shhhhhhhhhhh
“Peace. Stillness. Silence. Some seek such perfect moments through meditation, treks in the wilderness, or sessions in an isolation tank...or even a lucky few who hold desk jobs at the BBC~ but they’re raising the alarm against the sounds of silence. “pin-drop syndrome” was uncovered last fall in the BBC accounting offices and is gaining ground as the latest mental disturbance in corporate culture. With hermetically sealed buildings, soundless technology, and aggressively boring workloads, some white-collar workers are finding office hubbub dropping to 20 decibels. It’s a level several sound experts have labeled “tranquility.” But silence equals death, as the old saying goes, so the BBC is taking necessary steps. Borrowing from Japanese innovation, the broadcaster will spend approx $4000.00 on “mutter machines” to replicate watercooler chatter and even outbursts of laughter~ presumably laughing with and not at the accountants. “{the machines} will play mutter which is a level of speech that is indistinguishable so that you don’t know what they are actually talking about,” says a BBC spokesman. “it’s low level and it works.” Ahhhhhh technology…bringing humanity to the workplace.”
~James MacKinnon
Posted by jeff at September 15, 2003 11:23 PM
....................................
where is this quote taken from?
Posted by: Dave at September 16, 2003 12:20 AM
This makes me think of Kubrick, in that silence in and of itself can be horrible at times. It seems that it would be a by-product of technology, ie; less paper to shuffle, quiet keyboards, voicemail, email. One can seemingly produce work without sound. Thank goodness for music.
Posted by: ChinRingDingO at September 16, 2003 08:49 AM
"aggressively boring".......I don't know if I hate or love that word combo.
Posted by: Trex at September 16, 2003 08:53 AM
I like it 'cause I realize now that this site has become agressively boring. Pitcher I leave you and your ilk to your intellectual hand jobs. I'll stop in once in a while to raise hell if you type anything out of turn. Just remember you have me to thank for the unprededented 52 posts. You couldn't do it on your own.
John Rensing :)
Posted by: John Rensing at September 16, 2003 06:19 PM
An aside from a previous debate now that the fire has left the building.
New York Schools Get $51.2 Million From Gates
In the largest single private donation ever to benefit the New York City public schools, Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, announced $51.2 million in grants today to create small public high schools.
The gift, from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, will be directed to seven nonprofit groups to create 67 theme-based schools as part of a continuing effort by the city to break up large, failing high schools in favor of programs with fewer than 500 students.
At a ceremony this morning at Morris High School in the Bronx, Mr. Gates awkwardly shared the stage with an old nemesis, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein, a former federal prosecutor who led the government's antitrust prosecution of Microsoft.
"I'm glad we're working on the same team," Mr. Gates said, drawing laughs, after being asked about his previous dealings with Mr. Klein.
The Gates Foundation gift will aid a wider effort by the city to create at least 200 small schools, most at the high school level, and to reduce the number of huge schools with thousands of students, many of which are failing and have extremely high dropout rates.
Aides to Mr. Klein said they hoped to align the creation of the new schools with other efforts to overhaul the system by assigning graduates of the city's new Leadership Academy to be principals of the small schools.
"Small high schools are a concept that has been proven to work," Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said at the ceremony. "Students at these small high schools have lower dropout rates than students in larger high schools. Also more of them get passing grades, more of them graduate and more of them go to college. That's wonderful and what we are trying to do is replicate that success and make it available to more kids."
The largest chunk of money, $29.2 million, will go to New Visions for Public Schools, a New York group that has championed the small-school model and previously worked with the Gates Foundation to create 36 schools that opened in the last two years. New Visions will create 30 new schools in New York.
Posted by: t at September 17, 2003 04:28 PM
TAKE IT EASY ON THE TOFU ALL YOU VEGETARIANS. YOUR KILLING THE RAINFOREST!
Relentless Foe of the Amazon Jungle: Soybeans
UIABÁ, Brazil — It takes only a trip on the busy but rutted highway that leads north from here to understand how an area of the Amazon jungle larger than New Jersey could have been razed over the course of just a year.
Where the jungle once offered shelter to parrots and deer, the land is now increasingly being cleared for soybeans, Brazil's hottest cash crop.
Soy cultivation is booming, driven by a coincidence of global demand from as far off as China and the local politics of state where the new governor was known as the Soybean King even before his election last October.
Today soybeans are eating up larger and larger chunks of the Amazon, leading to a 40 percent jump in deforestation last year, to nearly 10,000 square miles. Even the pastures where cows grazed until recently are being converted, pushing a cattle herd that has become the world's largest even deeper into the agricultural frontier.
"The new factor in the equation of Amazon deforestation is clearly soybeans and the appeal they hold for agribusiness," Stephan Schwartzmann, director of the Washington-based group Environmental Defense, said after a visit to the region in July.
A dry season that was unusually parched also appears to have figured in the surge in deforestation from August 2001 to July 2002, according to the country's National Institute for Space Research. So did a certain laxness in law enforcement, traditional during an election year, and a weak currency that made farming for export especially attractive, analysts have suggested.
But experts are unanimous in warning that as soybean farming continues to spread through the adjacent southern Amazon states of Mato Grosso and Pará, the threat to the Amazon ecological system is likely to worsen in the next few years.
Environmental groups had hoped that Brazil's left-wing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, would take steps to combat deforestation. But Mr. da Silva has instead emphasized increasing agricultural production to swell exports and feed the urban poor, a position that has earned him criticism even from allies.
"The Amazon is not untouchable," Mr. da Silva said during a visit to the region in July. That view is strongly supported by Blairo Maggi, the new governor here in the state of Mato Grosso, who has repeatedly dismissed any concerns about deforestation.
Mr. Maggi, elected last year as the candidate of the Popular Socialist Party, and his family own one of Brazil's largest soy producers, transporters and exporters. The Soybean King, as the Brazilian press is fond of calling him, advocates soybeans as an engine of growth and development in the Amazon.
In fact, Mr. Maggi has called for nearly tripling the area planted with soybeans during the next decade in Mato Grosso, whose name means dense jungle. His own company, Grupo Maggi, announced early this year that it intended to double the area it has in production.
"To me, a 40 percent increase in deforestation doesn't mean anything at all, and I don't feel the slightest guilt over what we are doing here," Mr. Maggi said in an interview at his office here in Cuiabá, the capital of Mato Grosso. "We're talking about an area larger than Europe that has barely been touched, so there is nothing at all to get worried about."
Economists say that the main spur to the soybean boom is the emergence of a middle class in China, much of whose newly disposable income has been spent on a richer, more varied diet. During the past decade, China has been transformed from a net exporter of soybeans to the world's largest importer in some years of whole soybeans as well as oil and meal byproducts.
At the same time, the recent outbreak of mad cow disease in Europe has led to a sharp shift away from using ground-up animal body parts in feed, further increasing demand for soy protein for cattle and pigs.
Initially, the planting was focused in savanna in the area that the Brazilian government defines as Legal Amazonia, but which is not truly forest. But as soy prices rise, producers are pushing northward into the heart of the Amazon, especially along the 1,100-mile highway called BR163, which links this city to the Amazon port of Santarém.
Posted by: t at September 17, 2003 04:34 PM
you are so goddamn boring t. I wish you'd stop taking your meds and let rensing out to play.
Posted by: Trex at September 18, 2003 09:06 AM
I'm boring?!
This site is goddamn boring!
How dare you!
And if I knew where the JR was I would drag him out here to open a can of HammerTime on all you pasty white vegans!
Sincerely,
T
Posted by: t at September 18, 2003 11:40 AM
I'm sorry. I must be on the wrong website. But who are you people? Why are you so fucking hostile? When was the last time you came out from behind your monitors and supported the music of the people who created this website? Jefferson, Christina, Ron, Mie, thank you.
Posted by: Summer at September 18, 2003 02:09 PM
It's in jest, Summer, relax.
We're all friends here, right?
By the way, I never come out from behind my monitor. I'm the one at the show hiding in the corner behind the 20 in. CRT.
And Summer, you might want to walk around the site more often because Mie is Mie-ssing in Action.
lovingly,
t
p.s. would you like to cut off a piece of my outfit. It will bring peace to the world. I swear.
Posted by: t at September 18, 2003 02:40 PM
That bit on the soybeans is interesting to me. Afterall, all the hemp wearing nut eaters of the world are so sure that they're doing something so much better than the blood crazed meat eaters. It's nice (and distressing) to find that they're just as fucked up as the opposing camp. As a friend's bumper sticker once said: "Save the world...KILL YOURSELF."
I think it's essentially a problem of short sidedness. The problem isn't meat or vegetables; the problem is that there's just too much of this one particular animal species on this planet. I am told that in Mexico City you must register your car and your car is then assigned certain days of the week it can be driven. The other days, people MUST carpool or use public transportation. The workaround is that people save up and buy an additional car, hoping that they can get it cleared for the off days, or beg borrow or steal a car already cleared to be driven on their 1st car's off days. Again, shortsightedness.
I hope you've all clicked on the link in Jeff's post that leads to the throat-rippped hummingbird. The world is more brutal than we think and as much as we might polish it it's still going to grab us by the throat sometimes.
Back to my granola and bacon. (I never could make up my mind about such things.)
Posted by: Christian Kiefer at September 19, 2003 02:41 PM
