From 06dee920237e1cf8e8641a0266cbf70feb2fb487 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Silvio Rhatto <rhatto@riseup.net>
Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2018 19:30:18 -0300
Subject: [PATCH] Misc update
---
.../psicologia/psychology-of-intelligence.md | 6 +
books/sociedade/age-of-the-smart-machine.md | 322 ++++++++++++++++++
research/radio.md | 2 +
research/readers.md | 4 +-
4 files changed, 332 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
diff --git a/books/psicologia/psychology-of-intelligence.md b/books/psicologia/psychology-of-intelligence.md
index 6831b08..be516af 100644
--- a/books/psicologia/psychology-of-intelligence.md
+++ b/books/psicologia/psychology-of-intelligence.md
@@ -44,6 +44,12 @@ is a state of constant looping in a given theme.
* Habit: beyond short and rapidly automatised connections between per-
ceptions and responses (habit) (127).
+* How the whole body is seem according to his theory? There's a movement (sic)
+ where intelligence raises from the sensori-motor to the mind, but can we
+ consider the other way as well, about what's conceived by abstract thought
+ be then used as a source of sensori-motor intelligence? I guess so, but wonder
+ how that could be articulated in Piaget's theory.
+
## Intelligence and equilibrium
Then, if intelligence is thus conceived as the form of equilibrium towards
diff --git a/books/sociedade/age-of-the-smart-machine.md b/books/sociedade/age-of-the-smart-machine.md
index 8e25ce0..953d22d 100644
--- a/books/sociedade/age-of-the-smart-machine.md
+++ b/books/sociedade/age-of-the-smart-machine.md
@@ -13,6 +13,13 @@
As a result, they relied on skilled fitters to assemble each product.", 39.
* Continous Process as a possible way to break the effort-skill body paradox and the U-curve
of social integration, 50-56
+* Transition from oral communication to written communication (pages 77, 100);
+ it's followed by a transition where calculations were transferred from mental
+ operations to calculating machines.
+* Characteristics of action-centered skills, 106.
+* Typewriters, 115.
+* Feminization of clerical work, 116-117.
+* Secretaries: _dedicated_ (acting as buffers, sorters and organizers) versus _pool_ modes (treated as input-output devices), 122-123.
## Impressions
@@ -494,3 +501,318 @@ intellectual work, it still does not free workers from fatigue. It just put it
in a different framework: mental exhaustion and
[burn-out](/books/sociedade/burnout-society). Only dead, abstracted "work"
won't lead tiredness. But then it won't be work anymore.
+
+### Evolution of white-collar work
+
+ The evolution of white-collar work has followed a historical path
+ that is in many ways the precise opposite of that taken by blue-collar
+ work. Manufacturing has its roots in the work of skilled craft. In most
+ cases, that work was successively gutted of the elements that made it
+ skillful-leaving behind jobs that were simplified and routinized. An
+ examination of work at the various levels of the management hierarchy
+ reveals a different process. Elements of managerial work most easily
+ subjected to rationalization were "carved out" of the manager's activit-
+ ies. The foundational example of this process is the rationalization of
+ executive work, which was accomplished by ejecting those elements
+ that could be explicated and systematized, preserving intact the skills
+ that comprise executive craft. It was the carving out of such elements
+ that created the array of functions we now associate with middle man-
+ agement. A similar process accounts for the origins of clerical work. In
+ each case, the most easily rationalized features of the activities at one
+ level were carved out, pushed downward, and used to create wholly
+ new lower-level jobs. In this process, higher-level positions were not
+ eliminated; on the contrary, they came to be seen more than ever as
+ the depository of the organization's skills.
+
+ [...]
+
+ White-collar employees used their bodies, too, but
+ in the service of actino-with, for interpersonal communication and coor-
+ dination. It was not until the intensive introduction of office machinery,
+ and with it scientific management, that this distinct orientation was
+ challenged. During this period, an effort was made to invent a new kind
+ of clerical work-work that more closely resembled the laboring body
+ continually actino-on the inanimate objects, paper and equipment, that
+ were coming to define modern office work. Automation in the factory
+ had diverse effects, frequently limiting human effort and physical
+ suffering, though sometimes exacerbating it. But the discontinuity in
+ the nature of clerical work introduced with office machinery, together
+ with the application of Tayloristic forms of work organization, did
+ much to increase the physical suffering of the clerk. While it remained
+ possible to keep a white collar clean, the clerk's position was severed
+ from its earlier responsibilities of social coordination and was con-
+ verted instead to an emphasis on regularity of physical effort and mental
+ concentration.
+
+ -- 98
+
+ Many successful merchants and entre-
+ preneurs were well known for the speed of their mental calculations,
+ and Eaton's how-to book provides a chapter on tricks and shortcuts to
+ aid in rapid mental arithmetic. 6 Owner-managers frequently sur-
+ rounded themselves with sons, nephews, and cousins-a move that fa-
+ cilitated oral communication through shared meaning and context and
+ eased the pressure for written documentation. 7
+
+ [...]
+
+ Detailed empirical studies of modern executives' work, several of
+ which have been published over the last thirty years, are greeted with
+ the curiosity and fascination usually reserved for anthropological ac-
+ counts of obscure primitive societies. It is as if these researchers had
+ brought back accounts from an organizational region that is concealed
+ from observation and protected from rational analysis. Perhaps this
+ sense of mystery surrounds top management activities because they
+ derive from a set of skills that are embedded in individual action, in
+ much the same way as those of the craftsperson. In both cases, skilled
+ performance is characterized by sentient participation, contextuality,
+ action-dependence, and personalism.
+
+ What is different is that the craftsperson used action-centered skills
+ in the service of actino-on materials and equipment, while the top man-
+ ager's action-centered skills are applied in the service of actino-with.
+ Like the seventeenth-century courtier, the top manager uses his or her
+ bodily presence as an instrument of interpersonal power, influence,
+ learning, and communication. The know-how that is developed in the
+ course of managerial experience in actino-with remains largely implicit:
+ managers themselves have difficulty describing what they do. Only the
+ cleverest research can translate such embedded practice into expli-
+ cated material suitable for analysis and discussion.
+
+ [...]
+
+ "The process is the sensing of the organization as a whole and the total
+ situation relevant to it. It transcends the capacity of merely intellectual
+ methods, and the techniques of discriminating the factors of the situa-
+ tion. The terms pertinent to it are 'feeling,' 'judgment,' 'sense,' 'pro-
+ portion,' 'balance,' 'appropriateness.' It is a matter of art rather than
+ science, and is aesthetic rather than logical. For this reason it is recog-
+ nized rather than described and is known by its effects rather than by
+ analysis. ,,8
+
+ -- 100-101
+
+ Kotter stresses the implicit quality of the general managers' knowledge,
+ noting that their agendas tended to be informal, nonquantitative, mental road
+ maps highly related to "people" issues, rather than systematic, formal planning
+ documents.
+
+ -- 102
+
+ Daniel Isenberg's research on "how senior managers think" has pen-
+ etrated another layer of this, usually inarticulate, domain of executive
+ management. 12 Isenberg found that top managers think in ways that are
+ highly "intuitive" and integrated with action. 13 He concluded that the
+ intuitive nature of executive behavior results from the inseparability of
+ their thinking from their actions: "Since managers often 'know' what
+ is right before they can analyze and explain it, they frequently act first
+ and think later. Thinking is inextricably tied to action. . . . Managers
+ develop thought about their companies and organizations not by ana-
+ lyzing a problematic situation and then acting, but by thinking and
+ acting in close concert.,,14 One manager described his own immersion
+ in the action cycle: "It's as if your arms, your feet, and your body just
+ move instinctively. You have a preoccupation with working capital, a
+ preoccupation with capital expenditure, a preoccupation with people
+ . . . and all this goes so fast that you don't even know whether it's
+ completely rational, or it's part rational, part intuitive. 15
+
+ [...]
+
+ Kanter con-
+ cluded that the manager's ability to "win acceptance" and to communi-
+ cate was often more important than any substantive knowledge of the
+ business. The feelings of comfort, efficiency, and trust that come with
+ such shared meaning are triggered in a variety of ways by the manager's
+ comportment. The nuances of nonverbal behavior and the signals em-
+ bedded in physical appearance are an important aspect of such group
+ participation. Because the tasks at the highest levels of the corporation
+ are the most ambiguous, senior executives come to rely most heavily
+ on the communicative ease that results from this shared intuitive world.
+
+ -- 103
+
+ Top managers' days and nights are filled to the breaking point with a myriad of
+ activities, contacts, events, discussions, and meetings, which tend to be
+ brief, rapid, and fragmented. Many students of managerial activity have
+ proposed ways
+
+ -- 105
+
+ "Today the manager is the real data bank. . . . Unfortunately he is a
+ walking and a talking data bank, but not a writing one. When he is busy,
+ information ceases to flow. When he departs, so does the data bank.,,28 Lodged
+ in the body and dependent upon presence and active display, the implicit heart
+ of the executive's special genius appears to evade rationalization.
+
+ -- 106-107
+
+That's brilliant:
+
+ In the case of executive activity, those elements most accessible
+ to explication, and therefore rationalization, were carved out of the
+ executive's immediate domain of concern. These more analytical or
+ routine activities were projected into the functions of middle manage-
+ ment, just as those functions were also absorbing new responsibilities
+ for planning and coordination that had resulted from systematic analy-
+ sis of the production process. Thus, the activities that made the execu-
+ tive most special, based on action-centered skill, were left intact, while
+ the more explicit and even routine aspects of executive responsibilities
+ were pushed downward and materialized in a variety of middle-
+ management functions. This contrasts with the case of craft workers,
+ in which the action-centered skills that had made them so special were
+ resealched, systematized, and expropriated upward. To put it bluntly,
+ workers lost what was best in their jobs, the body as skill in the service
+ of actin8-on, while executives lost what was worst in their jobs, retaining
+ full enjoyment of the skilled body as an instrument of actin8-with.
+
+ -- 107-108
+
+In other words, automation and the robotization of the body that follows flows
+downward in that particular kink of enterprise -- capitalist business and other
+hierachical type of organizations with information-based management. From
+_action with_ to _acting on_ (page 119).
+
+Intelligence is extracted from the worked, deskilled, automated and robotized.
+From oral to written communication, from her memory to a memory bank of some
+sort. From her artisan skills of interpersonal relationships to standardized
+procedures. In a movement downward the hierarchy.
+
+How that phenomemon predates or is contemporanean to cybernetic-inspired
+corporate management?
+
+Also, today we see a discourse on replacing even top management with A/I
+working according to "smartcontracts", which might be an assymptotic
+ideological consequence of automating things downward, but that might be proved
+wrong if we consider that there's no way these organizations could work without
+any craftsmanship at it's top.
+
+Sounds like if there's no way to fully automated a capitalist bussiness or
+government body, even replacing it's management but at the same time there's
+an urge to do just that. The net effect is an overconcentration of power
+to an ever-diminishing managerial elite.
+
+If more value is given to non-automated work, then this overconcentration
+is directly related to wealth concentration.
+
+I guess this whole mainstream discourse on automation is entirelly flawed.
+It separates mind and body, hates the body, want it automated, a slave of the mind
+enslaved in a dellusion to free itself even more as the mind is considered a slave
+of the brain, it's material support.
+
+The next step after the creation of middle-management was it's removal from
+the organization by downsizing/delayering/outsourcing which happened after
+this book was published.
+
+ In 1925, the same year that Mary Parker Follett made her speech
+ exhorting managers to become more scientific, William Henry
+ Leffingwell published his well-known text, Office Mana8ement: Principles
+ and Practice, which he dedicated to the Taylor Society in appreciation
+ of its "inspirational and educational influence." Leffingwell presented
+ a copy of his book to Carl Barth, one of Taylor's best-known disciples.
+ That copy bore the following inscription: "It is with deep appreciation
+ of the honor of knowing one of management's greatest minds that I sit
+ at your feet and sign my name." Leffingwell was obsessed with the
+ notion of bringing rational discipline to the office in much the same
+ way that Taylor and his men were attempting to transform the shop
+ floor. Though his was not the only treatise on the subject, it quickly
+ became one of the most influential. 56 In an earlier work, published in
+ 1 91 7, Leffingwell had discussed "mechanical applications of the princi-
+ ples of scientific management to the office." His new text was written
+ to address the need for "original thought" concerning the fundamental
+ principles of his discipline and their relationship to office management.
+ Leffingwell summed up the message of his book with one sentence:
+ "In a word, the aim of this new conception of office management is
+ simplification. "
+
+ [...]
+
+ The overwhelming purpose of Leffingwell's approach to simplifica-
+ tion was to fill the clerical workday with activities that were linked
+ to a concrete task and to eliminate time spent on coordination and
+ communication. This concern runs through almost every chapter of his
+ 850-page text; it is revealed most prominently in his minutely detailed
+ discussions of the physical arrangement of the office and in his views
+ on the organization, flow, planning, measurement, and control of office
+ work.
+
+ Leffingwell advocated what he called "the straight-line flow of
+ work" as the chief method by which to eliminate any requirement for
+ communication or coordination. The ideal condition, he said, was that
+ desks should be so arranged that work could be passed from one to the
+ other "without the necessity of the clerk even rising from his seat. . .
+
+ [...]
+
+ . . . Routine. . . tends to reduce communication. ,,58 Layout,
+ standardization of methods, a well-organized messenger service, desk
+ correspondence distributors, reliance on written instructions, delivery
+ bags, pneumatic tubes, elevators, automatic conveyors, belt conveyors,
+ cables, telautographs, telephones, phonographs, buzzers, bells, and
+ horns-these were just some of the means Leffingwell advocated in
+ order to insulate the clerk from extensive communicative demands.
+
+ -- 117-119
+
+Mind how such changes of reducing interpersonal communication, despite
+raising production efficiency, also reduces worker self-organizing capacity
+and class awareness.
+
+ The requirements of actino-on associated with these new clerical jobs
+ demanded more from the body as a source of effort than from skilled
+ action or intellective competence. It is only at this stage, and in the
+ context of this discontinuity, that the fate of the clerical job can be
+ fruitfully compared to that of skilled work in industry.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Frequently, the jobs that were created had the
+ effect of driving office workers into the role of laboring bodies, en-
+ gulfing them in the private sentience of physical effort. Complaints
+ about these jobs became complaints about bodies in pain. In 1 960 the
+ International Labour Organization published a lengthy study of mecha-
+ nization and automation in the office.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Clerks complained of being "treated like trained animals" because of the
+ "uniformity and excessive simplification of the work of many machine
+ operators."
+
+ -- 119-120
+
+Another form of [labor camp](/books/historia/ibm-holocaust), it's mirror image:
+
+ "Tabulat- ing machine operators, for instance, even when the controls are set
+ for them and an automatic device stops the machine when something goes wrong,
+ cannot let their attention flag. . . . The strain of this kind of close
+ attentiveness to a repetitive operation has resulted in a rIsIng number of
+ cases of mental and nervous disorders among clerical work- ers . . . physical
+ and intellectual debility; disturbances of an emotional nature such as
+ irritability, nervousness, hypersensitivity; insomnia; vari- ous functional
+ disturbances-headaches, digestive and heart troubles; state of depression, etc.
+ ,,61
+
+ -- 120-121
+
+ The Office, featured an article in 1 969 by the director
+ of a New Jersey industrial engineering firm who said: "We know from
+ our company's studies that manpower utilization in most offices-even
+ those that are subject to work measurement controls-rarely exceeds
+ 60%. In some operations the percentage of utilization may fall below
+ 40%. At least 17% of the time, employees are literally doing nothing
+ except walking around or talking. . . . While many companies have
+ squeezed out much of the excess labor costs in their production opera-
+ tions, only a few have given serious attention to the so called indirect
+ labor or service operations. ,,62
+
+ [...]
+
+ "Clerical jobs are mea- sured just like factory jobs.
+
+ Clerical costs can be controlled on
+ any routine, Le., repetitive or semi-repetitive work. Non-repetitive
+ tasks, such as research and development, cannot be economically mea-
+ sured. Similarly, jobs such as receptionists, confidential secretaries,
+ etc., do not lend themselves to control. ,,65
+
+ -- 121-122
diff --git a/research/radio.md b/research/radio.md
index d76f34e..bd4d985 100644
--- a/research/radio.md
+++ b/research/radio.md
@@ -4,3 +4,5 @@
* [Transmitting FM, AM, SSB, SSTV and FSQ with just a Raspberry Pi](http://www.rtl-sdr.com/transmitting-fm-am-ssb-sstv-and-fsq-with-just-a-raspberry-pi/).
* [Raspberry PiRate Radio FM Transmitter](http://www.rtl-sdr.com/raspberry-pirate-radio-fm-transmitter/).
* [Transmitting Data with a Raspberry Pi and RTL-SDR](http://www.rtl-sdr.com/transmitting-data-raspberry-pi-rtl-sdr/).
+* [RTL-SDR Tutorial: Analyzing GSM with Airprobe/GR-GSM and Wireshark](https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-tutorial-analyzing-gsm-with-airprobe-and-wireshark/).
+* [Open Security Research: Getting Started with GNU Radio and RTL-SDR (on Backtrack)](http://blog.opensecurityresearch.com/2012/06/getting-started-with-gnu-radio-and-rtl.html).
diff --git a/research/readers.md b/research/readers.md
index 15375a2..fd2f725 100644
--- a/research/readers.md
+++ b/research/readers.md
@@ -35,8 +35,8 @@ Kobo
A partir de uma cópia completa do acervo:
storage="/path/to/complete/doc/repos"
- sudo rsync --size-only -avL --no-p --no-g --no-owner --delete-after --ignore-errors \
- --include='*/' --include='*.pdf' --include='*.epub' --include='*.mobi' --exclude='*' \
+ sudo rsync --size-only -avL --no-p --no-g --no-owner --delete-after --ignore-errors \
+ --include='*/' --include='*.pdf' --include='*.epub' --include='*.mobi' --include='*djvu' --exclude='*' \
$storage/books/ /media/tablet/books/
Notar que usamos:
--
GitLab