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Steve Bosserman

What does home mean if your bed is on the pavements of Paris? | Aeon Essays - 0 views

aeon.co/...d-is-on-the-pavements-of-paris

homelessness anthropology paris home

shared by Steve Bosserman on 29 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • The American anthropologist Edward Fischer, paraphrasing Aristotle, said that the good life is ‘a life worth living’, or a journey towards ‘a fulfilled life’. It has to do with happiness but is not limited to it; it’s often – perhaps counterintuitively – linked to commitment and sacrifice, to the work of becoming a particular person. The French philosopher Michel Foucault in 1982 described these practices as technologies of the self. According to Foucault, the self is ‘not given to us … we have to create ourselves as a work of art’. My informants on the streets of Paris were striving – in their own ways – towards being better selves. I came to understand the activities, processes and routines that they engaged in – begging, making a shelter, accessing temporary housing, etc – as practices of the self geared towards a better life, as practices of homemaking on the street, as practices of hope.
  • Aside from François, others I met on the streets of Paris – such as Sabal from India, and Alex from Kosovo – talked about their engagement in such practices of hope. Following them through soup kitchens, drop-in centres, government institutions and homeless shelters, I observed two main ways in which they attempted to push for a better life. Both of them were connected to the idea of home: my informants in Paris were longing to find and go back to a homeland, often one from the past, while on a daily basis they were struggling to construct a home in order to survive. That was what a better life looked like for them.
  • Home, according to the Australian social scientist Shelley Mallett, is always suspended between the ideal and the real. It relates to ‘the activity performed by, with or in person’s things and places. Home is lived in the tension between the given and the chosen, then and now.’ While Sabal’s India was part of the ideal, what Alex was dealing with was closer to the ‘real’ side of this distinction. His home-making efforts were a continuous process of daily activities.
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  • For many of the homeless people I’ve met in both London and Paris, home was connected to a place they departed from and have a desire to return to – a place that carried what the English sociologist Liz Kenyon calls a right to return and a sense of one’s origin. Sara Ahmed’s 1999 study of migrants’ writing, particularly Asian women living in Britain, supports this view of home as something in the longer-term future. The British-Australian scholar wrote that home is often a destination, somewhere to travel to: ‘the space which is most like home, which is most comfortable and familiar, is not the space of inhabitance – I am here – but the very space in which one finds the self as almost, but not quite, at home. In such a space, the subject has a destination, an itinerary, indeed a future, but in having such as destination, has not yet arrived.’ Home is, in this sense, not about the present – and surely not a place of passive suffering – but about one’s hopes, about making home an imagined place where one has not yet arrived.
  • Home is exactly such a process, involving the material and the imaginative, social connections and mundane acts. Routines, habits and rhythms – often as simple as regularly visiting certain neighbourhoods, shelters and food kitchens – are important parts of this process, and are deeply connected to a temporal as well as spatial order. This focus on order is best expressed in the classical analysis of home by the English anthropologist Mary Douglas:[Home] is always a localisable idea. Home is located in space but it is not necessarily a fixed space. It does not need bricks and mortar, it can be a wagon, a caravan, a board, or a tent. It need not be a large space, but space there must be, for home starts by bringing some space under control.
  • François, who introduced me to the labour of begging, found something close to home in his daily practices. His home was fashioned by coming face to face with the city around him. These narratives show how far removed these people are from a state of passive suffering. Yes, there were moments of idleness and, for some, long phases of pain. But most of the people I met sleeping rough – independent of age, gender, tenure on the street and level of addiction – were striving, in their way, towards a better life: first on, and hopefully off, the street.
Bill Fulkerson

This is the scariest, most counterintuitive thing astronauts had to do in space - 0 views

www.fastcompany.com/...astronauts-have-to-do-in-space

intuition space navigation

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 11 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 11 Jul 19
     
    That is just the start of the weirdness of navigating in space. Your human intuition-based on 30 or 40 years of living on Earth and rendezvousing with things all the time: a doorway, the curb, freeway entrance ramps-is not only useless in space but it also tells you to do the wrong thing.
Bill Fulkerson

Anatomy of an AI System - 1 views

anatomyof.ai

AI amazon

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18
     
    "With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user's commands more accurately, and to build a more complete model of their preferences, habits and desires. What is required to make this possible? Put simply: each small moment of convenience - be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song - requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives. III The Salar, the world's largest flat surface, is located in southwest Bolivia at an altitude of 3,656 meters above sea level. It is a high plateau, covered by a few meters of salt crust which are exceptionally rich in lithium, containing 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves. 4 The Salar, alongside the neighboring Atacama regions in Chile and Argentina, are major sites for lithium extraction. This soft, silvery metal is currently used to power mobile connected devices, as a crucial material used for the production of lithium-Ion batteries. It is known as 'grey gold.' Smartphone batteries, for example, usually have less than eight grams of this material. 5 Each Tesla car needs approximately seven kilograms of lithium for its battery pack. 6 All these batteries have a limited lifespan, and once consumed they are thrown away as waste. Amazon reminds users that they cannot open up and repair their Echo, because this will void the warranty. The Amazon Echo is wall-powered, and also has a mobile battery base. This also has a limited lifespan and then must be thrown away as waste. According to the Ay
Bill Fulkerson

Understanding vacuum fluctuations in space - 0 views

phys.org/...vacuum-fluctuations-space.html

vacuum space

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 10 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 10 Aug 20
     
    An international research team from Germany and France has created structures in which light fields interact with electrons so strongly that the quantum vacuum itself is significantly altered. Using extremely short bursts of light, they interrupted this coupling much faster than the timescale of a vacuum fluctuation and observed an intriguing ringing of the emitted electromagnetic field, indicating the collapse of the vacuum state. Their key achievement could improve our understanding of the nature of nothingness-the vacuum of space itself, paving a way toward photonics exploiting vacuum fluctuations. The results are published in the current issue of Nature Photonics.
Steve Bosserman

Gamification has a dark side - 0 views

www.fastcompany.com/...he-dark-side-of-gamifying-work

gamification productivity software development social control

shared by Steve Bosserman on 01 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • Gamification is the application of game elements into nongame spaces. It is the permeation of ideas and values from the sphere of play and leisure to other social spaces. It’s premised on a seductive idea: if you layer elements of games, such as rules, feedback systems, rewards and videogame-like user interfaces over reality, it will make any activity motivating, fair and (potentially) fun. ‘We are starving and games are feeding us,’ writes Jane McGonigal in Reality Is Broken (2011). ‘What if we decided to use everything we know about game design to fix what’s wrong with reality?’
  • But gamification’s trapping of total fun masks that we have very little control over the games we are made to play – and hides the fact that these games are not games at all. Gamified systems are tools, not toys. They can teach complex topics, engage us with otherwise difficult problems. Or they can function as subtle systems of social control.
  • The problem of the gamified workplace goes beyond micromanagement. The business ethicist Tae Wan Kim at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh warns that gamified systems have the potential to complicate and subvert ethical reasoning. He cites the example of a drowning child. If you save the child, motivated by empathy, sympathy or goodwill – that’s a morally good act. But say you gamify the situation. Say you earn points for saving drowning children. ‘Your gamified act is ethically unworthy,’ he explained to me in an email. Providing extrinsic gamified motivators, even if they work as intended, deprive us of the option to live worthy lives, Kim argues. ‘The workplace is a sacred space where we develop ourselves and help others,’ he notes. ‘Gamified workers have difficulty seeing what contributions they really make.’
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  • The 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault would have said that these are technologies of power. Today, the interface designer and game scholar Sebastian Deterding says that this kind of gamification expresses a modernist view of a world with top-down managerial control. But the concept is flawed. Gamification promises easy, centralised overviews and control. ‘It’s a comforting illusion because de facto reality is not as predictable as a simulation,’ Deterding says. You can make a model of a city in SimCity that bears little resemblance to a real city. Mistaking games for reality is ultimately mistaking map for territory. No matter how well-designed, a simulation cannot account for the unforeseen.
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