Digital Copies and Classroom participation.  The reality is we live in a mixed technology environment of digital formats for materials and concrete classrooms of boards, overheads, and each other.  I am figuring out how to balance the two.  These policies are a work in progress.

1)      Expect you to be ready to discus and share the materials.  You will have to figure out what this means for you.

2)      You may bring a laptop.  I reserve the right to ask you to put it away for certain activities.  I reserve the right to call you out for letting it distract you in class.

3)      I expect you to be good citizens of the information world.  Pay for protected copyright.  Respect other content’s creators by citing them, ALWAYS.  Any image, presentations, link or whatever should be somehow noted or cited depending on the context of the usage.  SO, on a power point lisde, pu a little note at the bottom.  On a blog post, hyperlink.  On a paper use normal citations, and so on.

lo-mentum: n.  The depressing feeling of realizing one had momentum that has been lost.  It tends to feed on itself in a negative feedback loop.

I have been meaning to comment on labor day, this past Monday all week. There is some kind of irony in Bucknell’s lack of observance of labor day. Do we not think learning and teaching are “work”? Of course some classes of employees are off, but not students nor faculty. I am not whining about wanting a day off, just wondering what the institution is say9ing, or not, in its scheduling choices. Bucknell aside, what are they key “issues” of the day, as C. Wright Mills would have us describe them? What is the state of working for a living in the ol’ US of A? The NY Times provided two interesting views on labor on the day in question. First, Robert Reich, professor (but Micheal Reagan thinks this is a disqualification to speak on matters of bread and butter), former Labor Secretary under Clinton, author, and very funny short man (one of his book titles was Let Me Be Short) tackles the two big issues of the day: the stagnant economy and rising inequality. Reich provides an interesting set of graphs to accompany his points. (Click to enlarge). First, the evidence: productivity is up, incomes are flt, and the wealthiest are wealthier at a faster rate than everyone else. Whether this is a problem or not can be divided into two pieces. First- are there negative effects to rising inequality? Second- can rising inequality understood not as a problem, but as the outcome of a more virtuous process? In this case, the process would be a well-functioning economy that allows individuals to find their own optimal point of rewards in the labor market relative to what they put into it (effort, capital). In other words, a free market will produce inequality as a result of liberating the engines of wealth-seeking. I’ll leave it to a reader to determine whether or not the inequality is a problem. The data are clear and it should be beyond debate that there is increasing inequality. His chart sums up the explanation of why. Wages stagnated starting around 1980, but the great “middle class” of America kept spending thereby creating enough demand to sustain economic growth for the producers of America (and the world). How did they do it? First,WOMEN. The women moved into the workforce in massive numbers. Whether it was to express their autonomy, enact a feminist vision of gender-equality, or to make the ends meet, the raw fact is they entered the economy. AS historians and sociologists have pointed out, this was really a re-entry into labor as the myth of the domestic, lesiure-oriented housewife was a historical anomaly. From hunter-gatherers to pioneer homesteads to early industrial work in homes, women did much, if not most, work. Second, taking on debt. Lots of it. At some point in the recent past, the average US household savings rate was negative. Negative! I remember when I heard this , it was like a punch to the stomach. You can’t sustain that. Blind faith in rising house prices and the slick sales pitches of elements of the mortgage industry played a big part in the bloating of debt. Anyway, that brings our story quite nicely up to the stories of the housing bubble, the role of Wall street in the bubble, and then AIG and the other Wall Street players at the center of the “great recession.” The other article, by Harvard Business school professors (woo hoo! Go Management Scholar), Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, shifts our focus from the buig picture to the small details of everyday work. At their conclusion, they offer this seemingly unobjectionable thought: “Work should ennoble, not kill, the human spirit.” This reminds me of another irony of labor day- shouldn’t we work on labor day? My grade school had school on MLK day so we could learn about him and the history of civil rights in our country. Anyway, digressions aside, what Amabile and Kramer found is disheartening: most professionals are disengaged, frustrated, and disatsified with work. They are unhappy. Using a HUGE amount of data (12,000 diary entries form 238 “professional” employees), they found that 33% were unhappy. What would make them happier? Is it some sort of Enron-like PRC with huge bonuses attached to the best reviewed? No. Is it little rewards and trophies? No. Is it more pay overall? No. Is it getting to lord over a prized working spot over co-workers? No. What is most motivating is making progress on meaningful work. So, Edward Freeman’s “responsibility hypothesis”– that people innately want to take responsibility for their work, finds some empirical evidence. Meanwhile, I am reminded of a clip from a food documentary I saw at our campus theatre the other day: Fresh. Chicken Farmers talk about how it is so hard to find people to “process” chickens (butcher) that they use work crews form a local prison to do it. Can manual labor be as meaningful as the professionals in Amabile and Krmaer’s study long for? Can butchering chickens be experienced as meaningful work? Or would simply paying more (and thereby reversing a little the flow of wealth Reich talks about) do more good? Do my students feel their academic assignments are meaningful work? Do I, as a professor-manager, provide the tools to enable them to be motivated by progress on meaningful work?

Virginia, this morning, I spy from the corner of my eye; V is hunting in the wild tupperware drawer. She self-narrates: “The female of the species stares at the drawer, hoping a wayward lid will meander to its (bottom) mate. Finding them near by makes her job easier. No luck.” She paused, taut. Her hand darted out fast as a cheetah. She had her prey.

I was playing with this neologism which I do not see anywhere yet.

Digindigenous: organizations, collectives, or other social phenomenon that emerge from within the socio-economic interactions of various cyberspaces.  Examples: Tringo (a game form within SL), electric sheep company (and other VW designers), the Uru diaspora, any number of virtual objects businesses (such as avatar or fashion companies), and so on.

The word is derived from digital + indigenous.

Is this a keeper?

First, the “Service” movement for lack of a better term continues with BU showing up at an interfaith call to service the white house.  I like how food is being incorporated thematically.  We live in an agricultural area.  Plus, wasting less is just good old fashioned American thriftiness.

In contrast, students in a spring 2011 waste audit found that about 850 pounds of food per day were being discarded in Bucknell’s main dining venue, Bostwick Marketplace. Bucknell Dining has addressed the waste issue in part through a composting program and the removal of trays, but, Fujita said, there are more opportunities to help students learn about consumption and waste.

I am not sure how no trays cuts down on waste.  People take less?

I wish there were some legal/organizational way to share unused food.  People usually say they can’t give it away due to safety regulations.  Well, then, is it possible to shield more food from being un-givable?  DO we need to shift attitudes about abundant food spreads?  Or, is it possible to have a way for recipients to agree to take on the risk of food problems in exchange for access to mostly fine food?  A way to have a middleman broker of unused food?
Second, in the general theme of experiential education that links service and this story,  we have BU students working with a local manufacturer to see a super-light-weight stove come to market.  What if this was the norm instead of the exception for our students? I don’t mean they all design objects, but that they all do a project with real world potential value before they graduate.  What would that look like?  Would it produce a generation of hackers, entrepreneurs, and “makers.”

“Countdown to a Meltdown” an article from 2005 in which James Fallows of The Atlantic lays out how a third party candidate will win the presidency in 2016 after 8 years of ineffective Democratic presidency.  Interesting use of creativity and focusing on larger political and economic trends.

“Revenge of the Ratings Agencies” a NYT op-ed frames the Stnadard & Por’s downgrade as a political act not in terms of a D-R blame game, but as a threatened industry playing hardball.

The law called for exposing rating agencies to civil liability in securities lawsuits if their ratings were inaccurate. It also challenged the oligopoly’s dominance by calling for the Securities and Exchange Commission to explore the feasibility of having an independent organization select rating agencies for asset-backed securities, instead of having the bond issuers select and pay the agencies, as they now do.

“Serving Shareholders and Democracy” is a NYT editorial about how the SEC should force public firms to disclose to shareholders how and how much money they spend on politics.

Last week, a group of legal scholars sent a petition to the S.E.C. urging it to craft rules requiring companies to disclose to shareholders how they use corporate resources for political activities.

Here, the NYT reports on what seems like a very common-sense idea: have natural gas drillers post funds to a special emergency response fund to cover clean up in case of inevitable accidents.  I man need this for class.

Finally, London and riots.  I saw a link somewhere mentioning this academic paper by Ponticelli and Voth, from a research center (the CEPR) that looks at Europe 1919-2009 and finds that in general, cuts in government expenditures lead to more unrest like riots, strikes, and assassinations.  A free copy can be found here.  While this may seem self-evident, it is useful to have it confirmed empirically.  The results also suggest it is not due to cultural factors, demographics, or lots of “bad people.”  What I also noted is that more media coverage did not seem to matter.

According to this: http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz I’m a a “liberal.” And in this one I am “solid liberal” or “post-modern” depending on how I answer. http://people-press.org/typology/quiz/. Why do I find myself arguing with lots of liberals then?

I find myself able to take either side in almost all of these forced choice pars in these things.  They are designed to squeeze people into set categories.  Neither one of them even has “progressive” as a political ideology.  I am not sure it is one, but it is worth thinking about. Off the top of my head, an embrace of pragmatism as an approach to knowledge and action is part of being progressive.  Let’s talk about what can work for this problem and not look to “ideology” to decide how we should approach an issue.

Three examples come to mind.

One, schools and religion.  I don’t think banning any whisper of religion from public schools is the best reading of the establishment clause.  As  I get it, even the supreme court recognizes religious expression as a form of culture.  The bright line is coercion or proselytizing.  However, for many schools or other public entities, it is simpler to ban than to handle the nuance of deciding if a menorah, cross, or whatever is clearly cultural as opposed to endorsement of a religion.  To pull it off, you need to trust officials to use judgement.  So, a pragmatic response is to figure out how to balance trusting judgement with means to redress clear violations of religious freedom and the establishment clause.

Second, educational funding.  I had an interesting discussion the other day with a friend and I mentioned that I would rather have MORE diversity among schools, and if a school choice- voucher system accomplishes that, fine.  Basically, focus public education policy on some broad outcomes and free up schools to differentiate and yes, compete, for families and their students.  Among his concerns was what happens if school officials are given too much autonomy and they enact discrimination or other harms.  He is invoking racial segregation under Jim Crow.  I get it; we don’t want to re-create that, but a system where each family and each school can be distinctive is not the same as forcing some to go to inferior schools.  Smaller schools that can create a sense of difference and cohesion will work better and hence a liberal approach of equalizing inputs through enforced sameness is a mistake.

Third, the tax code.  I believe in progressive taxes.  There are two reasons.  One, the wealthiest should pay more proportionally because their wealth is created and supported by more of government spending- courts, police, military, transportation, disaster relief, education (yes, we pay to educate the workers who create value in firms the wealthiest own).  Two, apart from economic fairness, we believe in social fairness.  Capitalism always exacerbates inequality and therefore it is good to tax progressively to create avenues to reduce inequality.  The periods of the greatest amount of activity to reduce inequality in the US, roughly the 1930s to the 1980s, saw the lowest rates of inequality.  Since the onset of neo-liberal economics in the a980s, roughly, economic growth increased along with gross measures of inequality.   Anyway, this is my case for progressive taxation.

However, that does not mean defending the current status quo tax code (at the federal level).  I’ve not done the math or seen anyone else do it, but I can imagine getting behind a simplified, progressive, LOWER set of tax rates.  The complexity of the tax code sucks up a lot of human capital.  Is it necessary?  Well, yes, for me.  I can’t stand doing income taxes.  What would happen if we had federal marginal rates at 0% (for people at living wage or less), 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25%  No other exemptions or deductions.  This would decouple a dynamic national economy, as well as personal financial decisions like getting a mortgage, from the tax code.

It would also obsolesce a chunk of the accounting profession.  But maybe their human capital could be redirected to tasks that they may like more and may create other economic or social value…

But, as to typology and ideology, I’ve never seen a “liberal” politician discuss anything like this.

I am still in the chapter on scheduling.  I just read a few pages today.

Point 1.  Eviatar claims a steady schedule is essential.  This includes times of the week you always write, as well as times of the day.  So far so good.  He also writes that you need to honor your own needs.  Writing is not like turning on a switch and some amount of warm up is a good idea.  He suggests looking at email, making coffee, or whatever else “sets the mood.”
Point 2.  You need to find your own best time which will involve some experimenting.  This can take “weeks or months” he says.
Point 3.  TO find your schedule it might also be good to start constraints; this means making a weekly schedule and marking through times you can not write and then starting there.

My thoughts.  Again this seems so obvious, I chafe at the thought of applying it.  I realize this is my own arrogance since even knowing it I don’t do it enough.

Having that set of warm up activities can bleed VERY quickly into full out procrastination.

I like the idea of finding one’s “natural” rhythm.  But I am so used to beating myself up that my first thought was I have had years and years of self-experimentation.  Fat lot of good it has done.  On the other hand, to be positive, I started thinking about what I do know.
A) I can be very flexible.  I have several ways to jot down tasks, for example.  Instead of trying to pick the “one best” I just switch back and forth as mood suits.
B) I think short writing exercises- baby steps- do help me get momentum.  These nuggets are part of that.
C) Early afternoon is the devil’s time.  I never feel energized.  That is the best time to get exercise, check email, clean up office.  From 1-3.
D) I often seem to be productive late afternoon, from 3-5 or 6.  This can produce conflict though with parenting and housework.

I think further experimentation is in order.  And as a good empiricist, I’ll need to record observations to have enough data.

Hat tip to Tracey, Jarvis and Phillips who mentionted this in “Bridging Institutional Entrepreneurship and the
Creation of New Organizational Forms: A Multilevel Model” in Organization Science Vol. 22, No. 1, January–February 2011, pp. 60–80