Category: Uncategorized

White threat in a browning America – Vox

On By Paul HubbardIn Politics, UncategorizedLeave a comment

White voters who feel they are losing a historical hold on power are reacting to something real. For the bulk of American history, you couldn’t win the presidency without winning a majority — usually an overwhelming majority — of the white vote. Though this changed before Obama (Bill Clinton won slightly less of the white vote than his Republican challengers), the election of an African-American president leading a young, multiracial coalition made the transition stark and threatening.

This is the crucial context for Trump’s rise, and it’s why Tesler has little patience for those who treat Trump as an invader in the Republican Party. In a field of Republicans who were trying to change the party to appeal to a rising Hispanic electorate, Trump was alone in speaking to Republican voters who didn’t want the party to remake itself, who wanted to be told that a wall could be built and things could go back to the way they were.

“Trump met the party where it was rather than trying to change it,“ Tesler says. “He was hunting where the ducks were.”

via Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and the war over change – Vox

That sinking feeling – Charlie’s Diary

On By Paul HubbardIn Politics, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Most likely the crisis will end with the UK crashing back into the EU, or at least into Customs Union and statutory convergence—but on EU maximalist terms with none of the opt-outs negotiated by previous British governments from Thatcher onwards. The negotiating position will most likely resemble that of Greece in 2011-2015, i.e. a vastly weaker supplicant in a state of crisis and near-collapse, and the British economy will take a generation to recover—if it ever manages to.

(This is, by the way, not the worst scenario I can envisage. The worst case is that the catastrophic collapse of the world’s sixth largest trading economy, combined with a POTUS whose understanding of economics is approximately as deep as that of Louis XVI, will lead to a global financial crisis on the scale of 2007-08—but without leadership as credible as, say, George W. Bush and/or Gordon Brown to pull our collective nuts out of the fire. In which case we’re looking at a global banking collapse, widespread famine due to those crop shortages, and a wave of revolutions the like of which the planet hasn’t seen since 1917-18. But hopefully that won’t happen, right? Because only a maniac would want to burn everything down in order to provide elbow room for a new white supremacist ethnostate world order. Oops, that would be Steve Bannon.)

I really, really hope that this grim take is wrong, but NC’s take is pretty similar. Theresa May really does seem like a simpering dolt, and the human cost will be enormous.

via That sinking feeling – Charlie’s Diary

Brutalist Web Design

On By Paul HubbardIn recommendations, UncategorizedLeave a comment

A website’s materials aren’t HTML tags, CSS, or JavaScript code. Rather, they are its content and the context in which it’s consumed. A website is for a visitor, using a browser, running on a computer to read, watch, listen, or perhaps to interact. A website that embraces Brutalist Web Design is raw in its focus on content, and prioritization of the website visitor.

A name that I dislike, but a set of ideas that I find compelling and worth pursuing. Well worth your time to read and contemplate.

via Brutalist Web Design

Impact of Open Offices on Collaboration | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

On By Paul HubbardIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Abstract

Organizations’ pursuit of increased workplace collaboration has led managers to transform traditional office spaces into ‘open’, transparency-enhancing architectures with fewer walls, doors and other spatial boundaries, yet there is scant direct empirical research on how human interaction patterns change as a result of these architectural changes. In two intervention-based field studies of corporate headquarters transitioning to more open office spaces, we empirically examined—using digital data from advanced wearable devices and from electronic communication servers—the effect of open office architectures on employees’ face-to-face, email and instant messaging (IM) interaction patterns. Contrary to common belief, the volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly (approx. 70%) in both cases, with an associated increase in electronic interaction. In short, rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM. This is the first study to empirically measure both face-to-face and electronic interaction before and after the adoption of open office architecture. The results inform our understanding of the impact on human behaviour of workspaces that trend towards fewer spatial boundaries.

This article is part of the theme issue ‘Interdisciplinary approaches for uncovering the impacts of architecture on collective behaviour’.

I have an intense dislike of open-plan offices, and this research result surprises me not at all. If you’re trying to focus, noise and motion are terrible.

But they’re great for micromanagement and management by walking around. And they save money. And nothing reinforces the hierarchy like seeing who retains an office and who gets chucked out into the pit.

Update 8/8/18: Here’s a nice PBS NewsHour video covering the findings.

via Impact of Open Offices on Collaboration | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Welcome to the age of anger | Pankaj Mishra | Politics | The Guardian

On By Paul HubbardIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Such breast-beating amounts to a truly irrational demand: that the present abolish itself, making way for a return to the past. Ideally, to the time when paternalistic white liberals occupied the vital centre, little disturbed by the needs and desires of history’s forgotten, humiliated and silenced people.

A good and thought-provoking read.

via Welcome to the age of anger | Pankaj Mishra | Politics | The Guardian