You could imagine a world in which more workers become independent contractors voluntarily, trading the social insurance functions of traditional employers for higher pay and greater flexibility ..
.. The unemployment rate was above 7 percent for nearly half of the period, from the end of 2008 to late 2013. Employers had the upper hand. That suggests it’s more likely that employers were driving the shift to these alternate arrangements.
.. When people working as a team need extensive experience working together, it can be tricky to contract out the work. But when there are clear, simple measurements of how successful each person is, and a company can monitor it, the employer now has flexibility.
.. “New technologies may allow some things to be shipped out and standardized and easily monitored,” Mr. Katz said. “Call center workers can be at home. Independent truck drivers can be monitored for the efficiency of their routes. Monitoring makes contracting more feasible.”
.. But the same technologies that made it possible could be making employers more interested in building a work force of nonemployees. A weak job market has probably given them more ability to make it a reality.
Why Do So Many Digital Assistants Have Feminine Names?
Hey Cortana. Hey Siri. Hey girl.
The simplest explanation is that people are conditioned to expect women, not men, to be in administrative roles—and that the makers of digital assistants are influenced by these social expectations. But maybe there’s more to it.
“It’s much easier to find a female voice that everyone likes than a male voice that everyone likes,” the Stanford communications professor Clifford Nass, told CNNin 2011. (Nass died in 2013.) “It’s a well-established phenomenon that the human brain is developed to like female voices.”
Which sounds nice, but doesn’t necessarily hold up to cultural scrutiny. Just ask any woman who works in radio about how much unsolicited criticism she receives about the way she talks.
.. It’s been widely reported that the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs didn’t like the name Siri, but that no one at Apple could agree on anything better. (Perhaps I should note here that Siri doesn’t always default to a female-sounding voice; if you switch Siri’s language to United Kingdom English, for instance, it switches to male.)
.. Google’s digital assistant doesn’t have a woman’s name, or even a human’s name, but OK Google, as it’s called, does have a female voice—and a voice that was recently upgraded to sound more human-like.
.. “As we start to see these intelligent agents,” Mortensen told me, “the first question we have to ask is: Do we choose to humanize it?
.. The funny thing is, some of the world’s most powerful and destructive technologies have been given female names, too. Humans have oftenbestowed deadly weapons with female names—like the Big Bertha howitzer and the Mons Meg cannon. It has been suggested, as I’ve written in the past, that perhaps this is an example of the objectification of women taken to its logical extension.
Is the world moving towards more or less competition in capital-intensive industries?
One thing I learned from their paper is that there’s been a remarkable rise in the profitability for the very top tier of firms ..
.. The high-return firms seem to be mostly in healthcare and information technology, not in traditional capital-intensive sectors such as manufacturing. Perhaps globalization is one reason for this. In manufacturing, globalization arguably has led to a pretty dramatic increase in competition. In information technology, globalization lets a firm such as Google use the same technology and ideas to earn high profits in the United States, and also Europe and elsewhere.
Opinion: The unspoken truth about managing geeks
The more things that occur that make no sense, the more cynical IT pros will become. Standard organizational politics often run afoul of this, so IT pros can come to be seen as whiny or as having a victim mentality. Presuming this is a trait that must be disciplined out of them is a huge management mistake. IT pros complain primarily about logic, and primarily to people they respect. If you are dismissive of complaints, fail to recognize an illogical event or behave in deceptive ways, IT pros will likely stop complaining to you. You might mistake this as a behavioral improvement, when it’s actually a show of disrespect. It means you are no longer worth talking to, which leads to insubordination.
.. What IT pros want in a manager is a technical sounding board and a source of general direction. Leadership and technical competence are qualities to look for in every member of the team. If you need someone to keep track of where projects are, file paperwork, produce reports and do customer relations, hire some assistants for a lot less money.