Maybe everyone else knew, but I was surprised to learn that the University of Miami has its own Android/IPhone app.
Of course it’s a bloated 10MB monster, but even so. Rumor has it you can use it to check out books from the library, but I haven’t figured out how yet. The map looks useful, but a search for “Architechture School” and “Law School” returned not found.
First impression: Looks slick, but it isn’t very efficient, and it’s not terribly user-friendly. In other words, all very Miami?
The Secret Shopper by Willie Osterweil has a bit too much jarring Marxist jargon for me to feel in tune with it, but it makes some provocative points about the institution of the “Secret Shopper” — the folks hired by management to go to stores and pretend to be customers and then report on the quality of the service.
Stripped of (some of) the cant, the conclusion is that the mystery shoppers are tools of conformity:
Mystery shoppers are miniature thought police, affective pinkertons, mercenary management to whom real management outsources the legwork of everyday psychic control. They are sent in to break the avenues of refusal available to workers, to enforce the arbitrary standards dreamed up by marketers, bureaucrats, and MBAs that so deaden the experience of everyday life under late capitalism. … All just for a little extra cash for the weekend.
Producing identification with the bosses; smashing labor; and making solidarity difficult through contract labor, precarity, and remote working are key features of neoliberal workplace organization. But central to this vision, too, is workplace surveillance. … Heightened workplace surveillance helps build a workplace where no time is wasted, where all effort is put directly into the production of the bosses’ product. But it transforms more than just the bottom line.
The threat of the ever-present spy, the fear that the woman who forgot her ID in the car but swears she’s 18 is actually a scab employed by your boss, means you trust no one, expecting them all to be against you, out to catch you breaking management’s rules, which you now enforce with paranoiac efficiency. Surveillance, ultimately, isn’t about stopping crime. It’s about making police.
I think that even if you are OK with Taylorized service jobs, this critique ties somehow to the importance of privacy in other realms — or the need for concern about the upcoming Dossier Society — more generally. Data is a way to watch you too.
The University of Chicago Press has sent me an unsolicited review copy of Failing Law Schools by Brian Tamanaha, his much-awaited, and already much-discussed, account of what’s wrong with legal education.
My plan is to read it as soon as I get over the current hump of backed-up work, and to blog my reactions. This post is thus not just a thank-you to the Press, but a mild precommittment strategy, since now I’ll be a bit embarrassed if I don’t.
This looks like the sort of internet ‘tax’ you could learn to love:
"Today at Kogan we’ve implemented the world’s first ‘Internet Explorer 7 Tax’. The new 6.8 [per cent] tax comes into effect today on all products purchased from Kogan.com by anyone still insistent on using the antique browser," says a blog post from the firm.
via Kogan implements Internet Explorer 7 tax – The Inquirer, who seem to think it’s copacetic.
Kidding aside, though, this isn’t a true tax since since it’s private, not governmental.
Worse, I wonder if this might lead to a new struggle for market share in which some retailers would offer a discount to users who visit with Chrome, or come from Bing. In the long run, this sort of deal would not work to the advantage of open source projects since they don’t have the deep pockets it would take to run that sort of (wickedly effective?) promotion. I wonder if there would be any anti-trust implications…
The Nation, Why We Should All Root for the Miami Heat, explains the politics behind tomorrow night’s game.
Missing from the story, though, is the extent to which the owners of the Arena may have failed to pay the county what it is owed. An amount that has, it seems, never been calculated, probably with the connivance of local government. See AmericanAirlines Arena audit cites Miami -Dade for poor oversight for more.
While my wife is in Hawaii at the Law & Society conference, I am going to be in Washington DC Thursday and Friday for the 5th Annual Privacy Law Scholars Conference, one of my favorite events of the scholarly year.
PLSC is run by Chris Hoofnagle and Dan Solove, who do a great job. The only bad thing about the event is that every year there are more and more parallel tracks — they are up to EIGHT this year — and I usually want to be be in at least three quarters of them simultaneously. This year I will miss more of the papers then ever before, not only because there are more tracks but because my draft paper, Lessons Learned too Well, was selected (by ballot of the attendees) for the so-called “Encore” track. That means I’ll be one of the six people presenting twice, which is an honor I’m absurdly pleased about. The downside is that because I’ll be presenting a second time, that makes even fewer papers I’ll be able to go to.
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