Archive

Brain Power: Corinna E. Lathan

Why don’t we quan­ti­fy the brain? What I want to argue today is that we need a shift from diag­no­sis and treat­ment, to well­ness and pre­ven­tion. And that we have the data to do it.

From Managerial Feudalism to the Revolt of the Caring Classes

I think we need to real­ly think hard about what has been hap­pen­ing to social class rela­tions. And the con­clu­sion that I came to is that essen­tial­ly the left is apply­ing an out­dat­ed par­a­digm. You know, they’re still think­ing in terms of boss­es and work­ers and a kind of old-fashioned indus­tri­al sense. Where what’s real­ly going on is that for most peo­ple the key class oppo­si­tion is care­givers ver­sus man­agers. And essen­tial­ly, left­ist par­ties are try­ing to rep­re­sent both sides at the same time, but they’re real­ly dom­i­nat­ed by the latter.

Data & Society Databite #119: Mary L. Gray on Ghost Work

I’m just going to say it, I would like to com­plete­ly blow up employ­ment clas­si­fi­ca­tion as we know it. I do not think that defin­ing full-time work as the place where you get ben­e­fits, and part-time work as the place where you have to fight to get a full-time job, is an appro­pri­ate way of address­ing this labor market.

Discovering Health Innovations in Humanitarian Settings

During the war in Afghanistan, the mil­i­tary decid­ed to air drop food pack­ages as part of its win­ning hearts and minds cam­paign. Unfortunately, the food pack­ages were very sim­i­lar in appear­ance to the clus­ter bombs they were drop­ping at the same time. If mil­i­tary decision-makers had spo­ken to com­mu­ni­ties, aid work­ers, mil­i­tary per­son­nel on the ground, they’d have fig­ured out there were smarter ways to deliv­er food and win the trust of the Afghan people.

Decoding Workforce Productivity: Nita A. Farahany

Are there any lim­its to the con­nect­ed work­place? Are there any con­cerns about the con­nect­ed work­place? Is there any way in which you would­n’t want either your­self or an employ­ee to be con­nect­ed? Are there any lim­its to the kinds of infor­ma­tion we can gath­er in order to make our work­forces more pro­duc­tive? In order to make our over­all soci­ety more productive?