Links and Thoughts 20: 5 June 2014
Punjabi & Hindi Nonstop (15min) Bass Mix by DJ Gill
Good Morning.
Yes, my musical tastes are… eclectic. (Of course, sometimes I’m just pulling your leg with the daily music embed, but there’s no way for anyone to tell the difference.)
Tech:
“[A]t some point you stopped focusing on delivering things that people really wanted. You have lost focus on the people using this platform, and that’s the first step toward losing touch and becoming obsolete.”
An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg : Re/code
Tech:
The future of mobile phones doesn’t include phone calls : Quartz
Tech:
If they really want to expand, maybe they should run a Kickstarter
Tech:
“Logistics experts have questioned whether a decentralized model that uses retail stores designed for shopping can really work as substitutes for warehouses designed for shipping. But ultimately logistics is a math problem, and math is something Google is really good at.”
With New Overnight Delivery, Google Confirms It Wants to Be Amazon : Wired
Psychology:
“I submit that the unifying core, the essence of jerkitude in the moral sense, is this: the jerk culpably fails to appreciate the perspectives of others around him, treating them as tools to be manipulated or idiots to be dealt with rather than as moral and epistemic peers. This failure has both an intellectual dimension and an emotional dimension, and it has these two dimensions on both sides of the relationship.”
A Theory of Jerks: Are you surrounded by fools? Are you the only reasonable person around? : Aeon
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Today’s Book Recommendation is to first, read this review, Jill Lapore writing for the New Yorker, Away From My Desk: The office from beginning to end
Nominally the review is of Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace by Nikil Saval (hardcover, April 2014, isbn 9780385536578) though in covering both the book and the topic, Lapore also gives us background on the 1951 book, White Collar: The American Middle Classes by C. Wright Mills (available used in several editions, Oxford University Press’s ’56 paperback is 9780195006773, which might be the best place to start your search). The book review covers (in part) the life of Mills and the reaction to his work, along with the scope of Saval’s book and a wide ranging essay on ‘cube life’ in the modern office. This essay-masquerading-as-a-book review is an excellent read and makes me eager to follow up on the topic with both Saval and Mills.
I’ll get my to-buy links sorted out eventually. In the meantime, you can still use most readers’ preferred option.
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