Thinking Outside the (Big) Box

When my wife and I first visited the supersize Ikea in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in 2008, we didn’t take time to stop for the lingonberry jam or meatballs. Soon after we walked in, we just wanted to leave. We realized that the place was a crowded, labyrinthine mess lacking the adequate amount of staff to help us chose between the Ekby Hensvik and the Ekby Bjarnum. We left angry and exhausted, and we swore — for the sake of our marriage — never to return. Ikea, I thought, was just like Walmart or countless other big-box retailers that seemed to have embraced a Faustian bargain with their customers. The chains would sell absurdly inexpensive stuff — like a Lovbacken coffee table for $60 — but as a consequence, customers would have to put up with huge stores manned by small, often unhappy and unhelpful staffs.

One recent Sunday, however, my wife and I caved. We needed to buy four separate closets and all the interior trimmings, and Ikea was the only place we could find them for less than $600. Coincidentally, it was the same weekend in which I was reading “The Good Jobs Strategy,” by Zeynep Ton, a business professor at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management. Ton, 39, grew up in Turkey and spent several summers working at her father’s apparel factory, often sewing pockets for bathrobes. The job was, like many menial low-wage tasks, both pressure-filled and boring, and Ton wished she could find a way to make such workers happier. After a volleyball scholarship brought her to the United States as a young adult, she eventually dedicated her academic career to figuring out how to make low-paid work more rewarding for employees and employers alike.

In the last few years, Ton has become a revolutionary force in a field that would seem unlikely to generate many — the Kafkaesque-titled Operations Management. Her central thesis is that many of those big-box retailers have been making a strategic error: Even the most coldhearted, money-hungry capitalists ought to realize that increasing their work force, and paying them and treating them better, will often yield happier customers, more engaged workers and — surprisingly — larger corporate profits. This sounds Pollyannaish, sure, but a study co-authored by Marshall Fisher, a Wharton professor who specializes in retail-management studies, backs it up. For every dollar of increased wages, one retailer that was studied by Fisher brought in $10 more in revenue. For more-understaffed stores in the study, the boost was as high as $28.

The problem results from the way many companies consider their workers. Ikea, for instance, has more than 130,000 global workers. In order to manage all these people, it uses something called work-force-management software, which ensures that there are enough workers — but not too many — to handle the forecasted in-store shopping traffic. (Walmart, which has 16 times as many workers, does, too, as do most larger retailers.) The software typically codes workers as a cost — one of the biggest — and aims to find the most efficient number of employees that can handle expected traffic. A trip to a big-box store reveals this algorithm’s logic in practice. There always seem to be endless aisles of merchandise but no one to answer your questions.

Ton, however, argues that workers are not merely a cost; they can be a source of profit — a major one. A better-paid, better-trained worker, she argues, will be more eager to help customers; they’ll also be more eager to help their store sell to them. The success of Costco, Trader Joe’s, QuikTrip and Mercadona, Spain’s biggest supermarket chain, indicate, she argues, that well-paid, knowledgeable workers are not an indulgence often found in luxury boutiques with their high markups. At each of the aforementioned companies, workers are paid more than at their competitors; they are also amply staffed per shift. More employees can ask customers questions about what they want to see more of and what they don’t like, and then they are empowered to change displays or order different stock to appeal to local tastes. (In big chains, these sorts of decisions are typically made in headquarters with little or no line-staff input.) Costco pays its workers about $21 an hour; Walmart is just about $13. Yet Costco’s stock performance has thoroughly walloped Walmart’s for a decade.

by Adam Davidson, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Kelsey Dake

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Memory Recollection - Jim Campbell
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Colorado Stores Throw Open Their Doors to Marijuana Buyers

[ed. See also: Holding Our Breath and Colorado's recreational marijuana stores make history.]

Customers began lining up before dawn on Wednesday to take part in what they called a historic departure from drug laws focused on punishment and prohibition. Many had flown in or driven hours specifically to buy a bag of marijuana.

At the Medicine Man dispensary in Denver, which claims it is the closest marijuana retailer to the airport, as many as half the customers were from out of state, here for the first day that marijuana could be sold legally in Colorado.

The store’s owner, Andy Williams, said he had redesignated about 60 percent of his medical marijuana to be sold retail but worried that it would not be enough to meet the demands of the lines snaking out the door.

Despite the long lines, Mr. Williams said, people seemed thrilled to be able to walk into a shop, lay down $50 or $60 and openly buy the drug.

“This is Independence Day for the marijuana community,” he said. “People don’t like breaking the law. The burden has been taken off them. “

With security guards posted outside many stores and police and state officials watching closely, the day’s first sales appeared to go smoothly, officials said. “So far so good,” said Ron Kammerzell, director of enforcement for Colorado’s Department of Revenue.

Mr. Kammerzell said the state had eight investigators checking retailers’ licenses, inspecting packaging and labeling, and ensuring that stores checked each customer’s identification to see if they were 21 or older.

To supporters, Wednesday was a watershed moment in the country’s tangled relationship with the ubiquitous recreational drug. They celebrated with speeches, hailing it as akin to the end of Prohibition, albeit with joints being passed instead of champagne being uncorked.

To skeptics, it marked a grand folly, one they said would lead to higher drug use among teenagers and more impaired drivers on the roads, and would tarnish the image of a state whose official song is John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High.” The governor of Colorado and the mayor of Denver both opposed legalization, and stayed away from the smoky celebrations on Wednesday.

While some 20 states allow medical marijuana, voters in Colorado and Washington State decided last year to go one step further, becoming the first in the nation to legalize small amounts of the drug for recreational use and regulate it like alcohol. Ever since, the states have been racing to devise rules detailing how to grow it, sell it, tax it and track it.

by Jack Healy, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Brennan Linsley/Associated Press

Vogue Italia Oct 2008 ‘The New Vision’ - Iris Strubegger by Mert & Marcus
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Slaves to the Algorithm

There are many reasons to believe that film stars earn too much. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie once hired an entire train to travel from London to Glasgow. Tom Cruise’s daughter Suri is reputed to have a wardrobe worth $400,000. Nicolas Cage once paid $276,000 for a dinosaur head. He would have got it for less, but he was bidding against Leonardo DiCaprio.

Nick Meaney has a better reason for believing that the stars are overpaid: his algorithm tells him so. In fact, he says, with all but one of the above actors, the studios are almost certainly wasting their money. Because, according to his movie-analysis software, there are only three actors who make money for a film. And there is at least one A-list actress who is worth paying not to star in your next picture.

The headquarters of Epagogix, Meaney’s company, do not look like the sort of headquarters from which one would confidently launch an attack on Hollywood royalty. A few attic rooms in a shared south London office, they don’t even look as if they would trouble Dollywood. But my meeting with Meaney will be cut short because of another he has, with two film executives. And at the end, he will ask me not to print the full names of his analysts, or his full address. He is worried that they could be poached.

Worse though, far worse, would be if someone in Hollywood filched his computer. It is here that the iconoclasm happens. When Meaney is given a job by a studio, the first thing he does is quantify thousands of factors, drawn from the script. Are there clear bad guys? How much empathy is there with the protagonist? Is there a sidekick? The complex interplay of these factors is then compared by the computer to their interplay in previous films, with known box-office takings. The last calculation is what it expects the film to make. In 83% of cases, this guess turns out to be within $10m of the total. Meaney, to all intents and purposes, has an algorithm that judges the value—or at least the earning power—of art.

To explain how, he shows me a two-dimensional representation: a grid in which each column is an input, each row a film. "Curiously," Meaney says, "if we block this column…" With one hand, he obliterates the input labelled "star", casually rendering everyone from Clooney to Cruise, Damon to De Niro, an irrelevancy. "In almost every case, it makes no difference to the money column."

"For me that’s interesting. The first time I saw that I said to the mathematician, ‘You’ve got to change your program—this is wrong.’ He said, ‘I couldn’t care less—it’s the numbers.’" There are four exceptions to his rules. If you hire Will Smith, Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp, you seem to make a return. The fourth? As far as Epagogix can tell, there is an actress, one of the biggest names in the business, who is actually a negative influence on a film. "It’s very sad for her," he says. But hers is a name he cannot reveal.

by Tom Whipple, Intelligent Life |  Read more:

Image: Brett Ryder

At 407: My Grandfather's House and a Lost Era

We called it 407 after its address, 407 Highland Avenue—an early Victorian, a big house on a street of big houses. It had high ceilings, airy and claustrophobic at the same time, like a church. It had a cured smell, the comfortable pungence of a can of pipe tobacco or mink coats in closets. There were huge Oriental rugs, wingback chairs, and standup ashtrays. On tables were objects of crystal, bronze, and sterling silver with monograms—cigarette boxes, porringers, picture frames, and a tea set of architectural splendor. To me, at the age of ten or so, it all had the air of furnishings for a ritual, however outworn.

My grandfather, Henry Southworth Allen, Jr., was called Harry. (My father is the third with that name, and I am the fourth.) He was a managing partner at Spencer Trask, a Wall Street investment bank. It was a station in life that gave him much satisfaction. He bought 407 after the First World War. An artist had owned it once, and had added a studio that went up two stories, enclosing an exterior wall whose bedroom windows overlooked what became the living room. After bedtime, we children could peer down on the mysteries of grownups, the men backhanding logs into the fireplace and lighting the women’s cigarettes.

When the three Allen sons, my father and his two younger brothers, got together there on holidays, they had wary smiles, as if life at 407 were an inside joke. They had grace, too, gliding around in pleated trousers that hung from high nineteen-forties waists. They lightly hitched them up by the creases before they sat down; they held cigarettes at the last knuckle of their fingers and smoked only half of them. They had spent their youths on the right lists, for coming-out parties at the Ritz-Carlton or the Plaza. That was before the war. (...)

I was born in 1941; my grandmother died soon after, of asthma and heart disease, at the age of fifty-six. She and her death seemed to occupy 407, at the edge of our peripheral vision. My grandfather took refuge in a small, dark, ground-floor bedroom. He would lead me and my younger sister, Julie, in there, lift us up, and let us put one hand in his penny jar. We could keep all the pennies we could hold—a lesson in the fundamentals of capitalism.

He had a little potbelly, quick eyes, and a busy precision about him. In middle age he had learned to figure skate in the old style, gliding backward to draw figure eights. He believed in homeopathy. He was superstitious. If he saw a man on crutches during his morning ferry ride to Wall Street and then the market went down, he’d come home grumbling about the “goddam cripple.” After very bad days, he would throw away the necktie he’d worn.

Into the nineteen-forties, he still went to New York on Saturdays to work a half day in the old style. He would not return until evening. My father asked him once what he did with the other half of the day.

He said: “I have lunch with Kerensky and then we go antique shopping.”

Kerensky! Alexander Kerensky, who lived in New York then, had been the Prime Minister of Russia, the last chance for democracy before the Bolsheviks overthrew him. I love the bravado of this lie. The truth was, my grandfather spent Saturdays with his secretary and their son: he had another family.

I wrote a poem about this:

Grandpa had a mistress.
The mistress had a son.
When Grandpa died the cancelled checks
Would show what he had done.

My grandfather was everything to my father. My mother despised him. “He was such a phony,” she would say.

She resented him for allowing one and only one martini to be served before dinner. He kept a close eye on the drinking, a family disease. I suspect she also didn’t like having to fight him for my father’s loyalty. He insisted that my father—though not his younger brother, David—follow him to Wall Street, as if it were a family legacy. My grandmother thought that he should be an Episcopal priest, but she was overruled. I think he would have found the clergy tedious, but he found working as a bond broker tedious, too—and he lacked the knack for making money. As for my father’s own youthful ambitions, he mooned over two impossible romances: Broadway songwriting and going to sea, as he had read about it in Joseph Conrad. (...)

Near the end of his junior year, he quit Princeton to attempt a transatlantic sail in a thirty-six-foot Friendship sloop with two friends—a feat that was covered in at least one New York newspaper. The boat sprung a board five hundred miles out, and they had to pump their way back to Nova Scotia. While repairs were being made, my father got a job harpooning swordfish. He hated the cruelty of it.

He told me about his boyhood failures, perhaps to comfort me for mine. Once, at St. George’s, he was running down a football field with the winning pass arcing toward him, and dropped the ball. I was sorry he told me.

In Southport, before the Depression, my father crewed on a Star boat that tied for first in the Eastern championships. The skipper had already rented a flatcar to haul the boat to San Francisco for the Nationals. In the sail-off, the other Star went out looking for wind on a reach and found it, and that was that. So many almosts, so many not quites.

by  Henry Allen, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: courtesy Henry Allen

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Image: Harris Graber

Tara Keefe. Tequila!
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Thomas Michael Gill, Broken
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Meth: Adderall for Construction Workers

The trailer parks of Jefferson County, Missouri, are a far cry from the international cartels of Breaking Bad, but this is the real picture of meth in America: Eveready batteries and Red Devil Lye on kitchen counters, used syringes mixed in with children's homework, drawers full of forks bent out of shape by chronic users’ obsessive tinkering. Over the course of nearly a decade studying home meth production in the rural U.S., SUNY Purchase anthropologist Jason Pine has looked on as Jefferson County’s practiced ‘chemists’ cook their product, watched addicts inject their own veins, and visited houses destroyed by meth lab explosions. “Jefferson County is largely rural,” Pine told me. “Houses can be quite secluded. It has rocky ridges that make it unsuitable for farming, but great for meth cooking.”

Alice Robb: Who makes meth?

Jason Pine: Many people in Jefferson County begin cooking to supplement their income and to cover the costs of their own addiction. There were some people profiting, but those profits dwindled as their habits increased. These meth manufacturers are not like cartel leaders: They’re making it for personal use. New regulations against pseudoephedrine-based medicine have made large-scale production harder. There’s a new recipe that’s easier and simpler, though it’s more dangerous and explosive.

The cost of setting up a lab is very low—you need a Gatorade bottle, some tubing, some batteries. And it’s portable: You can make it on the run. If you need to, you can pick up your ‘lab’ and throw it out.

Cooking meth is a kind of apprenticeship. Recipes circulate among cooks like secrets or rumors. Apprenticeships take place in the woods or in the home, sometimes inter-generationally. There are cases when three generations of a single family have cooked and used together. They engage in a DIY practice that I equate with alchemy. They’re transmuting base substances—everyday commodities you can find at Walmart—into something precious: a panacea, a cure-all. Meth cures all ills of the world by transforming the world, by tweaking the user’s neurological relation to the world. Meth cooking is alchemy in its contemporary, late capitalist form.

AR: How do people in Jefferson County get into meth?

JP: Many of the people I met began meth on the job—concrete work, roofing, trucking, factory work. It’s a way to make the job easier, to work longer hours and make more money. Meth increases dopamine levels in the brain, which can cause people to engage in repetitive (and often meaningless) actions—a behavioral effect that syncs up well with ‘work you gotta turn your mind off for,’ as one cook told me.

Others began at home, often because their parents, older siblings, or grandparents were making it. I talked to people in prison who began when they were in elementary school. Some users will administer it to their children—they’ll blow it into their mouths if they’re smoking it. They want to share it with their children; they want to experience it together, feel closer. If there’s no entertainment, no sports, nothing to do after school—you need money to pay for gas, to go to the movies—the main activities are drinking, smoking weed. The boundaries are blurry.

With meth, there aren’t big parties like there are with some other drugs. If there are large groups of people who take meth together regularly, it's a network of people who help each other acquire the ingredients to cook it.

by Alice Robb, New Republic |  Read more:

Image: Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty

Utagawa Kuniyoshi
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Fukushima Plume Already at Alaska Coast

• Main inventory of Fukushima 137Cs had been transported towards central North Pacific By 2012. […] The inventory of Fukushima radioactivity will almost entirely shift from the western to the eastern North Pacific during the next 5 years.
• Surface water distribution of Fukushima 137Cs in 2012 (Aoyama et al., 2013; G. Hong, pers. comm.)

via: ENENews

Bacteria for Breakfast

Here’s something to think about while you eat and drink to excess on New Year's Eve: your large intestine is host to roughly a hundred trillion bacteria, weighing a few kilos, and they can have a surprising effect on your health and maybe even your behaviour.

In December, researchers at the California Institute of Technology showed that mice demonstrating abnormal social interactions, obsessive behaviour and intestinal problems – all traits associated with autism in human beings – can be cured if they ingest the right type of bacteria.

That’s quite a startling result, and just the latest in a booming area of research. Typically, you will have hundreds of different species of microbes living in your gut; this is known as your gut microbiome. A study reported this spring showed that not hosting a sufficiently diverse bacteria population can lead to insulin resistance, which is often a precursor for Type 2 diabetes and can make you prone to putting on weight. This is fixable, according to another recent study: if you go on a low-calorie diet, it boosts your gut microbe diversity.

Or you could have a microbe transplant. Lean mice have been made obese simply by giving them the gut flora of obese mice. And, in a remarkable study published in September, gut flora taken from human twins where one is obese and one is lean affected the corpulence of the mice that received them. Those that received the microbiome of the fat twin became fat, and the ones that got the lean twin’s bacteria became lean. Body shape is, to a certain degree, transmissible.

Microbiology is becoming cheaper, and the processing of biological information is happening ever faster. Today, there are even crowdsourced, open-access studies, such as the American Gut project. In September, its scientists released the first analysis of the gut microbiome of North America, based on 1,000 stool samples. This is just the start: 4,000 people are now signed up to the project (you can sign up from anywhere in the world but researchers are having problems with US Customs over importing faecal matter). American Gut is co-ordinating its findings with information from large-scale genomic and body-mapping projects; we are beginning to build the kinds of database that could revolutionise medicine.

by Michael Brooks, New Statesman |  Read more:

Image: Getty

We Need to Talk About TED

In our culture, talking about the future is sometimes a polite way of saying things about the present that would otherwise be rude or risky.

But have you ever wondered why so little of the future promised in TED talks actually happens? So much potential and enthusiasm, and so little actual change. Are the ideas wrong? Or is the idea about what ideas can do all by themselves wrong?

I write about entanglements of technology and culture, how technologies enable the making of certain worlds, and at the same time how culture structures how those technologies will evolve, this way or that. It's where philosophy and design intersect.

So the conceptualization of possibilities is something that I take very seriously. That's why I, and many people, think it's way past time to take a step back and ask some serious questions about the intellectual viability of things like TED. (...)

So what is TED exactly?

Perhaps it's the proposition that if we talk about world-changing ideas enough, then the world will change. But this is not true, and that's the second problem.

TED of course stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and I'll talk a bit about all three. I Think TED actually stands for: middlebrow megachurch infotainment.

The key rhetorical device for TED talks is a combination of epiphany and personal testimony (an "epiphimony" if you like ) through which the speaker shares a personal journey of insight and realisation, its triumphs and tribulations.

What is it that the TED audience hopes to get from this? A vicarious insight, a fleeting moment of wonder, an inkling that maybe it's all going to work out after all? A spiritual buzz?

I'm sorry but this fails to meet the challenges that we are supposedly here to confront. These are complicated and difficult and are not given to tidy just-so solutions. They don't care about anyone's experience of optimism. Given the stakes, making our best and brightest waste their time – and the audience's time – dancing like infomercial hosts is too high a price. It is cynical.

Also, it just doesn't work.

by Benjamin Bratton, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: James Duncan Davidson/TED

Dieter Roth and Björn Roth 
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Camila Moreno / Incendie

Preste Atenção

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[ed. Or one generation plants the weeds, and another gets the weedwhacker.]