Roblog

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  • Filed under: creativity

    In praise of the idea shepherds

    What Shakespeare’s friends and textile manufacturers in a 1960s factory have to tell us about creativity, power, and who we collectively choose to celebrate.

  • Filed under: technology

    Jeff Bezos Is Not My Astronaut

    Scott Galloway unleashes an appropriately vituperative take on Jeff Bezos’s bulbous, compensating-for-something “cocket”:

    “Astronauts, my ass. Apollo 11 and Columbus travelled 240,000 and 3,000 miles to reach the moon and Caribbean, respectively. New Shepard 4 traveled 0.026% of the way to the moon. Put another way, on Tuesday we watched a man plant a flag three feet up from base camp at Mt. Everest and expect to be knighted. This weekend, I’ll be in Montauk. I plan to swim a half-mile from shore (I can do this) and declare I’ve discovered Spain.

    “It’s his money, and he has the right to spend it on what he wants. But if Mr. Bezos was genuine about doing something more than crashing a canary yellow T-top Corvette into a Bosley for Men franchise, he could raise the minimum wage at his firm to $20/hour.”

    (H/T: Max Bray) #

  • Filed under: technology

    The Untold Technological Revolution Sweeping Through Rural China

    In this review of Xiaowei Wang’s Blockchain Chicken Farm, Clive Thompson explores the bewildering, empowering, and alienating forces of technology that are shaping rural China as the country grapples with a deeply cloven urban-rural divide, massive and continuing urbanisation, and the question of how to feed an ever-growing population. The future is here, and not everyone benefits:

    “Wang also finds that, for rural China, tech-propelled business models can produce the grim dynamics of the gig economy, where a far-off tech giant runs your life. The blockchain chicken software? It’s nifty, but the farmer neither understands the technology nor owns it; it’s provided by a tech firm that in the first year of their collaboration ordered 6,000 chickens in advance to sell off to an online supermarket, and in the second year, nothing. Meanwhile, those Taobao villages also contain some embittered merchants who hate the e-commerce platform, because it allows buyers to demand refunds long after they’ve received their goods. One shoemaker has lost so much money this way that he’s forced to make lower- and lower-quality shoes to keep his profits up. ‘It’s all a scam,’ he says.”

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  • Filed under: science

    Does X cause Y? An in-depth evidence review

    Holden Karnofsky, founder of the GiveWell project, explains why the question “does X cause Y?” is trickier than you might think. #

  • Filed under: culture

    How TV Went From David Brent to Ted Lasso

    James Poniewozik writes of a cultural shift, particularly on TV and within that particularly in comedies, from a sort of detached irony – exemplified by The Office – to a sincerity and warmth.

    I’ve certainly found myself recognising this, falling deeply for shows like Schitt’s Creek, Detectorists and – the example that Poniewozik uses – Ted Lasso. They’re shows that are warm, character driven, full of heart. I don’t think it’s about a rejection of irony per se, and certainly not a return to old ways of doing things. These shows aren’t naïve or earnest. I think it’s more of a synthesis of two eras, something that only could have happened now – but I like it a lot. #

  • Filed under: brands

    What comes after brand purpose?

    Brand purpose is an idea that’s consumed the world of brands for nearly a decade, much to the chagrin of many marketers and countless more consumers. The tide seems like it might be turning – but what will replace it, and what does its death mean for ethical business more fundamentally?

  • Filed under: food

    Discover Japan’s Oldest Surviving Cookbook

    A fascinating early Japanese cookbook, the Ryori Monogatari dates from 1643:

    “Taken together, the book’s explanations of its dishes open a window on how the Japanese ate during the Edo period, named for the capital city we now know as Tokyo, which lasted from 1603 to 1863.”

    Perhaps surprisingly it contains recipes for several familiar-to-us dishes, such as sushi, udon noodles, and yakitori.

    You can read an English translation here, and notes from its translator here. #

  • Filed under: branding

    Purpose wins. Who loses?

    A really thoughtful post from Nick Asbury on the phenomenon of “brand purpose”, which has come to dominate the world of branding in the past decade:

    “It’s a hazy fiction that allows people to think well of themselves, even as their decisions are driven by commercial incentives. The defining dynamic of Tech Valley is this outward belief in brand purpose, allied to an inward focus on venture capital and IPO, where you just have to get enough people to believe in your story for enough of the time. IPO is the cashing out of brand purpose.

    “Mark Zuckerberg is the supreme example – brand purpose is the wind beneath his hydrofoil board. But we all live in Zuckerberg’s world. I believe passionately that, each time we lend credibility to brand purpose as a concept, another corporate sociopath gets their wings. It’s time to stop feeding this narrative that has dominated the last decade. Turn off the dry ice machine that provides the corporate atmospherics. See the world as it is.”

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  • Filed under: knowledge

    Thickening strategy

    In the 1970s, “thick description” revolutionised anthropology. Out went grand universal theories of human behaviour and passive, neutral observation on the part of anthropologists. In came context-rich, subjective narratives that took into account the complex web of relationships behind how people behaved. I think strategy needs to undergo the same revolution.

  • Filed under: nature

    Can Birds Taste Sugar?

    In a story packed full of interest about taste and evolution, one fact in particular blew my mind:

    “Genetic studies show that the largest group of birds – the oscines, or songbirds – originated in Australia before spreading worldwide. That group now contains about 5,000 of the 10,000 known bird species, including robins, cardinals, thrushes, sparrows, finches, jays, and starlings. All of these birds descended from an ancestor whose voice lilted through Australian trees and whose taste buds were tickled by sweet Australian nectar.”

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  • Filed under: poetry

    Until a Hundred Generations of People Have Departed – E. Saxey

    In the 1980s, the Human Interference Task Force set about trying to communicate, across tens of thousands of years, the danger of nuclear waste. Their mission was to develop signs and symbols that could be placed at sites where nuclear waste was buried, that would communicate the danger that lay beneath. One of the proposed solutions was to create long-time nuclear waste warnings, carved into stone and part of a system of hostile architecture and other symbols that would signal to any future inhabitants that these were hostile and dangerous places, not to be disturbed.

    E. Saxey has written a haunting poem in both Old English and modern that restates these warnings, transforming them into something supernatural and other-worldly. #

  • Filed under: knowledge

    Collective IQ and continuous improvement

    Seventy years ago Doug Engelbart realised that, if humanity was going to solve its most fiendishly complex problems, it was going to have to get an awful lot better at harnessing its collective intelligence. Even today, his ideas have enormous relevance to the ways we work together in teams and the ways that we manage the collective knowledge that those teams produce.

  • Filed under: music

    Dou Coula - Arat Kilo, Manani Keita, Mike Ladd

    A beautiful song, surfaced to me by the algorithmic vagaries of Spotify: a collaboration between Malian singer Mamani Keïta, Ethiopian band Arat Kilo, and US producer/MC Mike Ladd.

    In its “non-African musicians collaborating with African musicians” capacity it reminded me of when, a couple of years ago, Damon Albarn’s Africa Express project recorded in South Africa. The whole album is great, but the standout for me is this haunting Xhosa-Welsh duet between Zolani Mahola and the Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys: Absolutely Everything is Pointing Towards the Light. #

  • Filed under: food

    The Last Meal

    A mesmerising account, from 1998 and via Matt Webb, of François Mitterrand’s orgiastic last meal, including the horrifying and illegal spectacle of ortolan – a tiny songbird, drowned in Armagnac and eaten whole. #

  • Filed under: film

    Four Laps

    An innovative looping video about looping videos, by Marcin Wichary, delivered live at the Ignite conference. #

  • Filed under: equality

    Beholding Inequality: Race, Gender, and Returns to Physical Attractiveness in the United States

    A stunning – and yet in some ways completely intuitive – paper from Ellis Monk, Michael Esposito, and Hedwig Lee that explores the earnings gap between attractive and unattractive people, and discovers that it’s greater than the white–black income gap and the male–female one too:

    “Physical attractiveness is an important axis of social stratification associated with educational attainment, marital patterns, earnings, and more… Notably, the magnitude of the earnings disparities along the perceived attractiveness continuum, net of controls, rivals and/or exceeds in magnitude the black-white race gap and, among African-Americans, the black-white race gap and the gender gap in earnings. The implications of these findings for current and future research on the labor market and social inequality are discussed.”

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  • Filed under: coronavirus

    The Spirit of Lockdown

    I found this interesting and challenging to my own preconceived ideas. I’ve been strongly in favour of measures to curtail the coronavirus, although I hope I haven’t been judgemental about it. But this piece argues fairly convincingly that an army of middle class professionals, safely ensconced in their working-from-home Zoom palaces, have largely outsourced the risk of the pandemic to working class people and then had the temerity to chide those same working class people for perceived breaking of rules:

    “The Labour Zoomocracy has been quick to call for further lockdowns, harder border controls and has failed to acknowledge the inequalities that they both benefit from, and are complicit in. The middle-class sneers about pubs reopening and the protests against lockdown, whilst happen to attend and support their own protests. This demonstrates how removed many on the left are from the lived experience of suffering. It is easy to call for extended periods of lockdown when you are saving money, baking banana bread and transferring your risk to precarious warehouse and delivery staff.”

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  • Filed under: sustainability

    Affordable ethics

    What consumers say and what they do are quite different. That’s often used as a stick with which to beat the idea of “conscious consumerism”. Is it that consumers are only pretending to be ethical? Or does money play more of a part?

  • Filed under: diversity

    Stop Punishing Women for Being Ambitious

    Women are less likely to negotiate their salaries, earn less than men, and are underrepresented at the highest levels of business. Narratives that explain these problems often focus on what women can do differently – to “lean in”, to negotiate harder, to stop apologising, to be more assertive, and so on.

    Stefanie O’Connell explains how these narratives, problematic in themselves in the way that they blame women for problems they have little control over, can also have unpleasant side effects. Women who adopt these more assertive behaviours, and show their ambition clearly, often face a backlash for doing so:

    “A 2020 study linked this backlash directly to ambition: when women were arbitrarily assigned leadership positions, they were less likely to be found unlikeable. It was only when a woman was actively pursuing a leadership position that she encountered penalties. This suggests that more than power, influence or success, women are penalized for the pursuit of those things. This shows up in tangible outcomes, like the denial of job opportunities, raises and promotions – all of which can make building wealth harder.”

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  • Filed under: technology

    A TikTok Star’s Fave Accessibility Apps

    Lucy Edwards is a hit on TikTok with her videos explaining her life as a blind person, breezily answering questions from viewers that they might feel awkward asking otherwise. Lots of her videos focus on technology (How does she film herself? How does she read a menu in a restaurant? How does she edit her videos?), and Apple have done a special feature on the apps she uses.

    I’ve seen videos of visually impaired people using iPhone accessibility features before and always found them incredible. This is another great example of a side of technology that most people never see, but that is vitally important as more and more of modern life involves being able to use technology. #

  • Filed under: science

    Where Do Butts Come From?

    A surprisingly engaging – and informative – article on the evolution of the… well, you’ll get the picture.

    “One unusually aerated specimen, a type of polyclad flatworm, sports multiple anuses that speckle its backside like feces-spewing freckles. Two others, a pair of sponge parasites called Syllis ramosa and Ramisyllis multicaudata, will twine their body through host tissues like a tapestry of tree roots, with each tip terminating in its own proprietary butthole; they have hundreds, perhaps thousands, in total. (It’s not totally clear why these animals and others spawned an embarrassment of anuses, but in at least some cases, Hejnol thinks it’s a logical outcome of a branched digestive system, which can more easily transport nutrients to a body’s every nook and cranny.)”

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  • Filed under: creativity

    The taste–skill gap in creative work

    Many people who get into creative fields already have a highly tuned sense of taste for their chosen discipline. But this taste, rather than being an asset, often prevents them from progressing – by causing them to reject their own work as sub-standard. How do you get past that?

  • Filed under: organisations

    Cultural context and conflict

    There are high-context cultures and low-context cultures, in human society as well as in businesses. Strong cultures are often high-context: implicit, respectful of hierarchy, desiring of consensus and continuity. That means fewer arguments – but that’s not always a good thing.

  • Filed under: knowledge

    Failure Theory

    A lot of wisdom in a very short post: Andrew Bosworth on the ways that complex systems fail.

    “It has always struck me that the more edifice you build to prevent minor failures the larger the capacity you create for catastrophic ones, just like climbers roped together on a mountaintop… My concern is that many of the efforts we have to defend against failure create catastrophic complexity without meaningfully reducing failure at all.”

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  • Filed under: workshops

    How we are using asynchronous workshops to collaborate remotely at FutureLearn

    For those of us who have been running remote workshops during lockdown using platforms like Zoom and Miro, an interesting article from FutureLearn on taking that a step further by running asynchronous workshops – workshops where people don’t gather together at the same time, but rather participate over a longer period of time, batting ideas back and forth between each other. #

  • Filed under: knowledge

    Simplifying strategy

    Less is really more. When designing systems – from planes to marketing plans – we reach a point where additional complexity can only make things worse. Why is that? We do we find it so difficult to simplify things, and in doing so improve them? And how do we fix that?