testing networked blogs

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/sep/25/occupy-wall-street-protest?newsfeed=true

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Sent from Cynthia Wang's iPhone
cyndaminthia@gmail.com

From: Larry Gross <lpgross@usc.edu>
Date: July 27, 2011 10:58:44 AM GMT+08:00
To: “‘ (LARRYLIST-L@usc.edu)'” <LARRYLIST-L@usc.edu>, “‘Sept11 List'”@listproc.usc.edu
Cc: DnD <DnD@asc.usc.edu>
Subject: Telecommute Nation: If Half of Us Could Work Remotely, Why Don’t We?
Reply-To: lpgross@usc.edu

 

Telecommute Nation: If Half of Us Could Work Remotely, Why Don’t We?

By Derek Thompson

More than 34 million people — equal to the population of Texas and Pennsylvania combined — work from home occasionally. Twice as many could if they wanted. In the next few years, maybe they will.

You know, this would be a good day to work from home. The heat index is 114 degrees today in Washington, D.C. I have to walk half-an-hour to and from work to an office with no better Internet than my living room. Everything I need to write I can fit into a laptop bag, or on a couch.

So why am I writing this article from the desk at The Atlantic’s office?

***

Telecommuting, or working from home, is one of those trends that most people talk about as much in the future tense as the present. Only one in twenty formally employed Americans works consistently from home, but the fact that so many of us could work fills demographers’ eyes with visions of empty cubicles and broadband-blazing living rooms.

Fully 75% of the workforce will be mobile by 2012, the research firm IDC predicted in 2008. Not to be outdone, the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation predicted in 2009 that the number of jobs filled by telecommuters would grow nearly four-fold before 2020. Other studies hold that half of all jobs are receptive to telework, including the vast majority of information technology positions.

That’s a lot of stats. In a nutshell: Half of us could work remotely if we wanted. Far less do. Why?

Even if we’re technically more productive at home, we feel more conspicuously productive at work.

The answer might have more to do with psychology than economics. Even if we’re technically more productive at home, we feel more conspicuously productive at work. You might think a recession would lead to more telecommuting since it reduces overhead and increases work hours. Instead, telework among the formally employed has slowed in the last three years. Ted Schadler, a telecommuting expert who is vice president and chief analyst at Forrester Research, suggests the answer might be psychological.

“Some bosses think if they can’t see you working, you’re not working,” he says. “If you’re worried about losing your job, you’re going to come into the office every chance you get.”

For me, it comes down to people. The best social technology increases social connections. Facebook keeps us in touch with far-flung friends. Twitter broadcasts our internal monologues to the world. Email, texts, and phones keep us connected even when we’re remote. But none of these things forces us to not be with real live people.

Telecommuting is a choice to be alone. It reduces connections between workers. It removes us from the world of work and makes it indistinguishable from the period before and after, which we could simple call life.

***

Still, telework has clear benefits. For the employer, it can save office space, utilities and overhead for employee services. From the worker, it creates more hours for life or desk work. It reduces travel costs. It has external benefits, like less traffic and quicker travel for commuters. We talk a lot about building more efficient public transportation, but the most efficient public transportation is the technology that lets you work from where you sleep.

Telecommuting is a choice to be alone.

Widespread adoption of telework requires three things, Schadler tells me. First, you need to work in the right industry. The growth of high-tech information technology jobs should lead to a growth in telecommuting, which would allow employers to hire the best workers in Florida or Oregon. Within industries, management culture matters. “In pharma sales, everybody works at home,” he says. “In pharma marketing, everybody works in the office.”

Second, to make remote working really work, you need performance metrics, because bosses can’t manage what they can’t measure. “If employers could measure output [posts per day, tasks per week, etc] they don’t care where you work, or how long you work, as long as you produce the output,” Schadler says.

The third factor is the most important and the hardest to quantify: it’s personal motivation. I could have called Ted and written these paragraphs from my couch, or the coffee shop across the street from my apartment. Instead, I chose to walk 15 minutes through the tropical heat because … well, I like my colleagues. I like my desk. I like that it is not the same table where I eat dinner and find funny YouTube videos with my roommates. If telework increases work-time and “life”-time, it does so at the expense of a work-life balance.

Tens of millions of Americans obviously disagree. If you’re one of them, leave a note in the comments section. Why do you prefer to work without “coming in to work”?

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/07/telecommute-nation-if-half-of-us-could-work-remotely-why-dont-we/242382/

Copyright © 2011 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

 

 

************************************************

Larry Gross

Professor and Director

School of Communication

Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism

University of Southern California

Los Angeles, CA 90089

213-740-3770

 

Editor, International Journal of Communication

President, International Communication Association, 2011-12

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You know the Knight Bus from Harry Potter? Well, the buses here are like that. We just got back from Kawasan Falls last night – it was a 3.5 hour trip there, and another 3.5 hour trip back, and we took a public bus. This bus isn’t huge, but it isn’t small and agile either, by any sense of the words. I mean, it’s a bus. But the road can be completely blocked, and this huge bus will still find a way to get where it needs to be.

Wait, I figured, I should probably blog about our entire Kawasan trip. Or well, my Whac-a-Mole Where-in-the-World-is-Cynthia-going-to-turn-up-next travels thus far.

I’ve been traveling almost non-stop since July 3rd, where I left NYC and flew to LA, spending about 40 hours there and fitting in a dinner and a brunch (at Doughboys -delicious stuff), and an almost-complete episode of the Bachelorette (we HAD to see what Bentley had to say when he met up with Ashley in HK!) before hopping on a plane to HK. After a rather painless 14 hours, I landed in HK very early in the morn, where I missed the first bus back home, resulting in my poor mom waiting aimlessly for about 40 minutes outside the MTR station where our apartment is.

Upon arriving at home, after lamenting my weight loss since she last saw me, Mama took me to dimsum, where we gorged ourselves with discounted HK breakfast goodies. The next 40 hours or so were laying around lazily and repacking for Cebu, and meeting up with Phong, who I’m apparently chasing around the world (we had met in LA, had dinner in NYC, and now lunch in HK).

Let’s get onto Cebu, because that’s probably more interesting than HK. I was under the impression that my flight was at 1:35pm, because the flight itself was only about 2.5 hours, and my ticket said departure at 0135H, arriving at 0410H. It wasn’t until about a week ago that I looked at the ticket again, and my return flight departs at 2250H. Hrm, I thought. Is this on MILITARY TIME? Yes, indeed, it is. I was going to be leaving at 1:35AM, not PM…and this is their idea of a red-eye flight. WTF.

I whiz thru customs, and Roselynne meets me at 4am right outside the airport entrance. I’ll save you all the sap and mush (unless you really like oatmeal with maple syrup, in which case, ask me privately), but let’s just say seeing her was much needed. Slept for a few hours before she had to get up to go to class. I slept for most of the day, and immediately the next day, we headed to Kawasan Falls for the weekend. The traveling just doesn’t stop. Kawasan was amazing, but I’m very happy to be home and still for a while.

So, I’m chilling in the apartment now while she learns some sort of choreographed dance. I’ve only gotten two mosquito bites so far, but bracing myself for more…

R was laughing at me earlier because I was writhing around in pain from lactic acid buildup in my left leg from hiking and swimming this weekend. Laughing, because she knew exactly what it was, it wasn’t life-threatening, and there was nothing either of us could to do make it better. Only time. I’m still limping all over the place.

Have you noticed those signs that prevent you from doing something? Like smoking or littering? And how they always come with a “maximum punishment”? For example, if you smoke in the airplane lavatory, you’ll be fined a few thousand dollars, and possibly spend a maximum of 2 years in prison. I often wondered about why the signs attempt to make would-be criminals feel better about committing the crime. It’s almost like saying, “Oh, you can go ahead and commit this crime because the WORST that can happen to you is so and so.” Shouldn’t the signs be more scary in order to better deter people from doing that which the establishment does not want them to do? Like, “if you smoke in the lavatory, you will be fined a MINIMUM of $200 and do 30 hours of community service.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCH7B9m4A4M&feature=youtube_gdata_player

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Sent from Cynthia Wang's iPhone
cyndaminthia@gmail.com

My mom sent this one to me. Hilarious. Harry Potter versus 金庸. I’m not quite sure who won…

一位中年人問年輕人：「你有看過金庸的小說嗎？」 年輕人說：「沒有，只有看過
電視劇。」


中年人說：「那你知道金庸寫的14部小說的書名的第一個字，串起來會成為一首詩：


『飛雪連天射白鹿，笑書神俠倚碧鴛』嗎？」

年輕人說：「嗯…不知道，但是我有看羅琳（哈利波特作者）的小說，你知道這七本
小說書名的第一個字串起來是 什麼嗎?」





中年人:嗯… 不知道耶


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年輕人:哦，她寫的七本小說書名的第一個字串起來是 『哈哈哈哈哈哈哈』！

I’ve been procrastinating on writing this paper and reading old xanga entries. And I had good thoughts! Good questions! Like this one:

I’ve been thinking about this concept of heaven, and eternal happiness, and all that. And I have some questions.

First off, if I ever get to heaven, how old am I going to be, for eternity? If I see my grandparents, my great grandparents, how old will they be?

Secondly, scenerio: I am deeply in love with someone. A live-by-this-person, die-by-this-person sort of love. And this person dies in a freak accident. My world is crushed, but I live on. And I eventually meet someone else, with whom I fall deeply in love, and spend the rest of my life with, but I am still in love with person #1. Who am I going to spend eternal paradise with – my first true love, or the true love that I spent my whole life with?

How does it work?

>>>>

That’s a good question, right?? I mean, and now, in grad school, all of my questions are like “what are the hegemonic implications of the totalitarian system under which our government idealizes certain values and norms by which all individuals within the system must function?” or something like that?