Mar 29,2013

UP Links 29 March 2013

+ Kari Kohn

Costs of Nairobi’s Informal Housing Sector

A housing issue that is largely seen as a battle between two opponents: Tenants, typically viewed as marginalized and lacking basic rights, versus opportunistic landlords who take advantage of a population desperate for housing.…As is the case with most Nairobi slums, however, the neighborhood exists in a constant state of uncertainty. Consistent sources of income are rare. And while it’s well known that rent agents like Musa will be coming at the end of each month, informal tenants – occupying the space after nothing more than a verbal agreement – sometimes see little reason to hand over what little money they have rather to a man who doesn’t even own their home.

Julian Leyzoala’s Policing Methods in Ciudad Juarez

He then embarked on a campaign seemingly drawn from Community Policing 101, dividing the city up into sectors and instructing his sector chiefs to meet regularly with community leaders to talk about safety concerns. He also empowered his officers to go after any crime they saw, big or small — a radical step in Mexico, where drug trafficking is generally the purview of federal police. He made allies in the state prosecutor’s office, which began trying a higher percentage of murders (still only 11 percent each year, but up from 2 percent before he arrived), and the local business community, which started renovating abandoned buildings and lobbying for federal funding for youth programs and extra security downtown.

Brain Pickings on Viktor Frankl and Meaning

Celebrated Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, born on March 26, 1905, remains best-known for his indispensable 1946 psychological memoir Man’s Search for Meaning (public library) — a meditation on what the gruesome experience of Auschwitz taught him about the primary purpose of life: the quest for meaning, which sustained those who survived.For Frankl, meaning came from three possible sources: purposeful work, love, and courage in the face of difficulty.

Esther Dyson on the Benefits of “Working at Work”

Beyond that, Mayer’s edict makes more sense as a means of cultural change within a business than it does as a way to improve any particular individual’s productivity. Almost precisely because working remotely is easy, the advantage that a workplace has over a collection of home workers – or a set of outsourced workers assembled through Task Rabbit – is that people can accomplish more in a setting that provides a common culture and the benefit of serendipitous connections.Long ago, the advantage of a firm was that it lowered transaction costs (an idea first clearly expressed by the Nobel laureate economist Ronald Coase), such as the costs of finding workers, assigning them to tasks, assessing productivity, and setting salaries. Now that transaction costs are so low, the primary benefit of working at work is that the physical interactions foster an organizational culture and boost creativity, rather than efficiency or productivity, within an established routine. Mayer, I think, did not order her employees back to the office merely because some people were not actually working at home; rather, many of those who were working were not working together.

Review of Henry Hitchings’, “The English and Their Manners”

Mannerly behaviour in England, according to Hitchings, emerges from the moral teaching of the Christian church, develops in the monasteries, spreads throughout society through the dissemination of books and pamphlets, and gradually becomes codified over the course of hundreds of years, until finally we’re all familiar with certain “acts or gestures of avoidance and restraint” that signify good behaviour – like, not blowing your nose in your hand.