Krikorian stressed the importance of the engineering org’s compact, five-to-seven-person teams that sit together, are dedicated to specific areas of the site, and can operate autonomously, according to Krikorian’s slideshow pitch (no audio, but the slides are informative). Krikorian stressed how much control the individual groups have over how their teams work — likely a nice way to pitch would-be engineer recruits at the conference.

Both companies [Toyota and Google] make much better decisions because they don't rely on hierarchy, PowerPoint, persuasion. They're making decisions based on real experiments. So I said, wait a minute. Whenever reasonable, let's move from decisions by persuasion to decisions by experiment.

So today we are announcing VEDO – an extension of our core platform that brings programmable intelligence to the masses. Building upon our incredibly rich text pre-processing and parsing capabilities, we have added a whole new engine that allows customers to take advantage of advances in machine learning, statistical models, rich taxonomies and much more all through a simple and unified approach. As with the rest of our platform, we want to reduce the cost of developing this kind of functionality for our customers and let them focus on innovation and not on infrastructure.

Since the genetic code was deciphered in the 1960s, scientists have assumed that it was used exclusively to write information about proteins. UW scientists were stunned to discover that genomes use the genetic code to write two separate languages. One describes how proteins are made, and the other instructs the cell on how genes are controlled. One language is written on top of the other, which is why the second language remained hidden for so long.

“For over 40 years we have assumed that DNA changes affecting the genetic code solely impact how proteins are made,” said Stamatoyannopoulos. “Now we know that this basic assumption about reading the human genome missed half of the picture. These new findings highlight that DNA is an incredibly powerful information storage device, which nature has fully exploited in unexpected ways.”

The genetic code uses a 64-letter alphabet called codons. The UW team discovered that some codons, which they called duons, can have two meanings, one related to protein sequence, and one related to gene control. These two meanings seem to have evolved in concert with each other. The gene control instructions appear to help stabilize certain beneficial features of proteins and how they are made.

The discovery of duons has major implications for how scientists and physicians interpret a patient’s genome and will open new doors to the diagnosis and treatment of disease.

“The fact that the genetic code can simultaneously write two kinds of information means that many DNA changes that appear to alter protein sequences may actually cause disease by disrupting gene control programs or even both mechanisms simultaneously,” said Stamatoyannopoulos.

The authors of Managing Modernity certainly provide us with some an- swers about the state of bureaucracy in the early 21st century. They put forward a strong case according to which bureaucracy continues to be an influential and important mode of organizing. In this sense, the book provides further confirmation for the lines of argument set out by Paul du Gay (2000) and David Courpasson (2000). However, the con- tributors to Managing Modernity also pose some novel questions. In particular, many of them ask how we might think about these reformed bureaucracies which dominate today’s organizational landscape. The contributors try to grapple with those bureaucracies that seem to incor- porate elements of flexibility, markets, networks, entrepreneurialism, community engagement, virtuality and all manner of other manage- ment and public policy fashions. They put forward a number of new concepts in an effort to think through these reformed bureaucracies. Stewart Clegg's chapter provides a useful overview of some of the concepts which have been commonly used to understand 'post-bu- reaucracies'. He also suggests that projects are increasingly used as core organizing units in these neo-bureaucracies. David Buchanan and Louise Fitzgerald suggest the notion of accessorized bureaucracy as a way of capturing bureaucratic structures which add on various aspects of markets, networks and community orientation to a bureaucratic core. By embracing this idea, contemporary bureaucracies can build a de- gree of legitimacy. Looking at the case of the NHS, David Speed sug- gests that the idea of 'soft bureaucracy' may correspond to the NHS re- forms, which have been driven by attempts to introduce choice-based policies. Another consideration of the NHS, by Martin Harris, finds that notions of network governance have been used to supplement exist- ing bureaucratic procedures. This theme of networks is expanded on by Jannis Kallinikos, who highlights how many bureaucratic processes have been increasingly driven into virtual networks. In some cases, on- line communities and virtual production networks have taken on many of the administrative tasks usually undertaken by bureaucratic admin- istrators. Mats Alvesson and Dan Kärreman argue that two manage- ment consultancies which claimed to be paragons of post-bureaucracy actually relied on heavy bureaucratic measures (particularly personnel management systems); these bureaucratic systems often worked not to ensure that employees followed the rules but to encourage aspirational control which would tether employees to the company. In this sense, rules and regulations come to infuse the life-world and identity projects of people within the firm. To capture this, they suggest the concept of 'sociocracy'. Finally, Mike Reed puts forward the idea of bureaucratic hybrids as a way of conveying new modes of control in contemporary organizations.

[...]

Perhaps that which comes closest to achieving this is Kallinkos's discussion of the role of open-source communities. If we really mean to understand how these new forms of bureaucracy operate, however, we must understand how they try to harness the world beyond the bureau. In an attempt to further this line of enquiry, I would argue that neo-bureaucracies work through the cre- ation of extitutions.

Extitutions

The concept of the extitution was first posited by Michel Serres (1994). He used it to refer to forms of control which no longer have a strict place or setting, but rather come to be distributed or spread throughout a society (for more detailed discussion, see Tirdaro and Domènech, 2001, cf. Spicer, 2010). ‘Extitution’ refers to a form of authority where there is no inside and outside. There are no walls to this bureau. Rather, relationships of administrative authority spread throughout society in various networks and other flexible structures. An extitution is a par- ticular type of bureaucratic arrangement whereby services are no lon- ger provided within a strictly bounded space. Rather, service provision becomes infused into all aspects of society. This can be seen in forms of deinstitutionalization, whereby various social services are no lon- ger provided within the walls of a strictly bounded institution, but are distributed throughout society, with responsibility for this being largely placed on communities (Vitores, 2002). Some instances of this include the closure of asylums, the rise of 'care in the community', the increase of prisoners being placed under community supervision, and patients being pushed out of hospitals into virtual healthcare networks (eg. Mil- ligan, Roberts and Mort, 2011). All these de-institutionalized settings share a lack of any strict division between what is inside and outside the bureaucratic institution; the bureaucracy seems to exist everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

Extitutions do not strictly work through rules, regulations and proce- dures. Rather, they seek to work through people’s everyday lives: through their interests, passions, identities and so on. Many of the con- tributions to Managing Modernity note that neo-bureaucracies focus significantly on public involvement. Being involved, engaged, enthusi- astic and ever present have become watchwords for the contemporary bureaucrat. These neo-bureaucrats are asked to bring their lives (pri- vate passions and personal identity) to work, but the blurring of bound- aries does not end there. As well as bringing life into bureaucracy, we have witnessed processes where bureaucracy has begun to infuse certain aspects of life. Instead of entrusting our health or emotional well-being to institutional clinics, we are asked to manage them our- selves through careful self-monitoring. Bureaucracy has increasingly taken root in our everyday lives.

[...]

In some cases various shady private or non-government organizations take on the mantel of bureaucratic administration. But in other cases bureaucratic processes, rules and procedure become increasingly self-administered. We become bureaucrats for and of ourselves. When we begin to adopt a mantel of self-administration, a kind of collapse of the life-world and the systems world takes place. Bureaucracy begins to know no bounds and becomes ever-present, infusing all aspects of life and often working through them. In the words of Peter Fleming (forthcoming), it becomes a kind of 'biocracy' that seeks to control and modulate life itself. We become our own biocrats, with the primary task of self-administering our own lives.

[...]

Our sense of identity becomes something to be harnessed in the administration of culture.

[...]

Perhaps this reaches a kind of crescendo with Big-Society-style policies which ask us not only to pay our taxes but also to club together to provide the very services which these taxes are supposed to fund. The result is that our lives become saturated with constant demands to be involved. This comes at the very time when employers’ expectations regarding our involvement in the workplace have also increased significantly. This means that people's lives be- come increasingly saturated with demands to be constantly involved and active in everything from managing one's weight to running one's local library. The demands of (hyper-)active citizens may seem to be reasonable to some; however, they come at a high cost. Constant activ- ity shifts the expectations from the bureau itself onto the individual, but as Kafka was all too aware, bureaucratic expectations are unending. The result is that even the most diligent of self-administering individu- als finds it difficult to keep up. When this happens, self-administrators have no-one to blame but themselves. Such blame is then frequently directed internally and can often transform into a pervasive sense of guilt (Spicer, 2011), anxiety (Salecl, 2006) or even depression (Ehrenberg, 2010).

[...]

Resistance to modern bureaucracies has often been often mobilized through calls to replace cold instrumental reason with true and meaningful human con- nections. However, the over-saturated neo-bureaucracies which we see today call for precisely the opposite reaction. Rather than creating more connections, perhaps the central task of resistance movements is one of disconnection. This would involve seeking to disconnect our everyday lives from the administrative apparatus which tries to work through them. In recent years, a range of different strategies of discon- nection have been suggested. For instance, Paul du Gay has sought to revive existing modes of disconnection found in classical bureau- cratic thought. He makes an argument for the dissociation of political and administrative power. He also makes an argument for a distinction between one's own private interests and the various projects which are rationally pursued as part of a bureaucratic apparatus.

Q. You’ve worked in the digital space a long time. Thoughts on innovation?

A. I’m a real student of business transformation. In any transformation I’ve seen, the winner is always the one who takes out a clean sheet of paper and says, “This is how you would do it if you didn’t have the drag of your traditional business.”

Impatient marketers The digital world, however, runs faster than the typical IT department’s default speed. Other bits of the business are not always willing to wait. Marketing, desperate to use digital wiles to woo customers and to learn what they are thinking, is especially impatient. Forrester, another research firm, estimates that marketing departments’ spending on IT is rising two to three times as fast as that of companies as a whole. Almost one in three marketers thinks the IT department hinders success.

The IT crowd worry that haste has hidden costs. The marketers, points out Vijay Gurbaxani of the Centre for Digital Transformation at the University of California, Irvine, will not build in redundancy and disaster recovery, s...up”. Whatever the digital team comes up with still needs to fit in with the business’s existing IT systems.

So IT chiefs somehow have to let a thousand digital ideas bloom, while keeping a weather eye on the whole field. At Dell, a PC-maker shifting towards services and software, Adriana Karaboutis, the chief information officer, says that she works closely with the marketing department: people there have developed applications which, once screened by the IT team, have ended up in Dell’s internal and external app stores. With such co-operation, says Ms Karaboutis, “people stop seeing IT as something to go around, but as something to partner with.”

Corporate IT bosses are right to fear being overwhelmed. But cleaving to their old tasks and letting others take on the new unsupervised is not an option. Forrester calls this a “titanic mistake”. The IT department is not about to die, even if many functions ascend to the cloud. However, those of its chiefs who cannot adapt may fade away.

On January 29, 2009, another maple syrup event commenced in northern Manhattan. The first reports triggered a new protocol that routed all complaints to the Office of Emergency Management and Department of Environmental Protection, which took precise location data from each syrup smeller. Within hours, inspectors were taking air quality samples in the affected regions. The reports were tagged by location and mapped against previous complaints. A working group gathered atmospheric data from past syrup events: temperature, humidity, wind direction, velocity.

Seen all together, the data formed a giant arrow aiming at a group of industrial plants in northeastern New Jersey. A quick bit of shoe-leather detective work led the authorities to a flavor compound manufacturer named Frutarom, which had been processing fenugreek seeds on January 29. Fenugreek is a versatile spice used in many cuisines around the world, but in American supermarkets, it’s most commonly found in the products on one shelf—the one where they sell cheap maple-syrup substitutes.

Below is a list of 10 steps that a city or local government might take to create a ‘space’ where innovating and risk-taking are encouraged and protected. They are taken from our new series of occasional papers from the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School. Each step can help a city take advantage of the untapped potential for new ideas and practices from across city government and from among local nonprofits, foundations, businesses, civic associations, hackers, advocacy groups, and of course citizens.

1. Ensure mayoral and public support: Aversion to risk and fear or unwillingness to engage in a political battle over change to the status quo can be enough to sink any innovation—despite its potential. Mayoral leadership is critical for driving public innovation. Prioritizing innovation in the public sphere, recruiting outside thinkers, and protecti...agencies early in the process. Successful efforts to support and promote innovation involve operational partners in their planning from the earliest stages of ideation and development. A key to the Center for Economic Opportunity’s success is that it has partnered with some 30 city agencies in every stage from finding new ideas and designing and implementing pilot programs to collecting and analyzing performance data.

While we approached our framework for improving a local innovation landscape with government innovation teams in mind, these 10 steps and other elements of the framework have broader applications. For those who are not in government but see their role as promoting and supporting local innovation, many elements of the framework could be applicable to your work. And those who consider themselves entrepreneurs, whether in government or out, can lobby city government to deploy these strategies—benefitting both the broader city population and their own enterprise or idea.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/sunday-review/air-conditioning-is-an-environmental-quandary.html

airconditioning #climatechange #globalwarming

>A new report by the McKinsey Global Initiative predicts that one billion city dwellers “will enter the global consuming class by 2025.” And, for most of them, an air-conditioner will most likely be a first purchase since almost all of the cities with the highest potential cooling needs, according to Mr. Sivak’s research, are in developing countries that are in hot climates. These include Chennai, India; Bangkok; Manila; Jakarta, Indonesia; Karachi, Pakistan; Lagos, Nigeria and Rio de Janeiro. Sales of air-conditioning units are already growing by double digits annually in many emerging economies.

>So researchers say the best hope is that we all adjust our air-conditioning expectations and behavior.

>Building managers could increase airflow in hot buildings, for example, which improves comfort. Workers could wear lighter, looser clothing to work in summer — instead of carrying sweaters to protect themselves from over-chilled air. Architects could design office blocks using materials that did not conduct so much heat and where humans could open the windows to take advantage of natural ventilation and breezes.

>Stan Cox, author of “Losing Our Cool,” suggests that one solution might be a return to room air-conditioning, so we only use energy to cool spaces that people are actually using. He believes that people are accustomed to working in frigid offices but could acclimatize to warmer conditions.

The climate change movement needs to be as radical as Nelson Mandela’s fight against apartheid, said Naomi Klein, speaking to an audience in London today.

Gathering at the Royal Society for a conference on how global carbon emissions can be reduced drastically and immediately, speakers including Naomi Klein, Kevin Anderson and Corinne le Quéré argued for a new wave of radical environmental action.

“Transformative policies must be backed by transformative politics,” said Klein, a Canadian journalist and author on the green movement, via weblink. “An agenda capable of delivering radical emissions reductions will only advance if accompanied by a radical movement.”

As with the battle against apartheid in South Africa, fighting climate change requires “a clear moral vision of the alternative being fought for,” said Klein. Just as Mandela fought for a new “rainbow egalitarian society” rather than simply against racism, environmentalists need to establish a new approach to society.

It is time for a new generation of environmental activism to emerge, she said—one that is not dominated by acceptance of the prevailing world view, but one that breaks free from the “ideologically shackled environment in which we all operate”.

Why revolution is the only way

Hansen and his associates admonish the environmental community for doing the same things over and over again—advocating for renewable energy, recycling, and hybrid cars—and expecting different results. The change that is produced in this way is much, much too slow, they say. Their study concludes with what can only be characterized as a call to arms: a global challenge akin to the anti-slavery and civil rights movements, begging the world’s young people to disrupt their governments and demand immediate action on climate change. + In short, we’re talkin’ ’bout a revolution—or in the words of the paper, “a human ‘tipping point’.” + Are there no other options? Hansen and his co-authors argue there is a sliver of hope the world could stay near a 1°C goal if there were a bilateral agreement between the...lping youth fight climate change through the court system in a recent op-ed for CNN. + And indeed, the US military already seems to be preparing for climate-induced mass protests, the Guardian reported in June, based on documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. + But as with all revolutions, the fight for the climate will need a catalyst. It’s unclear what that might be, especially when the very consumption culture that forms the bedrock of the present-day economic system is so ubiquitous—and also at the root of the climate problem itself. Young people growing up now contemplating their futures may have the biggest reason for alarm, but with a problem like climate change that feels complex, distant and abstract, it may be hard to make the urgency that Hansen expresses resonate broadly. + And even if a “human tipping point” comes—an Arab Spring for the climate—will it sustain its momentum or, like most of the recent uprisings, burn out or collapse into factional bickering?

A world where what is fair and what is law diverge so markedly raises a number of important moral, legal and economic questions, the most basic and important of which is: How does a reality in which we own so little of what we create affect our drive to make something new and original?

To answer this question, the marketing professor On Amir and I researched how ownership over our skills and creative ventures affects our motivation to perform. In a study published this year in the Harvard Business Review, we reported on a series of behavioral experiments in which we asked over a thousand participants to perform various tasks and solve problems.

We divided the subjects into two groups. We told one set that they were free to later perform similar work for other “employers” in the virtual workplace of our experiment. We asked the others to sign over ownership of their skills to, and sign noncompete agreements with, their current “employers.”

All of the participants were assured that they would be paid for the tasks they performed in the experiment. But the effects of giving up future control over one’s own skills and products of the mind were significant. When we asked participants to relinquish ownership of their skills, they became less focused on the problem, spent less time on the task and made twice as many errors as the unconstrained group.

These effects were mitigated when our subjects found the tasks particularly interesting in and of themselves, but even then, the constraints we imposed on their human capital suppressed their motivation to perform well.

Kahan calls this theory Identity-Protective Cognition: "As a way of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups, individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values." Elsewhere, he puts it even more pithily: "What we believe about the facts," he writes, "tells us who we are." And the most important psychological imperative most of us have in a given day is protecting our idea of who we are, and our relationships with the people we trust and love.

[...]

To spend much time with Kahan’s research is to stare into a kind of intellectual abyss. If the work of gathering evidence and reasoning through thorny, polarizing political questions is actually the process by which we trick ourselves into finding the answers we want, then what’s the right way to search for answers? How can we know the answers we come up with, no matter how well-intentioned, aren’t just more motivated cognition? How can we know the experts we’re relying on haven’t subtly biased their answers, too? How can I know that this article isn’t a form of identity protection? Kahan’s research tells us we can’t trust our own reason. How do we reason our way out of that?

http://stoweboyd.com/post/7765736417/short-piece-from-last-year-on-work-that-alexander

> Mining Human Behavior at MIT, Andt Greenberg http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0830/e-gang-mit-sandy-pentland-darpa-sociometers-mining-reality_2.html

>Last year, for instance, Pentland's lab put sociometers on 80 employees at a Bank of America ( BAC - news - people ) call center in Rhode Island. The inconspicuous badges used Bluetooth and infrared signals to measure which co-workers the test subjects talked to every minute for a month and, later, another period of six weeks. After the first month the MIT researchers could see that individuals who talked to more co-workers were getting through calls faster, felt less stressed and had the same approval ratings as their peers. Informally talking out problems and solutions, it seemed, produced better results than following the employee handbook or obeying managers' e-mailed instructions.

>So the call center tried its own experiment. Instead of staggering employees' coffee breaks as it had previously, it aligned their breaks to allow more chatter. The result, Bank of America told MIT a few months later: productivity gains worth about $15 million a year.

>Let people form their own denser social networks and — surprise — happiness, knowledge, and better performance follows.

>Throw away the manuals, fire the managers, get out of the way: let people figure out how to invent their own work, cooperatively.

callcenters #socialdensity #happiness

http://stoweboyd.com/post/1446391431/friendly-social-interaction-and-social-cognition

cites Oscar Ybarra's work http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101028113817.htm

>Talking with other people in a friendly way can make it easier to solve common problems, a new University of Michigan study shows. But conversations that are competitive in tone, rather than cooperative, have no cognitive benefits.

>"This study shows that simply talking to other people, the way you do when you're making friends, can provide mental benefits," said psychologist Oscar Ybarra, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR).

>Ybarra is the lead author of the study, which is forthcoming in the peer-reviewed journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

>For the study, the researchers examined the impact of brief episodes of social contact on one key component of mental activity -- executive function. This type of cognitive function includes working memory, self-monitoring, and the ability to suppress external and internal distractions -- all of which are essential in solving common life problems.

>In previous research, Ybarra has found that social interaction provides a short-term boost to executive function that's comparable in size to playing brain games, such as solving crossword puzzles. In the current series of studies, he and colleagues tested 192 undergraduates to pinpoint which types of social interactions help -- and which don't.

>They found that engaging in brief (10 minute) conversations in which participants were simply instructed to get to know another person resulted in boosts to their subsequent performance on an array of common cognitive tasks. But when participants engaged in conversations that had a competitive edge, their performance on cognitive tasks showed no improvement.

Twitter, dopamine, and the evolutionary advantages of talking about oneself http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-selfish-meme/309080/

>The Harvard researchers—Diana Tamir, a grad student in psychology, and Jason Mitchell, her adviser—performed functional MRI scans on 212 subjects while asking them about their own opinions and personality traits, and about other people’s. Neuro­imaging of this sort can reveal which parts of the brain are being activated; in this case, the researchers found that the mesolimbic dopamine system—the seat of the brain’s reward mechanism—was more engaged by questions about the test subject’s own opinions and attitudes than by questions about the opinions and attitudes of other people. The system has long been known to respond to both primary rewards (food and sex) and secondary rewards (money), but this was the first time it’s been shown to light up in response to, as the researchers put it, “self-­disclosure.”

>What the study really illustrated, then, was a paradox: when it comes to information, sharing is mostly about me. The researchers weren’t trying to answer the thornier question of why—why, as they wrote, our species might have “an intrinsic drive to disclose thoughts to others.” The paper nonetheless points to an intriguing possibility: that this drive might give us humans an adaptive advantage.

|| related to Oscar Ybarra's work that shows 'friendly conversation' -- where someone asks you to tell them about yourself -- prior to a stressful situation increases performance?

dopamine #self-disclosure

The Fabric of Struggles, Benjamin Noys

Barely twenty years have passed since the collapse of actually-existing so- cialism and now the crisis of actually-existing capitalism, in its neoliberal version, is upon us. The shrill capitalist triumphalism of the 1990s, or the bellicose equation of capitalism with democracy that defined the ’00s ‘war on terror’, ring more than a little hollow in the frozen desert of burst fi- nancial bubbles and devalorization. The commodities that make up the capitalist way-of-life have turned malignant, exposed as hollow bearers of debt servitude that can never be paid off. The cry ‘No New Deal’ goes up as wealth is transferred in huge amounts to save the financial sector. We are prepared for yet another round of sacrifice as structural adjustment and ‘shock doctrine’ return to the center of global capitalism after exten- sive testing on its self-defined ‘peripheries’. Whether this is terminal crisis, entropic drift, or merely the prelude to the ‘creative destruction’ that will kick-start a new round of accumulation, is still obscure.

[...]

The extension of real subsump- tion over life, what Italian autonomists called the ‘social factory’, generalis- es struggles. In the capitalist counter-attack, however, we witness a second phase of real subsumption, a re-making of the world in the conformity to capital and the crisis of the identity of the ‘worker’. This re-making was, of course, central to the project of neoliberalism.6

[...]

A second problem, which I’ve already noted in passing, is that the triumph of ‘real subsumption’, which integrates the reproduction of the proletariat to the self-reproduction of capital, seems to allow very little space, or time, for resistance. Even if we don’t think in terms of real sub- sumption, but rather the global dominance of capitalism or ‘Empire’, we still have to confront the issue of whether it can be defeated, and how. The ways in which capitalism permeates and modulates the whole of life (what Deleuze called ‘the society of control’8) leaves us with little leverage to re- sist. In particular the end of the ‘workers’ standpoint’, the end of the classi- cal proletariat, seems to deprive us of an agency to make the mass changes communization would require. While TC insists on the proletariat as con- ceptual marker, they have to struggle with its empirical non-emergence.9 The alternative articulations of possible agents of change, such as immate- rial workers or ‘whatever singularities’, by other currents of communization are very thinly-specified.

[...]

What is as yet unclear is what forms of struggle will make ‘the poetry of the future’.

[...]

In his story ‘The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths’ Jorge Luis Borges describes the competition between two kings to construct the perfect, and so impossible to escape, labyrinth or maze.11 The first king uses the tradi-tional method of constructing a highly-complex series of tunnels, resulting in a terrible labyrinth which the second king only escapes from by the in- tervention of God. In his turn the second king lays waste to the first king’s lands and casts him into a labyrinth impossible to defeat: the desert. The impossibility of this labyrinth lies not in the choice of paths, but the ab- sence of any paths.

What are we to do?, Endnotes

If communization signals a certain immediacy in how the revolu- tion happens, for us this does not take the form of a practical prescription; ‘communization’ does not imply some injunction to start making the revo- lution right away, or on an individual basis. What is most at stake, rather, is the question of what the revolution is; ‘communization’ is the name of an answer to this question. The content of such an answer necessarily depends on what is to be overcome: that is, the self-reproduction of the capitalist class relation, and the complex of social forms which are implicated in this reproduction – value-form, capital, gender distinction, state form, legal form, etc. In particular, such an overcoming must necessarily be the direct self-abolition of the working class, since anything short of this leaves capi- tal with its obliging partner, ready to continue the dance of accumulation. Communization signifies the process of this direct self-abolition, and it is in the directness of this self-abolition that communization can be said to signify a certain ‘immediacy’.

[...]

With the growing superfluity of the working class to production – its tendential reduction to a mere surplus population – and the resultantly tenuous character of the wage form as the essential meeting point of the twin circuits of reproduction, it can only be delusional to conceive revolu- tion in terms of workers’ power. Yet it is still the working class which must abolish itself.15 [Tiqqun]

[...]

For us, communization does not signify some general positive process of ‘sharing’ or ‘making common’. It signifies the specific revolu- tionary undoing of the relations of property constitutive of the capitalist class relation. Sharing as such – if this has any meaning at all – can hardly be understood as involving this undoing of capitalist relations, for various kinds of ‘sharing’ or ‘making common’ can easily be shown to play impor- tant roles within capitalist society without in any way impeding capitalist accumulation. Indeed, they are often essential to – or even constitutive in – that accumulation: consumption goods shared within families, risk shared via insurance, resources shared within firms, scientific knowledge shared through academic publications, standards and protocols shared be- tween rival capitals because they are recognized as being in their common interest. In such cases, without contradiction, what is held in common is the counterpart to an appropriation. As such, a dynamic of communiza- tion would involve the undoing of such forms of ‘sharing’, just as it would involve the undoing of private appropriation. And while some might valo- rize a sharing that facilitates a certain level of subsistence beyond what the wage enables, in a world dominated by the reproduction of the capi- talist class relation such practices can occur only at the margins of this reproduction, as alternative or supplementary means of survival, and as such, they are not revolutionary in themselves.

[...]

Communization is a movement at the level of the totality, through which that totality is abolished.

[...]

In contrast to these linear conceptions of revolution, communization is the product of a qualitative shift within the dynamic of class struggle itself.

[...]

the social forms implicated in the reproduction of the capitalist class relation will not be instruments of the revolution, since they are part of that which is to be abolished.

[...]

Communization is thus not a form of prefigurative revolutionary practice of the sort that diverse anarchisms aspire to be, since it does not have any positive existence prior to a revolutionary situation.

[...]

This is a question which takes a spe- cific historical form in the face of the self-evident bankruptcy of the old programmatic notions, leftist, anarchist, and ultra-leftist alike: how will the overcoming of the capitalist class relation take place, given that it is impossible for the proletariat to affirm itself as a class yet we are still faced with the problem of this relation?

[...]

It is no longer possible for the working class to identify itself positively, to embrace its class character as the essence of what it is; yet it is still stamped with the simple factic- ity of its class belonging day by day as it faces, in capital, the condition of its existence. In this period, the ‘we’ of revolution does not affirm itself, does not identify itself positively, because it cannot; it cannot assert itself against the ‘they’ of capital without being confronted by the problem of its own existence – an existence which it will be the nature of the revolution to overcome. There is nothing to affirm in the capitalist class relation; no autonomy, no alternative, no outside, no secession.

[...]

The global working class is at present under a very overt attack as the functionaries of capital attempt to stabilise a world system constantly on the brink of disaster, and it has not had any need of insurrectionary pep-talk to ‘get started’ in its response.

[...]

this is an era in which the end of this relation looms per- ceptibly on the horizon, while capital runs into crisis at every turn and the working class is forced to wage a struggle for which there is no plausible victory.

[...]

The Double Barricade and the Glass Floor, Jasper Bernes

In recent struggles (basically since the mid-1990s) TC note the emergence of new forms of struggle in which ‘class belonging [is] an external constraint.’132 It is no longer possible to propose a politics based upon the affirmation of working-class autonomy, as there is no longer an independent ‘workers’ identity.’ Every affirmation of the class of labor becomes, by necessity, an affirmation of capital: ‘in each of its struggles, the proletariat sees how its existence as a class is objectified in the reproduction of capital as some- thing foreign to it.’133 This is a limit in the double sense above – a fetter on revolutionary action, but also a generative condition which produces the possibility of superseding the capital-labor relationship. The self-abolition of the proletariat is now possible because ‘being a class becomes the obsta- cle which its struggle as a class has to overcome.’134

[...]

TC -- In the riots in Greece, the proletariat does not demand any- thing and does not consider itself against capital as the basis for an alternative, it simply does not want to be what it is anymore.137

[...]

this barrier is now itself a condition of possibility, since it renders incoherent all attempts to imagine, as past revolutions did, an egalitarian set of social relations laid atop the existing means of production. It is the end of a communist politics that is merely redistributive. If we want communism, then we will have no choice but to take our radicalism to the root, to uproot capital not merely as social form but as material sediment, not merely as relations of production but as productive forces.

[...]

These, then, are the limits for communism, limits that we should see as merely the other side of the limits to capital. If it is impossible to project a communist future from present bases, it is also likewise impossi- ble to project a capitalist one. This is because, returning to the point where we began, capital is a self-undermining social dynamic – the limit to capital is capital itself – one that establishes by its very own progress forward an increasingly intractable barrier to that progress: by compressing necessary labor (and gaining more surplus labor) it also compresses the pool of work- ers it can exploit. Since capital must not only reproduce itself but expand, this means that, as the mass of surplus value grows ever larger, it becomes more and more difficult to wring subsequent increases in surplus labor from a relatively shrinking mass of workers. The vanishing of an autono- mous ‘worker’s identity’ is not a mere ideological fact, but a real feature of capitalism: the vanishing of workers themselves, of the need for work.

[...]

The political sequence which they [TC] see emerging in Greece and elsewhere suggests that the suspension of proletarian identity which one witnesses on the part of the disenfranchised, futureless youth will migrate into the sites of exploitation proper and the mass of workers will, in real- izing the futility of revindicative struggles and self-management both, join with the fraction of rebellious youth. This is the swerve…

[...]

Fire to the Commons, Evan Calder Williams

For the question is: do common things, having things in common, and what is common amongst us have to do with communism?

[...]

There are older vestiges of the commons, often material resources such as water, that persist, against capital’s attempts to privatize/ expropriate/enclose them, and one of our tasks is to defend them. Related argument: capital has generated – or there have gener- ated in spite of capital – new commons, often electronic resources, and one of our tasks is to defend them, ‘proliferate’ their use, and encourage the spread of the form of the common.

[...]

If one recognizes, as we must, that both the ‘human community’ of communism and a denser form of older community life are fully displaced by the material community of capital, and, furthermore, that appeals to either seem unconvincing as scalable models of resistance capable of contesting the social relations of capital, then the only thing common to us is our incorporation into that material community. But this is not a deadening or a subtraction of what we once had: it is the construction and imposition of a common position, the production of a negative content in accordance with a universal form. Camatte writes that, ‘The proletarian (what man has become) can no longer recognize himself in a human community, since it no longer exists[...] Men who have become pure spirits can rediscover themselves in the capital form without content.’ Without content, indeed, insofar as content is taken to be that from which form emerges. But capital (as social relation) is nothing if not the generative collapse of a distinction between form and a content. The common becomes, then, the quality across individuals that is neither a form nor a content: it is the form of general equivalence taken as general content. Marx points out that ‘The equivalent, by definition, is only the identity of value with itself.’151 The full subsumption of experience to the law of equivalence, accelerated all the more during a period of the ‘socialization of labor,’ therefore produces with it a hollow identity that defines man, an echo chamber of value with itself. Capital founds a negative anthropology, in that the subject common to it is the subject defined only by being potentially commensurable, as source of value, with all else that exists.

[...]

If the contradictions of capital generate a cursed dialectic of form and content, such that the form dominates the content at the same time that it cannot be separated from it, the elaboration of communist thought and strategy is to inflect and impel this worsening contradiction. Not to pathetically cheer at the failure of ‘reformist’ struggles and not to scour them in the hopes of finding the common element hidden in them, but to see in them the determined contours of the relations of capital, the de- mands placed on those bodies that work and die, the representations that bind together and mediate ‘the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high.’ The vicious fact of it is that it simply is not our decision. We choose a period of capital as much as we choose an earthquake. Yet to make of this a principle, not of withdrawal but of holding on and forth: such would be a courage and a line worth taking. To hate the ruined and the unruined alike, with neither fetish nor indifference, to know that we cannot make our time, but that it does not, and never will, unfold untouched. Communization, then, is not an option we choose to take, but it is not an inevitability. It is a situation that will present itself, given the limits of capi- tal, and it is a situation that has no guarantee of ‘leading to communism.’ To say that such a state of affairs will come to pass is very different from saying how they will come to pass, how the necessary measures taken by what has no reserve will happen, and what kind of resistance, physical and intellectual, they meet and for how long.

The point we will be making here is that logically, neither trial and error nor "chance" and serendipity can be behind the gains in technology and empirical science attributed to them. By definition chance cannot lead to long term gains (it would no longer be chance); trial and error cannot be unconditionally effective: errors cause planes to crash, buildings to collapse, and knowledge to regress. taleb antifragility convexity mathematics economics

>The crisis which emerges from the erosion of this stable state, the onslaught of change and turbulence that exists in the “modern world,” one that Schön and others apparently felt acutely in the late 1960′s and early 1970′s when this text was written and is still felt today some 40 years later, is then described in the following pages:

>>“In these situations there is not a lack of information. There is not an “information gap”. There is an information overload, too many signals, more than can be accounted for; and there is as yet not theory in terms of which new information can be sought or new experiments undertaken. “Uncertainty” is a way of talking about the situation in which no plausible theory has emerged. For this reason, pragmatism is no response. We cannot in these situations, say “Let us get the data,” “Let us experiment,” “Let us test,” for there is as yet nothing to test. Out of the uncertainty, out of the experience of a bewildering array of information, new hypotheses must emerge — and from them, mandates for gathering data, testing, experiment, can be derived. But in the first instance they do not as yet exist, and until they exist the method of pragmatism cannot be applied. The period of uncertainty must be traversed in order that pragmatism may become an appropriate response.

>>The feeling of uncertainty is anguish. The depth of anguish increases as the threatening changes strike at more central regions of the self. In the last analysis, the degree of threat presented by a change depends on its connection to self-identity. Against all of this we have erected our belief in the stable state.”

This is where data comes into play. “Analytic competitors who leverage big data will increasingly be able to identify, model, and act to mitigate or potentially exploit these risks,” writes Pieroni.

Even so, Pieroni contends that it’s crucial to distinguish the concepts of risk and uncertainty, two related but distinct ideas. In a 2013 blog, Pieroni wrote that the two terms are often used interchangeably, but are actually quite distinct:

Uncertainties pose unknowable and hence unmanageable threats. Risks, however, can be explicitly accepted, avoided, or transferred. Organizations that are fully exploiting big data are actively uncovering and converting uncertainty into known risk as well as addressing and exploiting competitive vulnerabilities. Large, long-lived and historically successful organizations are often most vulnerable to confusing risk with uncertainty, says Pieroni. One big issue: insular leadership and anecdotal decision-making. “If data and analytics are not explicitly part of decision-making and outcome feedback, the organization will increasingly be in jeopardy. Unchanging strategies and tactics work, until they don’t, with often disastrous outcomes.”

Web search is going through a pretty significant transformation with things like the Knowledge Graph, Google Now, mobile. What do you think search should be able to do? Are things that we see today that point us to where it's going to be five, ten years from now?

I've been saying the same thing about search in some sense for ten years or so. The perfect search engine would really understand whatever your need is. It would understand everything in the world deeply, give you back kind of exactly what you need.

So, why aren’t we seeing everyone race to use more contextual knowledge?

First off, contextual knowledge is still astonishingly hard to acquire. Our phones could know a lot about us, including where we go, what we’re doing, what we search for. No one’s really taking advantage of all of that information — yet.

That’s not to say we’re not making progress. Saga knows where I go — without me having to check in. (Disclosure: Saga is the flagship app of my company, A.R.O.) Cover and Aviate know which apps I use.

Second, access to the best sources of contextual knowledge depends on complete and unfettered access to data. Nothing held back. Unless they can always run in the background, most apps aren’t going to know about all the little things that make up the majority of my day. Those data points make it possible to understand what I’m really up to — along with why my blood pressure is skyrocketing today.

Finally, progress is blocked by siloed data. Even though I run with a different playlist, my wearables don’t know what I’m listening to — or catch that the timing of my run means my meeting ran late and I’m getting my workout in as the sun goes down.

Others have already called for unifying platforms that collide heterogenous data sets, eliminating sensor silos and producing non-obvious insights. And that’s the key. We’ve got to find ways to draw meaningful correlations between the different data silos we’re populating. That’s the only cure for the lackluster results we’ve gotten so far.

The next generation of wearables and sensor-data platforms — the ones that manage to be fulfilling and to be gratifying — will put these kinds of correlations at the center of their universe.

commuting is associated with fewer positive emotions than any other common daily activity

studies on talking with strangers

I was recently chatting to a doctor who described to me why she still works in emergency rooms well after others may have chosen to retire from a successful career. These days she sees fewer patients but she still plays a critical role in the functioning of a ward.

Her role is to contribute to management of the ward and most important of all she shares her wisdom and experience with her colleagues. She is a sounding board for opinions, guides the choice of tests and scans, helps read charts, and generally available to consult and guide others in the high pressure and high stress environment of an emergency room.

Where is the special value in access to advice and experience vs more hands-on work?

Well, the hospital asked the same question. Hospital budgets are tight and they need to be allocating their resources carefully to produce the best outcomes. Rather than assume ...cit knowledge made the entire system of the emergency ward perform better. Doctors took less time over their decisions and needed less often to wait to interrupt a busy colleague to get advice. That matters a great deal when many of the decisions are time critical and life threatening.

This is not a story about skills. All the doctors are smart, passionate and talented. They made their own decisions on what to do and when they needed advice. The ward is always well run, but it runs better with the opportunity for more collaboration. What mattered was that the opportunity for collaboration and access to greater experience, improved the outcomes by speeding the exchange of knowledge in the ward.

Tacit knowledge and experience matters to speed and to outcomes in knowledge work. Knowledge is a flow and comes from interactions between people with diverse experiences. Being able to draw on more of these interactions can save a great deal of rework and mitigation of doubts and concerns.

People don't really like creativity

Brent Coker, who studies online behavior at the University of Melbourne in Australia, found that people who engage in “workplace Internet leisure browsing” are about 9 percent more productive than those who don’t. Last year, Jonathan Schooler, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara published with his doctoral student Benjamin Baird a study called Inspired by Distraction. It concluded that “engaging in simple external tasks that allow the mind to wander may facilitate creative problem solving.”

How does one get one’s hands, conceptually speaking, around the cultural concept? It seems so definite—a term referred to again and again in both the anthropological and popular literature. And yet, as one examines the concept, it appears increasingly elusive. Different people perceive it in different ways, and, perhaps, not unexpected given its popularity, the concept often carries—in its different renditions—various political overtones.

With culture, the devil often appears in the details. Many people embrace the concept in the abstract. But they argue, sometimes heatedly, over what the term actually means. As [Elvin] Hatch writes [in Theories of man and culture]: “Even though the term has been discussed in countless books and articles, there is still a large degree of uncertainty in its use—anthropologists employ the notion in fundamentally different ways”.

Source: .

9 Nov - 06:27 Can dissent (i.e., diverse initial preferences) help groups to reduce defective decision processes and find the best solution? Is it also possible to improve decision making by informing group members about the defective processes and instructing them to avoid these processes?

9 Nov - 06:32 two processing biases: a bias in favor of shared information and a bias in favor of members' initial prferences

9 Nov - 06:35 Hypothesis 1: Decision quality in hidden profile situations is enhanced by systematic processing of information with regard to (a) information exchange in the group and (b) information elaboration of individual members (see Figure 1).

9 Nov - 06:36 in hidden profile tasks, only the integration of unshared information ensures higher quality decisions by groups compared to individuals. The introduction of shared information is unrelated to decision quality, and members give shared information higher validity because it can be supported by more members.

9 Nov - 06:39 Hypothesis 2: Decision quality in hidden profile situations is reduced by the sharedness bias with regard to (a) information exchange in the group and (b) information evaluation of individual members (see Figure 1).

9 Nov - 06:41 If a majority favors a certain alternative before the discussion, the group seldom decides to chose another alternative (Gigone & Hastie, 1997). Thus, frequently, group discussions are superfluous, and groups would be better off using a decision shortcut like an immediate vote or an averaging procedure. This strong effect of initial preferences, even when they are wrong, on the final group decision might be because of three different subprocesses. Two are at the group level: (a) a direct negotiation about members’ preferences and (b) a bias in information exchange favoring initial preferences. The third is (c) a related bias in information evaluation at the individual level.

9 Nov - 06:43 The preference bias occurs at the individual level as well—subprocess (c): New information that supports an initial preference is rated as more rel- evant and credible than information that undermines an initial preference (Edwards & Smith, 1996; Greitemeyer & Schulz-Hardt, 2003; Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979). This evaluation bias mediates the effect of the initial indi- vidual preference on the final individual decision after a group discussion and is sufficient to impair a person’s ability to solve a hidden profile task (Greitemeyer & Schulz-Hardt, 2003).

9 Nov - 06:44 There is evidence at the group level and at the individual level that dissent—a confrontation with opinions that deviate from one’s own opinion— can have promotional effects on decision making. At the group level, early field studies analyzed the effects of groupthink, a tendency for concurrence seeking that effectively suppresses the expression of dissent (Janis, 1982). They found evidence that groupthink can have detrimental effects on group decisions (Janis, 1982; Peterson et al., 1998; Tetlock, Peterson, McGuire, & Chang, 1992). Correspondingly, laboratory and field experiments demon- strated that encouraging group members to express divergent opinions openly before reaching an agreement promotes information exchange and problem-solving performance (see Johnson & Johnson, 1989). In recent group laboratory experiments with hidden profile tasks, the composition of groups, in terms of its members’ initial preferences, was directly manipu- lated. These experiments showed that dissent (compared to consent) enhances decision-making quality (Brodbeck, Kerschreiter, Mojzisch, Frey, & Schulz-Hardt, 2002), even when no group member favors the correct solution before the discussion (Schulz-Hardt et al., 2006). This effect was mediated predominantly by more systematic processing of information but also by less biased processing of information (Schulz-Hardt et al., 2006). Specifically, dissent led to the introduction and repetition of more information (see also Parks & Nelson, 1999) and to a more balanced discussion of shared and unshared and preference-consistent and inconsistent information. Not analyzed but also possible is an additional mediation of the effect of dissent by reduced preference negotiation. If the group members recognize divergent preferences of other members, they might be less prone to an early direct expression of their own preference than if they agree with the other members.

9 Nov - 06:46 Usually, divergent opinions are unexpected and therefore cause surprise and mobilize cognitive resources to explain the unexpected event (for exceptions, see David & Turner, 2001). In addition, it has been demonstrated that dissent, especially when articulated by a consistent minority, promotes divergent thinking, a variable related to unbiased processing (see Nemeth & Nemeth- Brown, 2003).

9 Nov - 06:47 Hypothesis 4: Enhances systematic processing with regard to information exchange in the group and information elaboration of individual members. Hypothesis 5: Reduces the sharedness bias with regard to information exchange in the group and information evaluation of individual members. Hypothesis 6: Reduces the preference bias with regard to preference negotiation and information exchange in the group and information evaluation by individual members. Hypothesis 7: Enhances decision quality in hidden profile situations (see Figure 1).

9 Nov - 06:49 Decision quality has been successfully enhanced by the following interventions: (a) inducing critical norms by having groups discuss a policy proposal that virtually all participants disapproved (Postmes, Spears, & Cihangir, 2001), (b) priming counterfactual mind-sets (Galinsky & Kray, 2004), (c) implementing a transactive memory system by an explicit expert role assignment (Stasser, Stewart, & Wittenbaum, 1995), and (d) instructing the groups to create a rank order of all decision alternatives (enhanced decision quality in face-to-face groups but not in virtual groups; Hollingshead, 1996).

9 Nov - 06:51 The mixed results of previous interventions suggest that a mere instruction to participants to prevent defective processes is not always enough to improve quality of group decisions.

9 Nov - 06:52 It was assumed that the sharedness intervention reduces the sharedness bias (Hypothesis 8) and that the preference intervention reduces the prefer- ence bias (Hypothesis 9), both at group and individual level (see Figure 1). Furthermore, it was assumed that both interventions enhance systematic processing at group and individual level (Hypothesis 10 and Hypothesis 11). All of these favorable effects of the new interventions on decision processes together can be supposed to promote decision quality as well (Hypothesis 12).

9 Nov - 06:56 When people do not have a strong commitment to their preference, dissent might lead to a more balanced exchange of information because it reduces the confidence in the individual predecision (Schulz-Hardt, Frey, Lüthgens, & Moscovici, 2000). But when people are more convinced of their initial preference, dissent might enhance discussion bias: Group members selectively mention preference-consistent information to convince the other group members that their own predecision is correct (for motivated information sharing; see also Wittenbaum et al., 2004). However, even when each individual member focuses on preference-consistent information and withholds preference-inconsistent information, dissent leads to more balanced information sampling for the group as a whole. Because more decision alternatives have a proponent in the group, it is more likely that the communicated information pro and contra each alternative is representative of the information present in the group. Therefore, each member is also confronted with preference-inconsistent information by the other members. This promotes a more balanced consideration of different information so that the preference bias in individual information evaluation is reduced by dissent in this study.

9 Nov - 07:00 The preference intervention especially was effective in reducing the preference bias at the group level and at the individual level: Groups focused less on negotiating about their members’ preferences and more on discussing preference- inconsistent information, which was also more highly appreciated individ- ually. The sharedness intervention was also able to reduce the individual motive to confirm other members’ information and be confirmed by other members (sharedness bias). However, it was not able to reduce the actual bias to favor shared information in discussion and individual elaboration. Neither the preference nor the sharedness intervention successfully enhanced the quality of the final decision.

9 Nov - 07:03 Decision making in the context of complex problems often requires the integration of knowledge from different experts. When decision quality is of high importance, the decision-making team should be composed of members with a diversity of opinions. It is true that the resulting dissent can stimulate members to bias their information exchange on the basis of their initial opinions. However, it leads to a more balanced individual evaluation of information and thereby improves decision quality. Although other stud- ies focused on either group-level or individual-level processes of group decision making, this study analyzed both levels simultaneously. In doing so, the importance of individual-level processes was demonstrated. The individual overvaluing of shared and preference-consistent information is responsible for the failure to identify the correct decision in the group. If no dissent is present, this evaluation bias can also be reduced by two training interventions with a group exercise to demonstrate defective decision processes. However, as no intervention alone was able to enhance group decision quality, a combination of both interventions and a stronger focus on individual-level processes is recommended.

last updated 8 days ago [edit]

a heavy workload has no effect on whether or not employees become depressed. Instead, it is the work environment and the feeling of being treated unfairly by the management that has the greatest effect on an employee’s mood.

MakerSwarm app -- #ifttt for hardware

There is a consensus, or something that has assumed the tone of a consensus, that we are living, to our disadvantage, in an age of snark—that the problem of our times is a thing called "snark."

The word, as used now, is a fairly recent addition to the language, and it is not always entirely clear what "snark" may be. But it's an attitude, and a negative attitude—a "hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt," is how Heidi Julavits described it in 2003, while formally bestowing the name of "snark" on it, in the inaugural issue of The Believer.

In her essay, Julavits was grappling with the question of negative book reviewing: Was it fair or necessary? Was the meanness displayed in book reviews a symptom of deeper failings in the culture?

The decade that followed did little to clear up the trouble; if anything, the identification of "snark" gave people a way to avoid thinking very hard about it. Snark is supposed to be self-evidently and self-explanatorily bad: "nasty," "low," and "snide," to pick a few words from the first page of David Denby's 2009 tract Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation. (I bought the Denby book used for six bucks, to cut him out of the loop on any royalties.)

But why are nastiness and snideness taken to be features of our age? One general point of agreement, in denunciations of snark, is that snark is reactive. It is a kind of response. Yet to what is it responding? Of what is it contemptuous?

Stand against snark, and you are standing with everything decent. And who doesn't want to be decent? The snarkers don't, it seems. Or at least they (let's be honest: we) don't want to be decent on those terms.

Over time, it has become clear that anti-negativity is a worldview of its own, a particular mode of thinking and argument, no matter how evasively or vapidly it chooses to express itself. For a guiding principle of 21st century literary criticism, BuzzFeed's Fitzgerald turned to the moral and intellectual teachings of Walt Disney, in the movie Bambi: "If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all."

[...]

If you listen to the crusaders against negativity—in literature, in journalism, in politics, in commerce—you begin to hear a recurring set of themes and attitudes, amounting to an omnipresent, unnamed cultural force. The words flung outward start to define a sort of unarticulated philosophy, one that has largely avoided being recognized and defined.

Without identifying and comprehending what they have in common, we have a dangerously incomplete understanding of the conditions we are living under.

Over the past year or two, on the way to writing this essay, I've accumulated dozens of emails and IM conversations from friends and colleagues. They send links to articles, essays, Tumblr posts, online comments, tweets—the shared attitude transcending any platform or format or subject matter.

What is this defining feature of our times? What is snark reacting to?

It is reacting to smarm.

What is smarm, exactly? Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves.

Smarm would rather talk about anything other than smarm. Why, smarm asks, can't everyone just be nicer?

[...]

Smarm hopes to fill the cultural or political or religious void left by the collapse of authority, undermined by modernity and postmodernity. It's not enough anymore to point to God or the Western tradition or the civilized consensus for a definitive value judgment. Yet a person can still gesture in the direction of things that resemble those values, vaguely.

That gesture can almost serve as a source of comfort. The old systems of prestige—the literary inner circles, the top-ranking daily newspapers, the party leadership—are rickety and insecure. Everyone has a publishing platform and no one has a career.

Smarm offers a quick schema of superiority. The authority that smarm invokes is an ersatz one, but the appearance of authority is usually enough to get by with. Without that protection, to hold an opinion is to feel bare and alone, one voice among a cacophony of millions.

[...]

Here is David Denby: Snark is the expression of the alienated, of the ambitious, of the dispossessed.

[...]

Snark is often conflated with cynicism, which is a troublesome misreading. Snark may speak in cynical terms about a cynical world, but it is not cynicism itself. It is a theory of cynicism.

The practice of cynicism is smarm.

[...]

What carries contemporary American political campaigns along is a thick flow of opaque smarm.

[...]

Romney was responding to the response to the disclosure of his private fundraising remarks dismissing 47 percent of the electorate as unreachable parasites. Romney had been caught in breach of the agreement never to speak divisively—and so he clambered up to a new higher ground, deploring the divisiveness of dwelling on his divisiveness. He had been attacked as a person, the kind of person who would write off 47 percent of the public. How low could the Obama campaign get? What ever happened to changing the tone? #47-percent

This content-free piety is so deeply expected that when Obama did toss a few barbed lines Romney's way, Gawker took offense, describing his use of "Romnesia" as "too juvenile and jokey to be coming from the president"—even if it "usefully carries an important anti-Romney message." Heaven forbid that substance should come at the expense of tone. A presidency is a serious thing.

[...]

The evasion of disputes is a defining tactic of smarm. Smarm, whether political or literary, insists that the audience accept the priors it has been given. Debate begins where the important parts of the debate have ended. #the-evasion-of-disputes

[...]

In this, as in so many other parts of contemporary politics, members of the self-identified center are in some important sense unable to accept opposition. Through smarm, they have cut themselves off from the language of actual dispute. An entire political agenda—privatization of government services, aggressive policing, charter schooling, cuts in Social Security—has been packaged as apolitical, a reasonable consensus about necessity. Those who oppose the agenda are "interest groups," whose selfish greed makes them unable to see reason, or "ideologues." Those who promote it are disinterested and nonideological. There is no reason for the latter to even engage the former. In smarm is power. #the-language-of-actual-dispute #apoliticizing-ideology #in-smarm-there-is-power

[...]

Smarm, on the other hand, is never a force for good. A civilization that speaks in smarm is a civilization that has lost its ability to talk about purposes at all. It is a civilization that says "Don't Be Evil," rather than making sure it does not do evil.

[...]

Adam Mordecai, an editor-at-large for Upworthy, explained to Quora readers what his site's headline-writing philosophy is:

• Don't depress people so much that they want to give up on humanity. Negative headlines breeds negative shares.
• Don't curse in your headlines. Moms hate it (and are the biggest sharers on the internet by a significant margin [...]
• Don't make people take positions they might be uncomfortable with. For example, "I Really Hate All White People" is going to not get shared, whereas, "An Open Letter To Pasty People" is far less hostile and more likely to get shared.
• Don't use terms that overwhelm, polarize or bore people. I never use Social Security, The Environment, Immigration, Democrats, Republicans, Medicare, Racist, Bigot, etc... You can talk about issues without giving away what they are.

The result of this approach, the Upworthy house style, is a coy sort of emulation of English, stripped of actual semantic content: This Man Removed the Specific and the Negative, and What Happened Next Will Astonish You. Even Upworthy's fellow participants in the ongoing SEO race to the bottom are horrified. But it works, in the sense that people who do not want to think about actual things or read any information will reliably share Upworthy stories.

[...]

When you hear a voice say "Everyone's a critic," listen for the echo: Everyone's a publicist. #everyones-a-critic

[...]

Market reasoning is deeply, essentially smarmy. We live, it insists, in a world that is optimized by the invisible hand. The conditions under which we live have been created by rational needs and preferences, producing an economicist Panglossianism: What thrives deserves to thrive, be it Nike or sprawl or the finance industry or Upworthy; what fails deserves to have failed.

We all live our lives, we're told, on these terms. If people really wanted a better world—what you might foolishly regard as a better world—they would have it already. So what if you signed up to use Facebook as a social network, and Facebook changed the terms of service to reverse your privacy settings and mine your data? So what if you would rather see poor people housed than billionaires' investment apartments blotting out the sun? Some people have gone ahead and made the reality they wanted. Immense fortunes have bloomed in Silicon Valley on the most ephemeral and stupid windborne seeds of concepts, friends funding friends, apps copying apps, and the winners proclaiming themselves the elite of the newest of meritocracies. What's was wrong with you, that you didn't get a piece of it?

Of course this is tyrannical. Of course this is false. Everyone is aware that market judgments are foolish and unfair. But what can you do about it?

[...]

“Drones,” Bridle said, “are inherently network objects. They allow you to see and act at a distance, while themselves kind of remaining invisible.” One measure of the distance that keeps them out of sight, however, seems to be shrinking. Flying, unmanned vehicles are transitioning from a technology that operates primarily in foreign space—for Americans, at least—to an increasingly familiar, domestic one. A small milestone of sorts was reached this fall when a three-pound quadcopter crash-landed in midtown; it was the first drone wreck in Manhattan to provoke a response from the New York Police Department. Impending commercial applications for drones, like the Amazon Prime Air service, announced earlier this week on “60 Minutes,” which aims, eventually, to use autonomous drones to make deliveries thirty minutes after products are purchased online, guarantee that it will not be the last unplanned landing.

Bridle recently visited New York for a conference on drones and aerial robotics, hoping to talk about what kinds of decisions could be left to an algorithm, and the problems with jamming every flying machine without a cockpit—whether it’s a warplane or a remote-controlled toy helicopter—into the same category, “drone.” But he left disappointed. “A good proportion of the drone-conference attendees were either owners or retailers of small remote-controlled aircraft, who really didn’t see why we should be discussing foreign policy or Waziristan,” Bridle said. “The discussion, at the moment, is confined to these engineering and very practical legal issues, about how to stop it from falling on someone’s head.”

As our locomotive races toward the cliff of ecological collapse, the only thoughts on the minds of our CEOs, capitalist economists, politicians and most labor leaders is how to stoke the locomotive to get us there faster. Corporations aren't necessarily evil. They just can't help themselves. They're doing what they're supposed to do for the benefit of their owners. But this means that, so long as the global economy is based on capitalism and private property and corporate property and competitive production for market, we're doomed to a collective social suicide - and no amount of tinkering with the market can brake the drive to global ecological collapse. We can't shop our way to sustainability, because the problems we face cannot be solved by individual choices in the marketplace. They require collective democratic control over the economy to prioritize the needs of society and the environment. And they require local, reigional, national and international economic planning to reorganize the economy and redeploy labor and resources to these ends. I conclude, therefore, that if humanity is to save itself, we have no choice but to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a democratically planned eco-socialist economy.

[...]

For the reality, Hawken said, was that: > Despite all this good work, we still must face a sobering fact. If every company on the planet were to adopt the best environmental practices of the "leading" companies - say, the Body Shop, Patagonia or 3M - the world would still be moving toward sure degradation and collapse. ... Quite simply, our business practices are destroying life on earth. Given current corporate practices, not one wildlife preserve, wilderness or indigenous culture will survive the global market economy. We know that every natural system on the planet is disintegrating. The land, water, air and sea have been functionally transformed from life-supporting systems into repositories for waste. There is no polite way to say that business is destroying the world. (The Ecology of Commerce (New York: Harper, 1993))

Some employers do complain that they’re finding it hard to find workers with the skills they need. But show us the money: If employers are really crying out for certain skills, they should be willing to offer higher wages to attract workers with those skills. In reality, however, it’s very hard to find groups of workers getting big wage increases, and the cases you can find don’t fit the conventional wisdom at all. It’s good, for example, that workers who know how to operate a sewing machine are seeing significant raises in wages, but I very much doubt that these are the skills people who make a lot of noise about the alleged gap have in mind.

And it’s not just the evidence on unemployment and wages that refutes the skills-gap story. Careful surveys of employers — like those recently conducted by researchers at both M.I.T. and the Boston Consulting Group — similarly find, as the consulting group declared, that “worries of a skills gap crisis are overblown.”

The one piece of evidence you might cite in favor of the skills-gap story is the sharp rise in long-term unemployment, which could be evidence that many workers don’t have what employers want. But it isn’t. At this point, we know a lot about the long-term unemployed, and they’re pretty much indistinguishable in skills from laid-off workers who quickly find new jobs. So what’s their problem? It’s the very fact of being out of work, which makes employers unwilling even to look at their qualifications.

So how does the myth of a skills shortage not only persist, but remain part of what “everyone knows”? Well, there was a nice illustration of the process last fall, when some news media reported that 92 percent of top executives said that there was, indeed, a skills gap. The basis for this claim? A telephone survey in which executives were asked, “Which of the following do you feel best describes the ‘gap’ in the U.S. workforce skills gap?” followed by a list of alternatives. Given the loaded question, it’s actually amazing that 8 percent of the respondents were willing to declare that there was no gap.

The point is that influential people move in circles in which repeating the skills-gap story — or, better yet, writing about skill gaps in media outlets like Politico — is a badge of seriousness, an assertion of tribal identity. And the zombie shambles on.

Unfortunately, the skills myth — like the myth of a looming debt crisis — is having dire effects on real-world policy. Instead of focusing on the way disastrously wrongheaded fiscal policy and inadequate action by the Federal Reserve have crippled the economy and demanding action, important people piously wring their hands about the failings of American workers.

Moreover, by blaming workers for their own plight, the skills myth shifts attention away from the spectacle of soaring profits and bonuses even as employment and wages stagnate. Of course, that may be another reason corporate executives like the myth so much.

So we need to kill this zombie, if we can, and stop making excuses for an economy that punishes workers.

Exercises are performed for 30 seconds, with 10 seconds of transition time between bouts. Total time for the entire circuit workout is approximately 7 minutes. The circuit can be repeated 2 to 3 times. 1. Jumping jacks Total body 2. Wall sit Lower body 3. Push-up Upper body 4. Abdominal crunch Core 5. Step-up onto chair Total body 6. Squat Lower body 7. Triceps dip on chair Upper body 8. Plank Core 9. High knees/running in place Total body 10. Lunge Lower body 11. Push-up and rotation Upper body 12. Side plank Core

I found the design process utterly transformed once I decided to stop trying to be the expert and start trying to encourage a culture of experimentation.

Battles that would rage, angrily, for months – dying down when the provocateur was busy with other work but rising up as soon as they had a little time on their hands – these battles began to go away. Long frustrating and unproductive sessions of trying to explain, defend, rationalise why the design that I suggested had more merit than the many and varied suggestions (or requirements) coming from stakeholders all but disappeared. People who would usually sneer derisively at the design team became participating members of the design process.

It’s not perfect, it’s no silver bullet, but for me, it’s been a transformation.

And it’s pretty simple. To embrace experimentation you just need to stop talking about design in a Socrati...her approaches, you design a test. Find out how to find out which design works best.

Hypothesis, prototype, test.

There are loads of tools you can use to test ideas quickly – from some quick in person user research, to some A/B testing (if you’re not set up to do A/B testing, meet your friend Google Content Experiments and get onto this immediately), to an online card sort, to one of the range of tests that places like VerifyApp offer. The methods for testing are limited only by your creativity and are mostly inexpensive.

Sure, you can’t design from the ground up this way – you will still need a good designer that you trust get you to a good starting point from which you can experiment up, but once you’ve got the framework in place, don’t waste time and goodwill bickering about the details but encourage experimentation throughout the entire organisation. You’ll raise the overall ‘design IQ’ and happiness quotient of your company, your design team and, most probably, even yourself.

couple with the pret-a-manger nonsense written up by myerscough https://workflowy.com/#/6ad8c72d-2d27-cb17-7d9d-f87089cadd1f

The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders.

From Critique to Cultural Recovery

unread #soon

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/09/interview-with-william-gibson/

futures #scifi

>I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity.

>[...]

>There’s really a lot of that in the futurology game, and everybody who markets any kind of futurological product — be it some kind of corporate advising or a given science fiction writer, has a real vested interest in making their product seem prescient. If I were a total cynical bullshitter, I’d go around trying to make everybody think that I knew what the future was going to be too. But I’ve never really seen the predictive part as being what I really do.

futures

>I think science fiction gives us a wonderful toolkit to disassemble and re-examine this kind of incomprehensible, constantly changing present that we live in.’

>Unfortunately, the predictive part is traditionally a large part of how we market science fiction and the people who write it. “Listen to her, she knows the future.” It’s a really ancient kind of carny pitch, but it’s not what I think science fiction really does. I think science fiction gives us a wonderful toolkit to disassemble and reexamine this kind of incomprehensible, constantly changing present that we live in, that we often live in quite uncomfortably. That’s my idea of our product, but it’s not necessarily a smart publicist’s idea of my product.

scifi

>One of the things that digital has done for me personally is that it’s made music of my ongoing now completely atemporal. I no longer have any idea or any anxiety about not having any idea about what’s happening now, because that no longer seems very important. Now, last week, 30 years ago? What’s the difference? What does it matter? It’s all there on YouTube. And so I find myself discovering things like a decade late, or I discover things before very many people have found them. It’s atemporal. It’s just all over the long calendar, and that’s going to make things different. But that’s been going on for a long time.

atemporality

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/09/06/trending_upward

>Signposting the future: The authors of these reports are keenly aware of the human tendency to project the present into the future ("anchoring on the status quo") -- and they fight it. The key analytical weapon against "present-ism" in the Global Trends reports has thus far been scenario planning. Scenarios frequently pop up in Global Trends reports with catchy labels such as "A New Caliphate" and "Cycle of Fear." Each scenario is a plausible extrapolation of what could happen if certain causal drivers take hold.

>These scenarios are useful, and we are not recommending dropping them. Scenario generation is a great way for imaginative analysts to channel their inner social-science-fiction writers. Organizations that want to retain talent should provide such outlets. But if scenario generation is not eventually subjected to rigorous logical discipline, the net value of the exercise plummets. For instance, research shows that the more scenarios participants generate, the more support they typically find for each one -- and the higher their probability estimates go. What's more, experts rely on the same crude sense of the balance of forces for estimating both the weekly and monthly probabilities, so if they can see a 1/20 chance of the regime falling in a given week, they will see roughly the same probability in a given month, an effect that Kahneman calls scope insensitivity. When we finish unpacking all scenarios and subscenarios, it is not unusual for the probabilities to sum to closer to 2.0 than 1.0, a logical impossibility.

>Scenarios are more valuable when they come with clear diagnostic signposts that policymakers can use to gauge whether they are moving toward or away from one scenario or another. For instance, Global Trends 2025 outlines a "BRIC's Bust-Up" scenario -- a conflict between China and India over resources. Which signposts or early warning indicators might help policymakers know whether such a future is becoming more or less likely? Falsifiable hypotheses bring high-flying scenario abstractions back to Earth.

>Similarly, specifying signposts requires breaking 20 years into finer temporal segments. If we are on a historical trajectory leading to the Chinese Civil War of 2023, for example, what should we be observing in 2013, 2014, etc. to justify taking so speculative a scenario seriously? How diagnostic would these signposts have to be? One could imagine such a conflict erupting from tensions between the poor, neo-Maoist countryside and affluent technocratic coastal cities, but imagining is not enough. We need specifiable metrics.

scenarios #signposting

My wife recently said to me, The past is the new future. She is given to remarks of that kind, full of vatic force yet requiring mental application on my part to make them useful. The sense I make of it is that instead of growing clearer as we probe it, the future has grown dimmer, less solid, almost hard to believe in, but the past has continued to expand rather than shrink with distance: the actual things we did do have gained rather than lost complexity and interest, and the past seems rich, its lessons not simple or singular, a big landscape of human possibility, generative, inexhaustible.

As a guide to present action and long-term planning, the future is anyway relatively new. The shape of things to come was not a constant concern of most people for most of the past. The Romans could imagine future wars and the founding of new cities and dynasties, but these would resemble in most ways the old ones. Christians foresaw an absolute end to time and history located (depending on specific creed and perceived signs of the times) at varying distances from the present, but between now and then it was all to be much the same, only worse. The Founding Fathers announced a New Order of the Ages, but it was a new order explicitly modeled on the classical republics that had existed in Rome or Athens. The idea of a future that will not at all resemble the past really only comes when advancing technology changes the conditions of life and work within a single generation. To that generation it is apparent that, just as the past differs radically from the present, so will the future.

At that point (it’s not really a locatable point, and not a universal one, but it can be thought of as somewhere in the first half of the nineteenth century, earlier in some places, later in others) a change can also be discerned in the efforts of planners and projectors to determine the future shape of the coming world—“determine” both in the sense of finding out what it would be and in the sense of controlling it. Early utopias from Plato through Thomas More (inventor of the term) and on to Charles Fourier were all about proper social organization, good laws, societies that fit human nature better than the state or society the utopian lived in. After this point utopias are almost all set not on remote islands or mountaintops but in the future, and all must take into account the force of accelerating technology on everything from wealth creation to population expansion to world peace.

So also must all the dark warnings of decline, disaster, waste, and failure that are the left hand of the predicting impulse.

[...]

The one scenario not conceived of as remotely likely by any faction of futurians—the reverse really of all their competing auguries—is the possibility, and then the final achievement, of a generous and benevolent One World government, solving humankind’s problems and adjudicating its disputes through the consent of the governed. The end of capitalism and its plutocrats and bought politicians. An antique among futures, that one, and impossible to envision on any grounds: political, economic, sociological, or simply the ground of basic human nature.

[...]

Any prediction about what is in fact to come, when cast as fiction, runs the risk not just of being wrong but of being not about the future at all.

left-handed-futurism #john-crowley

wikipedia, steady state economy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steadystateeconomy

>The Widow's Cruse - Is the name Keynes' gave to a parable from the bible for a magical cup of oil, using the biblical term "cruse" for "cup". It was first discussed in his Treatise on Money [13] to help explain why at the limits to growth investing for economic expansion becomes unprofitable for all. His way of correcting that to allow economic stability at the limits of growth we would now call a "sustainable design" for capitalism. It was discussed as for some future time when increasing capital investment would naturally meet diminishing returns for the system as a whole. Continuing increases in investment by the wealthy would then cause over-investment and result in "conditions sufficiently miserable" to bring the net savings rate of the economy to zero. He called the solution to the problem "the widow's cruse", after a bible story of Elijah coming to stay with an old widow[14] and making her cup of oil inexhaustible.

>The Cambridge intellectuals trying to understand Keynes' Treatise on Money misunderstood and called it "the fallacy" instead[15]. Though Keynes described it more clearly in The General Theory [16] a misunderstood idea is what it has remained. As a response to the natural over-investment crisis at the climax of capitalism it would have relied on the good will of the wealthy in spending enough of their own earnings to restore profitability to the rest of the economy. The original misinterpretation was that it was intended to restore growth rather than to allow growth to end without conflict. The misunderstanding has been generally repeated by other economists, except Kenneth Boulding who frequently referred to the eventual necessity to limit investment growth in response to environmental impacts and diminishing returns[17] and later by P.F. Henshaw as a general principle of systems ecology[18]. That it would stabilize the economy as conditions became miserable due to over-investment, but at the expense of ending the automatic concentration of wealth, is likely to have been one of the more confusing features to most economists who tried to understand it.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ptcyu1jdej1fpj6/The%20Moral%20Consequences%20of%20Economic%20Growth.pdf

Economic growth has become the secular religion of advancing industrial societies. —Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

Freidman makes the liberal case for growth, but it's weak sauce, honestly.

>Businesses too are rarely the singleminded profit maximizers portrayed in economics textbooks.

>Whether companies regularly launch new initiatives, whether they act with loyalty to their workers and respect toward their communities, even whether they obey the law, also reflects the broader culture of which they are a part. All societies develop moral norms—against violence, favoring family bonds, against theft, in favor of truthfulness—as a partial substitute for what would otherwise be hopelessly pervasive regulation aimed at getting people to behave in ways that may be of little or no direct benefit to themselves but nonetheless make everyone better off. Such norms are no less important in the economic sphere.

>Indeed, they may be more so. Laws and regulations are typically less effective when the desired behavior requires taking initiative or action, as opposed to refraining from unwanted action. Even in highly developed, well-organized societies, it is far easier to devise laws that discourage murder and theft than laws that encourage helpfulness to one’s neighbors. Especially when it comes to the creative impulse that results in enhanced economic productivity, laws and regulations are particularly useless. As we have learned from many countries’ experiences, regulations limiting how much sulfurous smoke manufacturers can release into the air, or restricting the pollutants we can dump into the water, are often reasonably effective. By contrast, a law requiring businesses to innovate, or otherwise become more productive, would be pointless.

>It is not surprising, therefore, that many cultures, especially Western societies in the modern era, have developed moral presumptions in favor of precisely those aspects of personal behavior that lead to greater productivity and economic growth. Hard work, diligence, patience, discipline, and a sense of obligation to fulfill our commitments clearly make us more productive economically. Thriftiness fosters saving, which enhances our productivity by making capital investment possible. Education likewise increases our individual capabilities as well as our stock of public knowledge. Such behavior brings benefits that accrue directly to those who conduct themselves in that way, and we value them partly on that ground. But, in each case, our society also regards these qualities, or actions, as morally worthwhile.

http://www.voxeu.org/article/us-economic-growth-over >Global growth is slowing – especially in advanced-technology economies. This column argues that regardless of cyclical trends, long-term economic growth may grind to a halt. Two and a half centuries of rising per-capita incomes could well turn out to be a unique episode in human history. >

Brad Plumer summarizes the controversy here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/09/11/have-we-reached-the-end-of-economic-growth

https://www.dropbox.com/s/j394is59uruvfu8/spaceship%20earth%20boulding.pdf

>The closed earth of the future requires economic principles which are somewhat different from those of the open earth of the past. For the sake of picturesqueness, I am tempted to call the open economy the "cowboy economy," the cowboy being symbolic of the illimitable plains and also associated with reckless, exploitative, romantic, and violent behavior, which is characteristic of open societies. The closed economy of the future might similarly be called the "spaceman" economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system which is capable of continuous reproduction of material form even though it cannot escape having inputs of energy. The difference between the two types of economy becomes most apparent in the attitude towards consumption. In the cowboy economy, consumption is regarded as a good thing and production likewise; and the success of the economy is measured by the amount of the throughput from the "factors of production," a part of which, at any rate, is extracted from the reservoirs of raw materials and noneconomic objects, and another part of which is output into the reservoirs of pollution. If there are infinite reservoirs from which material can be obtained and into which effluvia can be deposited, then the throughput is at least a plausible measure of the success of the economy. The gross national product is a rough measure of this total throughput. It should be possible, however, to distinguish that part of the GNP which is derived from exhaustible and that which is derived from reproducible resources, as well as that part of consumption which represents effluvia and that which represents input into the productive system again. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever attempted to break down the GNP in this way, although it Would be an interesting and extremely important exercise, which is unfortunately beyond the scope of this paper.

>By contrast, in the spaceman economy, throughput is by no means a desideratum, and is indeed to be regarded as something to be minimized rather than maximized. The essential measure of the success of the economy is not production and consumption at all, but the nature, extent, quality, and complexity of the total capital stock, including in this the state of the human bodies and minds included in the system. In the spaceman economy, what we are primarily concerned with is stock maintenance, and any technological change which results in the maintenance of a given total stock with a lessened throughput (that is, less production and consumption) is clearly a gain. This idea that both production and consumption are bad things rather than good things is very strange to economists, who have been obsessed with the income-flow concepts to the exclusion, almost, of capital-stock concepts.

[...]

>It is always a little hard to find a convincing answer to the man who says, "What has posterity ever done for me?" and the conservationist has always had to fall back on rather vague ethical principles postulating identity of the individual with some human community or society which extends not only back into the past but forward into the future. Unless the individual identifies with some community of this kind, conservation is obviously "irrational." Why should we not maximize the welfare of this generation at the cost of posterity? "Après nous, le déluge" has been the motto of not insignificant numbers of human societies. The only answer to this, as far as I can see, is to point out that the welfare of the individual depends on the extent to which he can identify himself with others, and that the most satisfactory individual identity is that which identifies not only with a community in space but also with a community extending over time from the past into the future. If this kind of identity is recognized as desirable, then posterity has a voice, even if it does not have a vote; and in a sense, if its voice can influence votes, it has votes too. This whole problem is linked tip with the much larger one of the determinants of the morale, legitimacy, and "nerve" of a society, and there is a great deal of historical evidence to suggest that a society which loses its identity with posterity and which loses its positive image of the future loses also its capacity to deal with present problems, and soon falls apart.

[...]

>The problems which I have been raising in this paper are of larger scale and perhaps much harder to solve than the more practical and immediate problems of the above paragraph. Our success in dealing with the larger problems, however, is not unrelated to the development of skill in the solution of the more immediate and perhaps less difficult problems. One can hope, therefore, that as a succession of mounting crises, especially in pollution, arouse public opinion and mobilize support for the solution of the immediate problems, a learning process will be set in motion which will eventually lead to an appreciation of and perhaps solutions for the larger ones. My neglect of the immediate problems, therefore, is in no way intended to deny their importance, for unless we at least make a beginning on a process for solving the immediate problems we will not have much chance of solving the larger ones. On the other hand, it may also be true that a long-run vision, as it were, of the deep crisis which faces mankind may predispose people to taking more interest in the immediate problems and to devote more effort for their solution. This may sound like a rather modest optimism, but perhaps a modest optimism is better than no optimism at all

Wacom has been pushing into the world of mobile for a while, and its efforts have just culminated in a pretty bold move: A single, cross-platform standard for sharing handwritten notes and sketches between users, regardless of whether they're using a stylus or a finger, an iPhone or a PC, an app or a browser. The tool is called "WILL" -- "Wacom Ink Layer Language" -- and it captures a pen stroke's coordinates, pressure and the identity of its creator (through a unique "Pen ID"), as well as allowing the scribble to be edited by others. Users can also see other people's handwriting being created in real-time, i.e. we're not just talking about static images.

Beginning next month, Wacom will promote WILL by distributing SDKs for iOS, Android, Mac OS and Windows, as well as for browsers and cloud platforms. These SDKs are meant to make it easier for developers to create apps that accept signatures scrawled on a touchscreen, or DIY smileys, or hand-drawn highlights on a cloud document, or any other sort of handwritten input. Of course, the concern with any such format is that it'll need to be embraced by a large number of companies in order to reach a tipping point and become widely accepted. Wacom doesn't seem to be ready to announce even a single partner just yet, but where there's a will... (Ahem, sorry.)

Work can bring happiness by marrying our passions to our skills, empowering us to create value in our lives and in the lives of others. Franklin D. Roosevelt had it right: “Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.” #FDR

In other words, the secret to happiness through work is earned success. #earned-success

the concept of ‘mindless accumulation'

Overearning Christopher K. Hsee1 Jiao Zhang2 Cindy F. Cai3 Shirley Zhang1 1Booth School of Business, University of Chicago 2School of Business, University of Miami 3Antai College, Shanghai Jiao Tong University Christopher K. Hsee, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, 5807 South Woodlawn Ave., Chicago, IL 60637 E-mail: chris.hsee@chicagobooth.edu Abstract

High productivity and high earning rates brought about by modern technologies make it possible for people to work less and enjoy more, yet many continue to work assiduously to earn more. Do people overearn—forgo leisure to work and earn beyond their needs? This question is understudied, partly because in real life, determining the right amount of earning and defining overearning are difficult. In this research, we introduced a minimalistic paradigm that allows researchers to study overearning in a controlled laboratory setting. Using this paradigm, we found that individuals do overearn, even at the cost of happiness, and that overearning is a result of mindless accumulation—a tendency to work and earn until feeling tired rather than until having enough. Supporting the mindless-accumulation notion, our results show, first, that individuals work about the same amount regardless of earning rates and hence are more likely to overearn when earning rates are high than when they are low, and second, that prompting individuals to consider the consequences of their earnings or denying them excessive earnings can disrupt mindless accumulation and enhance happiness.

The simplest and most effective response to the financial crisis of 2008–09 and the unpopular taxpayer bailouts of large banks would have been a law that put a hard cap on the size of financial institutions or else dramatically raised reserve requirements, which would have had much the same effect. If a cap on size existed, banks taking foolish risks could go bankrupt without triggering a systemic crisis and government bailout. Like the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, such a law could have been written on a few of sheets of paper.

But this possibility was never considered during the congressional deliberations on financial regulation. What emerged instead was the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, or Dodd-Frank, which, while better than no regulation at all, extended to hundreds of pages of legislation and mandated reams of further detailed rules (many still unwritten years after the fact) that will impose huge costs on banks and consumers down the road. Rather than simply capping bank size, it has created a Federal Stability Oversight Council tasked with the enormous (and probably impossible) job of assessing and managing institutions that pose systemic risks, which in the end will still not solve the problem of banks being too big to fail. Though a smoking gun linking bank campaign contributions to the votes of specific Congressmen may elude us, it defies belief that the banking industry’s legions of lobbyists did not have a major impact on how Dodd-Frank turned out, and on how its terms are still being translated into regulations.

[...]

There is plenty of good historical and social science analysis to sustain such beliefs. The late Mancur Olson emphasized the malign effects of interest group politics on economic growth and, ultimately, democracy in his 1982 book The Rise and Decline of Nations. Looking particularly at the long-term economic decline of Britain throughout the 20th century, he argued that democracies in times of peace and stability tend to accumulate ever-increasing numbers of interest groups that, instead of pursuing wealth-creating economic activities, make use of the political system to extract benefits, or rents, for themselves. These rents are collectively unproductive and costly to the public as a whole, but a collective action problem prevents those adversely affected from organizing themselves to offset groups like, say, the banking industry or corn producers, who can more readily organize to advance their interests. The result is the steady diversion of energy into rent-seeking activities over time, a process that can only be halted by a large shock like war or revolution. #mancur-olsen #the-rise-and-decline-of-nations #rentiers

[...]

The most obvious way is to try to distinguish a “good” civil society organization from a “bad” interest group. The former, to use the late Albert Hirschman’s terminology, is driven by the passions, the latter by the interests. The former might be a non-profit organization seeking to build houses for the poor, or a lobbying organization promoting the public interest by protecting coastal habitats. An interest group might be a lobbyist for sugar producers or large banks, whose only objective is to maximize the profits of the companies supporting them. Additionally, Putnam tried to make a distinction between small associations that invited active participation by their members, and “membership organizations” that simply involved paying a membership fee. #albert-hirschman

[...]

The primary argument against interest-group pluralism has to do with distorted representation. E.E. Schattschneider, in his seminal 1960 book The Semisovereign People, argued that the actual practice of democracy in America has nothing to do with its popular image as government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” Political outcomes seldom correspond with popular preferences given the very low level of participation and political awareness; real decisions are made by much smaller groups of organized interests. A similar argument is buried in Olson’s framework, since he notes that not all groups are equally capable of organizing for collective action. The interest groups that contend for the attention of Congress are therefore not collectively representative of the whole American people. They are rather representative of the best organized and (what often amounts to the same thing) most richly endowed parts of American society. This bias is not random and almost invariably works against the interests of the unorganized or unorganizable, who are often poor, poorly educated or otherwise marginalized. #ee-schattschneider #the-semisovereign-people

[...]

There is a further problem with interest groups and the pluralist view that sees public interest as nothing more than the aggregation of individual private interests: It undermines the possibility of deliberation and ignores the ways in which individual preferences are shaped by dialogue and communication. In both classical Athenian democracy and the New England town hall meetings celebrated by Tocqueville, citizens spoke directly to one another. It is easy to idealize small-scale democracy or minimize the real differences that exist in large societies. But as any organizer of focus groups can tell you, people’s views on highly emotional subjects will change just thirty minutes into a face-to-face discussion with people of differing views, provided that they are given common information and ground rules to enforce civility. Few single-issue advocates will maintain that his or her cause will trump all other good things if forced to directly confront those alternative needs. One of the problems of pluralist theory, then, is the assumption that interests are fixed, and that the goal of legislators is simply to act as a transmission belt for them, rather than having their own views that can be shaped by deliberation with other politicians and with the public. #public-discourse

This isn’t just a rhetorical point. It is commonly and accurately observed that no one in the U.S. Congress really deliberates anymore. Congressional “debate” amounts to a series of talking points aimed not at colleagues but at activist audiences, who are perfectly happy to punish a legislator who deviates from their agenda as a result of deliberation or the acquisition of greater knowledge. This leads then to bureaucratic mandates written by interest groups that restrict bureaucratic autonomy.

In well-functioning governance systems, moreover, a great deal of deliberation occurs not just in legislatures but within bureaucracies. This is not a matter of bureaucrats simply talking to one another, but rather a complex series of consultations between government officials and businesses, outside implementers and service providers, civil society groups, the media and other sources of information about societal interests and opinions. The Congress wisely mandated consultation in the landmark 1946 Administrative Procedures Act, which requires regulatory agencies to publicly post proposed rule changes and to solicit comment about them. But these consultative procedures have become highly routinized and pro forma, with actual decisions being the outcome not of genuine deliberation, but of political confrontations between well organized interest groups.

[...]

The underlying sources of political decay—intellectual rigidity and the influence of elite groups—are generic to democracies as a whole. Indeed, they are problems faced by all governments, whether democratic or not. Problems of excessive judicialization and interest groups also exist in other developed democracies. But the impact of interest groups depends heavily on the specific nature of the institutions. There is wide variation in the way that democracies structure the incentives facing political actors that makes them more or less susceptible to these forces. The United States, as the world’s first and most advanced liberal democracy, suffers today from the problem of political decay in a more acute form than other democratic political systems. The longstanding distrust of the state that has always characterized American politics had led to an unbalanced form of government that undermines the prospects of necessary collective action. It has led to vetocracy. #vetocracy

I mean by vetocracy the process whereby the American system of checks and balances makes collective decision-making based on electoral majorities extremely difficult. To some extent, any system that duplicates authority at multiple levels, giving Federal, state and local authorities jurisdiction over whole domains of public policy, risks creating a situation in which different parts of the government are easily able to block one another. But under conditions of ideological polarization, with the major parties about evenly popular (or unpopular) with voters, the constraints become acute. That is where we now are. The government shutdown and crisis over the debt ceiling that emerged in October 2013 is an example of how a minority position (that of the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party) could threaten the ability of the government as a whole to operate. This is why the American political system early in the 21st century has failed to deal with its yawning budgetary problems, among many others.

[...]

A system of checks and balances that gives undue weight to interest groups and fails to aggregate majority interests cannot be fixed with a few simple reforms. For example, the temptation in presidential systems to fix problems of legislative gridlock by piling on new executive powers is one that often creates as many problems as it solves. Getting rid of earmarks and increasing party discipline may actually make it harder under conditions of ideological polarization to achieve broad legislative compromises. Using the courts to implement administrative decisions may be highly inefficient, but in the absence of a stronger and more unified bureaucracy, there may be no alternative. Many of these problems could be solved if the United States moved to a more unified parliamentary system of government, but so radical a change in the country’s institutional structure is barely conceivable. Americans regard their Constitution as a quasi-religious document. Persuading them to rethink its most basic tenets short of an outright system collapse is highly unlikely. So we have a problem.

//

In essence, Fukuyama is calling for a #revolution, since that is the only way to break out of the trap imposed by our political system.

Zappos is also turning traditional management on its head. They announced at their All Hands meeting in November that they are becoming a Holacracy. Holacratic organizations are organized in circles. Workers are members of several circles depending on what they are working on at the time. Decision authority is distributed throughout the organization, with everyone focused on the core purpose and strategy.

According to John Hausknecht, a professor at Cornell’s school of industrial and labor relations, in recent years the economy has witnessed a “huge surge in demand for workforce-analytics roles.” Hausknecht’s own program is rapidly revising its curriculum to keep pace. You can now find dedicated analytics teams in the human-resources departments of not only huge corporations such as Google, HP, Intel, General Motors, and Procter & Gamble, to name just a few, but also companies like McKee Foods, the Tennessee-based maker of Little Debbie snack cakes. Even Billy Beane is getting into the game. Last year he appeared at a large conference for corporate HR executives in Austin, Texas, where he reportedly stole the show with a talk titled “Th...oach to Talent Management.” Ever since, that headline, with minor modifications, has been plastered all over the HR trade press.

The application of predictive analytics to people’s careers—an emerging field sometimes called “people analytics”—is enormously challenging, not to mention ethically fraught. And it can’t help but feel a little creepy. It requires the creation of a vastly larger box score of human performance than one would ever encounter in the sports pages, or that has ever been dreamed up before. To some degree, the endeavor touches on the deepest of human mysteries: how we grow, whether we flourish, what we become. Most companies are just beginning to explore the possibilities. But make no mistake: during the next five to 10 years, new models will be created, and new experiments run, on a very large scale. Will this be a good development or a bad one—for the economy, for the shapes of our careers, for our spirit and self-worth? Earlier this year, I decided to find out.

[...]

most American workers don’t believe attractive people in their firms are hired or promoted more frequently than unattractive people, but the evidence shows that they are, overwhelmingly so.

[...]

Teri Morse, the vice president for recruiting at Xerox Services, oversees hiring for the company’s 150 U.S. call and customer-care centers, which employ about 45,000 workers. When I spoke with her in July, she told me that as recently as 2010, Xerox had filled these positions through interviews and a few basic assessments conducted in the office—a typing test, for instance. Hiring managers would typically look for work experience in a similar role, but otherwise would just use their best judgment in evaluating candidates. In 2010, however, Xerox switched to an online evaluation that incorporates personality testing, cognitive-skill assessment, and multiple-choice questions about how the applicant would handle specific scenarios that he or she might encounter on the job. An algorithm behind the evaluation analyzes the responses, along with factual information gleaned from the candidate’s application, and spits out a color-coded rating: red (poor candidate), yellow (middling), or green (hire away). Those candidates who score best, I learned, tend to exhibit a creative but not overly inquisitive personality, and participate in at least one but not more than four social networks, among many other factors. (Previous experience, one of the few criteria that Xerox had explicitly screened for in the past, turns out to have no bearing on either productivity or retention. Distance between home and work, on the other hand, is strongly associated with employee engagement and retention.)

When Xerox started using the score in its hiring decisions, the quality of its hires immediately improved. The rate of attrition fell by 20 percent in the initial pilot period, and over time, the number of promotions rose. Xerox still interviews all candidates in person before deciding to hire them, Morse told me, but, she added, “We’re getting to the point where some of our hiring managers don’t even want to interview anymore”—they just want to hire the people with the highest scores.

The online test that Xerox uses was developed by a small but rapidly growing company based in San Francisco called Evolv. I spoke with Jim Meyerle, one of the company’s co‑founders, and David Ostberg, its vice president of workforce science, who described how modern techniques of gathering and analyzing data offer companies a sharp edge over basic human intuition when it comes to hiring. Gone are the days, Ostberg told me, when, say, a small survey of college students would be used to predict the statistical validity of an evaluation tool. “We’ve got a data set of 347,000 actual employees who have gone through these different types of assessments or tools,” he told me, “and now we have performance-outcome data, and we can split those and slice and dice by industry and location.”

Evolv’s tests allow companies to capture data about everybody who applies for work, and everybody who gets hired—a complete data set from which sample bias, long a major vexation for industrial-organization psychologists, simply disappears. The sheer number of observations that this approach makes possible allows Evolv to say with precision which attributes matter more to the success of retail-sales workers (decisiveness, spatial orientation, persuasiveness) or customer-service personnel at call centers (rapport-building). And the company can continually tweak its questions, or add new variables to its model, to seek out ever stronger correlates of success in any given job. For instance, the browser that applicants use to take the online test turns out to matter, especially for technical roles: some browsers are more functional than others, but it takes a measure of savvy and initiative to download them.

There are some data that Evolv simply won’t use, out of a concern that the information might lead to systematic bias against whole classes of people. The distance an employee lives from work, for instance, is never factored into the score given each applicant, although it is reported to some clients. That’s because different neighborhoods and towns can have different racial profiles, which means that scoring distance from work could violate equal-employment-opportunity standards. Marital status? Motherhood? Church membership? “Stuff like that,” Meyerle said, “we just don’t touch”—at least not in the U.S., where the legal environment is strict. Meyerle told me that Evolv has looked into these sorts of factors in its work for clients abroad, and that some of them produce “startling results.” Citing client confidentiality, he wouldn’t say more.

MIT’s Sandy Pentland has pioneered the use of electronic “badges” that transmit data about employees as they go about their days.

Meyerle told me that what most excites him are the possibilities that arise from monitoring the entire life cycle of a worker at any given company. This is a task that Evolv now performs for Transcom, a company that provides outsourced customer-support, sales, and debt-collection services, and that employs some 29,000 workers globally. About two years ago, Transcom began working with Evolv to improve the quality and retention of its English-speaking workforce, and three-month attrition quickly fell by about 30 percent. Now the two companies are working together to marry pre-hire assessments to an increasing array of post-hire data: about not only performance and duration of service but also who trained the employees; who has managed them; whether they were promoted to a supervisory role, and how quickly; how they performed in that role; and why they eventually left.

The potential power of this data-rich approach is obvious. What begins with an online screening test for entry-level workers ends with the transformation of nearly every aspect of hiring, performance assessment, and management. In theory, this approach enables companies to fast-track workers for promotion based on their statistical profiles; to assess managers more scientifically; even to match workers and supervisors who are likely to perform well together, based on the mix of their competencies and personalities. Transcom plans to do all these things, as its data set grows ever richer. This is the real promise—or perhaps the hubris—of the new people analytics. Making better hires turns out to be not an end but just a beginning. Once all the data are in place, new vistas open up.

[...]

For a sense of what the future of people analytics may bring, I turned to Sandy Pentland, the director of the Human Dynamics Laboratory at MIT. In recent years, Pentland has pioneered the use of specialized electronic “badges” that transmit data about employees’ interactions as they go about their days. The badges capture all sorts of information about formal and informal conversations: their length; the tone of voice and gestures of the people involved; how much those people talk, listen, and interrupt; the degree to which they demonstrate empathy and extroversion; and more. Each badge generates about 100 data points a minute.

Pentland’s initial goal was to shed light on what differentiated successful teams from unsuccessful ones. As he described last year in the Harvard Business Review, he tried the badges out on about 2,500 people, in 21 different organizations, and learned a number of interesting lessons. About a third of team performance, he discovered, can usually be predicted merely by the number of face-to-face exchanges among team members. (Too many is as much of a problem as too few.) Using data gathered by the badges, he was able to predict which teams would win a business-plan contest, and which workers would (rightly) say they’d had a “productive” or “creative” day. Not only that, but he claimed that his researchers had discovered the “data signature” of natural leaders, whom he called “charismatic connectors” and all of whom, he reported, circulate actively, give their time democratically to others, engage in brief but energetic conversations, and listen at least as much as they talk. In a development that will surprise few readers, Pentland and his fellow researchers created a company, Sociometric Solutions, in 2010, to commercialize his badge technology.

Pentland told me that no business he knew of was yet using this sort of technology on a permanent basis. His own clients were using the badges as part of consulting projects designed to last only a few weeks. But he doesn’t see why longer-term use couldn’t be in the cards for the future, particularly as the technology gets cheaper. His group is developing apps to allow team members to view their own metrics more or less in real time, so that they can see, relative to the benchmarks of highly successful employees, whether they’re getting out of their offices enough, or listening enough, or spending enough time with people outside their own team.

[...]

In a small conference room, we were shown a digital map of Northwest Washington, D.C., home to The Atlantic. Little red pins identified all the coders in the area who were proficient in the skills that an Atlantic Media job announcement listed as essential. Next to each pin was a number that ranked the quality of each coder on a scale of one to 100, based on the mix of skills Atlantic Media was looking for. (No one with a score above 75, we were told, had ever failed a coding test by a Gild client.) If we’d wished, we could have zoomed in to see how The Atlantic’s own coders scored.

The way Gild arrives at these scores is not simple. The company’s algorithms begin by scouring the Web for any and all open-source code, and for the coders who wrote it. They evaluate the code for its simplicity, elegance, documentation, and several other factors, including the frequency with which it’s been adopted by other programmers. For code that was written for paid projects, they look at completion times and other measures of productivity. Then they look at questions and answers on social forums such as Stack Overflow, a popular destination for programmers seeking advice on challenging projects. They consider how popular a given coder’s advice is, and how widely that advice ranges.

The algorithms go further still. They assess the way coders use language on social networks from LinkedIn to Twitter; the company has determined that certain phrases and words used in association with one another can distinguish expert programmers from less skilled ones. Gild knows these phrases and words are associated with good coding because it can correlate them with its evaluation of open-source code, and with the language and online behavior of programmers in good positions at prestigious companies.

Here’s the part that’s most interesting: having made those correlations, Gild can then score programmers who haven’t written open-source code at all, by analyzing the host of clues embedded in their online histories. They’re not all obvious, or easy to explain. Vivienne Ming, Gild’s chief scientist, told me that one solid predictor of strong coding is an affinity for a particular Japanese manga site.

Wrzesniewski and Dutton's research on job crafting for work reengagement

I write about Wrzesniewski and Dutton's research on job crafting https://workflowy.com/shared/db18baa3-29d9-3e43-380e-30aaa60b04bc/

Adam Bryant: Tell me more about how you encourage dissent.

Bob Pittman: Nobody’s in an ivory tower, and let’s figure this out together. Often in meetings, I will ask people when we’re discussing an idea, “What did the dissenter say?” The first time you do that, somebody might say, “Well, everybody’s on board.” Then I’ll say, “Well, you guys aren’t listening very well, because there’s always another point of view somewhere and you need to go back and find out what the dissenting point of view is.” I don’t want to hear someone say after we do something, “Oh, we should have done this.”

I want us to listen to these dissenters because they may intend to tell you why we can’t do something, but if you listen hard, what they’re really telling you is what you must do to get something done. It gets you out of your framework of the conventions of what you can and can’t do.

dissent #bob-pittman

gigaom:

People are rejecting leaders who rule by the formal authority of their position and command by hierarchical power. They are craving genuine leadership — leaders who lead by their moral authority to inspire, to elevate others and to enlist us in a shared journey. - Dov Seidman

A lot of ink has been spilled on people’s opinions of what makes for a great leader. As a scientist, I like to turn to the data. In 2009, James Zenger published a fascinating survey of 60,000 employees to identify how different characteristics of a leader combine to affect employee perceptions of whether the boss is a “great” leader or not. Two of the characteristics that Zenger examined were results focus and social skills. Results focus combines strong analytical skills with an intense motivation to move forward and solve problems. But if a leader was seen as being very strong on results focus, the chance of that leader being seen as a great leader was only 14%. Social skills combine attributes like communication and empathy. If a leader was strong on social skills, he or she was seen as a great leader even less of ...people who may lack the social skills to make the most of their teams and not giving them the training they need to thrive once promoted.

How can we do better? For one, we should give greater weight to social skills in the hiring and promotion process. Second, we need to create a culture that rewards using both sides of the neural seesaw. We may not be able to easily use them in tandem, but knowing that there is another angle to problem solving and productivity will create better balance in our leaders.

Finally, it may be possible to train our social thinking so that it becomes stronger over time. Social psychologists are just at the beginning stages of examining whether this kind of training will bear fruit. One exciting prospect, one that would make the training fun, is the recent finding that reading fiction seems to temporarily strengthen these mental muscles. Wouldn’t that be great — if reading Catcher in the Rye or the latest Grisham novel were the key to larger profits?

Joel Gascoigne’s salary is $118,000 a year and he doesn’t care who knows it. The co-founder of Buffer, a 10-person startup that allows users to schedule social media updates, Gascoigne is the proponent of a radical new way of doing business where there is no cloak and dagger, where every employee knows everything that is happening in the business.

The lean method has three key principles:

First, rather than engaging in months of planning and research, entrepreneurs accept that all they have on day one is a series of untested hypotheses—basically, good guesses. So instead of writing an intricate business plan, founders summarize their hypotheses in a framework called a business model canvas. Essentially, this is a diagram of how a company creates value for itself and its customers. (See the exhibit “Sketch Out Your Hypotheses.”)

Sketch Out Your Hypotheses Second, lean start-ups use a “get out of the building” approach called customer development to test their hypotheses. They go out and ask potential users, purchasers, and partners for feedback on all elements of the business model, including product features, pricing, distribution channels, and affordable customer acquisition strategies. The emphasis is on nimbleness and speed: New ventures rapidly assemble minimum viable products and immediately elicit customer feedback. Then, using customers’ input to revise their assumptions, they start the cycle over again, testing redesigned offerings and making further small adjustments (iterations) or more substantive ones (pivots) to ideas that aren’t working. (See the exhibit “Listen to Customers.”)

Listen to Customers Third, lean start-ups practice something called agile development, which originated in the software industry. Agile development works hand-in-hand with customer development. Unlike typical yearlong product development cycles that presuppose knowledge of customers’ problems and product needs, agile development eliminates wasted time and resources by developing the product iteratively and incrementally. It’s the process by which start-ups create the minimum viable products they test. (See the exhibit “Quick, Responsive Development.”)

Libraries haven't been just about books in a long time. They've developed into research spaces, safe places for kids, and casual meeting spots, but the current design of most libraries doesn't make this kind of interaction easy. Washington DC is one city hoping to change this: it just announced the winning proposal to renovate the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library — and it's an ambitious one. The design is a a joint pitch from Dutch firm Mecanoo Architecten and DC's own Martinez+Johnson Architecture and it wants to modernize the library's classic Mies van der Rohe style while turning it into a multifunctional environment.

None of the 62 elements have substitutes that perform equally well, and 12 out of the 62 have no substitutes at all (or if there are substitutes, they are inadequate). These 12 elements are rhenium, rhodium, lanthanum, europium, dysprosium, thulium, ytterbium, yttrium, strontium, thallium, magnesium, and manganese.

Economists have long assumed that a shortage of anything will promptly lead to the development of suitable substitutes, an attitude fostered in part because there have been successful substitutions in the past, such as in the cobalt and rhenium examples. But metals are special, Graedel said: “We have shown that metal substitution is very problematic. Substitution would need to mimic these special properties—a real challenge in many applications.”

'I can't even' because internet

11 Nations of North America

For Mr. Libin, one of the most obvious problems is the prevalence of presentation software like PowerPoint. As the information design scholar Edward Tufte has argued, because slide presentations are designed to be seen across a room, each slide can't contain much information. As a result, PowerPoint reduces complex thoughts to simple-sounding bullets. This makes it well suited to making pitches to large audiences, but "most meetings shouldn't be pitches," Libin says. Instead they ought to be thoughtful, collaborative affairs, in which people are encouraged to discuss issues at length.

At Evernote, meetings begin with an agenda that has been written out using complete sentences, not on PowerPoint slides. This makes for a clearer, more thoughtful place to start a discussion. The agenda is stored in the company's cloud-based note-taking software, maki...itself.

Does this approach actually improve the effectiveness of meetings? That is difficult to measure in any empirical way, but Mr. Libin says he's noticed a change in the culture at Evernote. In the past meetings often began with the bit of time-suck known, euphemistically, as "bringing people up to speed." Like an unusually dry version of one of those "previously on..." montages prepended to TV dramas, there was a synopsis of what happened at the last meeting, followed by a desultory recitation of what had happened since (usually nothing). Now, because everyone's notes from each meeting are being logged and disseminated, there is no need for the recap, and each meeting builds on top of the last one.

There is a cognitive shift, too. "A bullet list appears to be convincing without conveying information," Mr. Libin says. By replacing slide decks with written-out agendas, and by encouraging discussions around that agenda, the meeting becomes a discussion instead of a pitch meeting.

“The winner-take-all dynamic is obliterated on mobile,” argues Benedict Evans, an analyst and investor with Andreessen Horowitz. It’s not just that these apps can access our address books, reducing the frictional barriers to joining. The mobile experience makes it trivial to pick different apps for different uses with the mere tap of a thumb. And this shift, in turn, accelerates the process of building com­panies around such apps. “You don’t have to raise $50 million,” Evans says. “You don’t have to have 500 employees. You can have 20 to 40 guys who have never raised any money from venture capitalists reach 500 million users.”

My 16 favorites, in alphabetical order: ‘American Hustle’ (David O. Russell), ‘Before Midnight’ (Richard Linklater), ‘Behind the Candelabra’ (Steven Soderbergh), ‘Captain Phillips’ (Paul Greengrass), ‘The Counselor’ (Ridley Scott), ‘The Grandmaster’ (Wong Kar-wai), ‘The Great Beauty’ (Paolo Sorrentino), ‘Her’ (Spike Jonze), ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’ (Joel and Ethan Coen), ‘Manakamana’ (Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez), ‘Redemption’ (Miguel Gomes), ‘Rush’ (Ron Howard), ‘Spring Breakers’ (Harmony Korine), ‘The Square’ (Jehane Noujaim), ‘A Touch of Sin’ (Jia Zhang-ke), ‘12 Years a Slave’ (Steve McQueen).

And my honor roll: “All Is Lost,” “Bastards,” “Blue Caprice,” “Blue Jasmine,” “Computer Chess,” “Crystal Fairy,” “Enough Said,” “Faust,” “Gimme the Loot,” “In the Fog,” “The Invisible Woman,” “Kill Your Darlings,” “Mother of George,” “Nebraska,” “Our Children,” “Post Tenebras Lux,” “Reality,” “Room 237,” “Something in the Air,” “Stories We Tell,” “This Is the End,” “This Is Martin Bonner,” “Viola.”

http://tmblr.co/Z_iwbyPkllsP

>The core problem is the moral sclerosis of post-modern capitalism, the beggar-thy-neighbor, everyman-for-himself, exclusionary and avaricious capitalism of the globalist megacorporations, unrepentent Wall Street scam artists, and the profits-at-all-costs energy cartel.

>If we have any hope to turn the corner, and avert what is looking more like a certain cliff for our world society, we need to quickly construct a post-normal economic regime, one that breaks with Hutton’s bad capitalism. We need an economic system that rejects and dismantles the power structures responsible for the precariousness of our age. We need a post-normal humanism, and soon. And one of its cornerstones must be the eradication of inopportunity.

inopportunity #postnormal-humanism

Pollack interviews Dr. Jonathan Gruber, who is the Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the health care program at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Jon: I think, Harold, the single thing we probably need to keep the most focus on is the tragedy of the lack of Medicaid expansions. I know you’ve written about this. You know about this, but I think we cannot talk enough about the absolute tragedy that’s taken place. Really, a life-costing tragedy has taken place in America as a result of that Supreme Court decision. You know, half the states in America are denying their poorest citizens health insurance paid for by the federal government.

So to my mind, I’m offended on two levels here. I’m offended because I believe we can help poor people get health insurance, but I’m almost more offended there’s a principle of political economy that basically, if you’d told me, when the Supreme Court decision came down, I said, “It’s not a big deal. What state would turn down free money from the federal government t...e states, not to cover people under Medicaid, even if it’s financially very advantageous to do so. I think there’s a really important principle to defeat this politically, not just because Medicaid is important for people, but because it’s such a toxic political perspective that has to be … It has to be shown that that approach to politics doesn’t work because otherwise, we will really be stuck with some very unjust policies that will be pursued with complete impunity in some of these places.

Jon: That’s a great way to put it. There’s larger principles at stake here. When these states are turning – not just turning down covering the poor people – but turning down the federal stimulus that would come with that.

Harold: Yeah.

Jon: So the price they are willing … They are not just not interested in covering poor people, they are willing to sacrifice billions of dollars of injections into their economy in order to punish poor people. It really is just almost awesome in its evilness.

Goldman Sachs estimates that offshoring has accounted for roughly half a million layoffs in the past three years. Looking forward, perhaps the best-known projection is by Forrester, an information technology consulting firm, which expects the number of outsourced U.S. jobs to grow from about 400,000 in 2004 to 3.3 million by 2015. If this estimate turns out to be accurate, then offshoring could result in roughly 250,000 layoffs a year.

[...]

Economic theory points to two conclusions about the likely economic impact of services offshoring. Overall, offshoring will offer economic gains. However, some American workers, companies, and possibly communities will lose out in the process.

Offshoring is closely related to technological advance: both are driven by competitive pressures to reduce costs and result in displacement of existing jobs. Since the nation’s inception, the U.S. economy has experienced productivity gains and the displacement of jobs due to technological progress. Manufacturing productivity has increased roughly 3.5 percent a year over the last two decades, which helps explain why the share of U.S. workers engaged in producing “things” has declined significantly, although the pace has been very uneven.

International trade works much like technological change. Economists such as Catherine Mann of the Institute for International Economics, who point to offshoring’s overall benefits to the U.S. economy, typically argue that it helps lower costs and prices.6 A recent study by the consulting firm McKinsey and Co. estimates that the net cost sav- ings of moving some jobs offshore is about 50 percent.7 This is far lower than the sometimes 80 to 90 percent wage differential between U.S. and foreign workers (because of costs incurred for coordination and telecom- munications), but still sizable. In turn, lower inflation and higher productivity allow the Federal Reserve to run a more accommodative monetary policy, meaning the economy can grow faster, creating the conditions for higher employment. Mann estimates that economic growth would have been lower by 0.3 percent a year between 1995 and 2002 without foreign outsourcing in information technology.8

[...]

But if fewer people are needed in ex- isting jobs and occupations, then won’t total employment fall over time? His- torically, the number of jobs has closely followed the growth of the labor force, despite major increases in foreign trade and the advent of a host of new job-dis- placing technologies, such as voicemail, word processors, and optical scanners. Indeed, despite a surge in openness, the U.S. economy since 1985 has added 30 million workers to its payrolls, even tak- ing into account the recent recession and jobless recovery. At the same time, medi- an family income has jumped 20 percent. Structural changes, including trade and technology, influence where the jobs are, not the total number of jobs.

The policy challenge arises from the second sure bet from economic theory and practice. Offshoring, like trade and technology, is a process of creative destruc- tion whereby workers in af- fected industries face the very real possibility of losing not only their jobs but also their healthcare. Even worse, some workers fall down the economic ladder when they have no choice but to take new jobs at lower pay and thus face the prospect of lower lifetime earnings.

This concern is particularly acute because it comes at a moment when anxieties about jobs and wages are at fever pitch.9 Against the backdrop of a breathtaking acceleration in manufacturing job losses over the past few years, the jobs picture remained bleak much longer into the recent recovery than in any previous postwar recovery. [Looking back to the 2001 recession.]

[...]

This plays into a broader set of dis- tributive trends that have been quite negative for American workers since the end of the 2001 recession. As Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan noted in April 2004, “virtually all of the gains in productivity have ended up in rising profit margins and hence in a decline in the proportion of that national income going to compensation of employees.”10 Two years into the current recovery, the profit share of income grew 33 percent (on a pretax basis) compared with only 3 percent during the recovery of 1992–93; worker compensation, meanwhile, remained down 4 percent—a steeper decline than during any previous recovery in the last four decades. At the same time, the administration’s tax policies have exacerbated rather than offset these trends by shifting the tax burden away from wealth and towards earned income.

[...]

Now that college-educated, white-collar American workers will increasingly be in competition with highly qualified workers in the developing world, won’t they be subject to the same pressures?

In his new book, BusinessWeek’s chief economist Michael Mandel worries that that the answer to this question is “yes,” and he may well be right.11 If Mandel’s assumption is correct, the “skills premium” that educated workers earned in the past may be pushed down in the future, thus reversing a decades-long trend.

[...]

In an experiment the results of which were published last month in the journal PLoS One, we studied both possibilities. We found that receiving and observing generosity can both significantly increase your likelihood of being generous toward a stranger, but that if you observe a high enough level of generosity, your willingness to help suffers — you become a “bystander” who feels that help is no longer needed.

Ten years ago, 78% of an employee’s impact on functional or business unit performance came from their individual task performance and only 22% came from network performance. Today, the breakdown is 51% task performance, 49% network performance. A pretty even split.

Samsung has said its research found that people liked bigger-screen phones because they wanted a device that was good for handwriting, drawing and sharing notes. Asian-language speakers found it easier to write characters on a device using a pen rather than typing.

Now Samsung and other phone makers believe they will find a more receptive audience outside Asia, too, including in the United States and Europe.

“The cultural difference is not much,” said Lee Young-hee, head of marketing for Samsung’s mobile division. “Most people like the bigger display — it’s more and more welcomed by people around the world.”

Demand for big-screen phones is clearly strong. IDC, the research firm, estimates that at least 20 percent of all smartphones shipped last year in China, the largest smartphone market in the world, were five inches or larger. It predicts that number will balloon to 50 percent by 2017.

IDC also recently predicted that the growth of tablet sales would slow this year, partly because many people are gravitating toward larger phones and shifting away from smaller tablets.

“In some markets consumers are already making the choice to buy a large smartphone rather than buying a small tablet,” said Tom Mainelli, an IDC research director who follows tablets.

The most extreme example of a big phone announced this week came from Huawei, which introduced the MediaPad X1, a smartphone with a seven-inch screen, usually a size used in tablets. Because the device has a phone connection, Huawei calls it a phablet.

Mr. Naím, an economist who has been Venezuela's trade and industry minister as well as editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine, is a courageous writer who seeks to dissect big subjects in new ways. At a time when critics of overreaching governments, big banks, media moguls and concentrated wealth decry the power of the "1%," Mr. Naím argues that leaders of all types—political, corporate, military, religious, union—face bigger, more complex problems with weaker hands than in the past.

This "decay" of power extends beyond the shift of influence from developed to developing countries, or among regions of the world. Mr. Naím points to three broad revolutions: "more" of everyone and everything that overwhelms the means of control; "mobility" of people and ideas that has ended captive audiences; and "mentality"—a transformation of aspirations, expectations and values such that individuals "take nothing for granted anymore." Together, the "3 M's" have made power easier to get, harder to use and easier to lose.

Fast-rising factions and insurgent political movements, Mr. Naím notes—such as the Tea Party, the Pirate Parties in Europe and, most recently, Italy's Five Star Movement—are easier to organize and more potent. In business, Mr. Naím observes, companies in sectors as diverse as energy, media, banking, transportation and IT face a greater range of competitors, including from developing countries. Meanwhile, armies face off against ever more irregular enemies, such as insurgents, terrorists and militarized gangs like Mexico's Zetas.

Mr. Naím is not forecasting the end of states, conventional militaries, big business or established churches; instead, he describes in detail how their exercise of power is more constrained and their positions are less secure. As a result, the big, seemingly powerful actors in societies have a harder time getting things done. Power has a social function, Mr. Naím reminds us, so his concern is not principally for those who are supposedly in charge but for the societal breakdowns that occur when power fails.

Nate Fulmer, from South Carolina, was fired because his boss disapproved of his comments about organized religion on his podcast. Cameron Barrett, from Michigan, lost his job over kinky short stories he posted. Stacey Snyder, from Pennsylvania, was denied a credit for her teaching degree because she posted a photograph of herself drinking beer. You don’t even have to be the one doing what your boss disapproves of. Daniel Lakewas suspended for “conduct unbecoming a police officer” because his wife posted nude pictures of herself.

Sadly, almost all of this employer-driven abuse is legal. It’s illegal for your boss to penalize you because of your race or religion, but there’s no law protecting your right to live the way you choose. The only exceptions are the four states that have enacted such laws (California, Colorado, New York and North Dakota).

1. Note everyone’s initial ideas. A fundamental strength of teams is that each person brings their own unique knowledge and perspective to the table. This is the crux of the classic “wisdom of crowds” effect first documented early in the last century – that is, the judgment of a group of people will usually be superior to the judgment of any individual in that group.

In a creative setting, this could apply to problems like estimating product sales or predicting project timelines. But crucially, this group wisdom effect only applies when each person’s input is kept independent and free of outside influence. A team of Swiss and Hungarian researchers showed this in 2011 – group wisdom was undermined when team members were given the chance to modify their initial answers based on feedback about what others had said.

Too much early interaction can also compromise idea generation in a group setting. Vocal, overconfident team members have a disproportionate influence while shy contributors lose faith in their own proposals. Whether seeking predictions or brainstorming ideas, you can largely overcome these problems by making sure team members write down and share their initial thoughts and ideas before group discussion begins. With everyone’s ideas or predictions on the table, only then start the interactive group work.

1. Conduct a pre-mortem.

After a failed product or expansion plan, it’s a familiar experience to read that the relevant company is conducting in-depth inquiries to find out how their experts could have made such misguided, unrealistic judgments. A common cause is that the companies’ project group grew so isolated and inward-looking, they forgot to factor in the effects of other competing companies making their own ambitious plans.

Newly formed teams that often generate more and better ideas. To help safeguard against the unrealistic optimism that often bedevils creative teams, decision-making expert Gary Klein recommends a technique called the pre-mortem – a form of “ritualized dissent”. Team members (working on their own initially) are asked to assume that their project has already met with disaster and to come up with reasons why. This fosters an atmosphere that values the input of those who have doubts and reservations. Most importantly, the technique highlights ways to strengthen the project plan before lift-off.

dissent #premortem #teams

Research conducted in 1989 by Deborah J. Mitchell, of the Wharton School; Jay Russo, of Cornell; and Nancy Pennington, of the University of Colorado, found that prospective hindsight—imagining that an event has already occurred—increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%. We have used prospective hindsight to devise a method called a premortem, which helps project teams identify risks at the outset.

A premortem is the hypothetical opposite of a postmortem. A postmortem in a medical setting allows health professionals and the family to learn what caused a patient’s death. Everyone benefits except, of course, the patient. A premortem in a business setting comes at the beginning of a project rather than the end, so that the project can be improved rather than autopsied. Unlike a typical critiquing session, in which project team members are asked what might go wrong, the premortem operates on the assumption that the “patient” has died, and so asks what did go wrong. The team members’ task is to generate plausible reasons for the project’s failure.

A typical premortem begins after the team has been briefed on the plan. The leader starts the exercise by informing everyone that the project has failed spectacularly. Over the next few minutes those in the room independently write down every reason they can think of for the failure—especially the kinds of things they ordinarily wouldn’t mention as potential problems, for fear of being impolitic. For example, in a session held at one Fortune 50–size company, an executive suggested that a billion-dollar environmental sustainability project had “failed” because interest waned when the CEO retired. Another pinned the failure on a dilution of the business case after a government agency revised its policies.

Next the leader asks each team member, starting with the project manager, to read one reason from his or her list; everyone states a different reason until all have been recorded. After the session is over, the project manager reviews the list, looking for ways to strengthen the plan.

premortem #gary-klein #deborah-mitchell #prospective-hindsight #dissent

Kahan calls this theory Identity-Protective Cognition: "As a way of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups, individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values." Elsewhere, he puts it even more pithily: "What we believe about the facts," he writes, "tells us who we are." And the most important psychological imperative most of us have in a given day is protecting our idea of who we are, and our relationships with the people we trust and love.

In a world of increasing interconnectedness and rapid change, there is a growing need to improve the way people work together. understanding the true drivers of human social behavior is becoming ever more urgent in this environment.

SCARF = status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness

Silvia Bellezza, a doctoral candidate at Harvard Business School, and Francesca Gino and Anat Keinan, two professors there, first studied the link between accomplishment and informality. They found that scholars who dressed down at an academic conference, eschewing blazers for T-shirts, had stronger research records, even controlling for age and gender. Then, they explored why and when this sartorial tactic for announcing status—if that’s what it is—succeeds.

Bellezza went to Milan and asked some clerks at luxury boutiques (Armani, Valentino, etc.) to imagine a woman entering the store wearing either gym clothes or a fur coat. Others were to imagine a woman in flip-flops and a Swatch, or in high heels and a Rolex. Clerks then judged her likely financial and celebrity status. Of the hypothetical shoppers, the casually attired were judged wealthier and more important. One clerk said, “Wealthy people sometimes dress very badly to demonstrate superiority,” and that “if you dare enter these boutiques so underdressed, you are definitely going to buy something.” But when Bellezza ran the same questions by local pedestrians, they assumed a done-up client to be wealthier. Picking up on status cues, the researchers determined, seems to require familiarity with the environment in which those cues are used.

Next, the researchers asked students at American universities to imagine a professor who is clean-shaven and wears a tie, or one who is bearded and wears T-shirts. Students were slightly more inclined to judge the dapper professor as a better teacher and researcher. But some students were given another piece of information: that the professor works at a top-tier school, where the dress code is presumably more formal. For them, the slouchy scholar earned more points. Deviance can signal status, but only when there are clear norms from which to deviate.

What if you stand out not for informality but for originality? In another experiment, a hypothetical man wearing a red bow tie at a black-tie party hosted by his golf club was viewed as higher in status—and better at golf—than a peer who stuck with the black-tie dress code. But if subjects were told the man broke the dress code unintentionally, he gained no benefit. When it’s not clear that a person is breaking a norm deliberately, he might be seen merely as missing the memo, or not having the wherewithal to follow it.

The next study looked for clues about why we see nonconformity as a sign of status. Subjects evaluated a hypothetical M.I.T. student presenting a business plan in a competition. He used the M.I.T. PowerPoint template others were using, or he used his own. As predicted, participants saw the one who abandoned the standard template as having a better business idea, and as being more respected by his friends. They also rated him as more autonomous—someone who “can afford to do what he wants.” Further, people perceived the nonconformist as having high status and competence, because he seemed to act autonomously.

The red-sneaker effect fits in with a wider body of research on the idea that certain observable traits or behaviors signal hidden qualities by virtue of their “costliness.” For instance, a peacock’s colorful tail feathers make it easy prey for predators, but they tell a peahen that he’s fit enough to sustain the risk. The more one has of the trait to be touted (fitness, say), the less costly the signal (feathers), making the display of the signal a reliable proxy for the trait. This is how conspicuous consumption works: jewelry is costly, unless you’re rich and won’t miss the cash. Similarly, deliberate nonconformity shows that you can handle some ridicule because you’ve got social capital to burn.

Seeing Like a State (public library) by James C. Scott (1998) The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (public library) by David Lewis-Williams (2002) Crowds and Power (public library) by Elias Canetti (1962) The Wheels of Commerce (public library) by Fernand Braudel (1982) Keeping Together in Time (public library) by William McNeill (1995) Dancing in the Streets (public library) by Barbara Ehrenreich (2007) Roll Jordan Roll (public library) by Eugene Genovese (1974) A Pattern Language (public library) by Christopher Alexander et al (1977) The Face of Battle (public library) by John Keegan (1976) A History of the World in 100 Objects (public library) by Neil MacGregor (2010) Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (public library) by Richard Rorty (1989) The Notebooks (public library) by Leonardo da Vinci (1952 ed.) The Confidence Trap (public library) by David Runciman (2013) The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstein (1983) Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection (public library) by Sarah Hrdy (1999) War and Peace (public library) by Leo Tolstoy (1869) The Cambridge World History of Food (2-Volume Set) (public library) by Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas (2000) The Illustrated Flora of Britain and Northern Europe (public library) by Marjorie Blamey and Christopher Grey Wilson (1989) Printing and the Mind of Man (public library) by John Carter and Percy Muir (1983) Peter the Great: His Life and World (public library) by Richard Massie (1980)

Since a woman named Martine Postma established the first repair café in Amsterdam in 2009, the concept of free events at which volunteers with repair skills assist participants with broken furniture, appliances, bicycles, clothing and toys, has spread far and wide.

More than 50 cafes operate throughout the Netherlands, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, and, in the U.S., people have begun convening regularly at coffee shops and event spaces in New York, Chicago, Palo Alto, Los Angeles, Seattle and—as of earlier this year—my hometown of Portland, Oregon, to fix busted items.

The machines are not inexpensive, costing up to $250,000 (not including barn improvements) for a unit that includes a mechanical arm, teat-cleaning equipment, computerized displays, a milking apparatus and sensors to detect the position of the teats. Pioneered in Europe in the 1990s, they have only recently taken hold in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and New York, which is a leader in the production of Greek yogurt and the third-largest milk producer in the country.

Kathy Barrett, a senior extension associate at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University, credited a recent surge in milk prices with motivating dairy owners to seek new ways to improve their farms — and farm life.

“It’s really the flexibility of not stopping doing hay because at 3 o’clock you have to go milk,” Ms. Barrett said.

Ms. Barrett said about 30 farms in New York had installed more than 100 robotic milkers. Two European manufacturers, Lely and DeLaval, said they had installed hundreds more across the country. California, the nation’s leading dairy producer, has been a curious holdout, in part because there were problems at some farms that adopted the technology in its early years.

This week, the company launched the ability to sell subscriptions, rather than individual one-off payments, as a way to tailor the service even further to how customers were using it.

He said the company saw that users were selling tens of thousands of dollars of content through what was essentially a subscription, even if Gumroad didn’t formally support it. So he figured it was time to add this to the service: ”We were solely about helping people sell these atomic things,” he said.

With subscriptions, Gumroad will let creators sign up subscribers, set a monthly or yearly price (it can be $0 if they prefer), and then send their subscribers any kind of content, from book chapters to film episodes to songs or any kind of digital content. The customers can then download the content directly from an email.

“We want to make it as easy to sell something as it is to share something,” he said.

TURKLE CLAIM #3: SELFIES CHANGE THE WAY WE COMMUNICATE We don’t experience interruptions as disruptions anymore. But they make it hard to settle into serious conversations with ourselves and with other people because emotionally, we keep ourselves available to be taken away from everything. I talk to young people about etiquette when they go out to dinner, and they explain to me that when in a group of, say, seven, they make sure that at least three people are “heads up” in the “talking” conversation at any one time. … All of this has become the new normal. It’s true, some kids can be rude. But they’re also rabid communicators. Turkle’s right: We’re witnessing a new normal. Here are some other grumpy seniors that stared down a new norm... wholesome recreation is eliminated.”

In 1925, Princeton University Dean Howard McClenahan tied the car to a moral crisis: “The automobile gave increased opportunities on Sunday and thus lessened the chances of church attendance. The general effect of the automobile was to make the present generation look lightly at the moral code, and to decrease the value of the home.”

History is full of Turkles, and naturally so. Hers is such a terrifying idea, and yet such an appealing one: If we are at the vanguard of social change, then we--that is, we the elders, roughly ages 30 and up, who can remember a time before the latest disruption--are the precious and special last bearers of humanity.

It’s flattering, but it’s untrue. We aren’t special. We just grew up doing things the way we learned to do them. Now we see the next generation acting differently, and we cannot imagine it working. We forget that this is how it’s always been. We forget that we experimented as well. We turned out okay.

A group of researchers from Stanford has been working on deep learning models that can make sense of whole sentences at a time, and has recently trained its models on a large collection of online movie reviews.

IBM is teaming with MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, New York University and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to advance the state of the art in building smarter computer systems. Their research ranges from automatically classifying text and images to human-computer interaction.

Thomson Reuters is now incorporating sentiment analysis gained from Twitter for its Eikon market analysis and trading platform. The commercial terms of the deal are not being disclosed but to be clear it is not a deal directly with Twitter: a spokesperson confirms that it will be “combining a number of third-party and proprietary Twitter feeds for this service.”

You can think of this as an expansion of the kind of Twitter mining first tried out by Bloomberg last year, in which the company (a rival to Thomson Reuters) incorporated Tweets related to specific companies in a wider data stream.

Here, the Thomson Reuters implementation goes one step further by then creating visualizations and charts based on this kind of data — one of these is illustrated above. Looking at the graphics, traders and ...e volumes needed to make patterns meaningful,” the spokesperson tells me.

While Thomson Reuters doesn’t disclose what third parties may be involved in its rollout, the types of companies that are sitting in between Twitter and customer-facing enterprises like Thomson Reuters include the likes of Datasift, which mines and helps structure data from social networks like Twitter through the use of metatags.

For now, the sentiment analysis uses only Twitter, but Thomson Reuters is working on adding more content sources, including blogs, in the future.

Thomson Reuters believes it is the first mainstream financial platform to provide twitter sentiment in this way “on a broad scale.” Eikon has some 120,000 people using the service on desktop, “and that grows exponentially every week.” That’s a turn of events from a few years ago, when Thomson Reuters was still sweating out the billion-dollar investment it had made into the development of Eikon as a way to better compete against Bloomberg.

Indeed over the past decade the Valley itself has grown almost entirely in ways that have benefited the affluent, largely white and Asian professional population. Large tech firms are notoriously skittish about revealing their diversity data, but one recent report found the share of Hispanics and African-Americans, already far below their percentage in the population, declined in the last decade; Hispanics, roughly one quarter of the local workforce, held 5.2% of the jobs at 10 of the Valley’s largest companies in 2008, down from 6.8% in 1999, according to the San Jose Mercury News. The share of women in management also has declined, despite the headlines generated by the rise of high-profile figures like Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg. The mostly male white and Asian top geeks in Palo Al...ng the tax code to shelter profits offshore. Twitter’s founders creatively exploited various arcane loopholes to avoid paying taxes on some of the proceeds of their IPO that they set aside for heirs.

The set of differing rules for oligarchs and everyone else extends even to the most personal issues. Yahoo’s Mayer, a former Google executive, banned telecommuting for employees — particularly critical for those unable to house their families anywhere close to ultra-pricey Palo Alto. Yet Mayer, herself pregnant at the time, saw no contradiction in building a nursery in her own office.

This model of economic development seems it would be more appealing to those who believe in “the survival of the fittest” than people with more traditional liberal values. The alliance with tech may well be a critical boon to the progressive cause and its champions for the time being, but at some time even the most deluded progressives will begin to realize with whom they have chosen to share their bed.

Silicon Valley tends to vote Democrat but act Republican

WHAT is the chance that you could get someone to lie for you? What about vandalizing public property at your suggestion?

Most of us assume that others would go along with such schemes only if, on some level, they felt comfortable doing so. If not, they’d simply say “no,” right?

Yet research suggests that saying “no” can be more difficult than we believe — and that we have more power over others’ decisions than we think.

If you were looking for teams to rig for success, a call center would be a good place to start. The skills required for call center work are easy to identify and hire for. The tasks involved are clear-cut and easy to monitor. Just about every aspect of team performance is easy to measure: number of issues resolved, customer satisfaction, average handling time (AHT, the golden standard of call center efficiency). And the list goes on.

Why, then, did the manager at a major bank’s call center have such trouble figuring out why some of his teams got excellent results, while other, seemingly similar, teams struggled? Indeed, none of the metrics that poured in hinted at the reason for the performance gaps. This mystery reinforced his assumption that team building was an art, not a science.

The truth is quite the opposite. At MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory, we h...we found that the best predictors of productivity were a team’s energy and engagement outside formal meetings. Together those two factors explained one-third of the variations in dollar productivity among groups.

Drawing on that insight, we advised the center’s manager to revise the employees’ coffee break schedule so that everyone on a team took a break at the same time. That would allow people more time to socialize with their teammates, away from their workstations. Though the suggestion flew in the face of standard efficiency practices, the manager was baffled and desperate, so he tried it. And it worked: AHT fell by more than 20% among lower-performing teams and decreased by 8% overall at the call center. Now the manager is changing the break schedule at all 10 of the bank’s call centers (which employ a total of 25,000 people) and is forecasting $15 million a year in productivity increases. He has also seen employee satisfaction at call centers rise, sometimes by more than 10%.

http://www.saffo.com/02008/07/26/strong-opinions-weakly-held/

Saffo argues for abduction:

"Try as one might, when one looks into the future, there is no such thing as “complete” information, much less a “complete” forecast. As a consequence, I have found that the fastest way to an effective forecast is often through a sequence of lousy forecasts."

forecasts #futures #abduction

http://brickstarter.org/brickstarter-prototype-sketches-questions/#comment-292

>This latter aspect actually reveals that the point of Brickstarter is not really in making a website at all, necessarily, but rather in developing a sketch of “a 21st century social contract”. Or at least aspects of that. It’s not making a statement about what that should be, but using prototyping to explore what that might be.

http://cogprints.org/671/1/FAbductive.html

abduction

http://paulgraham.com/swan.html

>the best startup ideas seem at first like bad ideas. I've written about this before: if a good idea were obviously good, someone else would already have done it. So the most successful founders tend to work on ideas that few beside them realize are good.

http://googlemobileads.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/navigating-new-multi-screen-world.html

>We found that nine out of ten people use multiple screens sequentially and that smartphones are by far the most common starting point for sequential activity. So completing a task like booking a flight online or managing personal finances doesn’t just happen in one sitting on one device. In fact, 98% of sequential screeners move between devices in the same day to complete a task.

>With simultaneous usage, we found that TV no longer commands our undivided attention, with 77% of viewers watching TV with another device in hand. In many cases people search on their devices, inspired by what they see on TV.

Hans Monderman is a traffic engineer who hates traffic signs. Oh, he can put up with the well-placed speed limit placard or a dangerous curve warning on a major highway, but Monderman considers most signs to be not only annoying but downright dangerous. To him, they are an admission of failure, a sign - literally - that a road designer somewhere hasn't done his job. "The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there's a problem with a road, they always try to add something," Monderman says. "To my mind, it's much better to remove things."

European traffic planners are dreaming of streets free of rules and directives. They want drivers and pedestrians to interact in a free and humane way, as brethren -- by means of friendly gestures, nods of the head and eye contact, without the harassment of prohibitions, restrictions and warning signs. A project implemented by the European Union is currently seeing seven cities and regions clear-cutting their forest of traffic signs. Ejby, in Denmark, is participating in the experiment, as are Ipswich in England and the Belgian town of Ostende.

The utopia has already become a reality in Makkinga, in the Dutch province of Western Frisia. A sign by the entrance to the small town (population 1,000) reads "Verkeersbordvrij" -- "free of traffic signs." Cars bumble unhurriedly over precision-trimmed granite cobblestones. Stop signs and direction signs are nowhere to be seen. There are neither parking meters nor stopping restrictions. There aren't even any lines painted on the streets.

"The many rules strip us of the most important thing: the ability to be considerate. We're losing our capacity for socially responsible behavior," says Dutch traffic guru Hans Monderman, one of the project's co-founders. "The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people's sense of personal responsibility dwindles."

Here’s a little-known fact: Berkshire Hathaway, the fifth-largest company in the United States, with some $162.5 billion in revenue and 300,000 employees worldwide, has no general counsel that oversees the holding company’s dozens of units. There is no human resources department, either.

If that sounds like a corporate utopia, that’s probably because it is. To some people in this day and age — given the daily onslaught of headlines about scandal and fraud in corporate America — that also may sound almost like corporate negligence.

Mr. Munger’s thought experiment about trust is being studied at the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University. A professor wrote a paper last month about his contention, examining its suitability to corporate structures.

As Pollyannaish as Mr. Munger may sound, his view has a profound counterintuitive truth to it: Behavioral scientists and psychologists have long contended that “trust” is, to some degree, one of the most powerful forces within organizations.

Mr. Munger and Mr. Buffett argue that with the right basic controls, finding trustworthy managers and giving them an enormous amount of leeway creates more value than if they are forced to constantly look over their shoulders at human resources departments and lawyers monitoring their every move.

Only 30% of those that do not feel valued at work are satisfied with their jobs.

24% don't trust their employer, 32% say employer is not always honest and truthful

It’s not hard to imagine how the future behaviour of crowds might be embedded in the Twitter stream. People often signal their intent to meet in advance and even coordinate their behaviour using social media. So this social media activity is a leading indicator of future crowd behaviour.

That makes it seem clear that predicting future crowd behaviour is simply a matter of picking this leading indicator out of the noise.

Kallus says this is possible by mining tweets for any mention of future events and then analysing trends associated with them. “The gathering of crowds into a single action can often be seen through trends appearing in this data far in advance,” he says.

It turns out that exactly this kind of analysis is available from a company called Recorded Future based in Cambridge, which scans 300,000 different web sources in seven different languages from all over the world. It then extracts mentions of future events for later analysis.

It’s this data that Kallus has analysed to predict significant protests. “We find that the mass of publicly available information online has the power to unveil the future actions of crowds,” he says.

First, Kallus defines a significant protest as one that receives much more mainstream media coverage than usual.

He then analyses the mainstream coverage to see when significant protests actually occur and looks for activity in the Twitter feed that precedes the protests. If these are the predictive indicators, then it is possible to look for similar types of activity and assume that this is predictive too.

Kallus tests this idea by studying the tweets associated with the 2013 coup d’état in Egypt, which was centered around the anniversary of President Morsi’s rule, triggering significant protests during which he was removed from power by the Egyptian army.

Kallus says that evidence of the protests was clearly visible in the Twitter feed well in advance, as were the advanced protests that occurred before the anniversary. What’s more, the social media content predicted that the protests would go on for weeks beyond the anniversary.

Kallus’s conclusion that tweets can accurately predict significant protests in advance is an interesting one. There’s no question that the evidence is there to be found in the social media in retrospect. There is no shortage of people who make these kinds of predictions about historical events using historical data.

The bigger question is whether it’s possible to pick out this evidence in advance. In other words, is possible to make predictions before the events actually occur?

For some time now, researchers have attempted to extract useful information from this firehose. One idea is that the stream of thought is representative of the mental state of humankind at any instant. Various groups have devised algorithms to analyse this datastream hoping to use it to take the temperature of various human states.

One algorithm, called the Google-Profile of Mood States (GPOMS), records the level of six states: happiness, kindness, alertness, sureness, vitality and calmness.

The question that Bollen and co ask is whether any of these states correlates with stock market prices. After all, they say, it is not entirely beyond credence that the rise and fall of stock market prices is influenced by the public mood.

So these guys took 9.7 million tweets posted by 2.7 million tweeters between March and December 2008 and looked for correlations between the GPOMS indices and whether Dow Jones Industrial Average rose of fell each day.

Their extraordinary conclusion is that there really is a correlation between the Dow Jones Industrial Average and one of the GPOMS indices–calmness.

In fact, the calmness index appears to be a good predictor of whether the Dow Jones Industrial Average goes up or down between 2 and 6 days later. “We find an accuracy of 87.6% in predicting the daily up and down changes in the closing values of the Dow Jones Industrial Average,” say Bollen and co

Over the last decade or so, two Israeli researchers, Avi Assor and Guy Roth, and their colleagues in the United States and Belgium, have conducted a series of experiments whose consistent finding is that when children feel their parents’ affection varies depending on the extent to which they are well behaved, self-controlled or impressive at school or sports, this promotes “the development of a fragile, contingent and unstable sense of self.”

Other researchers, meanwhile, have shown that high self-esteem is beneficial, but that even more desirable is unconditional self-esteem: a solid core of belief in yourself, an abiding sense that you’re competent and worthwhile — even when you screw up or fall short. In other words, the very unconditionality that seems to fuel attacks on participation trophies and the whole “self-esteem movement” turns out to be a defining feature of psychological health. It’s precisely what we should be helping our children to acquire.

There seems to be something about big cities that makes murder more likely but suicide less so

Between 1977 and 2009 the total number of annual bike trips more than tripled, while the bike’s share of all trips rose from 0.6% to 1%.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/06/hotel-neighborhood/2284/ They've dubbed the project "Urbanauts," they say because the geography of the "hotel" encourages visitors to get out and explore the neighborhood. "Our 'breakfast room' is a traditional cafe around the corner, our 'spa' is the Moroccan hammam two streets away," says Kholmayr. "We've taken the hotel concept and made it horizontal, so the whole infrastructure of a four-star hotel is spread over the surrounding area."

It turns out that people like hanging out in public more than they used to, and those who most like hanging out are people using their phones. On the steps of the Met, “loiterers” — those present in at least two consecutive film samples, inhabiting the same area for 15 seconds or more — constituted 7 percent of the total (that is to say, the other 93 percent were just passing through). That was a 57 percent increase from 30 years earlier. And those using mobile phones there were five times as likely to “loiter” as other people. In other words, not that many people are talking, or reading, texting or playing Candy Crush on the phone, but those who do stick around longer. (In the case of Bryant Park, it doesn’t hurt that the area is no longer an open-air drug market — a major problem that P.P.S. was trying to root out in t...t uptick could be explained in part by an increase in the number of women on the street, many of them alone.

In fact, this was Hampton’s most surprising finding: Today there are just a lot more women in public, proportional to men. It’s not just on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. On the steps of the Met, the proportion of women increased by 33 percent, and in Bryant Park by 18 percent. The only place women decreased proportionally was in Boston’s Downtown Crossing — a major shopping area. “The decline of women within this setting could be interpreted as a shift in gender roles,” Hampton writes. Men seem to be “taking on an activity that was traditionally regarded as feminine.”

Across the board, Hampton found that the story of public spaces in the last 30 years has not been aloneness, or digital distraction, but gender equity. “I mean, who would’ve thought that, in America, 30 years ago, women were not in public the same way they are now?” Hampton said. “We don’t think about that.”

So the scientists turned to the Hadza, who still live much as humans did millennia ago. They outfitted 44 of the tribespeople with GPS watches and asked them to hunt and gather for several days while wearing the units.

The resulting data showed that the tribespeople frequently employed the Levy walk, moving briefly in one direction, then shifting and covering nearby ground, until that area was exhausted of potential food, at which point they’d set off on a longer-distance hike to new ground and there begin the short explorations again.

This finding has surprising relevance, even for those of us whose food is arrayed in grocery aisles, said David Raichlen, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona who led the study. The GPS readings reinforce the likelihood that Levy-style walking patterns are hard-wired into the human brain and predict how we behave. Even before this study was published, he said, planners in some cities had used the theory that people Levy-walk — spending much of their time exploring one area, with occasional “long steps” or forays into another part of a city — to determine where to place cellphone towers. At a more individual level, he said, the discovery may help to explain why, after spending hours in a small, familiar office, many of us feel an itch to wander the halls in search of new geography.

But the most resonant implication of the study, Dr. Raichlen said, is that Levy walking patterns bind modern, urban humans to the natural world. “This pattern” of movement “emerges so often in so many different species and human societies,” he said. “It links us” to the flight of the albatross and to an ancient part of ourselves, even when we’re strolling toward Disney’s Tomorrowland.

> In more specific computer science terms, a social graph consists of people (the nodes); information about the people (metadata on the nodes); the relationships between the people (the edges between the nodes); and content shared across them (information flowing along the edges). A work graph consists of the units of work (tasks, ideas, clients, goals, agenda items); information about that work (relevant conversations, files, status, metadata); how it all fits together; and then the people involved with the work (who’s responsible for what? which people need to be kept in the loop?).

<blockquote>In 2010, to find out how work nomads were handling work at home and peek behind the curtain, Coalesse did something unusual: it followed people into their homes. Emily Ulrich, Coalesse’s senior researcher at that time, conducted observational research in the homes, offices, and other places the New York City and San Francisco Bay area study participants worked.

What Ulrich confirmed and reported in a Coalesse report titled “Untethered” [see 360 Magazine, Issue 62] was that mobile technologies have indeed untethered work from desks and offices. Time-pressed knowledge workers are working anywhere they choose. And because availability and responsiveness are so important in business, a back-and-forth toggling between life and work happens constantly for many people.

Naturally, toggling comes with stresses. The people Ulrich studied are experiencing this radical change in a lonely way, unsupported ergonomically or emotionally, working long hours on mobile devices at dining tables, on couches, and, in more than a few cases, in bed late at night. According to International Data Corporation (IDC) there are now 1.2 billion mobile workers worldwide. In the United States, says IDC, almost 120 million workers are mobile, representing 75.5% of the total workforce. (Japan is next with almost 50 million mobile workers; 74.5% of its workforce).

Since 2010, things have only become more intense for mobile workers as technology has continued to advance and designing spaces that support mobile workers has become more complex. Most people are connected throughout the day to multiple clouds through smartphones, tablets, and laptops. And because networking and social media options have expanded so dramatically, so too has the time commitment to manage them.

Yet two stark contradictions remain. Mobile work outside the office is still not a mainstream consideration. And research is scarce on connecting the habits and needs of mobile workers with the technology trends that are driving changes in the workplace.

According to Primo Orpilla, a principal of Studio O+A, a San Francisco-based alternative officing’ firm that has designed spaces for Facebook and Evernote among many others, “There’s a real need to grasp the needs of the ‘other workplace’—the transitory spaces, the hallways, the break areas, the landscape outside the building, the coffee shop down the street. People can work anywhere these days so there are many opportunities to capture that work or to create that interesting space. But not enough people are thinking about it.”

Coalesse has been giving it a lot of thought. Bob Arko, the company’s creative director, says there is a vacuum to fill. “Architects and designers are not typically commissioned to do this kind of research and they rely on the major manufacturers for a more comprehensive perspective on workplace trends. At Coalesse, we are extending our own research focus beyond the traditional work environment and attempting to understand work behaviors in the context of people’s broader lives, including most recently the increasingly nomadic nature of work.”

[...]

After the digital dust settled, [Shujan] Bertrand distilled her interviews and blogging streams into a map of patterns. She produced a comprehensive report titled, “Nomadic Work Landscape Design Research” that spans 111 pages in a detailed slide deck.

[...]

Three formal product-development approaches have emerged from the Coalesse research: Inspiring Destinations, Optimizing Mobility and Cultivating the Senses.</blockquote>

steelcase #nomadic-workers #coalesse

“This has legs,” says Rick Miller, who has experience changing the fabric of American society. Back in the early ’90s, when he was doing public relations work for Levi’s, he and his team championed a wacky idea called Casual Friday. They distributed a guide that suggested polished looks with khakis and jeans, and a new sort of office style was born.

One secret to their success? Loosening up the dress code was a no-cost benefit to offer employees.

The timing is even better now, Miller adds. Companies are once again pinching pennies, and they’re more concerned than ever about rising health-care costs. Plus, social media could help spread the trend faster than you can say “selfie.”