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Bill Fulkerson

Biomimetic architecture - Daniel Christian Wahl - Medium - 0 views

medium.com/...etic-architecture-514e72cb2c36

biomimetic wahl architecture

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 23 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 23 Jul 17
     
    Biomemetic architecture
Bill Fulkerson

Researchers develop a mathematical model to explain the complex architecture of termite... - 0 views

phys.org/...chitecture-termite-mounds.html

architecture termite complex

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 20 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 20 Jan 21
     
    Following a series of studies on termite mound physiology and morphogenesis over the past decade, researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have now developed a mathematical model to help explain how termites construct their intricate mounds.
Bill Fulkerson

Globalization and the End of the Labor Aristocracy, Part 1 | naked capitalism - 0 views

www.nakedcapitalism.com/...-labor-aristocracy-part-1.html

labor capitalism globalization

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 07 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 07 Apr 17
     
    "Twenty-first century imperialism has changed its form. In the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, it was explicitly related to colonial control; in the second half of the 20th century it relied on a combination of geopolitical and economic control deriving also from the clear dominance of the United States as the global hegemon and leader of the capitalist world dealing with the potential threat from the Communist world. It now relies more and more on an international legal and regulatory architecture-fortified by various multilateral and bilateral agreements-to establish the power of capital over labor. This has involved a "grand bargain," no less potent for being implicit, between different segments of capital. Capitalist firms in the developing world gained some market access (typically intermediated by multinational capital) and, in return, large capital in highly developed countries got much greater protection and monopoly power, through tighter enforcement of intellectual property rights and greater investment protections."
Steve Bosserman

How Gaston Bachelard gave the emotions of home a philosophy - Gillian Darley | Aeon Essays - 0 views

aeon.co/...-emotions-of-home-a-philosophy

space intimacy philosophy architecture

shared by Steve Bosserman on 12 May 18 - No Cached
  • As Foucault said of Bachelard a few years later, his characteristic approach was to avoid all defined hierarchies, any universal judgments: ‘He plays against his own culture with his own culture.’ He stood apart, separating himself from the mainstream, finding cracks, dissonances, minor phenomena that he could make his own. Poetry of every description was his raw material.
  • Indoors, in The Poetics of Space, the journey into intimacy is neatly evoked by drawers, cupboards, wardrobes and above all locks, although he warns, somewhat testily, against their use as gratuitous metaphors (and he is strongly averse to the idea of habit).
  • The wellbeing of the warm animal (or human) protected in its nest or cocoon or cottage from the bad weather raging outside is a primitive sense of refuge that we can all share, adult or child. The appeal of a safe haven translates into domestic architecture with such features as the accommodating Arts and Crafts inglenook, seats close by the fire, Frank Lloyd Wright’s enduring penchant for an immense fireplace buried at the core of a house, or even, a favourite 1960s touch, the conversation pit – with or without its trademark shagpile carpet.
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  • Late in life, Auden wrote a set of 15 verses titled Thanksgiving for a Habitat (1960-1964). They were a celebration of domestic contentment in his Austrian cottage, and were structured around the rooms of the house, including ‘the Cave of Meaning’ (his study), the cellar, the attic, and his bedroom ‘the Cave of Nakedness’. In the title poem he ends, happily, writing of ‘a place I may go both in and out of’.
  • The ‘cupboardness’ of children’s play areas; a library tucked beneath some stairs; a universe of emotions in the corner
  • In his neat phrase ‘reading a room’, Bachelard encouraged readers to think of some place in their own past: ‘You have unlocked a door to daydreaming.’
Bill Fulkerson

DNA damage caused by migrating light energy - 0 views

phys.org/...0-09-dna-migrating-energy.html

energy damage dna light

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 15 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 15 Sep 20
     
    Ultraviolet light endangers the integrity of human genetic information and may cause skin cancer. For the first time, researchers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have demonstrated that DNA damage may also occur far away from the point of incidence of the radiation. They produced an artificially modeled DNA sequence in new architecture and succeeded in detecting DNA damage at a distance of 30 DNA building blocks. The results are reported in Angewandte Chemie.
Bill Fulkerson

Organized chaos in the enzyme complex-surprising insights and new perspectives - 0 views

phys.org/...ing-insights-perspectives.html

chaos enzyme complex

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 07 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 07 Jul 20
     
    For protein molecules that contribute to metabolism, interactions with other components of their metabolic pathway can be crucial. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen have now investigated a natural enzyme complex that comprises 10 enzymes with five distinct activities. They found that the molecular architecture is surprisingly compact, yet offers individual enzymes maximum free moving space, which opens up novel perspectives for drug discovery. The scientists have published their results in Nature Chemical Biology.
Steve Bosserman

Jane Jacobs's Theories on Urban Planning-and Democracy in America - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...501104

democracy urban design ecosystems diversity neighborhoods

shared by Steve Bosserman on 17 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Urban life was Jacobs’s great subject. But her great theme was the fragility of democracy—how difficult it is to maintain, how easily it can crumble. A city offered the perfect laboratory in which to study democracy’s intricate, interconnected gears and ballistics. “When we deal with cities,” she wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), “we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense.” When cities succeed, they represent the purest manifestation of democratic ideals: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” When cities fail, they fail for the same reasons democracies fail: corruption, tyranny, homogenization, overspecialization, cultural drift and atrophy.
  • I was encouraged to believe that simple conformity results in stagnation for a society, and that American progress has been largely owing to the opportunity for experimentation, the leeway given initiative, and to a gusto and a freedom for chewing over odd ideas. I was taught that the American’s right to be a free individual, not at the mercy of the state, was hard-won and that its price was eternal vigilance, that I too would have to be vigilant.
  • Her 1,500-word speech, a version of which appears in Vital Little Plans, became the basis for The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her main argument was Kirk’s: Small neighborhood stores, ignored by the planners in their grim demolition derby, were essential social hubs. She added that sidewalks, stoops, laundries, and mailbox areas were also indispensable centers of community activity, and that sterile, vacant outdoor space served nobody. “The least we can do,” she said, “is to respect—in the deepest sense—strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own.”
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  • Reduced to a word, Jacobs’s argument is that a city, or neighborhood, or block, cannot succeed without diversity: diversity of residential and commercial use, racial and socioeconomic diversity, diversity of governing bodies (from local wards to state agencies), diverse modes of transportation, diversity of public and private institutional support, diversity of architectural style. Great numbers of people concentrated in relatively small areas should not be considered a health or safety hazard; they are the foundation of a healthy community. Dense, varied populations are “desirable,” Jacobs wrote,
  • Madison argued that as you increase the “variety of parties and interests” contained within a republic, “you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.”
  • “We need all kinds of diversity,” Jacobs concluded in Death and Life, “so the people of cities can sustain (and further develop) their society and civilization.”
  • In her comparative study of fallen empires, Jacobs identifies common early indicators of decline: “cultural xenophobia,” “self-imposed isolation,” and “a shift from faith in logos, reason, with its future-oriented spirit … to mythos, meaning conservatism that looks backwards to fundamentalist beliefs for guidance and a worldview.” She warns of the profligate use of plausible denial in American politics, the idea that “a presentable image makes substance immaterial,” allowing political campaigns “to construct new reality.” She finds further evidence of our hardening cultural sclerosis in the rise of the prison-industrial complex, the prioritization of credentials over critical thinking in the educational system, low voter turnout, and the reluctance to develop renewable forms of energy in the face of global ecological collapse.
  • In the foreword to the 1992 Modern Library edition of Death and Life, Jacobs likens cities to natural ecosystems. “Both types of ecosystems,” she writes, “require much diversity to sustain themselves … and because of their complex interdependencies of components, both kinds of ecosystems are vulnerable and fragile, easily disrupted or destroyed.”
Steve Bosserman

High score, low pay: why the gig economy loves gamification | Business | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ivers-ride-hailing-gig-economy

gamification gig economy taxi service incentive productivity profit

shared by Steve Bosserman on 23 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • Simply defined, gamification is the use of game elements – point-scoring, levels, competition with others, measurable evidence of accomplishment, ratings and rules of play – in non-game contexts. Games deliver an instantaneous, visceral experience of success and reward, and they are increasingly used in the workplace to promote emotional engagement with the work process, to increase workers’ psychological investment in completing otherwise uninspiring tasks, and to influence, or “nudge”, workers’ behaviour.
  • According to Burawoy, production at Allied was deliberately organised by management to encourage workers to play the game. When work took the form of a game, Burawoy observed, something interesting happened: workers’ primary source of conflict was no longer with the boss. Instead, tensions were dispersed between workers (the scheduling man, the truckers, the inspectors), between operators and their machines, and between operators and their own physical limitations (their stamina, precision of movement, focus). The battle to beat the quota also transformed a monotonous, soul-crushing job into an exciting outlet for workers to exercise their creativity, speed and skill. Workers attached notions of status and prestige to their output, and the game presented them with a series of choices throughout the day, affording them a sense of relative autonomy and control. It tapped into a worker’s desire for self-determination and self-expression. Then, it directed that desire towards the production of profit for their employer.
  • Former Google “design ethicist” Tristan Harris has also described how the “pull-to-refresh” mechanism used in most social media feeds mimics the clever architecture of a slot machine: users never know when they are going to experience gratification – a dozen new likes or retweets – but they know that gratification will eventually come. This unpredictability is addictive: behavioural psychologists have long understood that gambling uses variable reinforcement schedules – unpredictable intervals of uncertainty, anticipation and feedback – to condition players into playing just one more round.
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  • Gaming the game, Burawoy observed, allowed workers to assert some limited control over the labour process, and to “make out” as a result. In turn, that win had the effect of reproducing the players’ commitment to playing, and their consent to the rules of the game. When players were unsuccessful, their dissatisfaction was directed at the game’s obstacles, not at the capitalist class, which sets the rules. The inbuilt antagonism between the player and the game replaces, in the mind of the worker, the deeper antagonism between boss and worker. Learning how to operate cleverly within the game’s parameters becomes the only imaginable option. And now there is another layer interposed between labour and capital: the algorithm.
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