newspeak

“One is that we should raise the retirement age — currently 66, and scheduled to rise to 67 — because people are living longer. This sounds plausible until you look at exactly who is living longer. The rise in life expectancy, it turns out, is overwhelmingly a story about affluent, well-educated Americans. Those with lower incomes and less education have, at best, seen hardly any rise in life expectancy at age 65; in fact, those with less education have seen their life expectancy decline.

via Expanding Social Security – NYTimes.com.

I hardly disagree with Krugman (who, me?) but one consideration is that lifespan, like healthspan, greatly depends on access (and use of) medical care. Poor Americans have neither; Canadians, with single-payer, universal access, have both. They also live longer. And they are pretty much as fat and sedentary as all those Down There. Does this mean, then, that Canadians should work longer, so as to pay more taxes? No. It’s merely an observation that as universal medical care takes effect, there will likely be political repercussions: More of the old and nonworking will be other than affluent.

Interview with Mårten Mickos • Productive! Magazine.

The interview is actually interesting. But let’s look at one, fairly important, item:

Michael:If you had to name three productivity-boosting tips that helped your remote team stay productive and motivated, what would they be?

Mårten:Firstly, as the leader, you must go all in. You must be entirely online. You can’t just put your professional self online for your colleagues. You must share your personality with them, too. You must show your vulnerabilities.

Second thing is that in this modern online world, command-and-control doesn’t work. The only real tools you have as a leader are vision and culture. So as the leader, you must spend a lot of time discussing and communicating the vision. And you must spend a lot of time instilling the right culture. You must remember to thank people even for small things. You must reach out to people and help them see how their work fits into what the company is doing. It’s a lot of signalling that you must be doing.

Last but not least, you must automate a lot, and measure a lot. With great tools and with great reporting, everyone can be productive and everyone can know where we are going. (Emphasis mine.)

Does one have to automate a lot? I can see the advantage, but is the result actually a more productive staff or workforce? Or just one that does the company equivalent of studying for the test? No doubt, in the instances that Marten is thinking of, worker productivity can be measured as a kind of quantity: bugs fixed, yes, but also work that lacks bugs needing fixing; list participation, yes, but also whether the posts are just noise or actually start threaded conversations. And so on.

But it’s not always so easy (not that measuring any social activity with any shred of accuracy is easy). As the idea of measuring scientific quality by measuring the quantity of citations to the scientist or study is under some pressure, so too I would suggest that certain kinds of value are less obviously numerable. That does not mean it cannot be done or even ought not to be done, though at some point the doing of it seems less than compelling. (What’s gained, especially in a smallish company?)

As well, the very context of panoptical scrutiny, as infinite measuring implies, would likely lead, for a good many, to workplace discomfort and anxiety. So, just as a problem with education’s constant testing is to dampen anything that falls outside the tests’ frame (and is by definition disruptive), so too in corporate culture.

So, perhaps room for whatever, including disruptive dissent and unlinking? Carnivals, in short, that function as places outside, and allow for what could also be called, creative destruction.

Wealth is created collectively, not by god-like ‘wealth creators’ | Left Foot Forward.

Why Cloud APIs Don’t Matter – InformationWeek.

Quote:

APIs do not matter, abstractions do.

Put another way, the API is simply the way to “talk” to software that implements a specific functional part of a cloud service or business. To make this functionality easier to use, faster to develop, and more robust, the software implements its functionality in terms of a logical abstraction.

Why should anyone care?

….

It is the design of the abstractions (the logical function of the cloud services) and not the APIs that result in desirable properties such as scale, resilience, and secure self-service. For instance, in most clouds it is not possible to specify on which specific machine a virtual machine (VM) should be launched. The abstraction says that a VM will exist sometime after the run command is issued (or an error will be reported), but no indication of where the VM is residing will be provided.

 

“And whether you see today’s Fast Company article as indication of a “pivot” or not, I think it’s a mistake to cheer this moment as Udacity’s admission of failure and as an indication that it intends to move away from university disruption. The startup is, after all, still in partnership with Georgia Tech and AT&T to offer a computer science Master’s Degree. The startup is still working with San Jose State University. And most importantly, Thrun himself is still the name most associated with the MOOCification of higher ed.”

Why We Shouldn’t Celebrate Udacity’s “Pivot”.

Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course | Fast Company | Business + Innovation.

The False Promise of Classroom Technology – Businessweek.

What I’ve argued relates to resource constraints and to the evident fact (to me) that tablets, along with adequate teaching, which I liken to the old notion from Mao’s China of the Barefoot Doctor: A sufficient number of “good enough” teachers to help other students master the course skills. But I don’t believe that tablets and MOOCs are a panacea. Rather, they offer what Tim Berners-Lee wished for the Internet, when he created it, that it would be a medium, not a replacement for politics, and that what mattered, and matters still, is the human not the technology.

Exclusive: ‘Jaw-dropping’ breakthrough hailed as landmark in fight against hereditary diseases as Crispr technique heralds genetic revolution – Science – News – The Independent.

Brazil is using the law to push innovation, but here’s how it can do more – The Next Web.

It’s easy to ignore history but it’s a mistake to do so. Past economic and political conditions affect present circumstances, unto the fourth generation, at least, or so it seems from this bracing study on polygamy.

These results pose challenges to existing theories of polygamy. The distribution of polygamy in Africa does not fit an explanation rooted in the gender division of labour. I find no evidence that educating women in the present reduces polygamy. Further, I find that history matters. Pre-colonial inequality, the slave trade, and colonial education all predict polygamy rates in the present. I find limited evidence that African marriage markets have responded to economic growth and fluctuations. The largest elasticities that I find are in response to changes in child health. This is consistent with theories that see polygamy as a strategy for men to increase fertility, making wives and surviving births per wife substitutes.

via African polygamy: Past and present | vox.