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Employees perform worse with daily monitoring
Employees perform worse with daily monitoring
Multilevel analysis findings confirmed that daily monitoring was negatively associated with daily felt trust, which in turn had a negative impact on subordinates' daily well-being in both contexts. Furthermore, we found that monitoring variability intensified the negative relationship between daily supervisor monitoring and subordinates' daily felt trust in the newly introduced remote working context, although not in a more stable context. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings and derive a research agenda to study the daily dynamics of monitoring and its implications for organizations.
·onlinelibrary.wiley.com·
Employees perform worse with daily monitoring
Culture is increasingly being used to treat mental health issues in Europe. Here's how | Euronews
Culture is increasingly being used to treat mental health issues in Europe. Here's how | Euronews
A growing number of initiatives across Europe are using access to the arts as a tool to improve health and well-being alongside classic medical treatment. In the Danish town of Silkeborg, a group of new mothers who suffered from postpartum depression reported feeling closer to their newborns, calmer and more optimistic after taking part in weekly singing sessions designed to improve their mental health.Similar results were also observed in groups also participating in the World Health Organisation's (WHO) Music for Motherhood project in four other cities in Italy and Romania. "Just like being physically active has health benefits, being culturally active also has health benefits," Nils Fietje, Technical Officer at the World Health Organisation and co-director of its Arts and Health Lab, told Euronews.
“Arts and culture are important in promoting the positive mental health and well-being of individuals and society in general by supporting social inclusion and reducing mental health stigma.”
·euronews.com·
Culture is increasingly being used to treat mental health issues in Europe. Here's how | Euronews
The Case of The Traveling Text Message — Michele Tepper
The Case of The Traveling Text Message — Michele Tepper
John Watson looks down at his screen, and we see the message he’s reading on our screen as well. Now, we’re used to seeing extradiegetic text appear on screen with the characters: titles like “Three Years Earlier” or “Lisbon” serve to orient us in a scene. Those titles even can help set the tone of the narrative - think of the snarky humor of the character introduction chyrons on Burn Notice. But this is different: this is capturing the viewer’s screen as part of the narrative itself [1] It’s a remarkably elegant solution from director Paul McGuigan. And it works because we, the viewing audience, have been trained to understand it by the last several years of service-driven, multi-platform, multi-screen applications.
The connection between Sherlock’s intellect and a computer’s becomes more explicit in one of my favorite scenes, later in the episode. Sherlock is called to the scene of the murder from which the episode takes its title.[3] We watch him process the clues from the scene and as he takes them in, that same titling style appears, now employed in a more conventional-seeming expositional mode
But then the shot reverses, and it’s not quite so conventional after all. The titling isn’t just what Sherlock is understanding, it’s what he’s seeing. In the same way that text-message titling can take over our screens because whatever we’re watching TV on is just another screen in a multiplatform computing system, this scene tells us that Sherlock views the whole world through the head-up display of his own genius.
·micheletepper.com·
The Case of The Traveling Text Message — Michele Tepper
Compromise Creates Values
Compromise Creates Values
given that each choice is a compromise, and that choice is also a reaffirmation of values, then compromise itself is a reaffirmation of our values. This is not even that mind-blowing, really: it should be obvious that the means by which we negotiate opportunity costs is by measuring our options against our values and ranking them, and that by making the choice, we have voted for that ranking of values as the one we want to continue embodying, that this is the person we want to become.
·blog.briankitano.com·
Compromise Creates Values
Liking the "Right Things"
Liking the "Right Things"
What better way to show how good your taste is in movies than to talk about how much you didn't like that popular movie that everyone seems to be like? What better way to show that you have good taste in music than ripping on top 40 hits?The more toxic version of this is finding people who like something you think is lame and telling them why what they like is actually bad. "Oh, you liked this thing? Here's why it's actually bad. You're welcome." The goal, I guess, is to make that person actually go, "you're right, I thought I got joy out of this, but maybe I shouldn't have."As I've gotten older, the more I've recognized that when it comes to art especially, there's upside to enjoying something, and very little upside to disliking something. My "credibility" doesn't hang on me liking the right things. What I really want is to enjoy as many things as possible because that means I'll spend more of my time being happy.That's not to say that I think everything is good. I go into everything wanting to enjoy myself, but sometimes I just don't, and that's okay. My movie review thread is full of films that I just didn't enjoy. Sure, it's more fun to write negative reviews, but I'm still bummed that I didn't have a good experience, and I'm jealous of people who did enjoy their time.
·birchtree.me·
Liking the "Right Things"
The Gap
The Gap
Designers move from idea to a wireframe, a prototype, a logo, or even just a drawing. Developers move from a problem or feature to a coded solution that is solved and released. Both are creative, both are in aid of the end-user. The Design Engineer role is also creative and authors code but systematically translates a design towards implementation in a structured way.  I have never worked anywhere where there wasn't someone trying to close the gap. This role is often filled in accidentally, and companies are totally unaware of the need. Recruiters have never heard of it, and IT consultancies don't have the capability in their roster. We now name the role "Design Engineer" because the gap is widening, and the role has become too complex to not exist.
·linkedin.com·
The Gap
Pessimists Archive
Pessimists Archive

Pessimists Archive™ is a project to educate people on and archive the history of technophobia and moral panics. We believe the best antidote to fear of the new is looking back at fear of the old.

Only by looking back at fears of old things when they were new, can we have rational constructive debates about emerging technologies today that avoids the pitfalls of moral panic and incumbent protectionism.

Pessimists Archive™ is a project to educate people on and archive the history of technophobia and moral panics. We believe the best antidote to fear of the new is looking back at fear of the old.Only by looking back at fears of old things when they were new, can we have rational constructive debates about emerging technologies today that avoids the pitfalls of moral panic and incumbent protectionism.
·pessimistsarchive.org·
Pessimists Archive
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz
What is the testable hypothesis? What would falsify the hypothesis? How do we know when we are getting into a danger zone? These questions go mainly unanswered apart from “You can’t prove it won’t happen!” In fact, these Baptists’ position is so non-scientific and so extreme – a conspiracy theory about math and code – and is already calling for physical violence, that I will do something I would normally not do and question their motives as well.
·a16z.com·
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz
Netflix, Shein and MrBeast — Benedict Evans
Netflix, Shein and MrBeast — Benedict Evans
both Netflix and Shein realised that you can make far more SKUs if you’re not constrained by physical inventory - the time slots on linear TV and the store rooms of physical retail.
If you don’t need thousands of physical stores, then you can turn over the product range much faster and reach new customers much more quickly - and so Shein is now bigger than H&M and on track to pass Inditex.
Of course, the fundamental TV question is ‘what’s your budget?’ There’s a circular relationship: a given budget means a given quality and quantity of content, which, combined with your CAC, means a given audience, which means a given level of revenue and a given budget. There is no network effect in TV, and going to Hollywood with the world’s best software and $5 will get you a latte.
While it is true that a popular TV show can attract more viewers and potentially drive subscriptions, there is no guarantee of this happening
YouTube doesn’t buy LA stuff from LA people - it runs a network, and the questions are Silicon Valley questions. YouTube, in both the network and the kinds of content, is a much bigger change to ‘TV’ than Netflix. It’s ‘video’, but it’s also ‘time spent’ and it competes with Netflix and TV but also with Instagram and TikTok (it does puzzle me that people focus on competition between Instagram and TikTok when the form overlaps at least as much with YouTube). And YouTube doesn’t really buy shows or buy users - it pays a revenue share.
Business model comparison between Netflix and YouTube
Netflix can indeed make TV shows as well as any legacy TV company, but did Disney make software that’s as good as Netflix? It didn’t have to. It just had to make software that’s good enough, because ‘software’ questions are not the point of leverage. But I don’t see any media companies competing with YouTube or TikTok, where software is the point of leverage - at least, not recently.
·ben-evans.com·
Netflix, Shein and MrBeast — Benedict Evans
Vision Pro — Benedict Evans
Vision Pro — Benedict Evans
Meta, today, has roughly the right price and is working forward to the right device: Apple has started with the right device and will work back to the right price. Meta is trying to catalyse an ecosystem while we wait for the right hardware - Apple is trying to catalyse an ecosystem while we wait for the right price.
one of the things I wondered before the event was how Apple would show a 3D experience in 2D. Meta shows either screenshots from within the system (with the low visual quality inherent in the spec you can make and sell for $500) or shots of someone wearing the headset and grinning - neither are satisfactory. Apple shows the person in the room, with the virtual stuff as though it was really there, because it looks as though it is.
For Meta, the device places you in ‘the metaverse’ and there could be many experiences within that. For Apple, this device itself doesn’t take you anywhere - it’s a screen and there could be five different ‘metaverse’ apps. This iPhone was a piece of glass that could be anything - this is trying to be a piece of glass that can show anything.
A lot of what Apple shows is possibility and experiment - it could be this, this or that, just as when Apple launched the watch it suggested it as fitness, social or fashion, and it turn out to work best for fitness (and is now a huge business).
Mark Zuckerberg, speaking to a Meta all-hands after Apple’s event, made the perfectly reasonable point that Apple hasn’t shown much that no-one had thought of before - there’s no ‘magic’ invention. Everyone already knows we need better screens, eye-tracking and hand-tracking, in a thin and light device.
It’s worth remembering that Meta isn’t in this to make a games device, nor really to sell devices per se - rather, the thesis is that if VR is the next platform, Meta has to make sure it isn’t controlled by a platform owner who can screw them, as Apple did with IDFA in 2021.
On the other hand, the Vision Pro is an argument that current devices just aren’t good enough to break out of the enthusiast and gaming market, incremental improvement isn’t good enough either, and you need a step change in capability.
Apple’s privacy positioning, of course, has new strategic value now that it’s selling a device you wear that’s covered in cameras
the genesis of the current wave of VR was the realisation a decade ago that the VR concepts of the 1990s would work now, and with nothing more than off-the-shelf smartphone components and gaming PCs, plus a bit more work. But ‘a bit more work’ turned out to be thirty or forty billion dollars from Meta and God only knows how much more from Apple - something over $100bn combined, almost certainly.
So it might be that a wearable screen of any kind, no matter how good, is just a staging post - the summit of a foothill on the way to the top of Everest. Maybe the real Reality device is glasses, or contact lenses projecting onto your retina, or some kind of neural connection, all of which might be a decade or decades away again, and the piece of glass in our pocket remains the right device all the way through.
I think the price and the challenge of category creation are tightly connected. Apple has decided that the capabilities of the Vision Pro are the minimum viable product - that it just isn’t worth making or selling a device without a screen so good you can’t see the pixels, pass-through where you can’t see any lag, perfect eye-tracking and perfect hand-tracking. Of course the rest of the industry would like to do that, and will in due course, but Apple has decided you must do that.
For VR, better screens are merely better, but for AR Apple thinks this this level of display system is a base below which you don’t have a product at all.
For Meta, the device places you in ‘the metaverse’ and there could be many experiences within that. For Apple, this device itself doesn’t take you anywhere - it’s a screen and there could be five different ‘metaverse’ apps. The iPhone was a piece of glass that could be anything - this is trying to be a piece of glass that can show anything.
This reminds me a little of when Meta tried to make a phone, and then a Home Screen for a phone, and Mark Zuckerberg said “your phone should be about people.” I thought “no, this is a computer, and there are many apps, some of which are about people and some of which are not.” Indeed there’s also an echo of telco thinking: on a feature phone, ‘internet stuff’ was one or two icons on your portable telephone, but on the iPhone the entire telephone was just one icon on your computer. On a Vision Pro, the ‘Meta Metaverse’ is one app amongst many. You have many apps and panels, which could be 2D or 3D, or could be spaces.
·ben-evans.com·
Vision Pro — Benedict Evans