Survival, TLS certificates, and non-obvious interpretations
Two new articles: one on statistics and one more sysadminny. Then we learn what formulations are in ethnography.
Hello! I hope your week is going well.
New articles
Log-Survival to Death Rate
We look at a quick-and-dirty way to extract survival rates (or any other event rates as functions of time, really) from a plot of log-survival against time until death.
Full article (4–8 minute read): Log-Survival to Death Rate
Checking TLS Certificates with OpenSSL from Terminal
Command-line tools are good for automation.
Full article (1–3 minute read): Checking TLS Certificates with OpenSSL from Terminal
Flashcard of the week
This is from back when I was reading about ethnography. I care because anthropologists are really good something I'm not: seeing things precisely for what they are. When I look at things, I start to abstract and generalise without even trying to. I can't not. But anthropologists and ethnographers focus on the very concrete in a way I envy.
Anyway, the card asks
Does a formulation reveal what someone thinks?
A formulation is when a person decides to express their interpretation of an ambiguous social interaction.
Examples include
- During a post-mortem, someone steps in and says, "Let's keep this blame-free". Even if nobody felt blamed before, this formulation has revealed to everyone that whatever happened just before could be construed as blame.
- When discussing details of an implementation, someone might say, "We're bikeshedding here", marking that they consider the work being done of little value.
- In the middle of a hackathon-type event, someone might complain that "You missed a step in our deployment process", indicating that they interpret the context as one in which the deployment process should be followed at all.
It might seem, then, like a formulation does reveal what people think.
No, formulations reveal what people want other people to think they think.
Formulations can be socially trained into people. Often they are honest, but they are also repeated to strenghten the in-group bond, even if the formulating person themselves might not feel strongly about it on their own. A group has decided on their social norms, and these are enforced, among other things, by formulations.
The way Emerson et al. phrase it in Writing Ethnographic Field Notes is (my emphasis)
Since any event may be formulated in a variety of different ways, a particular formulation reveals something about the concerns and relevancies of the person making it. In everyday and institutional settings, it is important to appreciate formulations as social constructions rather than statements of facts.
I think this stuff is interesting. I might be the only one.
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