I confess that I have co-sponsored baby talk among some of my favorite under-fives. Indeed, I was crushed the day one of my nephews explained to his younger brother that my name was not, in fact, Aunt Toasty. Yet as much as I miss the days of serving up hot choplate to my friend's young son, I agree that, by school-age, it is best for children to have learned correct pronunciations (though I would draw the line at calling one's mother his old lady).

community, cultivation and creation, language

Christy:

The child’s language learning, now and later, is governed by two obvious motives: the desire to communicate and the desire to be admired. He imitates what he hears. More or less successful imitations usually bring action and reward and tend to be repeated. Unsuccessful ones usually don’t bring action and reward and tend to be discarded.

But since language is complicated business it is sometimes the unsuccessful imitations that bring the reward. The child, making a stab at the word mother, comes out with muzzer. The family decides that this is just too cute for anything and beams and repeats muzzer, and the child, feeling that he’s scored a bull’s eye, goes on saying muzzer long after he has mastered other and brother. Baby talk is not so much invented by the child as sponsored by the parent.

Eventually the child moves out of the family and into another speech community - other children of his neighborhood. He goes to kindergarten and immediately encounters speech habits that conflict with those he has learned. If he goes to school and talks about his muzzer, it will be borne in on him by his colleagues that the word is not well chosen. Even mother may not pass the muster, and he may discover that he gets better results and is altogether happier if he refers to his female parent as his ma or even his old lady.

Committing to consuming only two-year-old media on two-year-old tech has an advantage beyond reduced prices: I'm guessing there would be a quite helpful filtering effect. A discipline of consuming the not-so-new is still, of course, a discipline of consumption—probably not the best thing to order all one's cultural interactions around.

computers, consumption, horizons of the possible, media, technology and change

Nate:

It seems to me that the best way to instantly raise your standard of living is to live in the past. If you subsist entirely on two-year-old entertainment, and the corresponding two-year-old technology used to power it, you’re cutting your fun budget in half, freeing up that money for more exciting expenditures like parking meters and postage.

The problem is that it’s hard living out of sync with the world around you. Just ask the Amish or Bill Cosby.

A fascinating brief history of the cubicle—and a great reminder that even well-intentioned culture making goes oft astray. The "father of the cubicle" intended to provide a more spacious workplace, but his invention ended up contributing to—in his words—"monolithic insanity." With a little help from the tax code. Oops.

business, changing the world, furniture, offices, unintended consequences

Andy:

Another critical factor in the cubicle’s rapid ascent was Uncle Sam. During the 1960s, to stimulate business spending, the Treasury created new rules for depreciating assets. The changes specified clearer ranges for depreciation and established a shorter life for furniture and equipment, vs. longer ranges assigned to buildings or leasehold improvements. (Today companies can depreciate office furniture in seven years, whereas permanent structures—that is, offices with walls—are assigned a 39.5-year rate.)

The upshot: A company could recover its costs quicker if it purchased cubes. When clients told Herman Miller of that unexpected benefit, it became a new selling point for the Action Office. After only two years on the market, sales soared. Competitors took notice.

That’s when Propst’s original vision began to fade. “They kept shrinking the Action Office until it became a cubicle,” says Schwartz, now 80. As Steelcase, Knoll, and Haworth brought their versions to market, they figured out that what businesses wanted wasn’t to give employees a holistic experience. The customers wanted a cheap way to pack workers in.

Propst’s workstations were designed to be flexible, but in practice they were seldom altered or moved at all. Lined up in identical rows, they became the dystopian world that three academics described as “bright satanic offices” in a 1998 book, Workplaces of the Future.

Designer Douglas Ball, for instance, remembers the first installation of cubicles he created for a Canadian company in 1972. “I thought I’d be excited, but I came out depressed,” says Ball, now 70. “It was Dilbertville. I’d failed to visualize what it would look like when there were so many of them.”

This is from a study published in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. How do I love a journal with a title like that? Let me count the ways ...

canada, cultural worlds, europe, germany, gestures, numbers

Nate:

Nicoladis and colleagues studied one and two-hand counting gestures and cultural differences between Germans and French and English Canadians. While the majority of Germans use their thumb to begin to sequentially count, the majority of Canadians, both French and English, use their index finger as the numerical kick-off point when counting with their hands.

However, Nicoladis noted that some French Canadians also displayed anomalous differences from their Canadian or even their German counterparts.

“They show a lot more variation in what they are willing to use in terms of gestures, suggesting there might be some influence from the European French manner of gesturing (whose gestures are identical to the Germans’), or possibly other cultures too,” she said. “This association suggests that there are some cultural artifacts left over from these older French gestures and that they have been replaced because of the cultural contact with English Canadians.”

The hook for this article write-up—that patterns of email-writing are similar to older patterns of letter-writing—somehow seems less surprising than they make it out to be. The original Science study on which it is based is humbly titled "On Universality in Human Correspondence Activity." Um, how exactly does showing that literate people in Western culture today correspond like famous literate people in Western culture did a few decades or centuries ago tell us that much about "Universality"? If the communiques of Tang Dynasty scholars, Inca string-knotters, and Roman emperors were all shown to look like my outbox, then I'd be a bit more universally impressed.

correspondence, email, horizons of the possible, letters, writing

Nate:

The researchers examined extensive letter correspondence records of 16 famous writers, performers, politicians and scientists, including Einstein, Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Ernest Hemingway, and found that the 16 individuals sent letters randomly but in cycles.

The same mathematical model the Northwestern team used in a previous study to explain e-mail behavior now has been shown to apply to the letter writers. This refutes the rational model, which says that people are driven foremost by responding to others.

No matter what their profession, all the letter writers behaved the same way. They adhered to a circadian cycle; they tended to write a number of letters at one sitting, which is more efficient; and when they wrote had more to do with chance and circumstances than a rational approach of writing the most important letter first.