Saturday 2 February 2019

social capital or the dunwich horror

As social media behemoth Facebook is proving that bad behaviour does indeed pay, profits up and still the darling of uninventive advertisers, grifters and undermining elements despite the disdain it has for its critics and its users’ privacy and well-being, more and more studies are demonstrating the positive benefits of cutting the platform out of your routine.
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” It has not been quite a year yet since I was persuaded to deactivate my account—rebuffing the cloying pleas to come back—and there was a time early on that I thought that the platform could have if not reformed and redeemed itself could merely demonstrate that it wasn’t something sinister and merely a wanton utility, an agnostic force majeure like other technological giants, but it’s since squandered that hope and I’ve not regretted the decision. “An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation.”

your feedback matters

Tedium treats us into another deep-dive—this time on the ostensibly quaint suggestion box, which for all its simplicity and peril of not heeding what it advice it solicits or fails to manages just to inform and propel the whole reputation-based service economy. The origins of inviting feedback are murky but one of the earliest examples can be sourced to a Shogunate of Edo-Era Japan.
In August 1721, public petition boxes called meyasubako (็›ฎๅฎ‰็ฎฑ) were installed, and the government acted on one popular recommendation and opened up a free hospital the following year for those without means. Development is traced through modern times but one kind of has to balk at what companies demand presently with circumspection since a large part of the utility of the device lie in its honest appeal with the perception of safety and anonymity and with no fear of recrimination—which is largely stripped away with most interactions, either overtly or covertly. What do you think about that? Though our opinions and customer satisfaction is very much sought after and we’re seemingly encouraged to speak up, the voice we’re given is open to act and is an immodest request on the part of the facilitators to push research and marketing off on employees or paying customers.

Friday 1 February 2019

frauenstimmrecht in der schweiz

Though the national referendum failed to pass with around sixty percent of the eligible voting population siding against it, on this day in 1959, the women of Vaud (Waadt) were enfranchised and could stand for public office. Other cantons over the ensuing decades eventually conferred suffrage to all residents, with the supreme court of the confederation ruling that the smallest, Appenzell Innerhoden (Appenzell Rhodes-Intรฉrieures), must extend women the right to weigh in on local affairs in 1991.


lozenge moquette

Thanks to City Lab, we are invited to revisit the plush and pile of mass-transit upholstery through the industrial textile designs of Enid Marx and other samples archived by the London Transportation Museum. By turns both extravagant and practical, both overlooked and omnipresent, the exhibit offers a retrospective look at the power of the intentionality in design, underscored perfectly by something that often retreats into the background yet (if not itself the subject of passing derision) so much part of a shared ridership experience.

i, robot

Hearing of this experiment—really a thought-experiment put through the paces of reality and practise thanks to advanced computing, via Slashdot, of a robot booted-up without prior knowledge of itself or its programming was able after a period of adjustment was able to imagine itself and deduce its identity reminded us of Avicenna’s concept of the floating man.
Buoyed aloft, blindfolded and deprived of sensation, the philosopher, whose ideas informed the thinking of later luminaries like Renรฉ Descartes, reasoned that even in this state of sensory deprivation, that the figure would still differentiate himself from the surrounding environment and have a sense of self. What do you think? To my mind, it seems like we are lurching towards self-awareness but there’s always the counter-argument that the machines are not quite pandering to their programmers but we do tend to prefer revelling in outcomes that confirm our own pet-theories—absent any counter-factuals.

minn tรญmi mun koma!

On this day a decade hence, reeling from the economic meltdown of that crescendoed in 2008 and revelation of graft and corruption within the sitting government, the Althing appointed member Jรณhanna Sigurรฐardรณttir (previously) as prime minster of Iceland.  The first openly lesbian head of government plus the country’s first woman leader.
Having served in parliament since 1978, she made a bid to head the Social Democratic party (Alรพรฝรฐuflokkurinn, later merged into the Social Democratic Alliance) in 1994 but was defeated. Never one to concede, Sigurรฐardรณttir’s rallying cry became the above, My time will come!, a popular saying outside of the political sphere as well.  Though this degree of political normalisation has been restricted to European governments thus far and progress is a fragile thing that never ought to be taken for granted, it does seem rather remarkable and even rather old hat that ten years on there are three currently serving gay or lesbian national leaders, the Taoiseach of Ireland and the prime ministers of Serbia and Luxembourg.