Products/Services

Fifth in this little end-of-year series I would like to exchange tips on how to make working from home suck less. This is mostly for those who work in an office type job. I suspect some of you have been doing this for years and perhaps then it was not a huge shift and may even work well. I, however, had not had a home office since graduate school (when my living room doubled as a study in my one-bedroom apartment). The sudden closure of offices was tough given zero office setup at home. It’s not that I hadn’t ever worked from home, it’s just that I had only done it by sitting on my living room sofa feet up on my coffee table, laptop in my lap (a laptop in a lap, imagine that). This was not sustainable for full-time work, however. I suffered on my definitely-not-for-constant-sitting dining room chair. It turns out that a lumbar cushion can make a significant difference. I use the Samsonite Memory Foam one and it has worked well. I have found the halfmoon-shaped one less effective. (Curiously, neither of these seems visible on Samsonite’s own Web site, I hope it’s not because they have discontinued it. It looks like lots of retailers have it though.)

Now, if you have the budget to go all out on chair supplies then I highly recommend the Herman Miller Aeron Chairs, but after ordering one in May (with which there was an administrative glitch so actually in) July, I only received it in November so I had needed other arrangements for much of the year. (I knew of the chair as it’s what I’ve been fortunate to use at work for about twenty years now.) I’m sure there are other more reasonably-priced ergonomic desk chairs out there that would also be much better than a dining room chair.

The other hardware arrangement was getting a monitor to supplement the laptop, which was a very good decision. The IT staff in my department was amazing back in March helping folks get set up especially for remote teaching. (Unlike many schools in the US that seemed to be on Spring break when lockdowns first occurred, at UZH we were told on Friday afternoon that starting Monday we’d have to be teaching online so there was some serious last-minute shuffling going on.) A friend convinced me to get a curved monitor and that’s been surprisingly helpful even though I had already had a rather large monitor in the office before.

In Zurich, we were allowed back in the office by June and I spent much of the summer and fall there so I didn’t have to keep innovating on my setup. However, as infections rose in the past few months, I started feeling uncomfortable going to the office so am again on the lookout for new ideas. I’ll have a separate post for software finds. In this thread, I’m especially curious to hear how folks made their physical home setup work well. And yes, I recognize my very fortunate position of having support for all these things and the privilege I have had of continuing a job I enjoy with ongoing support from my employer.

Paul Mason has an article today [about the impending end of cash](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/15/crime-terrorism-and-tax-evasion-why-banks-are-waging-war-on-cash). The subtitle asks “But what would a cashless society mean for freedom?” but sadly the article itself has little to say on the subject. It isn’t hard to see, though, that the end of cash would give governments almost unlimited power to deny resources to those they consider undesirable. We’ve already seen this with the way that the Obama administration successfully pressured the major credit card companies to block donations to WikiLeaks. And it is a key component of the UK’s rather horrible Immigration Bill 2015 which has as a central purpose to create a “hostile environment” for people who lack authorization to be on the territory of the state by, inter alia, “working with banks and building societies to restrict their access to bank accounts”. In practice this means that people whose right to remain is cancelled could almost immediately lose access to the resources they need to fight the administrative decision against them. History shows that technologies that are first piloted against one group of people can be extended to others. We face a future where people deemed by the executive to be problematic in some way could lose access to all means of payment. At least with cash you can subsist on the margins of society; without it, government control is potentially total. Perhaps this is coming sooner than we think?

Having gotten music all over the blog, I am now going to cover it with human blood. Intrauterine devices, whether copper only or with a progestogen-releasing cylinder, are actually the most common form of reversible birth control in the world. Most of the users are in China, however (2/3 according to Wikipedia). In the U.S., IUDs suffered a fatal blow to their reputation when the defective Dalkon Shield was released, causing at least 7 deaths and many septic abortions. It was pulled from the market in 1974, but the damage was done; as a girl I was never even informed about IUDs as a method of birth control.

That wasn’t totally unreasonable because they are less effective for women who have never given birth vaginally, being more likely to be expelled. I think there was also a misguided consensus that you couldn’t dilate a woman’s cervix enough to insert the device unless she had previously given birth. Today, as I understand it, manufacturers produce a smaller size to solve this problem.

I was on the pill for about 10 years. I always had trouble with it, experiencing breakthrough bleeding (basically you get your period twice a month, no thank you) and other various side effects including, in my opinion, exacerbation of depression. I got switched around to more types than I can remember in an attempt to find one that was acceptable.

Here’s what’s great about the copper IUD: no hormones! The copper makes your womb inhospitable to a fertilized egg, for reasons that I think are still somewhat unknown. So, maybe an egg is fertilized, but it can’t attach itself and begin appropriating resources to build a placenta. I’m not sure whether this counts as baby-killing to the anti-abortion crowd; probably yes, even though the definition of getting pregnant involves a fertilized egg implanting itself in your uterus. Not just, you know, hanging around briefly. (Do these people really think when they go to heaven they will be vastly outnumbered by the souls of fertilized eggs who failed to implant and were washed away during menses? That’s going to be some boring conversation right there. Will those little dudes be casting down their teeny, tiny golden crowns around the glassy sea? I call bullshit; I don’t think anti-abortion people believe that at all.)

Insertion of the device does hurt. It only takes a few seconds, though, and then you don’t have to do anything about it for several years. The main reason women have the device removed it that it causes heavier bleeding during their period. My experience was that this was (dramatically!) true at first, but that my body then adjusted.

Obviously the IUD does nothing to protect you from STDs. But it’s not competing with condoms in this area, it’s competing with the pill. Pregnancy rates are lower when using IUDs than when being on the pill, probably because it’s very difficult to be a perfect pill user. Guys may think it sounds easy: you take one a day, end of story. But sometimes you forget if you’ve taken it or not; actions repeated so frequently have a tendency to blur together. Or you end up staying out super-late and crashing at your friend’s place. In theory you’re meant to add condoms to the mix at that point until you start taking a new set, but in real life people often don’t bother. Part of the appeal of the IUD is that you don’t have to do anything.

My only jealousy now is of the new pills where you only get your period 4 times a year. That would be great! Let’s face it: getting your period is a pain. There’s blood everywhere! Who needs it? It’s true that it can be the most welcome sight in all the world, when you have been sitting there thinking you might be pregnant, and wondering what the hell to do about it. And suddenly these is a cadmium red solution to all your problems. Otherwise: lame. So, ladies, IUDs are great and you should consider them.

UPDATES: One commenter notes that although we don’t know how the IUD works, it seems to work primarily by inhibiting fertilization, and only secondarily by preventing implantation. So we all win, including the little dudes with the tiny crowns. Another commenter who survived a pregnancy while his/her mother was using an IUD wants me to point out that this is a possibility, and that grave birth defects can result. This is true, and something my doctor mentioned to me. The failure rate is incredibly low, but if the IUD does fail the consequences can be very serious for the developing fetus (if not fatal before the fetus is viable outside the womb, which is more likely).

A few weeks ago, the Tesco a playing field away from my house re-opened with a new look and a Costa café. The new look seems to be simply the re-situating of the booze section to the middle of the shop, so you now have to pass by the beer offers before getting at frozen foods or cleaning products. And the eggs have been put somewhere so unlikely – and of course miles from other staples like milk or bread – that the staff laugh or frown when you ask where, they have to answer so often.

Not much else has changed; the vegetable section is either bulging with unlikely and out of season produce or empty like in a zombie movie or communist Russia. The price war turns out to be just lower prices than in August when they were hiked up ahead of time. And there are a couple more self-checkouts barking orders and requiring on average two staff interventions to make each transaction go through.

But the Costa. That’s changed everything.

This is a suburb of Edinburgh about a mile from the nearer villages and with a mix of public and private housing. It’s by no means isolated, but on a wet and blustery day twenty minutes walk feels too far for a pint of milk or the morning paper. I can’t imagine I’d do it more than once a week if I had a buggy to push or arthritis, no matter how lonely or fed up I was. And when you work from home, a burst of fresh air and a face to face conversation with a real, live human is a godsend.

Now, one of my daily highlights is my overpriced, under-caffeinated and much loved light latte sipped at a plastic table under piped music drowned out by the endless cheeping of supermarket scanners. A mix of the same people is there most days.

One is an elderly woman bent over a stick who waits discreetly at her table while the counter staff bring over her tea and biscuits. Another is any one of the buggy-pushing set enjoying a guilt-free sit down before getting on with the shop. My favourite is the older woman I always have to repeat my order to but who always seems uncommonly pleased to be there.

I suppose the point is that however annoying the perpetual encroachment of large corporates and their vertical integrations and tie-in deals, the day to day of mega-commerce can still boil down to people in a community using the place to find, talk to or just quietly appreciate each other.

For years I have been wanting to write an overview book on the capability approach and it looks like I may find some time to do that in the next 18 months (possibly quicker if I can buy myself out of some teaching). There are a few publishers interested, and one (a major commercial press of academic books) is actually quite persistent in reminding me that they are interested in this project.

But why publish with a publisher? Why not simply put the book open access on the web? I wonder whether an open access book would be (a) feasible, and (b) all things considered a good thing to do.
[click to continue…]

Over the last few days I’ve observed that an increasing number of our spam comments for dubious commercial opportunities in pharmacological products etc have links leading to hijacked pages at “http://www.mises.org”:http://www.mises.org. Seems quite appropriate. If you want to visit our von Misean friends by the way, be sure to check out this “front page piece”:http://mises.org/daily/4633 on how playing _Caesar III_ demonstrates the futility of Marxism and central planning. In its own way, it is quite perfect: the conclusion’s finding that:

bq. As far as it went, Caesar III was an experiment in refutation. If a graduate from the Mises University has trouble planning a make-believe Roman colony, what hope is there that anyone could plan the real thing?

says it all, really.

Three Google executives have been convicted of violating Italian privacy law because of a children’s bullying video posted briefly by Google in 2006. Although Google took down the offending video of several children in Turin cruelly taunting a mentally disabled boy, and subsequently helped authorities to identify and convict the person who posted the video, three executives were convicted today of violating privacy. A fourth employee who has since left the company had his charges dropped, which seems to indicate that a political point is being made. The executives in question are outraged, and former UK Information Commissioner Richard Thomas is quoted as saying the episode makes a mockery of privacy laws.

For years I’ve observed that Italy always pushes for the most extreme EU version of laws about privacy and security and then domestically gold-plates them into laws that would seem more at home in Turkmenistan. It makes other Europeans scratch their heads as the Italians generally aren’t willing or able to enforce their draconian laws. Several years ago over a pint in Brussels, an exasperated UK official told me ‘the Italians have no intention of ever implementing this stuff, but we’re a common law country and if it’s on the books, we actually have to do it’.

Update: Milton Mueller has an interesting take on the decision and makes the point that the E-Commerce Directive has not aged well in an era of user-generated content.
[click to continue…]

The “Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/21/AR2008122102397.html?nav=hcmodule

This season’s animatronic Baby Alive — which retails for $59.99 — comes with special “green beans” and “bananas” that, once fed to the doll, actually, well, come out the other end. “Be careful,” reads the doll’s promotional literature, “just like real life, sometimes she can hold it until she gets to the ‘potty’ and sometimes she can’t!” (A warning on the back of the box reads: “May stain some surfaces.”) …

_Withnail and I_ some twenty-two years ago (or forty, depending on how you want to measure time):

First, may I say the triptans are a marvelous class of drug? When you’re wading through a 5 day migraine and liquids, not to mention solid food, are a distant memory. When the right side of your brain wakes you up every hour or two to pound a little harder on the left. When you haven’t been able to complete a sentence for days, but that’s just fine as you can’t leave your house to find any humans to talk to and you wouldn’t be able to find your way back home anyway. When you know, you just know that there’s one last zomig in the house if only you could find it. And then you do.

Joan Didion wrote that she came to regard her enemy, migraine, as a friend. Susan Sontag pointed out that describing illness with military metaphors has certain failings, not the least of which is to make ill people feel defeated. I don’t hold with making an ally of migraine, but I will grant you that the first day after the enemy decamps is a Red Letter Day. Today I am so full of vim and vigour that it seems a shame to waste all that energy on work. (Sadly I have so much to catch up on, I’ll have to.) The world is a bright, clear and shiny place today, even if my 401(k) is worth 53% less than what I’ve spent on it. So be it. Feeling like this, I could work until I’m 106, rather like that cheery nun who hasn’t cast a vote since Eisenhower, and who’s thrown her veil in the ring for Obama.

To business; why are triptans so expensive? Fair enough that nobody knows whether migraines are caused by bad chemistry or bad wiring. (Presumably it all looks the same at the molecular level.) So we’re not quite sure why triptans work so well for some people. But when they work, they are transformative within minutes. In Belgium, a month’s supply used to cost me about $100. Here in the US, my gold-plated insurer gives them to me more or less free. But someone’s making a lot of money either way, and migraine has such a huge impact on productivity/absenteeism that getting the cure for cheap would help hundreds of thousands of people and their employers. When did we invent this miracle drug, and will we be sharing the bounty any time soon?

This is the sort of information request that should be easily searchable, but any search terms I’ve thought to use have yielded a load of dross. So I’m turning to the collective brainpower of CT’s readers.

My beneficent employer, ICANN, has just opened an office in Washington D.C. (I’m still based in L.A., mope, boo, hiss). I’m here for a few days and just realised I don’t know what the authoritative source is for D.C. organizations is. Strikes me it’s the sort of thing we should have around the office.

When I worked in Brussels, it was easy enough to find comprehensive directories of trade associations, member state delegations, lobbyists, NGOs and the rest of the ragtag of organizations that gather around centres of political power. Does anyone know of a publication, ideally paper-based, with this info for Washington-based organisations? And where I might purchase such a tome?

You know when you wake up in the middle of the night, having dreamt of a great idea. And maybe you wake up on a plane, with your chin and a fair bit of drool on your chest, and, waking, you still think it’s a good idea. And then, the next day as you disembark you think to yourself, ‘wow, that’s a good idea’. You’re probably just jetlagged and waiting for your soul to catch up with you, as William Gibson would say.

Here it is; a transitional use of technology until those instantly downloading paper-like tablets intersect with the demand curve.

When you wake up on a plane after your pretend night’s sleep, and you’re eating the rubber omelette or the semi-defrosted muffin, you don’t want Internet connection and crumbs in your laptop (and the expectation that you’ll do work). What you really want is your morning paper.

In Brussels where there’s a big market of expats you can buy a locally printed version of your home newspaper. The publisher sends an electronic version of the day’s paper to a local printer and it gets delivered to the shops along with the national papers. It’s not on newspaper print, but it’s a more or less identical paper version of your daily comfort. It’s kind of an umbilical cord, and a good bit cheaper than the air-mailed version you get the next day.

Well, why not have this on planes? Stick one of those printers somewhere in the galley (where there’s loads of room…) and let passengers pay a premium to order their paper in advance and have it delivered with their rubbery breakfast. Then you get to read something a bit more timely than the in-flight magazine and get off the plane fully up to speed on the markets, international news and celebrity gossip. How cool would that be?

Via Tina at Scatterplot, you must buy Wicked Anomie’s terrific Blind Reviewer Voodoo Doll. Designed for those moments when you need more than just a brisk letter to the journal editor explaining that your reviewer is unclear on a few points.

This 9-inch doll (without hair) is lovingly crafted within the anomie studio and arrives finished and ready to be put to good use. This doll comes unstuffed, so that you can enjoy the cathartic act of shredding your own offending documents and stuffing them inside the doll. Finishing instructions and extra yarn included.

Proceeds go to fund designer’s trip to Annual Conference. Crooked Timber is not responsible for any stabbing pains you may experience in light of purchases encouraged by this post.

Obviously, I’m not Crooked Timber’s resident expert on the sociology of online communities, so here’s hoping that Kieran or Eszter will be along in a moment to reassure me, but, as a keen Flickr user, I’m perturbed by their decision to start allowing video. Flickr (owned by the troubled Yahoo, of course) probably has two (overlapping) kinds of user: the person who wants a repository for their snaps to show to friends and family and the person who is into photography on at least a hobbyist level who wants to interact with similar others. It also has thriving groups of various kinds based on shared interests or locality: for example my local group has 1000+ nominal members, dozens of active members, and a fairly thriving offline complement of activities (monthly meets where much beer is consumed, photowalks etc.).

All of this is threatened by the addition of video. As the photographic element is diluted and the YouTubers arrive, some photographers will find it less congenial and will choose to go elsewhere; as they go, the pool will become more dilute, leading others to take the same decision. In other words, I predict the kind of cascade effect the Mark Granovetter and others have written about. Of course, I could be wrong, and maybe the Flickr community is more robust and adaptable than I’m allowing for. SmugMug and Pbase don’t (yet) have local groups of photographers who hang out together, critique one another’s pictures and so on. But this seems a rash decision for Yahoo to make. Does it have to do so with the Microsoft bid? Maybe.

I should be prepping for class, but I want to add an alternative perspective to a question raised about Google’s popularity. The Freakonomics blog features an interesting Q&A with Hal Varian today, I recommend heading over to check out how Google’s chief economist answers some questions submitted by readers last week.

The Official Google Blog takes one of the questions and posts an expanded response to it. The question:

How can we explain the fairly entrenched position of Google, even though the differences in search algorithms are now only recognizable at the margins?

Varian addresses three possible explanations: supply-side economies of scale, lock-in, and network effects. He dismisses all of these (see the post for details) and then goes on to say that it’s about Google’s superior quality in search that makes it as popular as it is.

I don’t buy it, especially the dismissal of the lock-in factor. [click to continue…]