genetics that is making two individuals who look alike also having genome-wide similar profiles,” said Olivier Elemento, the director of the Englander Institute for Precision Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, who was not involved with the study. Discrepancies between DNA’s predictions and people’s actual appearances might alert doctors to problems, he said.

Dr. Esteller also suggested that there could be links between facial features and behavioral patterns, and that the study’s findings might one day aid forensic science by providing a glimpse of the faces of criminal suspects known only from DNA samples. However, Daphne Martschenko, a postdoctoral researcher at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics who was not involved with the study, urged caution in applying its findings to forensics.

“We’ve already seen plenty of examples of how existing facial algorithms have been used to reinforce existing racial bias in things like housing and job hiring and criminal profiling,” Dr. Martschenko said, adding that the study “raises a lot of important ethical considerations.”

Despite the potential pitfalls of linking people’s appearances with their DNA or their behavior, Mr. Malone and Mr. Chasen said the look-alike project, and the knowledge that we all might have a secret twin out there, was a means of bringing people together. The two have remained friends for 25 years; when Mr. Chasen got married last week, Mr. Malone was the first person he called. While not everyone with similar DNA shares such a bond, Mr. Malone said that he saw Mr. Brunelle’s photography project as “another way to connect all of us in the human race.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/23/s...twins-dna.html

[Bèsame*]

This is great. I love the song..lol

[nhplowboi]

OK look, I am already tired of hearing about illegal aliens and Martha's Vinyard. I am glad the Island stepped up big time. I have always felt there are numerous religous groups across our country that could take on only one family and solve this problem if we were needed to.

[nhplowboi]

Is there an age you feel locked into? I am 68 (yep old) but still feel like I am in my 40s...wondering if that is weird?

[clay]

NHPlowboi.......not at all. I am 72 BUT everyone, even my doctors say I look & act like my 40's! AND I LOOK 40!!

[nhplowboi]

High five Clay! OK...I am not weird just older than most.

[cathexis]

Originally Posted by nhplowboi

OK look, I am already tired of hearing about illegal aliens and Martha's Vinyard. I am glad the Island stepped up big time. I have always felt there are numerous religous groups across our country that could take on only one family and solve this problem if we were needed to.

Those poor immigrants. They've come to the US to escape unlivable conditions in the Central American countries. Reminds me of the words chiseled at the base of the Statue of Liberty...bring your huddled masses yearning to be free. Guess, it's either old and disregarded or doesn't apply to the Southern Border.

It's shameful what DeSantis and Abbott have done with the refugees; sending them to areas where they may not be able to communicate due to language differences and without supplies, food, or money.

We are fortunate to have people in the cities and towns who have stepped up to help these poor people who were dumped in US towns they don't know after being lied to about job prospects, shelter, and more than newsprint and TV reports haven't told us about.

There must be some Constitutional Amendment to force these governors to feel some psychological pain for the misery and fear that they caused people who walked all the way from countries where they lived in fear only to find that we (US) treat them with the same disdain as their home countries.