("JP")

While in theory the notion of Quality might appear rather philosophical and idealistic, in practice it could not be more pragmatic. One can think of Quality as simply the highest -leverage input into a system. F or illustrative purposes we could envision a continuum of layers starting with a company’s high -level outputs: financial figures and key ... See more

Why are rising labor costs expressed as less detail/ornamentation? Some kinds of activities — performing a string quartet is the canonical example — just intrinsically require a certain amount of labor. No amount of economic growth will alter the fact that it takes four musicians about 15 minutes each to play Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge. But why does i... See more

Not DJ Kool Herc. Not The Sugarhill Gang. Not Crazy Legs. Not even Cornbread. The true father of hip-hop is Moses. The tyrannical, mercilessly efficient head of several New York City public works organizations, Robert Moses, did more in his fifty-year tenure to shape the physical and cultural conditions required for hip-hop’s birth than any other f... See more

This is why I feel like people who are less cerebral and less aware of all of the ways in which they are imperfect, they just blast past everyone else. Because they're just doing things. And they get better so much quicker. So I think that's a message I want to give to the world. You're good to go. Just start doing things.

Fission-fusion societies are defined by a variety of these fission-fusion dynamics, also known as merge and split dynamics. It’s fascinating to think about how these dynamics translate to digital native or hybrid online communities — and how digital tools, products, and platforms can allow fission and fusion to occur.

Where do we see fission & f... See more

In the fall of 1970, the Black feminist poet, teacher, and activist June Jordan traveled to Italy as a Rome Prize recipient in the category of Environmental Design ( We’re On 153).1 She was awarded the prize for work that grew out of her collaboration with the architect R. Buckminster Fuller. Jordan’s connection with Fuller began in 1964, when Jord... See more

Taste is easily defined as the ability to discriminate between the valuable and the expandable. It’s another word for Good Judgment. When you decide whether to eat sushi or calamari for dinner, you're in fact erecting a hierarchy of value, and passing judgment according to said hierarchy. If you choose sushi, that is because you've deemed it best f... See more

And worst of all, we’ve lost sight of the most salient part about computers: their malleability. We’ve acquiesced the creation of our virtual worlds, where we now spend most of our time, to the select few who can spend the millions to hire enough software engineers. So many of the photons that hit our eyes come from purely fungible pixels, yet for ... See more