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Hannah Weiner and Basic English
a paper delivered at the National Poetry Conference: Poetry of the 1970s, Orono, ME 6/13/08
By Rodney Koeneke
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In this paper I'd like to suggest a new lens for understanding Weiner's work: the 20th-century fascination with constrained or invented languages. In particular, I'd like to link Weiner's interest in codes, signals, and the "clairvoyantly written" with the ideals and motivations behind Basic English, the simplified 850-word version of the language invented and promoted by Cambridge literary critic and Modernist "semiologist" I.A. Richards.
The continuum between the Basic vocabulary and the dense, highly abbreviated signifying of 1978's Clairvoyant Journal (parts of which resemble scrambles of the Basic English Wall Chart) point to a shared understanding of the political consequences involved in the ways we make words mean. Richards's own work to foster internationalism through "world" English, particularly in China, parallels Weiner's growing involvement with the American Indian Movement beginning in the 1970s. In both cases, a fundamental questioning of what it is we do when we signify leads to a shared fascination with the contours of the communicative loop that opens whenever we employ signs, which in turn results in a heightened sensitivity to the semantic contexts and political consequences of our language acts. Richards's and Weiner's approach to communication also raises contemporary questions about the limits of language in carrying meaning across cultural barriers.
I hope to use the parallels between Weiner's work and Basic English to offer a new way of reading her shift in the '70s from Code Poems to Clairvoyant Journal, one that reads the work as a visceral meditation on the politics of instruction.
Rodney Koeneke
National Poetry Conference: Poetry of the 1970s
University of Maine, Orono, ME June 13, 2008
August 1972 may turn out to be among the most significant dates in America's poetry history; certainly no account of what happened to our words in the 1970s can happen without it. This paper began with an intuition that the words Hannah Weiner starting seeing that month resemble the reduced, peremptory vocabulary of Basic English, an artificial language of 850 words, with just 16 verbs, invented by C.K. Ogden and I. A. Richards in Britain between the wars. I'm not aware of any evidence that shows Weiner knew about Basic, or thought of her writing as a response to it. But I'd argue that her own highly original thinking about artificial or simplified language systems, from the International Code of Signals to The Sign Language of the American Indians, pushed her work into a constellation of dreams and concerns similar to those of Richards's. What I'd like to do here is suggest some key parallels between Richards's ambitions for Basic English and Weiner's claims for her clair-style writings of the '70s, then use these connections to offer a reading of Weiner's work, in the Early and Clairvoyant Journals and beyond, as a kind of visceral meditation on the politics of language instruction.
I am interested in exploring methods of communication that will be understood face-to-face, or at any distance, regardless of language, country or planet or origin, by all sending and receiving.
That's Hannah Weiner at the twilight of the '60s, describing her recent work with code as a source of poetic invention, though it applies just as well to Richards's interwar ambitions for Basic English. I'd like to take a minute to look at Weiner's summation of her code work in this brief but important piece, "Trans-Space Communication," partly because it gives a powerful sense of the interests animating her poetics at the cusp of the clair-style writings, and partly because it connects so directly with the thinking about language that led Richards from the gleaming quadrangles of Modernist poetics into the briars of language instruction in 1930s China. What I hope to show is that Weiner's poetic progression from the Code Poems through her clairvoyantly written works of the '70s follows an arc not dissimilar to Richards's transformation from brainy Cambridge semiologist to failed apostle of simplified global English. I want to see if the similarities between Richards and Weiner's thinking about language might give us a new way to fold August 1972 into a larger history of 20th-century poetics, and at the same time expand our sense of Weiner's project as an ambivalent critique or counterpoint to the fantasy of a universal language that's shadowed modernity from the start.
Weiner's engagement with the semaphore language of letters, lights and flags that comprises the "INTERNATIONAL CODE OF SIGNALS for the Use of All Nations, British Editions 1859, 1899 and American Edition, post-war, 1931" (she was careful to note the full title, in all its thassalocratic glory) stemmed largely, she says, from its usefulness in "the understanding of the equivalents: [that] one kind of signal may equally be substituted for another with the exact same meaning." This sort of one-to-one signal correspondence, where all substitutions within the semantic system work out with the exactitude of math, has tantalized thinkers since at least Francis Bacon, and the 20th-century end of the rainbow lands on Modernist fantasias like Pound's pseudo-Confucian doctrine of ching ming, the "rectification of names," right word for right thing, the equivalents yoked up tight. But Weiner's interest in the clean substitutions possible within the Code of Signals isn't idealistic—another modern push for a pure, disambiguated language—so much as diagnostic. Because for Weiner, it's through the strict, linear mode of communication which the code enforces, in fact requires, that we begin to detect alternate pathways for meaning. While code enforces a rational, binary semantic circuit (a preoccupation Weiner would return to in late works like The Zero One), it also throws deviations from the circuit into high relief. The Code Poems themselves can be read as a wry, clever, and altogether serious attempt to infiltrate code's denotative pretensions—"[that] one kind of signal may equally be substituted for another with the exact same meaning"—with the connotative shadings of innuendo, ambiguity, and flirty entendre: the Romeo of "R Romeo" forced into play with the "wherefore art thou" one. The real value of code for Weiner, who would soon be receiving signals no code could ever handle, is that it sharpens our attention to what's not code; ways of meaning and thinking which Weiner calls in this piece "knight's thinking (schizophrenic thinking)," in which the communicative moves are "two up in a linear fashion, but then one jump to the side, to a conclusion or connection that may baffle the listener if he is expecting a linear-causal relationship." For Weiner, the liberating potential of an invented meaning system like the Code of Signals—or, for that matter, Basic English, where the whole word list fits on a single wall chart—is in its ability to show us the origins of our training as binary thinkers, in fact to expose binary or linear thinking as a form of training, with the corollary that another kind of training might provide us with an entirely other kind of brain.
Weiner's code experiments —her "explorations," as she put it, into "how much information can be received, and how accurately, through how little means"—are so urgent because she believes that in today's world, with its "high incidence of television, telephone, and other electronic communication" (not to mention, though Weiner does, the enhanced informational capacity of "users of LSD") we badly need differently taught brains. One of Weiner's driving concerns here at the brink of the clair-style is that our heretofore binary, linearly wired minds simply aren't equipped for the hyperactive signaling of modern life. "The amount of information available," she writes,
has more than doubled since World War II. In the next 10 years it will double again. How do we deal with it?
1. Do we use more than the 5% of the brain now in use?
2. Do we process quicker?
3. Do we decode information more and put it in another form (not language) so that the present brain can handle it?
4. Is there a change in the neural circuits of the brain?
If the last, is this a change from a binary to an analog system in the brain? Is this a mutant? Is this a quantum jump to a different energy level? Is there a new form of communication to accommodate these changes? Is it here? Has it yet to be developed? Has it any relationship to "knight's thinking"? Has it any relationship to changes in so-called "states of consciousness"? Is it an analogous, circular, field or some other non-linear system?
These questions, which immediately precede Weiner's own "quantum jump to a different energy level" in October 1970 as documented in The Fast, are uncannily close to I.A. Richards's questioning of signs and their functions in the aftermath of the First World War. Like Weiner, Richards directed his explorations of language to ends that are essentially pedagogic and therapeutic: How is it that words can train our brains to handle the new flood of information, delivered in entirely new ways? The influential "Cambridge School" of literary analysis that Richards pioneered in the '20s resembles Weiner's poetic interests in several key respects. It stressed the neurological effects of language on the brain; saw poetry in primarily instrumental terms as a medium of communication (rather than, say, an elevated aesthetic experience); framed truth—Weiner's "linear communication"—as a by-product of conventional linguistic habits; and argued for experiments in poetry as a kind of instruction in the communicative rigors of an accelerated, media-rich urban existence. Rhyming with Weiner's concern about the exponential info creep since WW II is Richards's own worry in 1924 that "human conditions and possibilities have altered more in a hundred years than they had in the previous ten thousand, and the next fifty may overwhelm us, unless we can devise a more adaptable morality." "Adapting" for Richards, as for Weiner fifty years on, hinges on our ability to pay new forms of attention to how we routinely use our signs. The theories of poet and neurophysiologist C.S. Sherrington—a neglected figure in the history of Anglo-American Modernism—persuaded Richards, in his influential, quasi-messianic books across the '20s, to see poems, especially the knotty modern kind, as a form of complex neurological rewiring that teaches our brains to harmonize the dissonant stimuli of modern life. If you can respond to a complex poem, the interwar Richards argued, you can also "reorder the impulses" (Richards's phrase) to handle the new profusion of signals generated by "the high incidence of television, telephone, and other electronic communication." (Weiner's.) (Weiner's own vexed relationship with "electronic communication" devices plays central role in The Early and Clairvoyant Journals.) So for Richards in the '20s as for Weiner circa 1970, poems are in a literal sense teachers: they educate us into new forms of communication that have a therapeutic ability to improve our lives.
I'd like to quickly outline where this kind of thinking led Richards, then turn to Weiner's own progression from code to clairvoyance to silent teaching to suggest how Weiner's different answers to some of Richards's same questions lead to a poetry that might be read as a profound interrogation of the nature of pedagogy itself. In 1929, Richards accepted a visiting professorship at Tsing Hua College, outside Beijing. China quickly became for Richards what Native Americans and the A.I.M. would later be for Weiner—a cherished Otherness through which he articulated a wide-ranging critique of Western rationalism, violence, and political injustice. His shift from literary criticism to a kind of international linguistic activism developed directly out of his Chinese experience in ways that recall Weiner's own move from "trans-space communication" to clairvoyance. In Mencius on the Mind, published in 1932 just after his first stay in China, Richards laments the erosion of classical Chinese modes of thinking in the country's rush to modernize. His fear is that the Chinese will lose access to their own history and traditions by adopting new forms of communication which fail to account for the differently structured modes of classical Chinese thought. By the standards of Western philosophy, Mencius's way of thinking is analogous to Weiner's "knight's thinking": jumping off to a "conclusion or connection that may baffle the listener if he is expecting a linear-causal relationship." "Those with a taste for clear, precise views," Richards argues
(itself a result of special training) will accuse [Mencius] of not knowing what he wants to say, or of having really no thought yet to utter. But there is another possibility—that a thought is present whose structure and content are not suited to available formulations.
and elsewhere:
" It is a possible suggestion that we perhaps Think and Feel and Will because we have for so long been talking as though we did and that if language and tradition professed a different set of psychic functions we might be conducting our minds otherwise.
Just as Weiner's code work calls attention to the silent pedagogy at the heart of all language use, which implicitly instructs us in the "available formulations" for legitimate communication, Richards's engagement with the "off-code" thinking of Mencius led him to question the normative way we conduct our minds in language as "itself a result of special training" that cuts us off from alternate modes of communication. If thought-forms like Mencius's are going to survive in a rapidly Westernizing world, we need to teach ourselves new methods for detecting "[thoughts] whose structure and content are not suited to available formulations."
Enter Basic English. Critics of Basic, which simplified the English vocabulary to a bare 850 words for the suspiciously imperial purpose of teaching non-native speakers how to pick up the rudiments of Western thought more quickly, accused it alternately of dumbing down the language; stripping English of its connotative richness; and, especially during the Cold War, which essentially killed it, of acting as an insidious Fifth Column for Anglo-American hegemony. But in Richards's eyes, Basic was meant to work much like the International Code of Signals did for Weiner—as instruction in "conducting our minds otherwise," a way to expose our habitual communicative moves as "a result of special training" rather than "[belonging] unconditionally to the constitution of things." The limits on what we're able to express with the constrained vocabulary of Basic was supposed to sensitize us to other pathways of communication that take shape within a different set of constraints. The intention was not so much to rationalize or purify our language use as to make language visible as language, pushing us up against its limits to bring into light other structures of thought. You master the code so as to grasp the value of the "off-code": hence "methods of communication that will be understood face-to-face, or at any distance, regardless of language, country or planet or origin, by all sending and receiving."
Attempt to eliminate all connotation eliminate still quoting page DO THAT PRONOUN THIS AFTER eliminate the message GOOD WORK talk about word as message, information story La Monte word as order just command unit of speech Word as instruction YOU MUST REPEAT SAY NOW
That's Hannah Weiner in Clairvoyant Journal, 3/1/74, talking back to Basic, or talking through Basic, almost in Basic, or maybe just pushing Basic out to its limit case. Because at the heart of the Basic project was the hope of teaching users to regard language, any language, with a kind of triple consciousness not so unlike Weiner's here: the brain moving through the code while recognizing the moves it's permitted as code and at the same time acknowledging the possibility of an entirely different code as a viable means of thought. I'd like to close by pointing out three features of Weiner's clair-style in the '70s that both extend and critique Richards's original aims for Basic: abbreviation, visuality, and instruction.
First abbreviation. Weiner's poems in Clairvoyant Journal can be read as a kind of hyper-diary, an intricate recording of brain circuits moving to process language and the mundane signals of everyday time (shopping, phone calls, parties, dietary regimes, etc.) (It seems to me that one of the great virtues of the clair-style is the way it heightens our attention to this restless processing activity—and effectively replicates it—in our own reading minds, just as code throws into high relief our non-code ways of sense-making.) But the prolix, often quotidian nature of the journal's content, which refuses any meaningful distinction between the everyday and the poetic, shouldn't eclipse the remarkably condensed and economical quality of Weiner's formal maneuvers. In a world where anything carries a potential to signal—colors, body parts, commodities, etc.—abbreviation becomes an urgent pre-condition of transcription. The Journals of the '70s are themselves reduced from much longer manuscripts—Caroline Bergvall reminds us that the 40 typed pages of The Fast were reduced from a 100 notebooks. But beyond that savage redaction, abbreviation—Weiner's ongoing experiment with "how much information can be received, and how accurately, through how little means"—deepens with the turn to the clair-style into one of the primary tools of semantic possibility. Think of Weiner's "Wis-DO," for instance, where dropping the 'm' from Wisdom both condenses and doubles the word. Is it one shortened word now, "wisdom" shorn of its last letter, or two joined together—"wis" stripped of "dom" and fused with a second, "do"? Either way, the effect is to "verb" the noun—with all the philosophical rewiring that implies, "wisdom" as something we do rather than something that is—while at the same time it preserves like a phantom limb its original nounness. Too, "Wis-DO" evokes the unspoken binary opposition of "Wis-DON'T," another instance of the yeas and nays always at issue in the clair-style, a "don't do this, don't do that" type of writing that reflexively reminds the reader at all times of the moves that aren't being allowed—the code not taken. Like the abbreviated word list of Basic, or Weiner's earlier experiments with the constraints of code, the clair-style achieves its particular teaching about language largely via "don'ts"—limitations, excisions, compressions, and erasures ("eliminate the message GOOD WORK") that work to train the attention on the rules that govern "word as message, information story." It's worth pointing out in this context that one of most important features of Weiner's clair-style, its use of different typography for different voices, was itself born of a code-like constraint:
"I bought a typewriter, and I looked at the words all over the place, and said: "You have three choices: caps, italics, and regular type." And that settled it, that's all. The words settled down to three voices."
The semantic power of abbreviation that Weiner opens up in the clair-style points back to the experiments with a tightly controlled language system in the '60s, and beyond that to language systems like Basic English, where limiting the word list was meant to break down the communicative limits of the world. Silence is a teacher; constraint and abbreviation are lessons in the primer that makes it visible.
Along with abbreviation, Weiner uses the visual field of the clair-style page as a semantic unit equal to—and often in tension with—the words themselves. The varied typography offers the reader a number of various but always equally available ways of moving through the text: Read just all the CAPS, only the italics, the interstitials on their own, or wander among the primarily "visual" words and marginalia that curlicue or drop precipitously down the page against the grid of conventional linear reading. What Weiner does with the space of the page in Clairvoyant Journal creates the conditions for "knight's reading," to match the "knight's thinking" of "Trans-Space Communication." The knight moves in an utterly unique fashion, but still depends on the grid for its semantic definition: in other word, the knight's making different moves, but within the same set of shared rules that everyone else uses. Weiner's visual use of the page enacts an identical tension, straying off the line of standard "linear communication"—here represented by our normal left to right, top to bottom reading habits—while at the same time relying on the grid to make the alternate syntax of other potential reading patterns visible.
The visual element in Weiner's work of the '70s parallels Richards's growing interest in teaching Basic through pictures as the Cold War progressed, and the politics that drove Richards to visual language instruction points to my final thought about the clair-style: that it enacts a complex critique of the teacher/student relationship. As Basic English went south during the Cold War, crushed by Third World colonial resistance and First World ideological elbow throwing, Richards increasingly came to rely on pictures as the primary means of Basic instruction, eliminating the need for politically messy media like teachers and classrooms and Westerners by making the vocabulary entirely self-taught. In the '40s he began to work with Disney Studios on a series of instructional films for Basic, and soon developed a series called English Through Pictures, a very early-Weineresque sort of endeavor, which he saw as the last best hope for Basic, as governments like China's increasingly shut their doors to Western meddling. This turn to visual self-instruction was only a Band-Aid though over what was always the Achilles's heel of Basic: that for all its echt international intentions, it was finally a version of English, dragging in its train a long history of domination, expansion and, above all, instruction that rendered most of the globe allergic to any kind of teaching through that medium.
I want to end here by suggesting that Weiner's own clair-style might be read simultaneously as a primer for and a "missing" critique of Basic, or at least of the presumptions about language and pedagogy that sustained it. The governing "doubleness" of the clair-style, I'd argue, is in its embrace of teachers on the one hand—the ALL CAPS visionary deliverers of guidance and daily instruction—and its sensitive questioning of their power to teach on the other. Weiner had a life-long affinity for teachers, and regularly described her own poetic development in student/teacher terms. Kenneth Koch, Jackson Mac Low, Satchidananda, the typewriter, the spirit-teacher Paw: all melded into a lineage of wisdom transmission that found its formal expression in the clair-style CAPS. One of Weiner's most powerful claims for clairvoyance was that "The words in CAPITALS and underlines" are "forces," a "guide to better living," " always suggesting a course that is to the most benefit of all concerned." In a late interview with Charles Bernstein, Weiner even places herself inside the tradition, as an ancestor of the Levis and Cohans, the "hidden teachers" among the Jews. Why, though, should teachers be hidden? Why must instruction be silent? Why clair-style and not Richards's English through Pictures?
I think part of the answer lies in the very first word Weiner says she ever saw: WRONG. The emphasis in Clairvoyant Journals on negative instances of instruction—the parade of "nos," "don'ts," "nots" "can't do that's," and "shut ups" that appear so frequently in the CAP script—invite a sharpened awareness to the power imbalance involved in teaching. Clairvoyance as Weiner employed it was in part a humane sensitivity to the fact that methods of instruction can also be forms of control and intrusion, and that the "guides to better living" avail themselves of an unconscionable amount of bullying, hectoring, and manipulation. "OBEY CHARLEMAGNE." What if this were the basic message at the root of all teaching? What if Charlemagne's instruction boiled down in the end to OBEY? If so, best teach silent.
To conclude: one way of understanding Hannah Weiner's work in the '70s—and one the comparison with Basic English helps us to see more clearly—is as a dramatization of the student/teacher dynamic: the best pupils follow the instructions, while also (often silently) resenting the authority of the instructor. "The words tell you to do/things you don't feel certain about doing." It's with this statement that instruction, all instruction, meets its limit, and it's part of the gift of the clair-style to us to deliver that message so sharply.


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The changing nature of the general business environment offers organisations both opportunities and threats. We can identify key drivers for specific organisations within this environment. The monitoring of the environment is a key activity for all businesses. We need to look at the competition and what is happening in the competitive environment, the environment that is closest to the organisation and has the most immediate impact on it. Once we have analysed the competitive environment, we need to develop strategies, and then formulate and implement actions to put the strategy into practice. This will require change, so we look briefly at some of the factors concerned with successful change in an organisation.
Stakeholders are the customers, suppliers, employees, owners, shareholders, pressure and consumer groups, regulators, professional organisations, competitors and any individual or organisation that has an interest in what an organisation does and how it does it. Some of these groups, such as consumer and pressure groups, are part of what we term the business environment. Some stakeholders such as employees are part of the organisation but, as customers, shareholders, members of pressure groups and members of professional organisations, they are also part of the competitive environment. So, not only are the boundaries between the business and competitive environment blurred, but these influential stakeholders also blur the boundaries between the organisation and the competitive environment. Therefore, before we look in depth at the competitive environment and how the organisation can respond to changes in it, we need to investigate stakeholders in more detail as they affect what the organisation is and what it does, and how it responds to the opportunities and threats in the business and the competitive environment.
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Plus, why parental leave should be a priority for businesses
NOVEMBER FOCUS: FINANCIAL EMPOWERMENT | ISSUE 5 OF 5 | 11.29.21
Good morning and happy Monday!
As we enter the thick of open enrollment season, this week we're running a story about how and why businesses are offering an increase in benefits, especially in the caregiving realm. (Are you or your organization adding new caregiving benefits in 2022? Let me know!)
Also featured in this week's edition is an excerpt of a guest opinion piece from Happy Medium founder and CEO Katie Patterson, who argues that offering paid family leave should be a priority for businesses.
Women-led businesses more likely to offer caregiving benefits as a result of the pandemic, survey says
The Des Moines skyline. Photo by Emily Kestel.
Call it what you want – a "labor shortage" or a "reassessment of work in America" – but companies are finding that in order to attract and retain current employees throughout the Great Resignation, they're going to have to expand their benefits offerings.
Many employers are planning to increase paid family and medical leave offerings, health care benefits, and child care support, according to the latest Principal Financial Well-Being Index.
The index is a quarterly, nationwide survey of business owners and top decision-makers at companies with two to 10,000 employees. The most recent index was conducted in June and surveyed 501 business leaders of for-profit companies that offer health insurance and/or retirement benefits.
So far this year, more than 34 million Americans have quit their jobs. Labor experts say there's no single factor driving the workforce behavior, but many point to burnout, low wages, the continuing child care crisis and lack of support as culprits.
What the Well-Being Index findings show
"I've watched these Well-Being Index results come in for years, and I would say this one is pretty interesting," Amy Friedrich, president of U.S. Insurance Solutions at Principal Financial Group, said.
The survey found that the vast majority – 84% – of businesses feel comfortable with their cash flow.
"That's good news because then they can consider investing in their people," Friedrich said.
In this particular survey, Principal asked about benefits that companies have in place, and then asked why. This was the first survey since it launched in 2012 that included questions about caregiving benefits, according to a Principal spokesperson.
They found that one-fifth of businesses increased child care support and caregiving benefits, and concluded that female-led businesses are more likely to have added caregiving benefits for reasons such as improving employee experience or out of a sense of responsibility. Male-led businesses are more likely to have added the same benefits for reasons to attract new employees.
Caregiving benefits include child care, elder care and employee assistance programs, Friedrich explained. Those could look like allowances, subsidies or providing access to resources.
In the latest Business Record Leaders Survey, 15% of respondents agreed that businesses and organizations have a responsibility to pay for their employees' child care costs. Fifty-five percent disagreed and 29% said they weren't sure.
Responses included:
"Child care assistance is a great benefit for businesses who can offer it, and will likely lure people away from other businesses. It is a great recruiting tool, but not necessarily a responsibility." - Jessica Dunker, President and CEO, Iowa Restaurant Association
"Businesses and organizations have a responsibility to pay their employees fairly. Those employees who choose to have children should be financially able to cover child care costs." - Michelle Book, CEO, Food Bank of Iowa
"It is both economically prudent, and ethically responsible, to ensure the evolving needs that people carry with them into the workplace are addressed. Not only is the child care crisis affecting workplace productivity with an increase in unplanned absenteeism, the data today is very clear the caregiving issue disproportionately impacts women – creating a cumulative and long lasting impact related to the gender wage gap, promotability, special projects and travel opportunities, and a gender wealth accumulation gap into retirement. A commitment to gender equality must equal a commitment to addressing barriers that limit equal opportunities." - Beth Shelton, CEO, Girl Scouts of Greater Iowa
"Businesses are not responsible for the personal decisions made by their employees. Paying for child care creates an unfair compensation situation when some employees don't have child care expenses." - Daniel McCraine, President, McCraine Associates, Inc.
Caregiving benefits, especially child care, are something that Cassie Sampson, owner of East Village Spa, wants to offer her employees. But she can't right now for several reasons.
"I would love to be able to add benefits because child care is one of the biggest challenges," she said. "While I would like to add assistance, a big part of our challenge is availability of child care for the hours my employees want to work. … I would love to offer it if there was a way for me to subsidize child care or even subsidize sitters for evenings and weekend hours."
Another reason why East Village Spa isn't able to offer more benefits is that a lot of the money goes directly toward compensation, Sampson said.
"We pay really well for our industry. Our full time starts at 30 hours a week. We have very few employees that work 40 hours a week and they're earning a living of somebody that works 40 hours a week."
For now, flexibility in work schedules and a comprehensive health care plan are core tenets of the benefit offerings to the employees at East Village Spa.
The health care plan offered at the spa covers mental health and therapy services and gender affirming care in addition to the medical and dental plan, Sampson said.
Flexible scheduling and opportunities for shorter days or weeks are something that employees feel is more important and more valued now, she added. That helps mitigate experiences of burnout and stress – something hospitality and service workers are more prone to.
"Scheduling has been the biggest way we've been accommodating to employees," Sampson said. "We'll change schedules as needed because child care changes in an instant."
As businesses across the state and country continue the process of reopening, leaders in the private and public sectors have made one thing clear: The economy won't fully recover unless women can fully participate.
Dawn Oliver Wiand, executive director of the Iowa Women's Foundation, said earlier this year that in order to address the workforce shortage, we have to figure out how to get more women back to work. "We can do that with family-friendly policies, quality, affordable child care, and work flexibility. It's going to be essential if we want our businesses and our state to be able to recover and continue to grow."
We are humans and need to be treated as such. That's why paid parental leave should be a priority.
BY KATIE PATTERSON FOUNDER AND CEO, HAPPY MEDIUM
It's not lost on me that I'm sitting down (finally) at 7:59 p.m. on Tuesday (this blog's due date) to write it. And like clockwork, the second I sat down, after working all day to run my companies followed by a Pinterest-inspired homemade pasta night with my 8-year-old son for some much needed and requested quality time with him, my 2-year-old (who I thought was fully asleep) starts crying and I need to go check on him. Be right back …
OK, got the pacifier back in and we're set up for success (hopefully). Also, note to self, wean 2-year-old off the pacifier.
The mental load of a mother is unmatched and often referred to as "invisible labor." For women who want to be in the workforce, we've come so far through the years. I am so incredibly grateful for the women before us who pushed our gender to the position it's in.
As a woman who started my own company in the Midwest at 27 years old, I took this for granted. It wasn't until I was in the trenches that I realized my own grandmother was born during a time where women weren't allowed to vote. We often have to look backward to see how far we've come.
Today, many women have progressed not only to working 40 hours per week in full-time jobs outside the home, but also filling incredibly demanding roles – managers, C-suite, and "always on" positions. So we've pushed through and earned our seat at the table, except now we're just responsible for more tables (dining room and conference room), and it feels really overwhelming and often very lonely.
Beyond feeling these emotions of the mental load, as women, we also take on the physical demands of childbearing, labor and giving birth. We're called birth warriors, then we're sent home with a newborn, often just 48 hours after giving birth or having major medical surgery. We have to immediately transition into the full-time caretaker of a completely helpless tiny human whose sleep schedule is completely backward.
When we have any other type of surgery, we're given significant time to heal and not be responsible for a newborn. Mothers are asked to go through all of this, and then are often within days pushed back to working outside their home again. All this is after nine months of the physical demands of pregnancy and working jobs during all of it.
Why are we having any conversations other than fully supporting women to be paid during this traumatic time? But here we are, fighting for the right to be treated with basic human decency.
The U.S. ranks last among industrialized countries relative to employee benefits like health care, paid leave, vacation days, unemployment and retirement. States can raise their standards from federal minimums.
When I started my company I didn't have children. I was only 27 and living blissfully unaware of the mental load the former female colleagues who were mothers had the entire time we worked together.
I did, however, know that the company I worked for before I started Happy Medium had me on a 100% commission plan, and I knew that their maternity leave plan was to not pay you your commission. Even if you had pre-sold everything and placed the orders, you would not get paid on them. You were put on short-term disability at a fraction of what you were owed and the company actually profited from you being out. They would then ask the other sales reps to manage your clients for three months and pay them $0 on it. Nothing. The money you sold was just going directly to the company, and people were forced to work on it for free and you were not paid what you were owed.
I didn't know what it was like to have a baby yet, but I absolutely knew this was not OK. So when I started my own company and eventually started to need to build company policies, it was never a question in my mind if we were going to pay the women on our team 100% for 12 weeks' maternity leave. Eventually, we evolved it to be even more inclusive and supportive of our families by adding in fathers and adoptive parents to this benefit.
I am a firm believer if my small company can find a way to do this, many more can as well. Yes, it's hard and sometimes complicated, but I consider it a basic human right – so we make it happen, no questions asked.
We've come a long way, but in the progress chain of events, we seem to be at the point where women can be anything, anywhere, and we're expecting them to be everything, everywhere. That doesn't work. It makes for frazzled mothers, which often makes for frazzled children and co-workers. Then the mothers blame themselves for not being able to do it all, and we slightly tell them they shouldn't have to, but our actions do not support our words.
So how do we make it better? It's unfortunately become very clear our country is not going to prioritize this. I don't understand how women aren't marching and demanding paid leave, but we're not there yet.
What we can do is localize the support. Work to use our newer presence in the C-suite and leadership roles to change our company policies. This is a huge priority for me and I'm always happy to do what I can to help other leaders see the way. We can no longer ask this much of women. We are humans and need to be treated as such.
READ THE FULL COLUMN
Left: Iowa women's wrestling coach Clarissa Chun. Photo credit: Stephen Mally/Hawkeyesports.com Center: Swedish prime minister Magdalena Andersson. Right: Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai.
Olympic bronze medalist Clarissa Chun has been named as the first head coach of the University of Iowa women's wrestling team. Her hiring comes less than two months after Iowa became the first Division I Power 5 school to add a women's wrestling program.
Magdalena Andersson has been approved by Sweden's parliament as the country's first female prime minister.
After she accused a Communist Party official of sexual assault a month ago, Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai disappeared from public view. That's led to global concerns about her safety, even as she appeared in a video call and at a public youth tournament in the last week. "These photos and videos can only prove that Peng Shuai is alive, but nothing else. They cannot prove that Peng Shuai is free," Teng Biao, one of China's most prominent civil rights lawyers, said.
A District Court judge has ruled an Iowa law that blocks Medicaid coverage of gender confirmation surgery as unconstitutional. Rita Bettis Austen, legal director of the ACLU of Iowa, called the decision "a historic win for civil rights" in Iowa. According to a spokesperson, Gov. Kim Reynolds is disappointed and disagrees with the ruling and is "reviewing the decision with our legal team and exploring all options moving forward."
Ann Arbor, Mich., will require all public bathrooms in the city to carry menstrual products for free under a new ordinance that takes effect in January. Many U.S. states and cities already supply free menstrual products at certain locations, but it's believed that Ann Arbor is the first jurisdiction to require them in all public restrooms.
Sandra Selden, an IT worker at Des Moines Area Community College, was awarded $1.4 million in back pay and damages following a lawsuit where she alleged she was paid "tens of thousands of dollars less" than a male colleague despite having the same title and greater responsibilities.
Being herself: Deanna Strable-Soethout
Strable-Soethout, 52, describes her professional life in three chapters. After finishing college at Northwestern University, she started at Principal in 1990 as an actuary. In the mid-1990s, she ran various product lines within Principal's insurance businesses and was named president of U.S. Insurance Solutions in 2015. In 2017, she became chief financial officer.
Through each chapter, she watched as other women leaders copied the styles and personalities of men. They didn't let their guard down. Strable-Soethout wanted to bring her full self to the executive level, to not change who she was to fit someone's else's ideal. READ THE FULL STORY>
"WHEN I WAS A LITTLE BOY, MY MOM USED TO SAY,
'SON, THE MOST POWERFUL, THE MOST DANGEROUS CREATURE ON THIS WHOLE EARTH IS A WOMAN WHO KNOWS HOW TO THINK.'"
RICHARD WILLIAMS IN "KING RICHARD"
'Am I even fit to be a mom?' Diaper need is an invisible part of poverty in America (The 19th). What we see in the shameful trends on U.S. maternal health (New York Times Opinion). How child care became the most broken business in America (Bloomberg). Questions to ask a new person instead of "What do you do?" (Girls Night In). Most state lawmakers earn low salaries. It affects who can afford to be one (The 19th).
YOUR TAKE
Last week, we shared two stories of fearlessness from audience members, as well as their opinions on confidence, leadership and risk-taking. Their responses show courage and strength in all of life's moments, whether they be relatively small or big.
Submit your own story to be featured!
Lifting the Veil is out now
Our sister publication, dsm Magazine, has just published its annual Lifting the Veil issue, which focuses on mental health. Take a look at the e-edition here.
Sent to: _t.e.s.t_@example.com


A large Sacramento construction company has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in federal court. As Dan Kennedy at the Business Journal reports, many local companies are owed money.
Azteca Construction in Rancho Cordova had 100 employees at its peak last year, with revenues of $17 million dollars. But signs of trouble arose months ago when the company couldn't fulfill the insurance and bonding requirements on a City of Sacramento project to improve roads in the Power Inn area. The incomplete job is awaiting a new contractor. Azteca president Rafael Martin couldn't be reached for comment. The company owes $11 million dollars … including sizeable debt to Western Sierra Bank, Urata & Sons Cement, and the IRS. Chapter 11 bankruptcy involves the court in trying to help a company reorganize and go forward.


PasswordSafe is an app for secure storing passwords and other sensitive data.
All entries in the database are encrypted with AES-256.
The entries can be organized in categories.
For every entry you can choose an icon and add as much input fields as you need.
For every input field you can give a meaningful name.
It is also possible to add small (<700 kByte) binaries to the entry fields e.g. for storing software keys, the private part of public keys and so on.
From the database with the encrypted entries a backup copy can be made on your SD card.
It is also possible to restore a backup from SD card.
TimeCalculator is a small app for calculating times.
TimeCalculator makes it easy to to this and displays the result in time format or decimal format in hours, minutes or seconds.
Sudoku app for creating, solving and playing Sudoku games.
SudokuMaster is a small app for creating, solving and playing Sudokus.
You can choose between 5 different levels (easy, simple, normal, difficult, hard).
You can request for a hint for a selected field.
A field can be marked by a long touch.
Every created Sudoku is solvable but there might be more than one possible solution.
Linear audio recorder with peakmeter.
Android API Level 10 (2.3.3 GINGERBREAD_MR1) or higher is required for recording in AMR wideband or AAC format. I can not guarantee that all sample rates, codecs and container formats will work on all devices. Please try out what works best for you.
For highlighting entries you can choose between nine colors.
OpenDictionary is a dictionary application for your Android mobile phone.
You can import CSV files from your SD-card to create dictionaries.
You can build a new dictionary from scratch and fill it with own data on your mobile phone.
You can edit every dictionary entry.
You can export every dicionary in a CSV file on your SD-card.
AudioPlayer is a small file based audio player for your Android mobile phone.
AudioPlayer is an ideal player if you have organized your audio files in folder and already created playlists.
E.g. for listening audio books, classical music and MP3 collections.
You can create and store your own playlists and shuffle playlists.
ID2V1 and ID3V2 informations are displayed (title, artist, album, comment).
You can step forward and backward through playlists. In the actual track you can jump to every playback position.
Playlists can be played in a loop.
During exit the actual plaback status (playlist, track, play position, play modus) is saved and restored during next start up.
There are adjustable jump functions available for seeking in a sound file.
During in- or outgoing calls pause mode is activated.
A commercial free version is available.
Little fancy logic game in which a secret color code must be find out.
GuessLogical is a little fancy game for which you need logic and some intelligent guesses.
You must find out a secret color combination. For every guess you make you get a response.
If you have found a color in the right position you get one red point, if you guess a color but still in the wrong position you get a yellow point.
You win when you guess all colors in the correct order within a given number of tries.
SensorView is a little utility to view the sensor values from your Android driven smartphone.
Most smartphones have sensors for acceleration, magnetic field and light.
E.g. with the magnetic sensor and SensorView you can detect iron and other magenetic materials and you can also measure weak magnetic fields.
!!! DONT TRY TO MEASURE STRONG FIELDS - IT COULD DAMAGE YOUR SMARTPHONE !!!
With the orientation sensor you can find the compass points.
Values are displayed as numbers and graphically in a bargraph. With clicking in the bargraph you can set a zoom factor for the graphical display.


Featured amenities include complimentary newspapers in the lobby, a 24-hour front desk, and luggage storage. Planning an event in Douai? This hotel has facilities measuring 2044 square feet (190 square meters), including a meeting room. Free self parking is available onsite.


text:
package com.vaadin.tests.applicationservlet;

import org.junit.Assert;
import org.junit.Test;

import com.vaadin.tests.tb3.SingleBrowserTest;

public class ServiceInitListenersTest extends SingleBrowserTest {

    @Test
    public void testServiceInitListenerTriggered() {
        openTestURL();

        Assert.assertNotEquals(getLogRow(0), 0, extractCount(getLogRow(0)));
        Assert.assertNotEquals(getLogRow(1), 0, extractCount(getLogRow(1)));
        Assert.assertNotEquals(getLogRow(2), 0, extractCount(getLogRow(2)));
    }

    private int extractCount(String logRow) {
        // Assuming row pattern is "label: 1"
        String substring = logRow.replaceAll("[^:]*:\\s*", "");
        return Integer.parseInt(substring);
    }

}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Notley Fern Gorge is a remnant patch of rainforest above the Tamar Valley, northern Tasmania. The wet sclerophyll forest area has a walking track and picnic area beneath towering trees.
The forest is dominated by eucalypts towering above the rainforest understorey. The state reserve is well known for a burnt out tree known as 'Bradey's Tree.' It is named after the 1820s bushranger whose gang is believed to have hidden in this forest. There is a 1.5 kilometre (1 mile) track weaving past glades of mosses and ferns which takes about 45-minutes to walk. The walk requires moderate fitness and crosses the creek several times with a steady climb uphill on the return.
Enjoy reading about the types of fauna and flora on information stands throughout the reserve and observe the native birdlife including pink robins and golden whistlers. Other largely nocturnal wildlife include Bennetts wallabies, Tasmanian devils and ringtail possums. Marvel at large tree ferns, hard water ferns down by the creek's edge and filmy ferns, found growing on the trunks of trees. After your forest walk, enjoy the picnic and barbecue area.
Notley Fern Gorge is half an hours' drive (24 kilometres/15 miles) north-west of Launceston.
Place Categories: See & Do in Launceston.Place Tags: activities, attraction, do, family, launceston and things to do.


text:
Q: Matomo - Location provider plugin and access to visit details i trying write my first Matomo plugi n(Location provider) that will determine user's location based on custom dimension column.
So far I have came up with this code:
<?php

namespace Piwik\Plugins\LocationProviderCustom\LocationProvider;

use Piwik\Plugins\UserCountry\LocationProvider;

class CountryProvider extends LocationProvider {

public function getLocation($info) {

    // custom_dimension_1 should be accessible here

    $location = array(
        self::COUNTRY_CODE_KEY => 'us'
    );
    self::completeLocationResult($location);
    return $location;
}

public function isWorking() {
    return true;
}

public function isAvailable() {
    return true;
}

public function getSupportedLocationInfo() {
    return array(
        self::COUNTRY_CODE_KEY => true
    );
}

public function getInfo() {
    return array(
        'id' => 'locationProviderCustom',
        'title' => 'Location Provide',
        'description' => '',
        'order' => 5
    );
}

}

So in getLocation($info) I should determine the country code.
$info is holding just IP address and browser language.
All of location provider plugings that I saw used one of those two properties to determine user's country.
Is it possible to get visit details and especially custom visit dimension values into the Location provide? Or should I approach it some other way?
Thanks

A: Use Common::getrequestVar() to get the request values.
Here's an example where I was using custom variable rather than custom dimensions:
    public function getLocation($info)
    {
        $country_code = 'us';

        $_cvar = Common::getRequestVar('_cvar', '{}');

        //in my case $_cvar string looks something like '{"1":["COUNTRY","gb"]}'

        $_cvar = html_entity_decode($_cvar);
        $decoded_cvars = json_decode($_cvar, true);

        if ($decoded_cvars !== NULL) {
          $custom_var = array();

          foreach($decoded_cvars as $var) {
            $custom_var[$var[0]] = $var[1];
          }

          if (array_key_exists('COUNTRY', $custom_var)) {
            $country_code = $custom_var['COUNTRY'];
          }
        }

        $location = array(
          self::COUNTRY_CODE_KEY => $country_code
        );

        self::completeLocationResult($location);

        return $location;
    }

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


The new video directed by Jonas Åkerlund, who has collaborated with Madge previously on Ray of Light, Music, Jump and Celebration, is set after a nuclear explosion in major cities across the world. Madge heads out to explore the post-apocalyptic destroyed city and nearly gets taken out with a sniper gun by Terrence Howard who also features in the clip.
Check out the video below and get your copy of Rebel Heart on iTunes now..!